If you guys don't think a Souls game is "hard"... what is? Other games are more technical but this is more unforgiving.

It's nebulous because people approach it from two different paths: difficulty as being relative to other games, and difficulty as being relative to your experience with it. The latter gives it an extra 30 different layers of gray.

It doesn't help that the Souls games in general are not difficult in the sense of demanding manual dexterity, but rather in the sense of demanding patience and observation, which results in some to regard it as "boring" because they expect other things out of games.

I also beat Father G on my second try without the music box, and I also agree that that's a hard fight, but I found him easier post transformation than pre, which differs from others' experiences.

@artisanbreads: A number of the levels on something like Super Meat Boy are probably harder. Things like I Wanna be the Guy and I Wanna be the Boshi are probably harder for sure. And some of the Ninja Gaiden games on their highest difficulties.

Hard has always been the wrong way to describe these games. Sure, individual parts of them are hard but on the whole, unforgiving and oblique are more apt at describing the nature of this series.

I love how whenever people talk about the difficulty of the Souls games, statements are thrown out like "PEOPLE ARE JUST TOO USED TO EVERY GAME TREATING THEM LIKE A FUCKING CHILD". Man, I don't know how you'd deal with the games industry if literally every game not made by From Software never posed a challenge to you.

I had a whole big thing of 4 paragraphs and then I got that stupid fucking post error, and I accidentally clicked away from the page, ugh. And I'm not retyping all that.

In short, Jeff is correct. While the games are challenging, they are not overly hard. And as with any game, the difficulty of it depends solely on the person playing it.

That sounds like the opposite of what Jeff said, since his sentiment was "if you found this hard then what is wrong with you."

Exactly. I would go further too. There is just no big game that is that hard these days. Sure, you can put most games on hard or insane or whatever but most games don't balance these settings properly and don't give you the proper tools to get through them. It's like they don't really expect anyone to go through the game on anything but dude bro CoD mode (normal).

In souls games you get a well balanced hard experience that you can't run away from by putting it on normal or easy. No big game is that hard by default.

@turambar: I took it he was implying it wasn't hard for him. And he was confused why people were commenting to him that he was good at the game. Because he didn't find it hard. And then Brad and Dan said something about you are still very early, and Jeff said okay ya what ever. Maybe I need to re-listen to it, but I didn't get that from it at all.

The game would be so much better with ANY kind of clue as to what your supposed to be doing. You don't need a damn checkpoint system with icons, but even a journal with something like "I need to find a key to this dumb building". That's not fun or challenging at all, it's just frustrating getting lost and not knowing what your supposed to be doing or where your supposed to be going while fighting the same enemy over and over and over. I'm running through multiple areas sometimes where i've killed everybody and still have no clue what to do next, so i just turn the game off for the day or end up having to look at a wiki just to know wtf to do.

@turambar: A lot of the bosses do require manual dexterity though. Rolling at the right time to avoid getting damaged isn't that easy to get a handle on, especially not in the middle of a boss fight. Sure you can get hit once here and there but you have to be constantly dodging and looking for openings/maneuvering yourself into relatively safe striking position. It certainly isn't something you just pick up right away.

We can argue semantics about the relative difficulty of navigating the world etc etc but at the end of the day all these Soul games pose a level of difficulty that the average player would more often than not describe as hard. People here are plundering the thesaurus trying to find some roundabout way of saying it's "challenging" or "unforgiving".. I think of it in this sense - if a friend of mine who played games very casually would ask me "hey should I get Bloodborne? Is it hard?" I would tell him "yes, it's a hard game" and then I would go on to explain the specifics of what makes it hard.

@pyrodactyl: Well put. Most games that get harder via difficulty are usually cheap and frustrating. Could be argued for Souls at times too but the whole game is tuned a certain way.

The punishment isn't there though, and that's what makes Souls the toughest and most unforgiving games to me. Ninja Gaiden I love but it has frequent enough check pointing that even if it's technical, it doesn't even approach how I feel playing through a Souls game.

@altairre: That image is amazing in an odd way

I think we all had some sort of misconception that someone who hates these kinds of games will suck ass at them when they play them. There are several factors at play here.

Jeff's had (some) experience with these games.

He had several others helping to explain the game and giving him recommended strategies at every corner.

Jeff was really taking his time.

The end result of "man who doesn't enjoy Souls games almost beats first boss on first try at starting level" is still funny. Also, it's not that the games are hard, per say, but the difficulty of Souls games comes from a nontraditional approach to game design. The games barely tell you anything, and they expect you to take your time and use your head. Most games nowadays want you to see it all and get on with it. Jeff, despite not liking the games, understood these differences and knew what to expect, and combined with the factors I mentioned above that allowed him to get away with dying only three times.

Just went back to it, and his specific line was, with some minor paraphrasing, "A lot of people were telling me 'You're doing so well', and I'm just like 'What the fuck is wrong with people', because nothing I did was particularly difficult."

The very fact that you would feel the need to go into specifics to describe what actually makes the game hard is only evidence that the term "hard" is too vague to, by itself, be any adequately informative descriptor for the game. The "average player", whatever that actually means, may find it hard, but I doubt it will be attributed to the same reasons, making difficulty in Souls games nebulous.

I agree

Hopefully Jeff finds in himself the strength to continue. His opinion, specifically, is very interesting having in mind his past experience with these games

Exactly.

I've played every one of these games, and there's no doubt to me they are hard games. I think people who say they aren't hard maybe just happen to be good at games? The souls games are hard but mostly fair, so their difficulty is managable...unlike some games which are hard in broken ways.

There's probably people who think Ninja Gaiden is easy too.

Just saying just cuz you think it's easy doesn't mean its easy. If most people say these games are hard, then guess what? They're probably hard, and you just happen to be one of the good ones.

I feel the same way. I get that it's not as challenging as he expected given the hype, but some people, myself included, genuinely find these games difficult. And to the folks that really think Souls games aren't that hard, go take on Artorias solo with a pure melee build. That shit ain't easy.

Eh it's hard to be specific about this stuff. People will have their own interpretation of what "hard" means for them. I always say that Final Fantasy 11 (an MMO) was hard because you had to be a stubborn person and never give up. You had to listen to instructions and time actions correctly. You had other people watching you and if you make a mistake, you'd piss off a bunch of people or delay the group etc. There was no information for quests and stuff in-game. Even if you've spent the last year trying to get an item to drop with no luck, you couldn't give up. That is something I would describe as hard, because most people would just be like "nah fuck this.." It's a mentally taxing experience. Meanwhile, my friend, and a bunch of other people out there, say it's not "because you just stand there and hit a button". Is being tortured not hard because you just sit there?

I always think of the Mega Man series when I think about the difficulty of these games. As a kid, I would watch my friend play Mega Man and just blast through the levels, super quick and smooth and executing a plan against a boss. I could never do that (I never played the Mega Man games) so it was amazing to watch. Souls games seem to have that kind of structure and flow. I watch people like ENB play and it's fascinating. His confidence, the graceful execution of his actions and almost never dying. He makes it awesome to watch, even as I've already completed just about everything in the game myself. You watch someone like Dan play and, at least for me, it's painful. He just runs straight into everything and mashes R1 and hopes he doesn't die. Somehow he stays alive most of the time and I think that might be evidence of Bloodborne allowing and even rewarding a much more aggressive play style, where as I still approach with a lot of careful baiting and dodging etc.

I'll say I think when we watched Jeff on UPF and were saying he was good (that includes me) it's more that he was doing very well for someone just jumping into the game. But he is far from being a fresh new player as he already knows the concept behind the play style, he's seen other people play them, he's heard people discuss them at length, he grew up playing equally unforgiving games etc etc. If you go into a Souls game with zero expectations and experience, like I'm sure most of the core audience did with Demon's Souls or Dark Souls, then you'll have a very different experience.

I don't like when people reduce a game it's most simple description as a way of putting it down. I think Jeff had somewhat large expectations for these games because everyone has talked about them so much. I think a HUGE part of these games is the environment and art style. The weird vague story telling. The drive to keep pushing and pushing to see what is around the next corner. Finding new weapons, seeing how cool they are, and trying them out. And I think if Jeff doesn't care about that stuff, then he doesn't have that emotional investment, and in turn you kinda don't care if you die or succeed in the game. It's also not good when Brad tries to convince him that the good stuff hasn't started yet. If you don't like the style of the game from the beginning, I don't think anything later will change your mind.

Anyway, enough ranting. I'm glad Jeff is giving it a shot.

@turambar: Anything can be nebulous if you over analyze it enough. Is Meatboy hard? Well technically it's not a hard game. You're basically just memorizing a level layout and executing some jumps. It takes repetition and perseverance much like a Souls game. Honestly though I don't want to waste time for both of us by arbitrarily trying to muddy things up that both of us know are perfectly clear. I understand where you're coming from and I agree that large parts of these games aren't difficult in a sense that you're not asked to execute difficult button combinations all in a row. Boss fights I would argue are hard in the clearest meaning of the word because they aren't just about learning boss patterns but are also about actually executing specific moves during those boss patterns that require manual dexterity and precise timing.

All I'm saying is that overall it's a difficult experience to get through one of these games. The sum of it's parts make it hard. I understand if that is not the exact word that you would use to describe it, but at some point it's just silly to argue whether it's more "challenging" or "difficult" you know?

@turambar: his real sentiment was "i don't understand how people find this hard.". In his time playing it he felt he grasped the core mechanics of the gameplay, and he easily (for him) took to them and as a result it feels very rote to him. Maybe his intent was muddled or could be taken wrongly but that's what i got from it.

I personally find it tough as nails but i blame my ability to grasp the mechanics more (it does piss me off a significant amount admittedly).

@saft: Give me an example of what you think is a hard game.

@sccdemir: Mario 3, Ghouls and Ghosts, Battletoads... most things on the original nes haha.

The Souls games really aren't super hard, they're just very different than other games. Most games you can half pay attention to what's going on, even forget about a couple of the systems the game has, and still make it to the end on normal difficulty. Souls games aren't like that. You have to learn the systems, you have to learn the environments (no maps), etc. All of these things you will learn, and you will remember in much more clarity than any other game. I read some article once about how Dark Souls 1 is the best game, because it forces you to engage in the purest, truest form of learning, and that's basically what I'm getting at. You learn by taking risks, being curious, failing a bunch, but ultimately figuring out what works for you, just like in real life. I haven't played Dark Souls 1 in like two years, but I can still close my eyes and envision exactly how every zone in the game connects to each other. I don't think I could say that about any other game I have ever played.

Most games are kinda like watching a movie despite the fact that they are interactive. They're meant to be fun entertainment and little else. Even when you hit a hard part, you usually know what to do. It's just a matter of trying a few times until you get it, and afterwards it fades in your memory. I found Metal Gear Rising to be a decently challenging game, but I barely remember it now and I didn't even play it that long ago, because it never forced me to learn anything beyond what the buttons do. Beating Modern Warfare and World at War on veteran was way harder than anything I've ever had to do in Souls, but I don't remember a damn second of those experiences because it was hard in the same way that beating your head against a wall to knock it down is hard.

Souls games are less like entertainment and more like taking a college course in a subject you're really interested in. Sure, it's work no matter how you look at it, and can sometimes be difficult or tedious, but it's a hundred thousand times more satisfying than just sitting on a couch and letting entertainment just enter your retinas without really sparking anything deeper.

I enjoy the act of learning immensely. I read books constantly, many non-fiction history or anthropological books. I watch historical documentaries. My favorite movies are the ones that don't hand their answers to me on a silver platter. I love science, literature, mythology, and psychology. Some of my favorite novels have zero violence and tons of politics. If I had infinite time and money I'd probably be taking a college course of some kind for the rest of my life. There is little in this world that feels better than learning, and no game has given that to me the way souls has, and that's why they are amazing. Not because they're "so hard" that they require "scrubs" to "git gud" or "get rekt" but because they force you to learn. A lot of people just seem to be shit at learning, or they have no interest in doing so. Maybe the horrible US school system scared them away from the activity, or maybe they simply don't want to be forced to learn in their video games. Either way, I feel like they're missing out on the most satisfying experience you can have while holding a controller in your hands.

Maybe someone said this already, but I'm not surprised that some people think this game is hard. Consider most mainstream games out there today. You can play all the way through them, start to finish, and never die once. That trend got really bad last console generation. We've just now started seeing somewhat harder stuff in the past few years (Souls games, Super Meat Boy, rogue-likes, etc.), and most of those are still indie games, not mainstream/blockbuster games.

So yeah, any game where you can die period in this day and age, is automatically going to make some people say it's "hard." Game players like Jeff, me, and others here who have been playing video games for 20-30+ years aren't going to find these games all that challenging simply because we still remember back when games being hard was the norm.

yeah there is definitely a snooty factor about these games, because you know being good at Souls games get you all the girls and stuff...

so alpha!

Personally I have nothing against them, but I have not enjoy my time with DK2 nor DK1, they not for me.

Yup!

Ah, but see that same lack of direction is part of what I love about the series. The exploration is as satisfying to me as any boss fight. Maybe I don't know what this key is for, but I'm going to find out. Until then, I'm going to run all over the game world, poking into every nook and cranny, like a kid on Christmas morning trying to find to find out which presents are his to open.

The difficulty in these games is a combination of wrapping your head around mechanics, learning combat animations, and practicing patience. You are often making some form of progress even if you die and it only gets easier as you learn certain tricks to push your advantage and exploit enemy behavior ("leashing", baiting certain enemy attacks based on your positioning, etc). The execution isn't that hard once you're able to recognize and digest all of this, I think this is the key distinction. Personally I've always found the i-frames on evading to be very generous, even moreso in Bloodborne, but this is coming from someone who went from Monster Hunter to Demon's Souls.

Jeff's perspective is understandable because a lot of old arcade games are much more challenging and unforgiving, mostly by nature. The greatly exaggerated marketing, word of mouth, and elitist community since Dark Souls have warped these games into some kind of pinnacle of achievement, to me this is completely missing the point. I play these games for the struggle and satisfaction of progression, and for the level of detail in their worlds and characters.

I thought Jeff's perspective on the Bombcast was interesting and I'm interested in seeing if he plays more. For whatever reductive statements of "You just dodge and hit dudes" (at this point the passive negativity comes with the territory) he may have made, he also said there was something to it and he'd likely continue giving it a look.

Eh, I think you kinda gotta enjoy the atmosphere and the style of the game to brush aside annoyances like a non-optimal camera (it's actually fine, though... if you find yourself getting closer to the camera, you should back away since you're putting yourself into a corner) and the occasional heart-breaking death. I just don't think Jeff enjoys fantasy games enough (I said "enough," not "at all;" I know he has liked and played many fantasy games).

Also, I haven't played that much of this game yet, but damn it's pretty clear Manus from Dark Souls was the first live incarnation of a Bloodborne boss. The whole "ravenous relentless attacks by hairy/tendril-laden monsters" thing is all over the place in this game, and that's a good thing.

@sccdemir: I do think the Souls games are rather hard, just not as hard as people would like you to think. A good example of a game that i found incredibly hard is the original version of Devil May Cry 3, it was a long time ago i played it though.

Idk. The games always seemed super easy to me. I haven't played them, but based on what I've seen, they don't look hard. Maybe it's a control thing, but whenever I watched someone play them, the person just seemed like an idiot. I need to play them.

So Jeff trashed/over reduced a game he doesn't enjoy? No surprise here.

They are hard games. They might not be SMT1-2 and Strange Journey levels of difficult, or even Spelunky levels of difficult, but Average Taylor Gamesperson will probably be completely flummoxed by them for some time unless there is someone there to help them out. The thing is, after that initial period of vexation, the difficulty sort of caps. Yes, bosses will do more damage and have more movesets, but the way to handle that is pretty easy to decipher from a certain point onward. Jeff just happened to reach that point early on - a mixture, I'd say, of years of experience and three-to-four people actively guiding him through the area.

They're not the PARAGON OF DIFFICULTY FEED ME MORE DARK SOULS 2 YESSSSSS OH SO HARD, and they're not stupidly easy. They strike a certain balance between mechanical difficulty and straight-out esotericism that people find appealing in an age where, for a lot of games, how they play and what happens in them is readily apparent from day one. To some extent it's becoming true of this series as well, which is why it was nice for them to shake up the mechanics somewhat this time around. Still, I can't help but wonder if they will have to do something drastically different with the next game to keep me invested.

Exactly. They aren't hard they just require that you unlike most modern games take some initiative and pay fucking attention to what you're doing. I'll side with Jeff on the fact that i think that the game is littered with bullshit. Namely having to constantly wade back through enemies to get to a boss. Which is why I love Dark Souls II because you can just eradicate any enemies from spawning. If you end up having to take a few swipes at the boss. Which I really enjoyed.

I'm seriously starting to wonder if I'm playing a different game than everyone else. I've had my share of difficulties with the previous games but patience and awareness don't seem necessary at all for Bloodborne. Sprinting at things and mashing R1 seems to be a viable strategy. Needed to summon someone for the Blood Starved beast but every boss afterwards has been beaten on the first or second try by mashing R1 or using the flamesprayer. I'm not even fighting bosses enough times to learn their names. I just killed the giant lightning thing after you return to the prison. I can't imagine I'm still in the early areas. I don't leave my PS4 on when I'm not using and I have almost 50 insight. Maybe the Mercy Blades are way too strong?

I feel like Bloodborne is the easiest souls game simply because it allows the least variety in play style. Jeff is right, every encounter is as simple as dodging and mashing R1. In Demon's and Dark souls I messed around with different weapons, shields, and offhands that completely changed my play style (sometime blocking, sometimes rolling, sometimes going all out offense). In Bloodborne there are far fewer options and I find that every enemy requires me to dodge an initial volley of attacks, run in and mash R1, and then dodge out.

Pretty much. I remember also finding it pretty funny back in the Demon's Souls days when it was the opposite. You know, the whole "what kind of person would want to play a masochistic game like this" thing, but also being weirdly belligerent about it then too.

These games aren't difficult, they're just punishing. I dunno, it's more Bushido Blade than Super Meat Boy. Or hell, more like Divekick than I Wanna Be The Guy.

That's literally the definition of hard. Challenging is a fucking synonym for hard. Also Jeff was being cocky and forgetting that he has learned how to approach these sort of games through osmosis as Vinny, Brad and numerous other people have talked about it. Someone running in blind or fresh for the first time in a Souls game would be overwhelmed, because there is a specific rhythm and strategy to how you play Souls games. Try to Devil May Cry it, and get shut down immediately.

I ALSO WILL PRETEND IM SUPER GOOD AT IT TO IMPRESS INTERNET STANGERS

They're hard. Get over yourself if you think otherwise.

Hard to begin with but through levelling and gear most challenges can be overcome by being able to hit harder and move better.

I'm bad at Dark Souls games. I don't think they are especially hard, I'm just not good at games anymore.

I'm not saying it was easy, but after playing the original Dark Souls I had a pretty similar reaction. I think people really oversell the difficulty of these games. Or maybe there are just a lot of people who screwed themselves on the RPG end of things or something.

I liked him saying that it's not hard and all you do is mash R1, even though he's got killed a bunch of times doing just that. In most games, failing and dying 8 times to the same enemy you would probably say it's a difficult encounter, but when talking about this particular game, it doesn't count somehow.

The game has already reset his expectations about what is 'hard', to the point where dying doesn't seem like a failure so much as a temporary roadblock presented by the game to your progress, like a door you don't have the key for yet.

I had more trouble with Dragon Age: Inquisition then this game, however, DA is hard in that it requires some more tactics and thinking ahead. This game is more of just dodging at the right time.

I agree that a lot of the elitist "Only the most harcore players like us can deal with this insane videogame" is complete bullshit. I also think Jeff is arriving at the series from a ridiculously privileged position, having several series veterans sit through the first hour of the game with him and explain to him all the basic mechanics which would otherwise have been overwhelming. And while I agree that the combat itself is pretty basic (Essentially managing animation cycles and positioning) there are levels of obscurity to some of the design mechanics which won't be a problem until elsewhere down the line.

I've personally had to sit on screenshare and walk several friends through the early parts of the game because there were getting overwhelmed and frustrated at not understanding anything.