I was watching a few videos on the difficulty in Khazan recently (https://youtu.be/iRn_4QtYFiM and a different one which I can’t find any longer) where the creators argued that the difficulty, while very hard, is essential to the experience of the game. If the bosses were any less difficult, they would not pose enough of a challenge to players, thus diminishing the sense of accomplishment when beating the boss.

This made wonder if difficult bosses really are the most defining characteristic of soulslikes since that’s what most people seem to focus on. Dark Souls was notoriously marketed as the difficult game franchise, with FromSoft even leaning into this reputation with their DS1 Prepare to Die edition. But is difficulty really that important to a good soulslike?

Demon’s Souls, for example, mainly has gimmick bosses. Sure, Allan and Maneaters are quite difficult objectively speaking, but apart from Flamelurker (?) there was no boss in the game that gave me major trouble - it was primarily the brutal level design and lack of bonfires.

DS1, which had been heralded as this super hard game, doesn’t pose too many super difficult boss fights, by modern standards, either - the level design and interconnectedness of the world is the primary focus.

I feel like Sekiro (and maybe Nioh? haven’t played any of them) pushed the genre to include suuper difficult bosses, then Elden Ring did, now lower-budget studios with games like Lies of P or Khazan do, whilst the other pillars of what make up a “standard” soulslike take up a little bit of a background role.

With all that said, I was just wondering what your experience with difficult bosses has been recently and if you value difficult bosses over any other aspect of the games. Maybe you don’t care about difficulty at all and rather want to explore and feel the atmosphere of the world you’re in.

Have a nice weekend ✌🏻

  • 🇰 🌀 🇱 🇦 🇳 🇦 🇰 🇮 @pawb.socialEnglish
    2·
    5 days ago

    It’s a whole vibe.

    What Fromsoft has done has yet to really be replicated in its entirety. The combination of old and new school design philosophies is a big part. Another is changing the story to fit the game, and not changing the game to fit the story.

    Lots of games replicate the 3rd person perspective, the stats, the dodge and parry mechanics, the respawning mechanics and bonfires/checkpoints, but still fail to get the vibe right when it comes to the actual story and storytelling. The worst offenders are things like Remnant that have BOOKS of exposition that tries to explain every little thing instead of allowing the player to figure it out and having things open to interpretation. Or Lords of the Fallen that just fail to have anything interesting going on in their worlds and have flat, one-dimensional characters.

    The closest thing that has managed to get most of everything right, including the vibe, is Lies of P. That’s a dev that really understands what it is they are imitating and the things it doesn’t live up to are super minor.