Comment on Hollow Knight: Silksong Sparks Debate About Difficulty and Boss Runbacks

Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

• caseofthematts@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Yea. I wont dismiss this criticism as hate, but I will dismiss it as dumb. The game was designed to be a challenge. Not everyone is up to that challenge, that’s fine. The game isn’t meant for you, then.

  My friend can’t play the Dark Souls games. He’s really interested in the setting and has given a few multiple attempts, but the difficulty curve just isn’t for him, so he just doesn’t play them.

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  • Coelacanth@feddit.nu ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    Not everything that makes the game harder or more challenging to play is good game design though, and a game shouldn’t get a free pass just because its developers stated “well the game being hard is part of our artistic vision”. It’s fine to criticise things, even - or actually maybe especially - things we like. We don’t have to be binary about things, we can like something while still recognising its flaws.

    Excessive runbacks for example is something that is primarily concerned with disrespecting your time as a player and even FromSoft seem to have realised that they’re not a good addition or a fun way of increasing difficulty seeing as they introduced Stakes of Marika in Elden Ring.

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    • caseofthematts@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      I can’t say I’ve gotten to some of the examples people have mentioned as “annoying; bad design”, so I’ll leave judgement until I get there. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with runbacks if it’s part of the design and the boss is the culmination of that.

      Stakes of Marika are definitely there to appeal to a wider audience. I personally don’t care for them, as for most areas in DS I enjoyed trying to claw my way back to the boss unharmed. It was like a puzzle.

      It’s fine to criticise things, but I personally think “make checkpoint outside of the boss” the criticism is not a good one.

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      • FishFace@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

        A lot of DS1 runbacks were true runbacks where you could just run past everything. Once you’d worked out the running, they weren’t too irritating, but some were a bit long. In DS3 a number of runbacks had unavoidable enemies on the way where you could mess up and eat a hit and then be down an Estus charge.

        The main two problems are:

        1. boredom. Punishing you for failure by forcing you to walk through a section of level again for a couple of minutes isn’t fun for anyone. It’s not “stakes”; it’s boring. Repeatedly dying to the challenging boss is not boring because you are constantly trying to improve, learn its moves, and beat it. Running through the same path is boring. Anything boring is bad game design.
        2. Risk of unrelated mistakes. This is more subjective, but for me there should be some separation between different challenges; there should be a feeling that after you have convincingly solved one challenge, you shouldn’t have prove yourself against it again too much. Doing so is, yes, boring again, but also frustrating. Things that are frustrating (to some) can be good game design, but I don’t want to be frustrated. Whiffing a roll you’ve done successfully many times and being set back on an unrelated challenge is, to me, annoying.

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  • Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    It’s undeniable that the challenge is part of the mystique for some games. I note with great respect the fact that Celeste offers accessible difficulty tweaks. I beat that game and it was a great experience.

    Both choices can be good, when made with intention and care, and when motivated by specific goals as a creator.

    With dark souls, at least the ones I’ve played, the difficulty can be tweaked by engaging with the world, learning the progression system and the character options that suit you. For example I didn’t beat DSI until I tried playing a magic user, because I’m slightly bad at those games. DSIII was easy enough by comparison to beat as a straight up STR build, but that’s beside the point. Difficulty is a design choice, and the conversation around it is tiresome when it ignores the aims of the creators.

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  • acosmichippo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    well if you buy the game and it’s difficult enough to keep you from playing it all the way through that’s kinda shitty.

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• domi@lemmy.secnd.me ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  The thing is, there is no reason not to add accessibility settings.

  Hollow Knight and Silksong are beautiful games with an intriguing world, great characters and lots of areas to explore. There’s no reason to gatekeep games like these from people that just can’t beat them because they are too hard.

  Just add a simple accessibility menu where you can scale health, damage and loot drops. It’s almost no work to implement, players can still try the regular difficulty and turn it down when it’s too much and speedrunners can make their lifes more difficult. Everyone wins.

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  • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    In a game like Hollow Knight (and Silksong), I can't help but feel such a crude setting would end up doing more harm than good. I mean, let's take health for example. Increasing your health wouldn't help much if you can't handle what the game is throwing at you; the few extra masks the game gives you only really help if you can handle the difficulty but need mistake tolerance, otherwise enemies will still hit you and you'll still fail at platforming and fall into spikes. Fundamentally the difficulty of a game like Hollow Knight comes from a lot more than just damage numbers, so a naive difficulty scale would only give an illusion of accessibility that would fade away at the first difficult part, and in that case it's better for everyone involved if the inaccessibility of the game is easily apparent.

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    • domi@lemmy.secnd.me ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      the few extra masks the game gives you only really help if you can handle the difficulty but need mistake tolerance

      Increasing mistake tolerance already increases accessibility, even if you still have to manage a tough platformer part.

      Of course the options given are just examples to get it done quickly. Accessibility options can be a a lot more nuanced, even going as far as altering level structures to provide pathways for players that can’t platform.

      The point of my post was that for all I care the difficulty options can go all the way to invincibility, one hitting every boss and skipping every platformer segment. It does not reduce my enjoyment of these games if other people can play the game in a way they want to.

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      • NoneOfUrBusiness@fedia.io ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        Accessibility options can be a a lot more nuanced, even going as far as altering level structures to provide pathways for players that can't platform.

        Sure, but then we're way past "there's no reason not to add X."

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  • Goretantath@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    The accesibility is called getting a controller that works for your disability, then training to beat it.

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    • domi@lemmy.secnd.me ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Not every disability is magically cured by a controller.

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    • Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      The thing is, I can’t personally think of an accessibility setting that would serve the intended function without removing the sense of having finally met the challenge. I struggle with difficult games too, and I don’t always complete them. That struggle and uncertainty is part of the journey though to me and if there was a difficulty tweak available as soon as I got frustrated the first time, it would erase those stakes (for me).

      I mentioned Celeste as a positive example. I did feel a satisfaction with completing that game, but if not for the highly emotional personal journey of the narrative potion of that game I don’t think it would have been as satisfying. At every point I knew there was an easy way out, and staying frustrated and gradually getting better was a conscious choice without any real stakes attached to it other than my own self-satisfaction. The was never any worry that I’d fail to complete the game. Those stakes do make eventually winning feel real.

      So I just can’t think of any suggestions for this. It’s elitist or ableist I realise, and I’m not happy with that. The creator certainly was aware of games like Celeste, and they had plenty of time to consider those options. Before casting any judgment or making suggestions on their behalf, I’d be really interested to hear what they have to say about the choice. Do they think the struggle has to be as firmly set as it is for the triumph to feel as elating? I can’t read their minds, so if there’s an interview where they address that I’d be all ears.

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      • Coelacanth@feddit.nu ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        To each their own, I always think of difficulty and challenge as proportional and relative to the individual. You can just as easily turn the question around the other way: how can you feel any satisfaction beating a Souls game using magic and summons and level ups and items when there are people who have beat it at Level 1 hitless and using a dance pad instead of controller? What’s “appropriately challenging” is way too individual for the bluntness of a single difficulty setting.

        And coming up with solutions isn’t even that hard. Add some sliders to adjust the length of parry windows and i-frames on dodge rolls and whatnot and you’re probably a good part of the way there. Gameplay intact, people still go through the same motions they just have a chance now even if they don’t have the reflexes or timing for frame-perfect inputs.

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• frank@sopuli.xyz ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  Let me start by saying I have a few thousand hours in Hollow Knight and I do for the most part enjoy the Git Gud type of games.

  There are entire genres of games that I can’t enjoy because they’re too open/chill and if they had a hard mode I would probably really like them. This is the same problem the other way.

  Maybe wait and some modders might make the QoL parts you want available, maybe never play it, maybe watch a streamer do it. But not every game has to be fun for everyone.

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  • Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    There might also be a generational divide taking shape. People my age grew up with “Nintendo hard” and the industry was all about making games seem longer by making them extremely difficult to beat. Our options were to get better, cheat, or give up.

    These days the industry is all about mass appeal, and all the problems that we see with games having massive budgets and having to make sure as many people can like them as possible. Indie games have different incentives, and so when a game comes along that was made with priorities that aren’t in step with what we’re used to, it tends to ruffle feathers.

    I know my kid doesn’t have any sense that games should be difficult, or that a challenging game can be satisfying. Even FromSoft games are trending towards less difficulty, despite having the fans who famously chant “git gud”. Bigger studios might know something my generation doesn’t get about younger gamers - maybe games like Silksong are having their swansong, so to speak. I hope not, but it’s hard not to notice once it’s been pointed out.

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    • Feyd@programming.dev ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

      “Nintendo hard” isn’t about difficulty it is about entire games being based around knowledge checks, like having to remember to pre-swing when you jump particular gaps or get knocked into the gap in og ninja gaiden for instance.

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      • Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        When you’re a kid with no understanding of game design, no internet, and no subscription to magazines that explain it, all those dirty tricks that we now rightly put to much rubbish did have the power to make you think “I suck at this”. They didn’t have to be clever back then to give us this insane need to be punished by game designers just the right amount so that we can finally just try really hard, get really annoyed, stick with it way too long, and eventually get to say “yes, fuck you, I win!” For a certain kind of kid from that generation, that’s almost a healing fantasy.

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• MyDarkestTimeline01@ani.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

  I have to agree. Although I would have said “the real easy difficulty is realizing that not every game is for you”. And sometimes that includes really popular games, ones that everyone else seems to be enjoying. And that’s ok.

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  • PonyOfWar@pawb.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

    That’s fair, but I also don’t see a problem in voicing criticism about aspects of the game I don’t like. Especially if I do like the game as a whole. People should not see that as an attack on their personal enjoyment of the game.

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    • MyDarkestTimeline01@ani.social ⁨2⁩ ⁨days⁩ ago

      Sure, and as a consumer of a product, you are within your rights to do so. But I think that a lot of times there’s an underlying thread of entitlement that comes with a lot of the criticisms. The tone suggests more ,“how dare you make something I can’t play” and less “I’m not suited for this challenge”. There’s surprisingly little in the way of complaints about the game design that read as things that fit the theme and game vision. There are a few, but most aren’t.

      And full disclosure I’m speaking from the standpoint of someone who while interested in a lot of the “git gud” genre games, can cut it 90% of the time. It took me realizing that I just wasn’t who those games were for before I was able to look at some of my options and realize.they were just me and my sour grapes.

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      • acosmichippo@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

        if i purchase a game, you bet your ass i feel entitled to play the whole thing.

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• drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zone ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

  I’m reminded of when Elden Ring first came out and we had a little panic attack about how much harder it was than other souls games.

  Then like a year later it was widely considered to be the easiest Fromsoft game (if you’re just doing the required content).

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  • Gradually_Adjusting@lemmy.world ⁨1⁩ ⁨day⁩ ago

    Time will tell. These games all have so much talk about how certain builds are “cheese” or how the ashes make the game too easy or whatever - that’s all just dumb. The game itself is the difficulty settings, sometimes.

    It seems too early to say how Silksong will be remembered, and Team Cherry still only had two games under its belt so it’s arguably too early to judge them. Will their next game be totally different and a massive risk, or do we have a Vivaldi on our hands, doing masterful variations on a theme?

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