So what exactly made this series the goalpost for "Hard Games"
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So what exactly made this series the goalpost for "Hard Games"
So what exactly made this series the goalpost for "Hard Games"
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it's challenging to beat while being incredibly approachable with its insanely simplistic combat mechanics
so any old moron can bash their head against it and beat it eventually and feel like they're l33t
Exactly this, but also:
>no difficulty options you can select from a menu
The fact is a lot of "games for casuals" are actually harder than Fromsoft games if you play them on the hardest difficulty, but 95% of people just select easy or normal when given the choice. Meanwhile in Soulshit you can use any of dozens of completely broken builds and turn the game into something a goldfish could beat and still think your hardcore because you technically beat the game.
Yeah I got the BKS supera early like in the 2nd hour of gameplay and literally slayed the game with some NPC cheesing.
The only hard part is the final boss because you have to learn to parry it but that's it, the game is as hard as it gets until Anor Londo then slightly harder in New Londo because of fricked up OP npcs that you cannot fight aggressively then it turns back to easy mode.
The only annoying thing for me about Fromsoft is that certain NPCs are literally harder than bosses and that fricking pisses me off really bad.
babies first challenging game
note that nobody cared about demons souls
the halo of rpgs
Nobody cared about demon's souls because it's inferior in every aspect, and it never came to pc. Mostly the latter, ptde release was when the game took off for real.
Westoids avoided challenging games for a long time at that point with movie slop and thought Monster Hunter lite was hard when it hit the shelves.
The incredibly tight combat made the game feel fair and allowed the dev to crank up the damage of enemies without making it feel frustrating because you could always just get good.
Journalists discovered it and it was all over.
it's the only popular game who's popularity is mainly derived from its difficulty. most series are popular for other reasons
The Marketing Team trying to give it more of an audience than Demon's Souls. And it worked. It's very dumb but it worked.
>So what exactly made this series the goalpost for "Hard Games"
It came out in 2011 at the absolute peak of the industry infantilizing and tutorializing their games out of fear the player might fail at any point and stop playing. Games were peak baby mode. Dark Souls came out, and developers everywhere realized your game could be successful without excessive handholding.
It’s less that Dark Souls was hard, and more that nothing else was. That, and that a lot of care and time was put into Dark Souls. It also sparked the rise in asynchronous multiplayer. Super influential game.
Came in here to post this. I don't think people remember just how stupidly easy and patronizing most games were in the late 2000s through early 2010s. People complain about yellow paint now, but it was so much worse a few years ago.
During that time, I mostly played flash games. Most vidya I've played are either from 2003 and earlier or 2015 and later. Did I miss anything important?
Here's a crop of the Ganker PC History infographic. You can argue about which games are "important" or not. I think most of them weren't that individually influential in the long run. This era of vidya history was bland as frick.
Looking over it, I don't like most of the games here, but I'll list the ones I like:
>KOTOR
>Republic Commando
>FEAR
>Hitman BM
>STALKER
>Portal
>PvZ
>L4D2
>BamHam
>New Vegas
>Skyrim
>Portal 2
>Sleeping Dogs
>DS
>Dishonored
>HM
>FTL
>X-Com
>Paper's Please
>MG Rising
>MG: GZ
simply? the tagline. "prepare to die." in a world where people were very used to easy games, it was an outspoken challenge to people who thought they were good at games.
I didn't like it for its difficulty because at the time I have already played difficult games like Ninja Gaiden but it was one of the few games that didn't have a cutscene explain to me what the hell is going on with everything. It was novel for its time eventhough it's laughed at today since FS became too popular for its own good and reached a larger audience of braindead ecelebs stealing lore points from reddit or the generals.
Even back then nobody said it was super hard. People parroted hard but fair and while that didn't make much sense you could see where they were coming from.
It's more the fact that the games didn't treat you like a complete bubbling idiot that made it better than many 2010 games.
Every other developers catered to <35 IQ audience
hard choices.
On my first playthrough for long time I didn't know you HAVE to talk to NPCs multiple times to exhaust their dialogue for shit to happen.
I got meme'd by the cat and invaded a lot in the fun forest.
I couldn't beat anyone in the forest and gave up on the game for years because I thought it was impossible to progress
It was not as bad for me because I rarely had any humanity :^)
A lot of people forget or choose to forget that dark souls came out in 2011 when the age of QTEs was in full swing. People were sick and tired of glorified cutscenes with button presses.
Who gives a frick about what other games were out at the time? This a game where if you beat it, you joined "the club" You talk like a girl, "How many times did you die fighting the Cleric Beast?" idk 0 times homie. I beat these games 0 sweat first try your games should make me angry b***h
>Who gives a frick about what other games were out at the time?
NTA, but the design trends around its release are literally the reason for its popularity. When viewed in isolation, Dark Souls isn't a very impressive game
If you weren't a child at the time you would know the answer to this, but it's basically becasue the games coming out at the time were notorious for handholding and Dark Souls didn't do that.
Did you start gaming with the PS4? Because if you had any experience with 7th gen consoles then you would remember games that gen started being super easy and braindead because of the influence and popularity of the Wii. Everyone wanted to cater to casuals, so games in general became super mega easy and braindead and then came Demon's Souls and Dark Souls and made challenging games great again.
From what I remember when I first played it when Prepare to Die came out: Your character's levelup progress resetting (souls) when you die and having to redo everything up to the point that you died in order to get your progress back.
DS is not hard once you understand how to play them, unlike other games DS wants you to go slow and carefully, at least the first time you play it because the game loves to pull your leg with traps and pincer encounters.
The game sucker punches you with those, and thus you die in a cheap way, the only time when dying is fair is the second time you die to the exact same situation on the same exact area or encounter.
Additionally, you can just be an INTchad and spit on the face of the game with you gigantic INTwiener, b***h I'm not playing your silly gotcha game, get bend to my soul arrows and magic infused weapon motherfricker.
Marketing
artificial difficulty
I mean soulsgays always gush about how hard their games are. I can't really blame them for catering to a bunch of morons.
normalgays falling for market
I genuinely don't understand it. I started playing it recently and the game isn't even hard at all unless you want it to be. You can easily overlevel without doing much grinding at all and the basic gameplay is very easy to understand and perform. It doesn't require very fast reaction time. I think Donkey Kong country would filter 90% of souls players.
>my overlevel
It's insane how you can still hear this 15 years later. You have over a decade to understant level doesn't do shit in Dark Souls. You can be lvl 20 with 15 STR or lvl 400 with 99 endurance and vitality and your weapon will still do the exact same damage. Even with 99 STR, you will do maybe 20% more damage.
There's a reason the game has caps on every stat and makes it harder and harder to level up. The whole game is balanced around 20 in all stats, and going higher won't do shit except making your dick twitch at seeing the big number.
It was the antithesis of the vidya industry coming into the early 2010s. There were several but not much of those that really got into the gameplay part. Most games felt actiony and lightwieght meanwhile tanky ones were on their way out after RE 4. Lore and story weren't compacted into cutscenes and talking heads who would interrupt the gameplay but rather reading it or interacting with npcs. Some would argue that the dialogue choices are too limiting but I think getting into the point is more important than making mr scrimbo mad or happy.
Well in a sea of piss easy aaa games it was the only normalgay thing to stand out.
It only has one difficulty level, and for an AA tier game as challenging as that, it stands out.
Honestly I enjoy sekiro and elden ring more than dark soul, the game ages like shit and it shows like if you need to open wiki on the side in order to play the game, you should frick rightfully off
>be me
>try pyromancer because it sounds cool
>get to the dragon on the bridge zone
>wtf how to upgrade my magic and keep dying because my character throws the spell so slow
>frick around for 30m, give up, look up on the internet, realize you are supposed to upgrade dex and forget about using pyromancy until you rescue some missable npc
>epic.jpg
>uninstall
>missable npc
that holds true for all of their games tho
If it weren't for the marketing and games sucking at the time then it would have fade into obscurity like King's Field.
Nothing to do with being hard. It just doesn't treat you like a moron, the gameplay is simple and great fun, and the setting is fascinating, the exploration is rewarding, you have a constant feeling of progression. All of that makes you want to continue dying untill you beat the next boss.