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    Bloodborne

    Game » consists of 5 releases. Released Mar 24, 2015

    An action role playing game by FromSoftware, marking the studio's debut on the PlayStation 4. It shares creative roots, as well as gameplay elements, with the Souls series.

    I laughed about Jeff

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    Zevvion

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    On this week's podcast, Jeff talks about playing Bloodborne some more after Unprofessional Fridays where he played it for the first time. I honestly had to laugh when he said he didn't get people who told him he was good at the game, because he thought it wasn't that hard. In a good way. I always found the difficulty about the series to be massively overstated, as discussed in other threads. Even though Bloodborne is the easiest Souls game (opinion, obviously), I don't think any of them were ever hard. Just challenging and not very forgiving. Requiring more attention and learning stuff than other games.

    I'm hoping he sticks with it. It doesn't necessarily gets harder, but it does get more interesting with the enemy variety. I'd be interested to hear what he thinks about it in the end.

    Anyone else more or less agreeing with his stance? What did you think about the Bloodborne talk this week?

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    Baillie

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    It's hard when you fight a boss you don't know how to defend against, it's also hard when you have a horde of enemies after you.

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    Oldirtybearon

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    The difficulty of From RPGs has always been overstated. The thing that people like Jeff get confused about isn't people praising the "difficulty" of the game, but rather that games like Bloodborne don't hold the player's hand throughout the duration. These games expect you to pay attention and to play well. They expect you to be smart enough to figure shit out on your own. Really, after an entire generation of games treating gamers like idiots the Souls games (and Bloodborne) feel like a breath of fresh air.

    Another thing to consider is that a lot of gamers these days don't remember a time when games were hard. When games expected you to master their systems or fail repeatedly. Coming out of a generation of video games where everything was designed to make it easier on the player to just reach the end of the game, it's not hard to see why there are some who think the games are incredibly difficult. They aren't incredibly difficult, they just expect more than a pulse from you as a player.

    The one thing that probably bothered me about his (and Brad's) commentary was their general outlook on the souls fan base. Maybe it's because I don't stream video games for a living, but I've found the Souls fan base to be nothing but supportive and encouraging.

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    Retris

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    @oldirtybearon: I've noticed that there are two kinds of Souls fans. The ones who just genuinely enjoy playing the game. Then there are the ones who play it (or claim to play it in a lot of cases) because it's the rad new difficult game that makes you cool if you win at it.

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    Sinusoidal

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    #5  Edited By Sinusoidal

    The hardest part of the Souls games is having the patience to learn how to play them. Once you learn to take your time and not rush forward mashing the attack button, they're actually easier than your average action game or shooter. I've experienced way more frustratingly difficult part of games like God of War and Bulletstorm that require quick reflexes or fast paced shooting accuracy.

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    Getz

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    Yeah I agree. The game is about patience and awareness, and maybe a little pattern recognition

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    ElixirBronze

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    @retris: i agree with this -- people play it, finds it not to be that hard, and then interprets that as proof that they are just fucking hardcore and awesome and proceeds to be dicks about it to everyone else. Then there are those who just enjoys it for what it is and just love to talk about it in general.

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    Y2Ken

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    #8  Edited By Y2Ken

    For sure. Fighting dudes isn't "difficult" in those games per se, it's the lack of guidance (or rather guidance not being forced in your face). Also one thing Jeff brought up on UPF was that the game requires a lot of long-term patience, which is why I get on with it quite well. I find them quite relaxing - I take my time, stroll around areas, look carefully for enemies and find ways to single them out and pick them off. Usually people who die a lot are trying to bite off more than they can chew, whether that's running through a new area at speed or diving into a group of enemies and swinging wildly instead of measuring attacks and dodging/healing when necessary. "You step out of the way, and then you murder them."

    Also, plenty of games are hard if you want them to be - FromSoft are just one of the few developers who insist upon their chosen balance as the only way to play (which I think is a valid choice to make). I've played the Arkham games on hard and they're probably tougher combat-wise, just a little more generous with checkpoints. Dead Space 2 had that hardcore mode with no checkpoints and a maximum of three saves for the whole playthrough that I couldn't even bring myself to attempt. I spent close to three hours on the final boss of Metal Gear Rising on hard the first time I played it, which in many ways was not too dissimilar to a Souls boss but also required some QTE-style sequences that you had to nail or restart the whole fight. There's ample challenge in modern games if you're looking for it.

    @oldirtybearon I've found it goes both ways, but I think on the whole the core fanbase are pretty positive. That said, there definitely is a tendency (I have to fight against this myself sometimes) to just tell a new player everything as they go along, which can sometimes overload them with information or give them a false sense of security that then causes problems when they have to work things out by themselves later.

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    Punched

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    #9  Edited By Punched

    @sinusoidal: I don't know. I've been pretty successful with Bloodborne so far charging forward and mashing the attack button. Seems like the best strategy.

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    BelowStupid

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    I love that these games require that you pay attention. There are a lot of arena action games that are either too fast for me to follow what's going on, or I can zone out every couple of encounters because there isn't a huge penalty for messing up. The idea that every enemy matters is pretty cool.

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    Humanity

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    #11  Edited By Humanity

    It depends on what you consider to be "hard" really. It's a hard game in a sense that one mistake could cost you an entire run. The bosses are hard mostly because they give you little leeway in that it takes 20 or so hits to kill a boss and it will only take the boss 4 good swipes to kill you. Generally the games are hard because there is a tiny margin of error. It's not that fighting those villagers is difficult, because it's obviously not, it's that one moment of inattention can make you roll wrong or something, get cornered, stunlocked by 3 weak enemies and instantly killed - and depending on where you are, you might have to re-do an entire area to get to that very same point.

    So yah I think they're hard, just in a very specific way.

    Also I don't know what Brad is talking about. When Jeff said "is the whole game just evading an enemy attack and then counter attacking?" (paraphrased) I instantly thought, yeah, thats pretty much the entire game. The formula doesn't change, so I don't know what Brad means. You meet enemies that take more hits to kill, they have different attack patterns, but at the end of the day none of them are radically different. They wind up, you jump out of the way at the last second (or parry) and then you slash them to death. If Jeff is finding this to be too boring, and I completely understand where he's coming from, then he should just stop now because it doesn't radically change into Ninja Gaiden or something.

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    Maedhros925

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    @y2ken said:

    For sure. Fighting dudes isn't "difficult" in those games per se, it's the lack of guidance (or rather guidance not being forced in your face). Also one thing Jeff brought up on UPF was that the game requires a lot of long-term patience, which is why I get on with it quite well. I find them quite relaxing - I take my time, stroll around areas, look carefully for enemies and find ways to single them out and pick them off.

    I never thought of it that way, but you're right. I love being in a new area, figuring out every path I can take, searching every nook and cranny for items, and clearing the place of enemies. The combination of combat and world design makes the Souls games an immersive experience unlike any other game I've played.

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    Ares42

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    The myth of Souls game being excruciatingly hard comes from back when people didn't understand its systems. Every time I see someone playing these games and finding it too challenging it's because they've put themselves in that position by doing "stupid" choices (which in most cases are actually just uninformed).

    What really exemplifies this is in the few instances where Bloodborne actually tries it's best to be challenging. Fights like the last hunter in Eileen's quest, or the true last boss, or the chalice difficulty modifiers. They all the share the same thing, they cheat the system. The core design concepts of the games are more than forgiving enough to make anything managable as long as it works within its systems, and only by breaking them can it actually challenge people that have enough experience with it.

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    alwaysbebombing

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    I agree with Jeff, I never thought that the Souls games were actually hard. I don't feel as difficult is the right word either. The Souls games are more "tedious and boring." Once you found your attack pattern, how many times you can realistically hit and still have enough time to get away, you were golden. The only time you would take damage or get killed is when you got greedy or were learning a new boss routine. The games are just more about slow, methodical pacing, then being a "oh fuck you this game is hard" difficulty.

    I think Jeff was even saying something like this on his drive home last night.

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    AlKusanagi

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    Playing a Souls game isn't hard, LEARNING a Souls game is hard, and Jeff benefited from having people who have played the game sitting with him and talking him through the part where many people not familiar with the series would get frustrated with it and give up.

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    kewlsnake

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    #16  Edited By kewlsnake

    I thought Jeff pulled out some sick moves during that UPF. "just dodging and hitting stuff" isn't as straightforward as he makes it seem in my opinion.

    I also got a whole different experience from the Souls games (mainly Dark Souls 1) than what the guys described on the podcast. The combat was secondary to the exploration aspect for me. You had this whole world that you could piece together from the architecture, items & enemy placements. If you looked through the window just right before opening the door to the very first boss, you can see him standing on a ledge, ready to jump on you. The castle level isn't just a castle level, the gods lived there. The stairs had big steps for them, and little steps on the side for the humans.

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    PrivodOtmenit

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    They're not hard. They're oppressive. (and boring)

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    alistercat

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    Even if the difficulty is not accurately portrayed by players, Jeff is inadvertently shitting on those of us who don't find it as simple as "run up, press R1 and kill a guy" ad aren't that good at playing games.

    There's a lot of real life things I'm terrible at too, like chopping an onion."Come on, you can't even chop an onion? You just slice down and move the knife along.". It's easy to be reductionist and take for granted your own knowledge/skill. Unfortunately this feels like just the opinion people were waiting to jump on to and say "See? Souls games aren't that good."

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    Y2Ken

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    @kewlsnake said:

    I also got a whole different experience from the Souls games (mainly Dark Souls 1) than what the guys described on the podcast. The combat was secondary to the exploration aspect for me. You had this whole world that you could piece together from the architecture, items & enemy placements. If you looked through the window just right before opening the door to the very first boss, you can see him standing on a ledge, ready to jump on you. The castle level isn't just a castle level, the gods lived there. The stairs had big steps for them, and little steps on the side for the humans.

    Definitely with you. It certainly helps that I love the combat - right from the first few swings in Dark Souls I knew that I could spend ages just fighting enemies because it felt so physical and satisfying to me - but the real long-term appeal for me definitely comes a lot from the intricacies of the world design.

    I'm still not really deep enough into Bloodborne to judge how well it pulls that off, but there's quite a lot even early on that impressed me with the way the world interweaves and the hints you start to get about how Yharnam came to be the way it is today.

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    CaLe

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    Yeah, if you go back long enough you'll find plenty of my posts stating these games aren't hard and arguing why Professor Layton is the only truly hard game in town. I can play through Souls/Blood games without any help and finish them in short order and I always need help to get through Layton games, they are ridiculously hard.

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    Teddie

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    Jeff is inadvertently shitting on those of us who don't find it as simple as "run up, press R1 and kill a guy"

    The only problem I really have with him saying that is the part where it obviously wasn't working on Father G., who he attempted 8 times and only won on the time where he used a cheap item that stuns him whenever you use it.

    Otherwise I agree that the difficulty is way overstated, and that sucks because I know a lot of people who won't even give it a second glance because of that.

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    thatpinguino

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    #22  Edited By thatpinguino  Moderator

    The Souls games are more intentionally uninviting and obtuse than they are difficult in the "I can't react fast enough or perform this action" sense of the word. You need to invest a bunch of time into them to even understand what to do and where to go, but the act of killing enemies or dealing with bosses is often not that hard. Most of the difficulty comes from camera trouble, "gotcha" enemies hiding off screen, new enemies killing you in ways you could not prepare for, a lack of mechanical clarity or tutorialization on the game's part, and a slower pace than most conventional action games. The general loop is the same as most action games, the Souls series just dials up enemy damage in a way most games don't and it provides little to no guidance to new players (which is why I doubt the souls series will ever achieve mainstream success without radically altering how they bring new players up to speed).

    If you understand how to play action games, you will usually do fine at playing the Souls games until you stray off of the game's undefined "path" and into a late game area. Either that or you screw yourself by building your character poorly because the ideal ways to spend souls can be really hard to see at the outset.

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    Humanity

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    At this point we've come full circle and instead of annoying people claiming how it's the hardest game in the world we have equally droning individuals who proclaim just how easy they are.

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    washingmachine

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    Also, Jeff is in the starting areas, so..

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    mithhunter55

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    @humanity: @oldirtybearon: Jeff grew up in the age where many games were overly difficult for no reason. I think that informs part of his feeling about the over stated difficulty, as in it's really nothing new.

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    obcdexter

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    I also never thought these games were brutally difficult. Challenging, for sure, some bosses in particular, but nothing too outlandish. And they never needed to be to appeal to me. I love them for how they feel both mechanically and atmospherically. Exploring those worlds, piecing together the lore, opening shortcuts, secret pathways, hidden areas etc. pp. Never once did I think: "Oh, wow, that boss kicked my ass a dozen times, what a great game." If it's a well designed boss or area and it keeps kicking my ass, great, I'll take it. But the latter certainly isn't the hallmark by which I'd judge its quality. There have always been encounters that I was able to beat in my first, second or third attempt that were still absolutely amazing. Queelag, Sif, the fucking Phalanx (being the very first Souls boss) and even the Asylum Demon come to mind.

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    SaFt

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    Most games that are made today are treating you like a five year old with ADHD. With checkpoints every 10 seconds and difficulty settings that mean that the hardest difficulty actually is the normal setting. No wonder people think the Souls games are hard.

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    matiaz_tapia

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    #29  Edited By matiaz_tapia

    @humanity said:

    It depends on what you consider to be "hard" really. It's a hard game in a sense that one mistake could cost you an entire run. The bosses are hard mostly because they give you little leeway in that it takes 20 or so hits to kill a boss and it will only take the boss 4 good swipes to kill you. Generally the games are hard because there is a tiny margin of error. It's not that fighting those villagers is difficult, because it's obviously not, it's that one moment of inattention can make you roll wrong or something, get cornered, stunlocked by 3 weak enemies and instantly killed - and depending on where you are, you might have to re-do an entire area to get to that very same point.

    So yah I think they're hard, just in a very specific way.

    Also I don't know what Brad is talking about. When Jeff said "is the whole game just evading an enemy attack and then counter attacking?" (paraphrased) I instantly thought, yeah, thats pretty much the entire game. The formula doesn't change, so I don't know what Brad means. You meet enemies that take more hits to kill, they have different attack patterns, but at the end of the day none of them are radically different. They wind up, you jump out of the way at the last second (or parry) and then you slash them to death. If Jeff is finding this to be too boring, and I completely understand where he's coming from, then he should just stop now because it doesn't radically change into Ninja Gaiden or something.

    I think I can understand what Brad is getting at when it comes to his new found love for the Ludwig's. The game sure is about evading and attacking, but a greatsword makes it more about luring and waiting. In the case of that weapon, even poking around out of reach of a counter attack. It changes you tactics slightly.

    I think part of the fun is to find a weapon you like.

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    Fear_the_Booboo

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    I don't understand why people are angry about him. He seems to understand why people love those games, but he knows they're not for him.

    Also, I don't think Bloodborne is that hard, but I don't think it's easy. It's more about learning what to do and how to do it. Jeff seems to understand that too.

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    rethla

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    #31  Edited By rethla

    Jeff is good at gamelogic and a game thats all bout basic gamelogic is ofc. not hard for him.

    "is the whole game just evading an enemy attack and then counter attacking?"

    Yes it is but that is easier for some and harder for some. Its also like saying a car game is just about gasing and then brake and turning when the road turns wich is also true but games is so much more than their core gameplaymechanics. As many would like to point out monsterhunter has the same kind of coremechanics as souls games but they are still wildly different games becouse of everything thats built around those mechanics.

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    Michael_Langman

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    For me most of the "souls games" difficulty lies in the speed at which you play the game. You have to take it slow and steady to succeed, most modern games I've played have dumped a majority of their mechanics in my lap at the start with a healthy tutorial on how to use them. "Souls games" have never done that, they give you a few messages with the basic controls at the beginning and then your off to the races to discover the game for yourself. On a side note which souls game has been the most difficult for players? For me it was demon souls, it was my first one and was the hardest for me because of that reason still haven't beaten it (looking at you flamelurker) but all the others have gotten progessively easier because I now know what to expect out of these types of games. Bloodborne did throw me a curveball though with the faster paced combat

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    BluPotato

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    #33  Edited By BluPotato

    The best way I could describe it is the game is sorta like a door. It's gonna seem hard if you just sit there and bash your head against it or you can take a step back and see if you can find a doorknob and in failing that, see if there is a open window.

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    obcdexter

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    For me most of the "souls games" difficulty lies in the speed at which you play the game. You have to take it slow and steady to succeed, most modern games I've played have dumped a majority of their mechanics in my lap at the start with a healthy tutorial on how to use them. "Souls games" have never done that, they give you a few messages with the basic controls at the beginning and then your off to the races to discover the game for yourself. On a side note which souls game has been the most difficult for players? For me it was demon souls, it was my first one and was the hardest for me because of that reason still haven't beaten it (looking at you flamelurker) but all the others have gotten progessively easier because I now know what to expect out of these types of games. Bloodborne did throw me a curveball though with the faster paced combat

    Same here. I started with Demon's and it was a constant struggle from start to finish. When Dark Souls came out I was already experienced enough to mostly know what to expect and familiar with the combat. It was still really tough because of its non-linear structure. I often times found myself not knowing where to go and tackling enemies way above my level early on. Dark Souls 2 was pretty much a cakewalk. Bloodborne felt quite a bit more difficult, which I attribute mainly to it doing away with a lot of the series' earlier conventions, like shields, equip load, rolls etc. I'd go so far and say that the fact I've played so much of the older games before was actually detrimental to my progress in Bloodborne early on. The Father Gascoigne fight made that blatantly obvious for me.

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    Maedhros925

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    @humanity said:

    At this point we've come full circle and instead of annoying people claiming how it's the hardest game in the world we have equally droning individuals who proclaim just how easy they are.

    That's unfair. There are some exceedingly thoughtful responses in this thread. I see very little groupthink, and you negate the personal feelings of your peers when you label their opinions as such.

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    deactivated-61665c8292280

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    I think the conversation irritated me when it just came down to being exaggeratedly reductive. Beyond that point I felt like the statements were made mostly for the sake of cheap heat.

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    emfromthesea

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    Words like "hard" and "easy" are never any good at explaining the difficulty of a game because they tell you nothing of why it is or isn't challenging. If I were to describe the difficulty of Bloodborne, I would call it unaccommodating. The game doesn't go out of its way to ensure that the player knows what they should be doing, nor does it offer any options to modify the experience in a way that would be more welcoming to those who don't have a lot of experience with these types of games. The game expects you to learn its mechanics by using them, and you will be punished if you don't pick up on them quickly.

    Jeff can say that the game isn't nearly as hard as people have told him, but he's been playing games for a long time. He's also played small amounts of the previous Souls games. So even if the game is obtuse in the way it presents information to the player, he will naturally pick up on the mechanics faster than someone less experienced might.

    But there's another element to the Souls games that make them challenging to those who are familiar with them. Hubris. Most every enemy in Bloodborne can be defeated with ease if you play carefully and cautiously. There's also the option to farm weaker enemies in order to level up more and gain more items. But with experience in the Souls games comes impatience, and impatience is punishable. There are mechanics in the game, like the visceral attack, that can speed up the process of fighting enemies but at a higher risk. The game also presents the option of going to more challenging areas early to potentially reach the end game faster. Take the Vicar Amelia boss fight as an example. It's clearly meant to be the most challenging boss in the first area outside of the "tutorial", but it's not the first boss you have to face in that area. If you were to take your time and explore the area, you would find an item that would make the boss easier, and you would come back at a higher level. But the desire to jump any hurdle you encounter can lead to the game being more challenging then it needs to be.

    Of course player skill will always vary and difficulty will always be subjective, but I don't think calling Bloodborne and the other Souls games "hard" is fair, nor do I think they are "easy". The series simply expect something different from the player compared to other contemporary video games, and blanket statements about their difficulty robs them of the work that goes into creating the experience they offer.

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    Quid_Pro_Bono

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    @teddie: Yes, you're right, but the game only allowed him to beat Father G because he had that item. That item is there for people who aren't fully ready to learn the parrying system or the stick and move technique at that early point in the game. As Jeff progresses and gets less and less items to use to his advantage, he will be left with less leeway. The difficulty comes from restricting yourself to only make moves you know will pay off, avoid overcommiting your stamina, avoid wasting vials and bullets on boss attempts, etc. It's more of a psychological difficulty than a mechanical one.

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    OurSin_360

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    Demon souls and dark souls were "difficult" do to bad controls, clunky movement, and levels designed for constant fall deaths. Otherwise the difficulty is pretty average with a lot of grinding and repetition.

    Bloodborne allows for much better movement and the levels are designed to support that. Some of the bosses are tough (i found father G extremely easy and don't see the big deal though, i mean the gattling gun guy was way harder). I have to say that i haven't played with high insight though, but i find the game satisfying to play as it is.

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    Zefpunk

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    So funny that the state of games is that normally they are so overbearingly adamant on helping you every chance you can get. When a game like Demon's Souls comes along and gets rid of all that junk, people go nuts over it when really it is just a modern throwback to older games.

    Games used to be hard, in the sense that they didn't tell you anything. Their systems weren't explained, and you figured it out by playing.

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    ripelivejam

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    #41  Edited By ripelivejam

    I think it's a certain mindset that divides the it's-not-hard-at-alls from the it's-hard-as-nails camps. Some just seem to pick up on its particular requirements a little easier. Sadly i fall into the latter camp and ive been stuck near the very beginning (only made it to cleric beast once, died horribly). Maybe for me it will eventually be like dark souls where i brute force my way into being barely passable at the game (also maybe by grinding and over leveling).

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    AngriGhandi

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    Well, they're hard games (in the sense that any game can be considered "hard" on the internet, where someone is always there to tell you how easy it was for them), but we've also spent the last five years hearing people talk about the "right" and "wrong" ways to play them, and all the ways in which they're different from regular action and RPG games, and then playing the games ourselves, and then intermittently watching people play the games, sometimes from start to finish, and then reading a bunch of critical essays about "challenging design" and "not hand-holding the players" and "a sense of mystery and discovery--"

    I guess what I'm saying is that, at this point, we've all basically had an entire online college course in Souls games even if we've never played them before, and if that hadn't made us a lot better at them, that would mean we were some kind of idiots.

    I mean, if Jeff had come on the podcast and been like "oh my god you guys this game is so crazy the enemies don't wait for you, they just come up and HIT you! And then you lose all your experience! It's fucked! Popular opinion was correct about everything!" that would have been a very, very strange thing.

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    rangers517

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    He's still in the early areas of the game. I was kinda in the same boat as him. This was my first souls type game and I made it through the first area and beat the first boss on my first try and then made it through the next few areas without dying a ton and I was super confident but I think from the 4th boss on (sounds like he just beat the 3rd boss) it starts getting a lot harder and I started realizing those first areas were just easier.

    And saying, "all you do is dodge and then hit them!" is a really weird thing to keep repeating. First of all you can break down any game into a similar sentence and secondly he does understand this is a super long game, right? in those first areas it's more simple but obviously the timing for dodges and the amount of enemies there are and the amount of damage you take is gonna get harder.

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    Michael_Langman

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    @obcdexter: totally that guy kicked my butt, I had a very stable sword and shield build in dark souls and would take the brunt of enemy hits with the shield and wait for an opening. I never parried in dark souls so with bloodborne the gun basically being the parry I had to learn the hard way to adjust my play style to be fast and more agressive. What's your take on the cooperation for souls? Do you find it a detriment to the accomplishment of beating a hard boss with a second person or blazing through areas with someone who has been through it before? I personally enjoy the multiplayer it's a nice way to have a hand in an area that is too rough, didn't have help for my first playthrough on bloodborne but my subsequent sessions with the game I have summoned for nearly every boss encounter

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    gatehouse

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    To be honest, I still find these games hard, although that might just be down to me not being very good at video games and having the reaction times of a doped up sloth.

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    Humanity

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    @maedhros925: it's a hard game. I don't know why we're doing this dance of philosophizing difficulty like its some nebulous concept. Unlike Jeff I beat Father G on my second try without the music box and I still think it's hard.

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    obcdexter

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    @obcdexter: totally that guy kicked my butt, I had a very stable sword and shield build in dark souls and would take the brunt of enemy hits with the shield and wait for an opening. I never parried in dark souls so with bloodborne the gun basically being the parry I had to learn the hard way to adjust my play style to be fast and more agressive. What's your take on the cooperation for souls? Do you find it a detriment to the accomplishment of beating a hard boss with a second person or blazing through areas with someone who has been through it before? I personally enjoy the multiplayer it's a nice way to have a hand in an area that is too rough, didn't have help for my first playthrough on bloodborne but my subsequent sessions with the game I have summoned for nearly every boss encounter

    I always try (and manage) to beat bosses solo on my first playthrough, too. Afterwards I do help people out quite a bit on bosses that I found tough or just cool in general. A) that allows me to experience these cool fights some more without having to start over and B) like you, I also enjoy the heck out multiplayer in general. On subsequent playthroughs I don't shy away from summoning other people to speed up my progress. I also see it as a "gift" to the helpers, so to speak, since they'll get rewards from that too.

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    bacongames

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    Patrick and Vinny said the same thing when they dove into Dark Souls but they realized that the difficulty comes in player patience and execution. It's you against yourself and it's also on you to have the time to invest in learning the game's systems and the world.

    If it happens that the early game is a bit easier than that dynamic isn't as apparent and Jeff doesn't strike as someone who enjoys the prospect of learning yourself around obstacles that are doable. He never got into Spelunky, he never went full down the path in Super Meat Boy, put down Binding of Isaac, etc. These are games, along with the Souls games, that are built around the concept of player drive to improve or learn at a fundamental level to overcome the obstacles in front of them, be it difficult or random or both. This is why the narrative of them just being hard games is always tenuous because they also give you all the tools and expect you to get better and you totally can, which is really satisfying but not for everyone.

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    I_Stay_Puft

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    #49  Edited By I_Stay_Puft

    I don't even play the Souls game and thought the same 100%. I thought him kinda breaking the game down to its basic mechanics was kinda dismissing the series in itself. You could basically do that with any game to make it sound so simple but we all know there's more complexity into games if you look hard enough. Not sure if Jeff will stay with it or not but I gotta respect the guy for at least playing something new, different, and playing it some more on his own time.

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    altairre

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    @humanity said:

    It depends on what you consider to be "hard" really. It's a hard game in a sense that one mistake could cost you an entire run. The bosses are hard mostly because they give you little leeway in that it takes 20 or so hits to kill a boss and it will only take the boss 4 good swipes to kill you. Generally the games are hard because there is a tiny margin of error. It's not that fighting those villagers is difficult, because it's obviously not, it's that one moment of inattention can make you roll wrong or something, get cornered, stunlocked by 3 weak enemies and instantly killed - and depending on where you are, you might have to re-do an entire area to get to that very same point.

    So yah I think they're hard, just in a very specific way.

    Also I don't know what Brad is talking about. When Jeff said "is the whole game just evading an enemy attack and then counter attacking?" (paraphrased) I instantly thought, yeah, thats pretty much the entire game. The formula doesn't change, so I don't know what Brad means. You meet enemies that take more hits to kill, they have different attack patterns, but at the end of the day none of them are radically different. They wind up, you jump out of the way at the last second (or parry) and then you slash them to death. If Jeff is finding this to be too boring, and I completely understand where he's coming from, then he should just stop now because it doesn't radically change into Ninja Gaiden or something.

    Nailed it. Of course the Souls games are hard but guess what, the more experience you have with these kinds of games and the more information gets out there, the better you are going to get at them. It also helps if you play a lot of videogames. There is a thread on gaf about Bloodborne impressions for newcomers and there are plenty of people that are getting wrecked by bosses or certain areas. The Souls games are fair for the most part and once you understand the systems, mechanics and pace of the game, you're not going to die as much but you're still going to die, which is also part of the experience. There are also people who are going to be better at applying the theory to how they play and people that are having a tough time hours in because of how unforgivable these games can be. That being said, they have to have a certain difficulty to them to work the way they do, it's why they're so good in the first place. It would kill any appeal if it looked like this:

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