Help me appreciate Soulslikes

Submitted by twovests in killallgames (edited )

I think Souls-like games are bad. The biggest reason is I don't enjoy playing them, which is my most important metric for a videogame.

My impression is that these are games with fantastic worldbuilding and character design about the inhabitants of dying worlds, but the entire game just seems so annoying. They remind me of Kaizo Mario, or Shobon no Action, or IWTBTG.

Even ignoring the stale trend of indie games making bad soulslikes, I just never had fun with Dark Soulses. I don't like the idea of spending a lot of time memorizing very difficult bosses, replaying them a hundred times, until the memorization and luck allow me to progress.

Trial-and-error is how you progress in Soulslikes, but that's a gimmick. It should be reserved for joke games like Getting Over it with Bennett Foddy.

I enjoyed Tunic very much, but it is a Souls-like, which makes it a worse game. It suffers from bosses that are so difficult that they almost caused me to stop playing. I was able to get through them with some effort, but I can't recommend this otherwise excellent game to almost anyone else I know, because most people I know are well adjusted people who haven't spent cumulative tens of thousands of hours of their life playing videogames.

The entire fanbase seems to be about celebrating gatekeeping the genre by making difficult games, turning a good 10-hour game into a bad 40-hour game.

What am I missing? What is it that's good about the Soulslikes games? I don't think beating a videogame is an accomplishment, but do people play these games because hard game = big feeling of accomplishment? Can I put Dark Souls in the same category as Farmville, black market nicotine vapes, and MAGA hats as things that are popular but not good?

Or is there something good that I'm missing? Tunic was very fun but the boss battles continue to be a reason that I can't seriously recommend the game.

(edit) But a lot of people really enjoy these, including people with opinions I trust, so I really think there just might be something I am missing. What am I missing?

TLDR: Play Outer Wilds

edit: i was going to delete this post but it has already been upvoted; i worry a comment is soon to come and i would not want a long comment to be met with a 404

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neku wrote

honestly there are 10000 games out there. just move on its not worth it

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twovests OP wrote

I've given them a cumulative 10 hours maybe; investing 30 minutes as a Hater with an open mind seems like it might have art payoff.

I'd invested 20 minutes in Outer Wilds before I was encouraged to see it through by a friend, and I am so happy I did. Maybe Dark Soulses can be like that too

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Dogmantra wrote

Dark Souls is popular not because it is hard, but because it is easy. Elaboration coming at some point.

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Dogmantra wrote

elaboration that hopefully doesn't make me sound like an obnoxious git gud person:

It's really about the expectation that you'll have to try again, which is a different design philosophy from a lot of other games. The thing that I personally think is satisfying about a souls game is that you can encounter a scenario like a boss that you start out dying to in 30 seconds and barely hurting it, have another go and analyse what you're doing, what's going wrong, where you're getting hit, and work on those individual aspects over the next few encounters, and a lot of the time you can go from losing almost instantly to beating the boss over the course of a play session. This is what I mean when I say "it's easy" - it is still a challenging game but individual encounters let you speedrun that system mastery and get the enjoyment from overcoming a difficult challenge relatively quickly compared to a lot of other hobbies.

The optimal outcome is that you get to feel like Neo in that scene near the end of The Matrix where he starts to see everything as code and he can just effortlessly beat Smith. When you get it, that feeling is extremely satisfying, and there aren't that many single player games that have given me that experience before. The thing is that it's a decent amount of work to get there and it can feel unrewarding on the way. If you don't enjoy soulslikes you can do one of two things - play something else, or work hard to enjoy the acquired taste. I'm personally glad that I beat my head against the wall and I like them now but I can't recommend it one way or the other.

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devtesla wrote

I feel really bad saying it to people who find DS difficult but it's true Lol

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hollyhoppet wrote (edited )

They're fun if you like a game that demands skill building. It is trial and error at first, but once you develop mastery you start to learn how to apply what you've learned to different situations, and become able to do things like kill bosses in one try which feels extremely satisfying. It might just be you don't like that kind of gameplay and that's fine.

Like personally, I want to play a game that will punish me until I learn to approach it on its terms. I want that challenge. For me, I don't enjoy playing games that are too easy or not crunchy enough. I get bored too fast. I need that friction.

The real problem is the communities and they way they try to give this attitude that you should like this kind of game or you're inferior. They're insufferable. Stay away from them. Especially the reddits.

Also fromsoft really could stand to include some accessibility options. A lot of japanese game dev companies seem to have this "you play it our way because this is the game we designed" attitude still and it's... annoying.

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hollyhoppet wrote

And like... I see this pattern a lot where people get into this state of "other people like this but i don't and i'm missing out." Which is fair and makes sense. But there are so many different games out there tailored to so many different playstyles and tastes that you're going to miss out on something anyway! I started feeling a lot better once I let go of the games that looked interesting but knew I wouldn't enjoy. I also started finding more niche indie titles that really zeroed in on what I liked.

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devtesla wrote

Something that kind of ruins my life to think about is that to young people a videogame is like, some random crap they downloaded to their phone covered in ads or sells gatcha rolls or something. Or like Fortnite? The people who buy games that cost between $20-$70 and provide a contained experience is shrinking population, and it's getting older and older. So the games are getting more niche, and people are seeking experiences where they feel challenged because they've played videogames for decades.

Dark Souls specifically pioneered a "tough but fair" feel, where the tension comes from the fact that you're scared to move forward, and the frustration is offset by the fact that you can retreat at any moment and level up. It makes you learn about the world as you move through it, and enemies have extremely well telegraphed moves that you can just roll through. It's a game about learning. It's less hard than it has a reputation for, you just have to slow down and accept failure sometimes, but if you aren't fucking with it than that's not really shameful. I've played enough of them, I think.

So yeah a lot of indie games copy those ideas because it makes players slow down and appreciate things they might blow through otherwise. A lot of them have accessibility options that Souls games don't have, like Tunic has something that makes the bosses easier, but they are meant to be hard. And often these games are not as good as From at realizing what players can take or not.

It used to be where games were going for flow above everything, where a game needed to be neither too hard or too easy, but that comes off as boring to a lot of players these days. Personally I'm less willing to deal with hard action combat because my reactions have gone to shit, but I want to have to think over long term. Love a turn based. And I want a story to think about. So yeah no souls likes for me, but I get the appeal for sure.

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twovests OP wrote

Fortnite is something I've grown to appreciate (but never play, because I will never make an Epic Games account). The microtransactions are so silly (I feel bad about humanity and society when I think about them) but the game has a lot of technical depth and variety. There's a Guitar Hero in Fortnite. There's a Minecraft in Fortnite. It's really a lot like Ace of Spades was before Jagex killed it.

What I mean to say is "I think you and I think about games similarly and I read your post with that lens." I think the main contention is that "fair" is necessarily subjective, and tricky to define.

If I were to suggest a definition, I'd say a singleplayer game which feels fair is one communicates well, does not have difficulty which demands a huge time commitment, and (counter-intuitively) has generous hitboxes. E.g. Celeste is fair because everything is clearly communicated (you can see the level and know what will kill you), the tricky levels send you back to the start of the screen, and the hitboxes feel sensible by lying to you up and down. (Celeste has three hitboxes, and hazards have tiny and sparse hitboxes.)

And often these games are not as good as From at realizing what players can take or not.

This is something I really liked about Tunic. I could beat any Soulslike I think, but I usually don't want to put up with that. But I had this experience in Tunic, where the first boss was very difficult. I thought I might have sequence broken to an impossible boss. Then, (spoilers; rot-13, you can use DDG to un-rot13 V unq pbyyrpgrq n cntr bs gur phgr va-tnzr znahny, juvpu unq n oyheel fperrafubg bs gung obff ng ebhtuyl zl fxvyy yriry, jvgu na rapbhentvat "LBH PNA QB VG!" zrffntr. Gur tnzr nagvpvcngrq zl pbaprea naq gbyq zr, npghnyyl, lbh pna orng guvf obff.

Then I beat the boss, and I was able to trust that I could beat any of the bosses in Tunic. They were just about the edge of what I was willing to put up with, though. I liked that experience very very much.

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voxpoplar wrote (edited )

I am going to offer a counterpoint to the Dark Souls promoters here and as someone who hated Dark Souls when they first played it and then came back to it years later and finished it and thought “That was pretty alright this time” what made it click with me was accepting that the game is badly designed and fails to tell you how shit works properly and, despite what everyone says about these fucking games, it actively punishes experimentation. After that I just looked shit up. Just read fucking stupid, annoying wiki pages to understand basic game mechanics and how I should be using upgrade materials and shit.

People who think Darks Souls is intuitive have either played so much of these games they have forgotten what the first experience is like or watched other people playing it first before playing it themselves or were playing it at the same time as a bunch of friends and sharing information.

To put this in a nicer way and meeting the game more on its own terms: These games were designed to be collaborative. That is why they have messages from other players. That's why you can summon people. They are not intended to be sat down and played by yourself with no extenral input. You aren't actually meant to figure everything out, you are meant to collaborate and share information. And if you aren't caught up in the initial frenzy and excitement of a release and have a bunch of friends sharing information the first time you play one of these then you are not getting the actual experience the game was designed around and you need to look up forum posts and wikis about how upgrading your weapons works.

Or just play a better game.

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twovests OP wrote

This contextualizes it a lot and I appreciate it.

To add on to this, the Dark Souls and related wikis seem to be pretty bad (Fandom??) and a lot of the knowledge seems to be on YouTube videos, which is a culture of knowledge I don't respect and don't want to put up with.

I did try to get into Elden Ring when it launched but it didn't run on my computer, and the community was insufferable. People on r/eldenring got personally offended by the criticism of "it has a launch bug" so I gave up on them.

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Dogmantra wrote

the upgrade materials are bullshit for sure, especially in the earlier games. I didn't finish elden ring on my play but I managed to play it almost completely blind, compared to when I went through dark souls 1 where I used a lot of external help

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