something that i think gets lost in the sauce in thrse discussions is whether fun is derived from playing or winning. people are comparing Silksong- and to get ahead of it right now i haven’t played and am not criticizing either of the Hollow Knights- to old arcade and early console games and their legendary difficulty, but a lot of those games were meant to be complete and fun experiences even if you game over very early on. they also didn’t have levels full of bespoke Stuff in them, it was the same few tiles and entities in different configurations., so being stuck on level 1 didn’t mean you were missing out on a narrative and worldbuilding. with how the lines have blurred between games and narrative art forms in the last few decades, there are different incentives at play and someone stuck on world 1 of SMB isn’t missing out nearly as much as someone stuck on whatever the first stage of Silksong is. it’s all ultimately apples and oranges
I recently started gaming again after a twenty year gap. Back in the day I used to go for high difficulty and complete everything. Now, I’m playing on easy difficulty setting. Partly cos I’m in my 50s, reactions are slower and my hands are a bit fucked up. Partly because I want to enjoy the story and the experience - if I get stuck on a fight and keep dying I get frustrated eventually and angry with myself for not being as good as I want to be. That feeling is not what I’m gaming for, so yeah, easy setting.
I haven’t played hollow knight because I’m told it’s frustrating and difficult, and, while the aesthetic really appeals to me I don’t wanna be frustrated. But I’m so happy for all the people who have been waiting for this and are enjoying it, sometimes we do get nice things!
I’m older also and am enjoying Hollow Knight a lot, it’s hard but I wouldn’t say frustrating, the game lets you say “Hmn this is not working out, I’m coming back here later after I get more skills or abilities” and it’s relatively non-linear for a metroidvania type game.
Part of why it was very popular is the difficulty straddled a good line between challenging and manageable enough to keep making progress. But every player has different experience levels, distractions or time-limits on how much we can dedicate to gaming so it should be standard to allow players to choose difficulty. However, in a game like Hollow Knight you might be able to adjust the difficulty of boss fights but that’s only part of the challenge, the rest of the challenge in inherent in the game’s layout and mechanics.
The problem with “old difficulty” was that in arcades especially, and even on consoles by way of the industry being smaller and the same people working on both, were designed around quarter-munching.
Stuff was hard to get people to pay up.
I would have preferred modern ideas like bosses are hard because you have to learn their patterns- and to be clear, this is also present - but also the feeling that I’m not strong enough to do anything more than chip damage is a bit annoying.
I think there’s validity in all the arguments I’ve seen people making; but at the same time I’m glad the game’s not easy. I just don’t know if it always needs to be punishing through frustration.
(The thing that pisses me off the most are those
Tap for spoiler
Red flower buds you need to pogo off of. Do they REALLY need to be over spikes every time? Does my downward thrust really need to be at an angle to bounce off them?? I started out being ok with that movement and I’ve never regressed so fast or so hard at anything in a game before. I swear I’ve lost more lives and to that than bosses; and by the game’s very nature that means a run back every time! Ugh!
So that’s why I say there’s a difference between “tricky” hard and “annoying” hard.
tip
If you’re having trouble with red flower buds, maybe explore a different area.
I found them much easier after I unlocked some other things
Thanks for the reassurance. I was starting to do just that, but I’ve only had about 6 hours in game so far and of that I feel like I’m moving pretty slow. So perhaps there is hope yet!
I would have preferred modern ideas like bosses are hard because you have to learn their patterns- and to be clear, this is also present - but also the feeling that I’m not strong enough to do anything more than chip damage is a bit annoying.
This is why I stopped playing Elden Ring. I have no problem learning patterns for boss fights but the perpetual feeling that I’m fighting Godzilla with a badminton racket is obnoxious. Especially after I spent the last 20 hours of play grinding out equipment upgrades and levels. It doesn’t feel fun or rewarding.
Might I ask for which boss this applied to you? I only had this for optional bosses for which I was underleveled and never for required bosses.
I enjoyed getting the shit beaten out of me when fighting the Black Gargoyle in Caelid. I never struggled like that with the required bosses, except a bit for the final boss, which I enjoyed.
Maliketh. First phase I can handle but his second phase can eat my whole ass. I stopped playing after 40 or so attempts. I like a challenge. I’ve beaten every Soulsborne game aside Demon and Sekiro. But there is a point where my frustration overrides the fun I’m having.
For me, much of the fun is making progress. i never finished the first game because I kept getting lost and stuck and unable to progress for extended periods. In a From Software game I can spend weeks on a single boss and masochistically enjoy every moment because I know what I have to do. The problem I had with Hollow Knight was I kept finding myself completely at a loss about where to go or what to do. I would spend days retreading the same empty caverns looking for a clue or a new path and not finding any. When I knew what I had to do, I enjoyed it immensely, but progression was often too obscure and my interest slowly evaporated.
This is the “metroidvania” genre part of the game but, it’s not for everyone.
That being said, both Hollow Knight and Silksong make the exploration a lot more streamlined than in older metroidvanias with the map features. When you don’t know where to go, check your map and look for paths that lead to areas that aren’t filled in yet. When you get a new power, see if you can remember any locations where that might be useful.
The game screams passion and devs spend seven years making it the way they like it. It is also a dirt cheap.
Critisism is fair and everybody has right for opininion. My opinion is that people who are bitching about the boss runs can shove it up to theirs.
High difficulty is not good game design. Making a game more approachable through lower difficulty settings with additional checkpoints doesn’t make it worse for people who like a challenge. It just makes it enjoyable to more people.
Claiming it’s down to “artistic vision” just feels dishonest. You could claim Studio Ghibli movies should never be dubbed or subbed. You just have to learn Japanese to enjoy them, just don’t watch them if that’s not for you… but why? How is it a bad thing if more people can enjoy something?
Cup Head is a great example. It’s a fantastic game with an art style that younger kids love. But it’s too difficult for most kids, which doesn’t make the game better, it just locks them out from a game they’d otherwise love.
Cuphead is a throwback in every sense. Making it easy would just make it a throwaway game that is seen once and never again.
Studio Ghibli movies should never be dubbed or subbed. You just have to learn Japanese to enjoy them, just don’t watch them if that’s not for you…
I feel this is a false equivalence.
If you wanted to make a movie analogy, I’d say it’s more like a movie having subtle subtext or context which would make it’s message or intent more difficult to comprehend.
Imagine if someone watched The Cabin in the Woods (satire movie about horror movies) and said it was a bad movie because it wasn’t scary.
I think its fair to say that person would have low film literacy at least.
How do we compensate for that? Should movies start offering accessibility features so every viewer can have the ability to know foreshadowing, film cliches, or meta-narrative devices?
I feel like giving viewers an option before a movie to say “i have low media literacy”, which would result in popups during the movie to say “hey, this is a callback to the Hellraiser franchise” would be insulting to the creators.
The film wasn’t made for casual movie viewers, it was made for a specific audience. The creators aren’t obliged to make it more easily digestible.
Cabin in the woods was a satire movie??? I like the movie…
I can’t tell if you’re being ironic or not lol.
I’ll write my response as if you’re being sincere;
Cabin in the Woods is one of my all time favourite movies, but the entire premise is built around horror movie tropes.
The “gods” mentioned at the end of the movie are the movie viewers themselves. They “demand blood” (watching a splatter movie for the sake of watching people get killed).
It’s a requirement that “the virgin” be the last one killed, but the death is optional (this is a staple of horror movies; the ‘Final Girl’)
One of the literary devices the movie toys with is the idea that ALL the horror movies we’ve seen are part of the same universe, and the guys in the offices are the ones pulling the strings to entertain us.
The entire movie is one giant nudge-nudge, wink-wink for people who love to get meta with horror movies.
If you enjoyed it regardless, that’s fine, but my point was that it would be a bad product if it tried to accommodate for viewers such as yourself.
No I really did like the movie and yes it was full of stereo types like the chad, the stoner, the girl etc but I never came to think of it as satire or that we are the gods demanding the blood. But it was a good movie, I liked it.
Glad you liked it anyway lol.
Small aside: the characters aren’t stereotypes, they’re archetypes. This is another example of the satire, as well as the gas station attendant from the start (I think he was called the Harbinger?)
Oh yeah arch types it is. Did you know you can buy the cup-bong on the internet lol
But The Cabin In The Woods is exactly what I’m talking about. A product with mass appeal that still caters to a small group of people. Much like Paul Verhovens old movies. You can watch them as dumb action or social criticism.
And movies have several accessibility features. Things like subtitles, which often translate cultural references or jokes that don’t directly translate to viewers from foreign countries. Descriptive audio tracks for visually impaired, directors commentary to learn things behind the scenes. Many services and devices also allow you to even out dynamics and enhance speech.
The problem with games that have a too high difficulty threshold isn’t that you’re missing out on some hidden subtext. It’s that you will never get to see 70% of the game, for absolutely no good reason.
Cuphead is such a good example of this, according to xbox achievement stats 31% never made it past the first part of the game, 72% never got to the end of the game.
Accessibility in film delivers the same work to more people. Accessibility in games can cross the line into creating a different work entirely, because the interaction itself is the art, not just the visuals or sound.
Saying “most players never saw the end of Cuphead” isn’t proof of failure; it’s proof of selectivity. Just like not everyone finishes Infinite Jest, but it doesn’t mean Wallace failed as a writer.
Cuphead was made to invoke arcade game feelings. The gameplay is brutal by design. That’s the point.
It’s like watching Terrifier and throwing up half way through, storming out of the cinema and saying “the acting was good but it was too violent, I wish I could watch a version of the movie without the gore”
But it doesn’t, accessibility in film does not deliver the same work to more people. Films are translated, dubbed and subbed to be approachable. Adding voice acting from talent that were never involved in the original film. It’s all about adapting the film to fit a wider audience.
The fact that gamers think games are somehow different and the “git gud” approach is just pointless elitism. How would Cuphead, Super Meatboy or Silk Song be a worse game if they had an easy game mode where you had more life and/or checkpoints? How does that setting change the experience of someone playing in normal, veteran or hardcore mode?
“How would the game be worse if it had an easy mode?”
Adding an easy mode changes the experience even for hardcore players because:
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Design intent shifts. Once multiple difficulties exist, developers design around them. Balancing, encounter pacing, even story beats get shaped by the lowest common denominator.
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Cultural meaning shifts. If a work is known as “brutal but fair,” its identity collapses when an easy bypass exists. (Dark Souls without consequence isn’t Dark Souls; Cuphead without punishment isn’t Cuphead.)
Easy mode doesn’t just let more people in; it makes it a different game. Saying “just don’t play easy” is like saying “why not release a PG-rated Terrifier with no gore? Horror fans can still watch the R version, so what’s the harm?”
The harm is you no longer made Terrifier.
Terrifier is available in several cut versions for specific regions / services. Which is incredibly common for movies in general and have been since the 70s. Which you do to reach a wider audience.
Both Silk Song and Cuphead already have additional difficulties. They’re already balancing difficulties, they’ve just decided to gate keep gamers who are not able to play difficult games.
If Gears Of War and Call Of Duty had hardcore and veteran as the only difficulty setting, it wouldn’t make them more interesting games or make a statement about the horrors of war and the fragility of man. It would just make less people enjoy them, for no good reason.
A high difficulty threshold is bad game design. And it’s exclusive to people who have physical disabilities or limitations, or other reasons to why they can’t play overly difficult games.
And I say that as someone who loves to beat games in the higher difficulty tiers. But as someone who also wants more people to be able to enjoy the games I enjoy and who’s happy game design has improved since the 80s.
“But as someone who also wants more people to be able to enjoy the games I enjoy”
Its really not about you is it? I get where you are coming from but in the end its people who make the games who decite what kind of experience they want to make. Sometimes their visio does not click with everyone and that is allright.
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(Ill reply to both parts in separate replies)
Subtitles/dubs are translations. They adapt language, not pacing, cinematography, editing, or structure. That’s fundamentally different from altering a game’s difficulty, which changes the mechanics, the thing the art is built from and differentiates it from other mediums.
A better analogy:
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Subtitles are like adding glasses so more people can see the same painting.
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Easy mode is like repainting sections of the canvas so it’s “clearer.” You can call both “accessibility,” but one preserves the work, the other mutates it.
Furthermore, language isn’t a good metric by which to compare analogies because games are also translated.
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Following up on this, I think the studio ghibli is a good example of where community adding accessibility in the form of mods or cheats (or fan subs or dubs in the case of ghibli)
Why everything should be for everybody? And why artists should care about your opikion when they are creating what they want to create.
Cup head is great example. Everything in the game is meticiusly hand crafted. The big part why its so popular is the difficulty that forces you to focus on the aninations and sprites. The difficulty also is economical in game as labor intensive as cup head. Because every sprite was hand drawn devs could not just churn unlimited levels and the games lenght came from the difficulty. Making the game easy would ruin the pacing of the game.
Games are art form like any other. There are mainstream movies, plays, songs, paintings and games etc etc etc. that try to reach as large audience as they can. But there is also obscure art pieces that only small group of people can enjoy. And both ways are fine
I find it obnoxious when people bitch about desing choices that devs have consciously made. Its not like they have any obligations to make a game in one way or another.
Is it not fair for the game developers’ artistic vision to not be accessible to all? Accessibility is nice, expands the potential audience, but if it compromises my artistic vision and I’m ok with giving up reach and money to preserve it, that doesn’t make my game bad or my vision invalid.
It would be ridiculous to call up the bar or the ama and complain to them that becoming a lawyer or a doctor is not accessible to all.
One last addition, adding control remapping, color options, and text to speech are true accessibility. Easy mode is fake accessibility
Easy mode is not fake accessibility. Celeste has the correct idea in allowing players adjust the difficulty for accessibility purposes. Not everyone has the same reaction speed, same cognitive abilities, same eyesight. There are people who can only use one hand and that automatically makes reacting to attacks many times harder, should they be excluded from being able to enjoy the game because they are not physically capable enough for the boss fights? And boss fights are probably 5% of the game anyway!
That’s an interesting take. You think game developers should not make games that require hands, vision, hearing, etc to enjoy them?
I think we don’t have enough language to talk about difficulty in a productive way.
You could keep all the boss mechanics the same in a game but add a 1 minute unstoppable cut scene at the start and the game is “more difficult” because it takes you longer to learn boss patterns and experiment with different strategies. But that feels very different to narrowing the windows to react or expanding the move set of a boss which feels different again to changing the values so you need to grind more/fewer levels or resources to pass it.
“Runback too long” and “git gud” sound a lot like people talking past eachother, but maybe thats just an artifact of the journalist reporting rather than the discussion itself
I think we have the language and you just proved it, but often people are just not reading or thinking enough about other perspectives before talking, and so do talk past each other like this.
I like your comparison to an unskippable cutscene; these are, I think, universally reviled at the start of boss fights. For some reason I don’t think long runbacks are reviled in nearly the same way, yet repeatedly running through the same area with no challenges (jumping off the staircase for the shortcut to Ornstein & Smough in DS1 does not count ffs!) is not really any less boring.
The ideal runback to me has a few enemies that you can soon work out how to run around. You actually get a feeling of having accomplished something, but don’t have to get perfect at defeating those enemies, nor waste time doing so (running will always be faster than fighting, pretty much).
I think “git gud” is just a knee-jerk meme though - there is no reason to believe that someone saying it has engaged in the slightest with what has been said to that point; they’re just trolling.
they are related and compound each other. it’s harder to “git gud” if you have to do a bunch of runbacks too.
Add an easy mode just half the boss health and damage. Easy fixed
I haven’t played this yet, so I don’t know anything about what difficulty settings it may or may not have But in general, I see difficulty settings as an accessibility feature.
I liked the way that Ender Magnolia did it, where, at a save point, you could adjust several settings to customize the difficulty. I was able to temporarily make it slightly easier just for a few bosses that I lost my patience for.
Mandragora had the exact same difficulty system, you could adjust enemy HP, Damage and even Stamina cost at every bonfire. Great accessibility feature.
I’m about 10 hours into silksong and it’s amazing, don’t get me wrong. But the majority of the boss fights seem… cheap?
Like, their difficulty doesn’t come from their various attacks, or their environment. Instead, it usually comes from the fact that they do double damage, or the fact that they spam the same two attacks over and over way too quickly, or the fact that they can do the same add summon three times in a row and make what was a controllable situation practically impossible
Now, I’ve 112% the OG hollow knight and beaten true radiance, so I’m not against difficult boss fights. In fact I relish the feeling of learning their moves and patterns after every single death
But when the moves are “ram into wall. Then ram into wall again” it becomes incredibly annoying
The game was designed for people to have played the first one first. I think the difficulty curve works best if you consider Silksong as a direct continuation of the first game, picking off where the main story left off rather than the extra challenges they added through updates like godhome.
Did these people forget how ball-smackingly hard Hollow Knight was???
I was all-in on Hollow Knight. Beat it multiple times, including Path of Pain and the Nightmare King. But I’m struggling with Silksong.
I went back and started up Hollow Knight again just to sanity-check myself, and, yes, it’s definitely an easier game. Many fewer enemies can hit for 2 health; there’s more variety in paths in the early game, so if you hit a wall in one direction you can try another; and you get access to upgrades that actually feel impactful relatively early instead of skills that use up my magic pool that I can’t spare because I need them because I’m always one hit away from dying.
My pet theory is that Silksong is actually just exactly what they originally pitched: DLC for players that have mastered the highest skill points in Hollow Knight. And maybe that would be fine if I were coming straight into it off of the back of Godhome. But it’s been years since I was playing those areas, and my skills have atrophied. It’s okay for a DLC to expect mastery from the start, but a standalone game should have more of a curve.
Yes.
I think time has made people look at Hollow Knight through rose tinted glasses. When I picked up the game in 2018, I got to the Soulmaster and gave up entirely because of its runback, it was just too annoying.
I ended up finishing the game a few years later and absolutely loving it, but runbacks are to this day my main criticism of the game, and I know a lot of people agree about that.
For this reason I hoped that they’d make things better in Silksong, but at least now I know what to expect so it doesn’t annoy me as much as it used to.
HK can be trivialized pretty early on by stacking charms and upgrades. Silksong spaces out meaningful upgrades in a way that really forces you to learn the ins and outs of the game before you can start buildcrafting.
FWIW, all the final bosses are easier than HK’s true final boss. The difficulty scaling starts with a rough curve but evens out over time.
So far I have only found two or so runbacks that really bothered me. One is THAT BOSS (TLJ…) which isn’t actually too bad (once you figure out the safe path) but a single missed jump or tag by an enemy is 2 masks of damage. So just spend all your souls ahead of time and if you flub, end it all and respawn.
The other is a much earlier boss in Widow (?). The runback is actually zero danger and just a matter of holding R2 and running. My big issue is that there is an elevator right next to the bench. So you start the sprint back because you want to get it right this time and slam into a cage and have to wait for it to reach the top then hop back in to get back down and it just feels horrible.
But yeah. I actually like a good runback as a way to reset your brain and avoid getting on tilt against a boss. Elden Ring very much spoiled people by putting the bonfire right outside the fogwall for effectively every single boss and it just leads to making the same mistake over and over again until you warp away to do something else. But Silksong’s balance is definitely rough.
I’m loving it, and the runbacks and difficulty just feel like standard metroidvania to me. Yeah, it takes time and caution, but that’s just the genre.
If anything I find the walkbacks much shorter than in the original. There is always a bench 30s/1m away from each boss or tough platforming section. At least so far…
It’s definitely fair most of the time. There are one or two places I’ve seen so far where it’s deliberately ramped up (or appears that way at first.)
Yeah I am almost at the end of the act 1 (i think?) and so far the impression is that if something seems to have a long walk or having to repeat a hard parcour section, I didn’t find some hidden bench or shortcut to bypass said parcour section.
In general I can see this game being started as an expansion for HK, the difficulty is quite high and the curve steeper, but I can’t relate with most of the complains so far (the currency maybe a little, but it’s normal IMHO you can’t just shop everything at once from a new vendor you find).
Initially I was put off by the double damage, but the heal being short and x3 I think compensates for it (plus, you can do it mid air etc.).
the vastly increased traversal speed also helps mitigate the walkback tedium
Yeah the game’s definitely harder than HK was, but by no means impossible. It’s not nearly as difficult as say Elden Ring for a recent-ish example. The true ending final boss didn’t even take me as many tries as Last Judge or that frog fucker lmao
None of the runbacks are egregious either. There’s just about always a bench barely 30-40 seconds away at absolute most.
Since when do metroidvanias not have save points right outside boss rooms? That’s been the standard since symphony of the night at least…
They haven’t really been a thing in either Metroid or Castlevania for a long time, interestingly.
Doesn’t metroid only have save rooms?
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After you unlock godhome, you can practice against any boss youve fought once, so practicing against bosses is arguably easier than many other meteoidvanias, which is what you’re arguing the run backs prevent you from doing.
This is to be expected. Silksong gained so much hype that now you have a bunch of people trying it who are finding out it’s not their thing.
I know people these days are used to early access garbage being shoved out the door as a full release, and are ready to rush to the comments to explain why the game is wrong, but I promise you this is not one of those cases.
So far, every run back I’ve experienced in silksong has a purpose. If it’s not something you enjoy, I recommend not playing the game. But don’t be in that overlap of the Venn Diagram between people who are enjoying the game and people who are complaining they aren’t enjoying the game. Either stop playing, or finish it and then we can talk about its design.
Name one with purpose, then. There is the big cave with the boss. It is separated in two halves by a long ass platform. There are no enemies, exploration, rewards or challenges on the platform. The sole purpose of it is to make you run right and then left, instead of just facing the boss right away.
If it’s the one I’m thinking of, I barely consider that one a run back. It’s like 40s to get to the boss from the bench. And at that point I the game, I noticed myself start hitting the bounce plants much more consistently after having to do this run many times. Up until then I hadn’t been forced to repeat the same small section yet.
And (staying vague to avoid spoilers), the bench itself was particularly “surprising” specifically because of the long gap without any benches leading up to it, forcing you to repeat the same long platforming/combat sections over and over. Players would not have been “surprised” by it if they weren’t so desperate for a bench.
So glad they fixed the slow/boring difficulty curve the first game had. I shouldn’t need to slog through 20 hours of gameplay before I feel challenged.
Binged it all weekend, it’s a great game, but folks whining about some of the game’s earlier challenges are unlikely to finish it.
In this thread: people complaining who are apparently bad at game mechanics and can’t or won’t learn to improve.
Just beat Widow second attempt.
The run back has you start on one screen, traverse two screens, and done. I got as high as 12 Mississippi counting during it.
Kids crying because a game is not a walkthrough? Maybe they should play something more suitable for their age group.
Why people resort to insulting anyone who criticizes things they like
It’s not about me liking it or not. I don’t even have that game. The point is that one should play games fitting ones abilities. There are people who will master this game, like I mastered Elite about forty years ago. Complaining about a game being difficult is either they overestimated their abilities, or they lack perseverance.
For the rest, there is always tictactoe or animal crossing.
Well whether you like it or not, you’re just insulting people for criticizing a game. Not even just for it’s difficulty, so you couldn’t be more off base.
Legitimately this mindset is why most gaming forums are so toxic. It makes it difficult to actually discuss problems with and opinions on games without people basically going “git gud.”
There is room to bring up the fact that some games are just not for everyone, but that also doesn’t invalidate the criticism they have.
Seems to me it’s usually “kids” that don’t mind difficult games. I’m in my 40s and I don’t have the time or inclination anymore to replay a boss for hours on end, but when I was younger I loved a challenge like that and would usually set difficulty to hard.
