Increasing Souls difficulty resembles a case of Fisherian runaway selection. The "git gud" meme once had a rationale, but not anymore. However, increasing difficulty can no longer be selected against as the "git gud" meme has firmly taken root in the player-base and any attempt to select against increasing difficulty will simply be met with "git gud"—a vicious circle. This process will continue until the difficulty of Souls is disproportionate with the skill-level of its player-base and game and player-base simply collapses.
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I don't really give a frick unfortunately.
This thread is for ludologoists (>130 IQ) only.
Can a sub-80 kinoist join? I'm the very important other half of the ludokino after all.
Of course, my simple-minded anon.
You might be pushing 50
>This process will continue until the difficulty of Souls is disproportionate with the skill-level of its player-base and game and player-base simply collapses.
This is already happening with Elden Ring, despite having numerous tools to counteract the spiking difficulty of boss fights compared to previous installments. It's much more likely that "soulsborne" as a trend will burn out due to oversaturation in the collective gamer brain space.
This chink has lost his mind, oh wow
Hello saar
Too many gacha games eroded their brain.
/sci/entist, this thread is like pearls before a swine. Don't waste your time in this slum.
What's so scientific about
>make game hard
>but don't make game TOO hard or it becomes niche
The explanation of the mechanism behind the phenomenon.
Because this requires keeping track of more than two things at a time
get gud
Isn't that just normal runaway selection? Fisherian implies there's a second kind of selection and its removal is what causes the runaway effect.
Also, I don't think the modern science community believes in Fisherian runaway selection, because it implies the men women are attracted to aren't the best men in some objective sense, and that can't be true because women are always right.
>there's a second kind of selection and its removal is what causes the runaway effect.
Selecting for increasing difficulty no longer increases game quality.
>it implies the men women are attracted to aren't the best men in some objective sense
Synchronically, no, diachronically, yes.
Fisherian runaway selection does not apply here, since the increased difficulty never increased game quality and Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 are still the best games in the series.
>Selecting for increasing difficulty no longer increases game quality.
In your analogy, difficulty is sexual selection and quality is fitness. What's natural selection?
>Synchronically, no, diachronically, yes.
No, even at that specific point in time they're not the best men, hence the lowered fitness. They don't become less fit over time, they were less fit when women selected them. It's not like the environment is changing.
Difficulty is initially selected for both naturally and sexually. The "git gud" meme only obtains in Soulsloppers though.
>No, even at that specific point in time they're not the best men
Only relative to another specific point in time i.e. diachronically. The tendency in the long run is always toward increasing fitness, even if it isn't in the short run.
>Difficulty is initially selected for both naturally and sexually
Fisherian runaway selection refers to the loss of one of two selectors in a tug of war causing runaway selection. The narcissism of the fans cause the difficulty of the games to experience runaway selection, but what was the discarded selector holding difficulty back in the first place?
>Only relative to another specific point in time
No, the mate they're selecting is not the best mate right now. That's the whole point. Whether they'd be a better mate in the past or future is irrelevant, they're not the best mate when they're selected. If they were the best mate, then it wouldn't be "runaway."
>The tendency in the long run is always toward increasing fitness
That's only true for a group and you can constantly redefine a group by taking a step back and just drawing a larger circle. Individuals die off all the time, but sure the breed survives; oh, and breeds die all the time, but sure the species survived; oh, and species die all the time, but sure the clade survives; and so on and so on until all life forms are extinct. Evolution is only partially about mutations, it's mostly about differential fertility, those organisms that fail to successfully breed are not becoming more fit by dying, it's the group that's becoming more fit by watching them die - except who's the group? Are pandas becoming more fit right now? No, they're trending toward extinction. You would have to look at the bigger picture and say, "Well, BEARS are becoming more fit by leaving behind the pandas." That's how evolution works.
So yes, when civilized humans stop natural selection and rely entirely on sexual selection, the human species becomes more fit - because the civilized humans stop selecting for fitness, become unfit and die off, like an amputated limb. But if we just zoom in on those civilized humans, are they becoming more fit? No, they're dying.
>what was the discarded selector holding difficulty back in the first place?
The general audience.
>No, the mate they're selecting is not the best mate right now.
You can only say this because you have hindsight; the fitness of the mates are already relativised for you.
>That's only true for a group and you can constantly redefine a group by taking a step back and just drawing a larger circle.
There is no problem with this; it's just the corollary of increasing the explanatory power of your causal model. Not "drawing a circle the larger group" doesn't cause that larger group to cease existing.
>The general audience.
The general audience didn't leave, though, Elden Ring is their most popular game by a wide margin.
>You can only say this because you have hindsight; the fitness of the mates are already relativised for you.
I don't see how that matters at all. I look back at the past 200 years of selection and see a deleterious pattern. It's totally possible that it'll end right now in the present or that things could turn around, I suppose anything's possible, but your prior should be that the pattern will continue. To think otherwise is to spit in the face of the entire concept of causality.
>There is no problem with this; it's just the corollary of increasing the explanatory power of your causal model. Not "drawing a circle the larger group" doesn't cause that larger group to cease existing.
No, but redefining "fit" by the metrics of the larger group allows the smaller group to cease existing. This would be like if I suggested some behavior was evolutionarily fit, and it wiped out all land animals, and then I said, "Yeah, but the birds are fine." That's moronic, anon.
>The general audience didn't leave
Their selection pressure did. We're talking about memes here not genes. A general audience member can turn into a fan.
>I suppose anything's possible
No, the only thing that's possible is increasing fitness in the long term (unless you're not a Darwinian).
>That's moronic
Yes, nature can sometimes offend our anthropocentric sensibilities. The alternative though is introducing a secondary hypothesis to the explain the phenomenon, which is not parismonious.
*parsimonious
DS1 had the best bosses in the series because it was the perfect combination of difficulty but uniqueness. Now every boss is the same: a flashy spectacle and highest test of skill, but ultimately diluting the experience and making everything feel the same.
Christmas celebrated every single day ceases to be Christmas, and just becomes another tedious day.
is elden ring even hard? granted I dropped this bloated game somewhere around mountaintops but I did everything leading up to it including that huge underground area and what have you and it was probably the easiest souls for me. to me it felt like they took numerous steps to reduce the difficulty spikes and raise the mass appeal.
>is elden ring even hard?
Yes, arbitrarily so
For its moronic fanbase
yes
It is if you don't use Spirit Ashes, Bleed, Rot, Incantations or Guard Counters. Sorceries are also pretty strong, but I don't think they're as strong as other options outside of Comet Azur under the Cerulean Crystal Tear effect inside the magic buff circle spell. Elden Ring has a lot of options to make the game incredibly easy.
Correct. Difficulty in these game has become slop. It's not fun. It's made for streamers to farm le 99999999 death epic gamer rage content
The streamers I know are not having fun with this either. It's too much lmao
this is why white women prefer bbc
(i'm american)
They do not.
>If anything, most souls players brute force the game and not really develop a "gamesense" so to speak. Being hard to describe; gamesense is a if you know, you know, situation. It involves unconsciously knowing how developers make games and place enemies and items in their games. At the most basic level it's knowing that a difficult fight is ahead or that a boss will appear in a given area due to level design. As so called "pro" souls players play other games and get brickwalled by otherwise simple mechanics or level design it becomes apparent that souls games do not train this gamesense and does not make players "gud" at games in general.
This is wrong, though.
1. Souls players have a tendency to think each game is easier than the last, but when you watch newbies to the series play them, it actually looks like the opposite. This is because playing each Souls game makes the others easier. You could see this when DS3 came out and Souls veteran bodied the game so hard it actually disappointed them, even though new players thought it was stupidly hard. This happened again with Sekiro and Elden Ring. Miyazaki literally described Sekiro in interviews as being more accessible. Did general audiences find Sekiro "accessible"? Same exact thing happened with Elden Ring, and both times, Souls fans cried he was dumbing the games down. And then average players played them and got fricking raped.
2. The streamers I see who are good at Souls are also good at other games. That little israelite whose name I forget played DMC, the supposedly "actually hard" game, and he breezed right through it. Distortion had no trouble beating Cuphead and even speedran it for awhile. A lot of vtubers who play Souls games regularly are also just good at video games in general (Aqua, Bijou, Luna).
>souls
>skill
Repeatedly getting crushed by enemies or a boss to remember it's attack patterns isn't skillful or "getting gud". If anything, most souls players brute force the game and not really develop a "gamesense" so to speak. Being hard to describe; gamesense is a if you know, you know, situation. It involves unconsciously knowing how developers make games and place enemies and items in their games. At the most basic level it's knowing that a difficult fight is ahead or that a boss will appear in a given area due to level design. As so called "pro" souls players play other games and get brickwalled by otherwise simple mechanics or level design it becomes apparent that souls games do not train this gamesense and does not make players "gud" at games in general. Souls games reward persistence, not skillful play, and give players an unearned sense of ability due to their reputation as being very difficult. See how terms like "artificial difficulty" cropped up once the souls games went to PC and players who believed they are good for simply playing souls games faced more challenging parts of the game.
Dark souls style games will not have a runaway difficulty selection problem because the games aren't incredibly difficult and require skill, but required brute force persistence. If you want runaway difficulty selection, look at high level puzzle games that filter 99% of all gamers.
or you could just do it on the first try by being good at videogames
literal skill issue
>be me
>realize big tailed wieners are actually hot
>get roasted by normies for having good taste
>now big long tails are a symbol of being a homosexual
elden slop is easiest overlevel game from all souls series, so to combat overlevel it just got a bunch of bs like malenia healing to compensate for it. Git gud doesn't mean anything nowadays, Elden Ring isn't hard, it's just tedious and boring, but normies who never smelled good games consider this mediocrity a new coming of jesus christ
Game sense headass watch the slo-mo replay some tryhard posted of the moronic lion boss and see the moment it finishes a 10 hit combo and then immediately shits on you for getting one hit in. These dumbasses either don't have the game or spend 10 hours winning a pissing competition in the name of their "game sense" lmfao
Git gud.
Simple as.
while this is kind of true, the difficult game meme is a niche in itself that people enjoy for the intense challenge
I think it's fine for fromsoft to keep making more ridiculous shit because that's their thing. it's not like this is an industry wide problem. most other "soulslikes" from other studios are significantly easier
it's not a skill based game if you can level up and let other people beat bosses for you
>The games have been getting increasingly easy over time and gradually scaling back the heavily diegetic autistic dungeoncrawler difficulty adjustment in favor of coop and summoning mechanics
I genuinely can't think of a fan base in 25 years of gaming more pretentious than the fart sniffing midwits that make up the souls fanbase holy frick
>applying biology theory to a fricking game
You are a fricking midwit.
Culture follows the same evolutionary principles as biological organisms. Do you even know what is the original meaning of the term "meme"?
I strongly encourage you to go out more, anon. It might prevent you from making threads like this again.
>touch grass, it might make you less interesting
Normgroids are crabs in a bucket
A more apt way of phrasing this is that they got carried away making the fights dramatic that they forgot to make them have decent gameplay.
Nah, it's just Marketing getting high on their own supply: the playerbase is all casuals who are there for the brand, next Souls game could have hitmarkers, difficulty selection, and a preorder-exclusive Snoop Dogg summon and it would still sell.