How would you describe things like Mario Kart's "catch-up" cheating or ridiculously tricky hitboxes? It's easy to make things difficult in a game, but making them feel fair is a legitimately difficult task.
There's an aspect of taste to it: many people like Souls games. But my experience of Dark Souls was "It's not that I can't do this,…
How would you describe things like Mario Kart's "catch-up" cheating or ridiculously tricky hitboxes? It's easy to make things difficult in a game, but making them feel fair is a legitimately difficult task.
There's an aspect of taste to it: many people like Souls games. But my experience of Dark Souls was "It's not that I can't do this, but it's kind of ridiculous that a game is asking me to do it." It felt difficult not because it was, but because the developers had made a host of choices that made things take longer than they ought to have.
absolutely agree that there's bad balance, worthy of criticism, in a lot of video games. but "artificial difficulty" has just always struck me as a term that's too general, too hand-wavy, and too unintuitive (video games are inherently "artificial") to get at the truth of what's so inartful or unfair about certain implementations. "artificial difficulty" just ends up being the language of rage-quitting.
It strikes me as a very odd conceptualization as well. As if putting a bonfire directly outside a boss fight represents “actual” difficulty and putting it far away to create more of a sense of punishment for failure is false difficulty. Just a weird framing to me.
I'm curious what you think some of those choices are. Certainly the function of items in Dark Souls is somewhat frustratingly opaque but aside from that I can't really think of anything.
Some might have been because I played on the PC port, which is apparently notoriously bad: narrow and inconsistent hitboxes, a camera that swung around unhelpfully, and a weird inconsistency between visual indicator and actual hit (it took me a long time to time dodges correctly, because when it seemed like you ought to dodge based on the animation wasn't correct).
Long gaps between save points (requiring you to run a lot of content over again if you fail) combined with enemies that are hidden and often cannot be seen before they jump out. A lack of a save point before boss fights combined with boss fights where you have to already know how they work before you can beat them--I wouldn't mind "trial and error" boss fights or having to repeatedly run to a boss fight, but the combination of both is infuriating.
The wonky hitboxes are legit annoying, not really sure why that is except that a lot of games have hitbox issues. Dodge timing is just something you have to learn. As for the bonfires, well, that's a design decision. Dark Souls really wants you to learn the maps really, really well and that's one way they enforce that. Once you have a map down you're probably no longer than 30-45 seconds away from the boss.
I guess it's because I never talk or read about modern video games online but I have never in my life had my mind changed again and again by each successive reply in a thread. In my head it's like the Simpsons teacher strike episode.
How would you describe things like Mario Kart's "catch-up" cheating or ridiculously tricky hitboxes? It's easy to make things difficult in a game, but making them feel fair is a legitimately difficult task.
There's an aspect of taste to it: many people like Souls games. But my experience of Dark Souls was "It's not that I can't do this, but it's kind of ridiculous that a game is asking me to do it." It felt difficult not because it was, but because the developers had made a host of choices that made things take longer than they ought to have.
absolutely agree that there's bad balance, worthy of criticism, in a lot of video games. but "artificial difficulty" has just always struck me as a term that's too general, too hand-wavy, and too unintuitive (video games are inherently "artificial") to get at the truth of what's so inartful or unfair about certain implementations. "artificial difficulty" just ends up being the language of rage-quitting.
It strikes me as a very odd conceptualization as well. As if putting a bonfire directly outside a boss fight represents “actual” difficulty and putting it far away to create more of a sense of punishment for failure is false difficulty. Just a weird framing to me.
I'm curious what you think some of those choices are. Certainly the function of items in Dark Souls is somewhat frustratingly opaque but aside from that I can't really think of anything.
Some might have been because I played on the PC port, which is apparently notoriously bad: narrow and inconsistent hitboxes, a camera that swung around unhelpfully, and a weird inconsistency between visual indicator and actual hit (it took me a long time to time dodges correctly, because when it seemed like you ought to dodge based on the animation wasn't correct).
Long gaps between save points (requiring you to run a lot of content over again if you fail) combined with enemies that are hidden and often cannot be seen before they jump out. A lack of a save point before boss fights combined with boss fights where you have to already know how they work before you can beat them--I wouldn't mind "trial and error" boss fights or having to repeatedly run to a boss fight, but the combination of both is infuriating.
The wonky hitboxes are legit annoying, not really sure why that is except that a lot of games have hitbox issues. Dodge timing is just something you have to learn. As for the bonfires, well, that's a design decision. Dark Souls really wants you to learn the maps really, really well and that's one way they enforce that. Once you have a map down you're probably no longer than 30-45 seconds away from the boss.
I guess it's because I never talk or read about modern video games online but I have never in my life had my mind changed again and again by each successive reply in a thread. In my head it's like the Simpsons teacher strike episode.