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Anon fixes Super Mario Bros
(sh.itjust.works)
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this post was submitted on 22 Jan 2025
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sure but you won't know that as a new player unless you go outside the actual game for info.
The game provides everything you need to know that though.
If one hit takes most of your health away, then clearly you need more health. So buff your health stat.
Still learning and need to survive better? Wear armour.
Casting magic? Maybe you need more Mana.
Maybe as a person who's been playing games my whole life I have a cognitive dissonance or something when it comes to people not understanding game mechanics.
Here's a good video that helps me understand a bit better.
But like... You can literally see what each stat buffs and by how much each time you sit at a bonfire to level up.
The game doesn't hold your hand but it's not difficult to understand enough to play the game.
Oh, so Dark Souls is trail and error?
That doesn't sound fun at all.
Are there any video games that don't involve some level of trial and error? I suppose respawn mechanics should be removed from all games then?
I guess what I'm saying is that the souls games reward experience. The more you learn, the easier it becomes. More akin to a roguelike in learning curve than a puzzle game.
The barrier for entry may seem high but I genuinely think after an hour of playing you'll quickly get the hang of it and be just fine.
some of the highest-rated games of all time have no trial and error. Disco Elysium springs to mind because i'm currently playing through it.
Some games not having trial and error doesn't invalidate my point though. At a fundamental level videogames reward knowledge of mechanics the further you progress. One mechanic may work well in one game and horribly in another.
I'm certain the more you play Disco Elysium the better you get at the game. Same applies for any game. Not being able to grasp a repeated mechanic in a game doesn't make it a bad game either. It just means it isn't a game for you.
it's hard to get better at a story.
i don't know if it's your intention but i take umbrage with the choice of the word "grasp". it implies that the issue is one of skill rather than interest. i do agree that it is not for me, but the reason for that is not the game itself. as i said, explicit settings for difficulty would not hurt the experience of playing the game for anyone, but people are reacting as though it would.
ah, so it's king's quest style progression. i played enough of that in the 90s.
I mean, that's RPGs for you. Level up, buy equipment, wear armour and cast spells.
Any part of the equation is the solution. Just depends on how you want to play. The story is what you make of it along the way.
with king's quest progression i meant that the game is designed around players getting stuck, possibly without them knowing.
RPGs center around the story and the role you play, and the mechanics are built to aid that. you play for the story. in most RPGs, failure still progresses the story because failure is interesting. getting stuck is not interesting. having the mechanics without a story to reinforce would just be going through the motions.
someone else said that the fromsoft games are made to feel like videogames, and that resonated with me. that explained the disconnect i see in the mechanics and the world.
I think you have a bad impression of how souls games work and I'm not sure how to address that.
Did you ever play Rogue or Thief back in the day? Maybe the Binding of Isaac, Enter the Gungeon, Cuphead or Balatro? Loss is part of the game but it still progresses the story. You're never "stuck" as you say. Dying, making mistakes and retrying is part of the game.
Old RPGs that just gave you nothing sucked because they were directionless. Which is not a word I would ever use to describe a souls game. Sure, they're difficult but there's certainly a flow to them. I think a lot of people get hung up on the mechanics of the games and drop them immediately.
As you said, RPGs are centred around the story and role you play, mechanics are built to aid that. Once you get into a souls game, that is made abundantly clear. They just don't hand it to you in the first 30 seconds and they expect you to be able to figure some things out as you play because the game does a good job at that.
And yes, fromsoft/soulsborne games most definitely feel like a videogame and they should. This Harkins to the story elements where you play as a literal nobody, worthless undying but you somehow ascend to godhood despite the odds and it breaks the world over and over again. We, the player, are the god. But the characters don't know this. It's unfathomable to them that something greater than they, exists. To us it's a videogame but to the characters it's the end of the world. Over and over and over again. No matter how insurmountable the odds, we get infinite chances to topple pantheons and change everything.
thief sticks out to me in that list. all the others are run-based with metaprogression (except the original rogue of course) which means there is never a time where you get stuck. you die, you restart, you get an entirely new experience. thief is not only linear and slow, it is almost entirely devoid of combat and encourages savescumming because that was the style at the time. by thief 3 that was mitigated.
souls games, in contrast, are not run-based, heavy on combat, and not liberal with the opportunity to save. in addition there's the retrieval mechanic which means that when you fail, your only option is to redo the run that you just failed but with higher difficulty.
and with "plays like a video game", my main gripe is the dissonance between the world and what you do. the story is interesting, but it's like the game itself doesn't care about it. the developers do, and the player is supposed to, but the game doesn't.
You should! The game desperately wants you to! That's why stuff like the messaging system was created, to incentivize the player to player share of information. Yeah, all the messages left these days are going to be trolling, unfortunately, but there's still plenty of videos and info from the era it was released on the internet.
There's absolutely no shame in looking something up when you get stuck and can't progress further, or asking a friend where to go next. That's FromSoftware's intent.
but that's not interesting to me. i want immersion. that's also why their multiplayer aspect seems like such a weird idea.
Then they might not be the games for you. Immersion is probably the last thing I'd really think of for Souls. They're very much a series of videogames that feel like videogames, especially when you realize how many of the assets and animations get re-used from game to game.
that's... the most concise way to explain it i've ever seen, and something that has never clicked for me until now. it's always looked to me like this lore-heavy dark RPG and i've never been able to square the gameplay with the feeling. hearing that it was never supposed to gel at all and it's all just background noise makes a lot of sense, and made all the remaining curiosity i had for the series disappear.
now if only other games could stop getting infected by the fromsoft bug...