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saltypiss · 3 months

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ngl, I feel like Dark Souls was never really that difficult. I mean, my non-gamer friend got past Ornstein and Smough (with me coaching him but regardless it was all his own effort and knowledge with me as a quicker google search at most), sure, it's difficult, but only in that, you aren't given a cheese for every single encounter, and those that exist are genuinely less fun than actually improving.

The whole point of Dark Souls was Improving both your character and yourself. Getting armor and weapons, leveling up, that's character stuff, important given how they handle stat systems, but it doesn't make things Easy, just shaves off difficulty. That's intentional and very directed.

For you, you improved by exploring the world, finding information, experimenting with all sorts of equipment, positions, attacks, armors, you learned the enemies' patterns, sizes, speeds, silhouettes, and the game's never punching you as hard as it possibly can and telling you just to "git gud" Dark Souls was never "git gud" it was always "get prepared" "learn more" "experiment more" "grow as a person" "grow as a character"

To me, it's been irreparably ignored to focus solely on difficulty and obscure lore not even partially meant to be entirely learned by the average player. They utterly removed the world design for what can best be described as OOT's world design but worse. If anything is hidden you never feel good finding it because it's like finding a needle in hyrule field, the enemy placement is garbage, and of course, it's gotta go faster and faster and faster every subsequent game. Gotta keep the streamer's audience engaged! Marketing is a cinch when your gameplay is designed near entirely around advertising!

I've always felt that combat was DS's weakest link, that doesn't mean it's bad, just that, when you put Literally Everything Else on the table, combat's simply a Very small part of what you do. You're spending Far more time preparing and learning before fighting. And yet, Game of all Time. Not DS2, not DS2's DLC meant to just make it harder, not DS3's...bleh, just, just bleh, not BB, not ER. Dark Souls. Because it was a well rounded game, even when it's second half is utterly atrocious.

I guarantee my non-gamer friend cannot get further than I have in DS2/3/ER. Not that he did in DS, but he at least wants to come back to DS and complete the game. DS3/ER just makes you honestly not even want to come back. Why bother? There's nothing more I can do but devote time like a second job to improving a skill that will Never Benefit Me as much as Dark Souls has in my life.

Dark Souls gave you challenges that appeared insurmountable. But what the developer's did to keep you engaged and hopeful, was that they proved there's an Intention and Design to what you're encountering. You're only intimidated because you don't know enough. When you fail, you learn more, you grow more confident, and you try again. If that fails, you explore more, you try more, you experiment more, if that fails, you better your equipment, you grow your character, and if that fails, you know by then, it's down to You to "git gud".

DS2 onwards has None of that. It's just "git gud" there is no other place to go that makes this place feel or play any better, no amount of levels or equipment will honestly feel like they make much of a difference and there's So Much Garbage inbetween all of that. By the end of a boss fight I failed, I never think "Hmm, I should try this!" because I already did and it didn't work. Nothing gives you an advantage, it's either full on cheesing, or waste as much time as humanly possible going BACK to the god damn cheesy boss fight hoping this time the AI doesn't break in such a way that's impossible to ever predict or counter or care.

Don't get me started on how fast these games are getting but the camera seems to keep getting closer and closer to the player since DS1, and enemies larger and larger, and the combat areas are either so fucking small, or cluttered to shit, that you Literally Cannot See near every god damn combat situation.

Remember when the difficulty was due Near Entirely to the player lacking information and knowledge, and now-a-days, near anyone can beat DS with a guide? Good times. I sure wish they made games you're meant to have fun and genuinely get invested into. Now it's about making the combat visually sell itself when the gameplay aspect is not made to be fun. I don't find any enjoyment in having to quickly put in button combinations in DDR formatted patterns.

I seriously can't stop. You know what the BEST part of the weakest link, combat, is? That you and the enemy are Just As Vulnerable When Attacking. When they attack, if you aren't hit, you can go for it a hit. It's Very Mechanical and thus means you can Learn and Improve.

Enemy attacks, I dodge left, I get a hit, they're stunned, I get another hit, they go for an attack, I dodge.

Simplified, but it sure is nice to See The Enemy and Know What They're Doing based on Knowledge I Accrued Fighting It.

Now it's

Enemy attacks, attacks, attacks, attacks, attacks, now you have Maybe a Chance at a Single Swing. Repeat forever until the bulletsponge stops moving.

I get that it's it's own thing, but my god it's never been nearly as good as DS's combat. Just looks cool. Doesn't feel cool at all. It feels very lame, just bizarre to me to make DDR-like combat in place of an actual challenge you're meant to figure out, not just eventually get past. Hard to explain, but in DS, if something seemed insurmountable, it was an illusion of sorts, still difficult, but not as impossible as it seemed. What felt random and loose now feels tight and responsive. That's Supposed TO HAPPEN.

But it Never happens in any subsequent game. Every boss fight I always am pissed. Because it's never cool, or fun, it's just frustrating and when it's done I just sigh, and try to move on while ranting about just about every aspect because MY GOD no one playtested that! No one! Not one soul thinks that was a well designed moment of gameplay! Then hope to god it never gets that bad again. Then it does.

It's like...DS1's first half was a total fluke, and it's second half just permanently poisoned the rest of the series. Because that second half is just DS2, it's just DS3, it's just ER. There's not an interconnected world or any feeling that these places are even in the same universe. It's Hallways. That lead to the next level. Imagine the first Zelda's Dungeons, that's DS1's second half onwards, except each dungeon is connected by a hallway, or elevator. Just utterly boring. "You're stuck here til you're done here" simply didn't happen every turn in the first half.

Just really don't know how it went so off the rails. All I can really think is that it's all about difficulty. And god forbid if their game is FUN instead of HARD! They might just get another Game of All Time that way! And God knows No one Wants that!

To be clear, it's not about "the game is too hard" it's that it's Entirely focused on keeping that faux lineage it genuinely never had or earned. Just marketed.

If you want a harder Dark Souls, there's a Plethora of challenges you can do. Not a one feels forced honestly. Soul LV1, magic/bows only, heavy load only, there's so many ways to play DS1 that, simply put, aren't as feasible, nor as interesting or fun in subsequent games.

Oh I got it! It's like Castlevania SOTN vs Castlevania 2. Sure, 2's not as bad as it's made out to be, but it sure isn't well regarded. Meanwhile SOTN has exploring, growing, learning, like holy hell, it's literally 2D Dark Souls. DS wasn't even the first to do something like itself. Kinda sad how off the rails it went and how Backwards it's become. A total step down in every aspect that made a game "Of All Time" to focus on a Genuine Lie that their game's are difficult. They aren't. They're Tedious. Learning DDR is Tedious. And when that's Literally All You Have Left, I'm sorry, but that's never going to be Game Of All Time, it's simply going to be forgotten as the hype continues to die down.

As we see today, I don't think DS has ever been more popular. A game from 2011. Doing better than it was before. DS2? Still flailing in "no it's good" and "no it's bad" discussions (it's bad, it's really, really bad, not even debatable, some enjoyable aspects, but we all like burnt toast sometimes) DS3? I hardly hear anything about it because it's such a soulless piece of shit. ER is dwindling, only rescued by DLC, Bloodborne continues to be Overwhelmingly overhyped and stuck to Sony devices. I'm not even going to touch Sekiro at this point, heard it's hard, guarantee it's faux difficulty and just by looking can tell gameplay took a backseat to marketability again.

Don't get me started on artistry. It's dead. Do ya like the color grey? Because boy howdy, they got you covered. Do you like primarily 3 colors at any given point? Because boy, I sure hope you like the colors Green Yellow and Red! But grey versions of them. Like, Veeeeery Grey versions of them. Ya'll know they put this filter on there so it looks standard across everyone's monitor's and stream's right? Like, they handicap their visuals, so everyone has an equally bad visual experience? Instead of...you know just having a good looking game that doesn't stream right all the time online...Maybe we can try...not putting more than half the budget in graphics? Given it's just a marketing tool, and half the total budget is equal to the marketing budget, maybe we can try NOT putting 3/4ths the budget into marketing????

I fuckin hate souls-likes because Not A One understands what the fuck made Dark Souls good! Is it so hard to understand that, in a time where Not A Single Soul had any confidence in the design of any game they played, that the One That Made People Go "Oh Shit GOAT" was the ONLY FUCKING ONE IN YEARS that gives the player CONFIDENCE AND TRUST IN THE DESIGN!?

You can't just have it be HARD AND CALL IT A DAY

YOU HAVE TO EARN THE TRUST OF THE PLAYER

YOU HAVE TO EARN THE RESPECT OF THE PLAYER

YOU HAVE TO MAKE THE PLAYER TRUST THE DESIGN

TRUST THAT THERE IS A REAL DESIGN

YOU NEED TO GIVE THEM SOMETHING

All this faux difficult shit does is tell the player, There is no design, there is only fitting string into needle holes. And any attempt to stray from that is Severely Punished.

Fuck off.

Dark Souls is a Puzzle game where the puzzle is your fear and how you can surpass it.

It is NOT pushing a fucking boulder up a god damn wall.

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hamletthedane · 3 months

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I was meeting a client at a famous museum’s lounge for lunch (fancy, I know) and had an hour to kill afterwards so I joined the first random docent tour I could find. The woman who took us around was a great-grandmother from the Bronx “back when that was nothing to brag about” and she was doing a talk on alternative mediums within art.

What I thought that meant: telling us about unique sculpture materials and paint mixtures.

What that actually meant: an 84yo woman gingerly holding a beautifully beaded and embroidered dress (apparently from Ukraine and at least 200 years old) and, with tears in her eyes, showing how each individual thread was spun by hand and weaved into place on a cottage floor loom, with bright blue silk embroidery thread and hand-blown beads intricately piercing the work of other labor for days upon days, as the labor of a dozen talented people came together to make something so beautiful for a village girl’s wedding day.

What it also meant: in 1948, a young girl lived in a cramped tenement-like third floor apartment in Manhattan, with a father who had just joined them after not having been allowed to escape through Poland with his pregnant wife nine years earlier. She sits in her father’s lap and watches with wide, quiet eyes as her mother’s deft hands fly across fabric with bright blue silk thread (echoing hands from over a century years earlier). Thread that her mother had salvaged from white embroidery scraps at the tailor’s shop where she worked and spent the last few days carefully dying in the kitchen sink and drying on the roof.

The dress is in the traditional Hungarian fashion and is folded across her mother’s lap: her mother doesn’t had a pattern, but she doesn’t need one to make her daughter’s dress for the fifth grade dance. The dress would end up differing significantly from the pure white, petticoated first communion dresses worn by her daughter’s majority-Catholic classmates, but the young girl would love it all the more for its uniqueness and bright blue thread.

And now, that same young girl (and maybe also the villager from 19th century Ukraine) stands in front of us, trying not to clutch the old fabric too hard as her voice shakes with the emotion of all the love and humanity that is poured into the labor of art. The village girl and the girl in the Bronx were very different people: different centuries, different religions, different ages, and different continents. But the love in the stitches and beads on their dresses was the same. And she tells us that when we look at the labor of art, we don’t just see the work to create that piece - we see the labor of our own creations and the creations of others for us, and the value in something so seemingly frivolous.

But, maybe more importantly, she says that we only admire this piece in a museum because it happened to survive the love of the wearer and those who owned it afterwards, but there have been quite literally billions of small, quiet works of art in billions of small, quiet homes all over the world, for millennia. That your grandmother’s quilt is used as a picnic blanket just as Van Gogh’s works hung in his poor friends’ hallways. That your father’s hand-painted model plane sets are displayed in your parents’ livingroom as Grecian vases are displayed in museums. That your older sister’s engineering drawings in a steady, fine-lined hand are akin to Da Vinci’s scribbles of flying machines.

I don’t think there’s any dramatic conclusions to be drawn from these thoughts - they’ve been echoed by thousands of other people across the centuries. However, if you ever feel bad for spending all of your time sewing, knitting, drawing, building lego sets, or whatever else - especially if you feel like you have to somehow monetize or show off your work online to justify your labor - please know that there’s an 84yo museum docent in the Bronx who would cry simply at the thought of you spending so much effort to quietly create something that’s beautiful to you.

#shut up e #long post #Saturday thoughts #this has been in my drafts for a week haha #also this is the heart of why AI art feels so wrong #forget the discussion of copyright and theft etc - even if models were only trained on public domain they would still feel very wrong #because they’re not art. art is the labor of creation #even commercial art and art commissioned by the popes and kings of history: there is humanity in the labor of it #unrelated: I did not know living in the Bronx was now something to brag about. How the fuck do y’all New Yorkers afford this city???

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