So I read a few reviews of Dark Souls. I'm NOT trying to start a flame war here, but I would like to express that I was very dissapointed that all the reviews (and for that matter most previews) just can't seem to shut up about how "challenging" and "punishing" and "unforgiving" this game is.

So two things. First, I mean come one, let's be serious for a minute. It's a damn video game. You're not crab fishing or ice road trucking or smoke jumping, you're pushing buttons on a controller and thinking. I think these sites are going a little overboard on stating how hard this game is without taking a step back to realize that a video game is never really that serious, at least not so enough to warrant the kind of language they're using. Maybe I sound like some sort of snobby [censored] right now, I don't mean to, I'm just trying to say that I think getting so excessively enthusaistic about how hard it is to push the right buttons with the right timing is kind of immature.

Second, the most challenging game I've ever played is definitely the OG remake of Ninja Gaiden on the OG XBOX (later updated to Ninja Gaiden Black, and then ported to PS3 as Ninja Gaiden Sigma. By the time the difficulty had been dumbed down a little, but it was still very tough). Second to that would be the OG Devil May Cry 3 (not the special edition, although the new continue system made that version more fun for me). Some of the boss fights warranted at least 10 tries from me the first time I played through. The God of War trilogy was also a nice challenge at their respective max difficulties. I can't imagine Dark Souls being even harder than those games and still be enjoyable. So how about you guys? What are the top 2 or 3 most difficult games you've ever played? Did you enjoy the challenge? Do you think Dark Souls will be TOO hard? Is that really it's only good selling point? What about Skyrim; two easy maybe? Just right? What difficulty will you do your first run on? Did I ask too many questions? Discussion GO! :shocking:

They have added alot of skills that have dumbed down the game for noobs but thank god they are optional to use. I pray to god that there is no tutorial because i love the whole well yur out of prison now what you do is you own buisness Thing. The game can be overwhelming to those who havent played a elder scrolls game before becuase this is true open world and not the kinda open world where it seems open but the main quest is the only option.. you can totally ignore the main quest and still have fun withthe game.. I have never played any of the games you mention above but i understand the difficulty of them.. Like with asassins creed series, and fable sometimes could be a little challenging but liek i said they arent true open world RPG'S yeah they have customization but the only thing to do and actuall have fun is main quest where as oblivion is like main quest who?? Sorry im with the dark brother hood now..

Dark Souls is a different type of hard.

I've said before dying in Dark Souls is part of the tutorial, to see what's ahead of you, to gain the right strategy in beating a boss, and just generally being aware and careful.

Dark Souls likes to challenge you in funny ways, I remember a part where there is this bridge with enemies at the end, obviously you're fixated on them, but the REAL danger is this huge dragon that swoops out of nowhere and breaths fire on you.

That's not hard. It's not like I failed at fighting that dragon, that dragon was supposed to kill me, so death in Dark (and Demon's) Souls is totally different and is the gameplay mechanic itself.

A hard game for me is Zelda II, I can get very far but it's a game I didn't expect to be too hard. The first was challenging in some ways, but Zelda II is much harder imo due to it's sidescrolling nature and thinking Link can do anything.

In the Game Informer review they said...

"The majority of the game is spent in much less frustrating areas (In reference to The Tomb of Giants), but there are a few that break the golden rule that made Demon's Souls so good: Every death, however painful, was always fair."

Cheapness is just something I won't deal with. Seems like Dark Souls unfortunately veered in the wrong direction compared to its predecessor.

The most challenging game experience ever? C'thun in AQ40 pre-nerf but that was basicly broken. (Sorry I have a WoW past).
Basicly as long as a game is challenging because you need to think more, be creative or need to know you're strenghts/weaknesses better it remains fun. When a game becomes hard because you need to press button x , y, x, c, a, y, x in exactly that order faster then 1.5 seconds or you die and need to play for 15 minutes to get back up to the point you were at its gets annoying.

As long as difficulty is done in a way that forces me to think or use my characters potential to the extreme I am all for it though. There are enough easy games out as is.

Should have figured this would end up in general, thanks Mods =)

Ninja Gaiden was like that. As in, you react, right now, or you die. Standing there and blocking or dodge-rolling while you look for an opening got you killed and quick. That game had a near perfect balance of offense and defense and rewarded careful timing, and smart target and combo choices. I'd like to see Dark Souls do it as well, seeing as that seems to be the game's main selling point. I realize it's an RGP and NG is just action/adventure, but if that's the pedestal you're going to sell your game off of, it better be the bes thing about it (the challenge, and therefore the combat overall).

I generally get a lot more enjoyment out of games where you die frequently. I think I would enjoy Dark Souls and Demons' Souls; however, there doesn't seem to be any plan to release a PC port and I don't own a console.

Oblivion with a number of mods like Duke Patricks, FCOM, etc., is quite hard at around 75% on the difficulty slider. You can one-shot enemies with your bow, but enemy archers can also one-shot you, so you have to approach every encounter very carefully. I die frequently, at almost every combat encounter. Smaller dungeons that would normally take about 15 minutes to clear with vanilla Oblivion take several hours to complete.

Likewise, Fallout New Vegas with Arwen's Realism Tweaks and Expensive Wasteland mods (at Very Hard difficulty setting), every single battle has become tremendously challenging. I die even more frequently than heavily modded Oblivion. I have to approach every encounter very carefully, sometimes using frag mines or explosives in strategic locations. My weapons skills are all very low as I've only been putting points into survival and repair.

• if you get hit, you develop a wound that you can't heal during combat.
  
• you can manually adjust the rate of your XP gain (default is 1/4 the XP gain rate for vanilla)
  
• if you bleed out you start losing too much blood and you have to use bandages or a belt as a tourniquet to to slow down the bleeding or inject a stimpak into the wound (reduces your STR and can only be done outside combat)
  
• If you lose too much blood your carry weight goes down by 15 pounds. it can be treated by a blood transfusion
  
• Many perks are modified to make the game more challenging.
  
• If your wound infection level gets too high you start continuously losing health unless you treat it with antibiotics.
  
• If your left or right arm is crippled, you can't use rifles or 2-handed melee weapons.
  
• To treat fractured limbs you have to apply a medical brace for a period of time until it heals. For fractured skull or ribs, you have to inject morphine into the fracture. You can only use a doctor's bag if your medicine skill is high enough (I think 50).
  
• Eating food and drinking liquids does not provide HP.
  
• if you don't cook your food it increases your Bacteria Level quickly and if it goes over 5.0, you get Food Poisoning.
  
• The total carry weight is massively reduced (walking around with some injuries, I can only carry about 70-80 lbs as a 2nd level character with 6 STR). Skill magazines all weigh 1.0 lb and the skill boost is cut in half.

Most of my caps earned from looting items goes toward bandages and medical supplies, just so that I can survive the next encounter.

Hard Reset is also pretty challenging on Insane mode.

I like the kind of challenge where you have to prepare wisely for what's ahead, and I like the kind of challenge where you sometimes have to think on your feet.

I think it's great when games punish you for making a stupid decision, going in ill-prepared or otherwise svcking at the game - either by throwing loads of tough enemies at you, or through bad consequences later.

I absolutely hate it when there's no way of figuring out what needs doing and you have no real option other than to die a few times and 'learn' the boss / level / whatever. That kind of difficulty seems cheap and is no fun for me. The above comments make it sound like Dark Souls goes down that route, so I guess it's one to avoid.

*shouts at the sky* Curse you Battletoooaaaads!

Sorry, trauma flashback. Part of why its difficulty is excessively described is because not many games these days are very hard; while there's often a lot of nostalgia and spite that clouds comparison of old and new games, difficulty is one area where there's a rather clear difference, for a few reasons, nearly all of which boil down to money. A fair amount of older games were ports of arcade games, for one, which were specifically made to be absurdly and unfairly hard in order to eat quarters. Older storage media led to many games being shorter than games today, and the difficulty was high to make them take longer to beat, so that people would get their money's worth in play time. These days videogames are big business, and most of them are designed to appeal to the largest demographic possible; "high challenge" subsequently goes out the window most of the time. A game that's very difficult and rubs it in your face is rare, so reviews make a big deal of it.

I think everyone's aware of that, including the reviewers. They're describing it in video game terms. Nobody's saying it's harder that climbing Everest.

The difficulty in Demon's Souls was always fair. Although frustrating at times (Maneater, I'm looking at you) the thrill of knowing that any enemy in the game world was easily capable of killing you gave it an edge and made completing it such a satisfying moment. If Dark Souls pushes the fine balance that Demon's Souls had then I won't buy it.

A video game, even if it's an RPG, have to present challenges and be a bit unforgiving in order to have it be interesting. As a video game RPG, it differs greatly from dice RPG in that we always have a second chance (and way beyond) because of load saved game. Also in a dice RPG, the GM may award good role playing by adding bonuses to his own rolls, whereas in CRPGs all rules are set in stone for obvious reasons, plus the fact that a GM may give answers to our questions about creatures and NPCs that in CRPGs will only be revealed when you first attack them.

Oblivion on normal difficulty is way too easy, near dice RPG easy wrt chance of getting killed, which is then ruined by loading save games and removing any kind of challenge with 100%s. People (including myself) then complain about maximum difficulty being nuts, because we (including myself) tend to employ the same playstyle and just pound on for a longer period of time, when instead you should use poisons and spells (maybe burden or illusion spells are more effective than fireballs in some situations?) more actively to give you the edge you now actually need, or choose to avoid getting into a fight instead.

I don't like games where I die more frequently, as long as I think I'm doing it right. But I deserve to be punished for not thinking ahead. Fighting a troll or frost atronach for the first time? Going at him with a dagger is probably a bad idea, due regenerative abilities. Try different spells to see what he is weak to, or pay attention to the lore you're reading, and you may be well prepared to figure out the weak spots and take advantage of that. But in Oblivion, at normal difficulties, you don't need to - everything pretty much works for everything (with a few exceptions).

So yeah, I think normal difficulty should be upped significantly, since this is a CRPG where load save games makes up for the need to stay rather simple compared to dice RPGs.

Reminds me of Stalker. Gotta try those mods.

I'm a big fan of Shadow of Chernobyl. Haven't tried the other games in the series yet.

Another game I found to be pretty challenging but also lots of fun is Call of Cthulu: Dark Corners of the Earth. This is probably one of my all time favs. The first few levels you don't even get any weapons, so when you finally get a shotgun you are so happy to find it

Unfortunately I keep dying right after I find the shotgun, so I haven't gotten past that part yet. :lmao:

I had all kinds of fun with DCotE (big fan of Lovecraft) up until somewhere after the sewers - at a warehouse iirc - when it turned completely shooter.

Didn't finish it. Should I?

Personally as a person with Demon Souls I just dislike losing so much of my health or just getting one shot in general. I liked all the other areas but I dislike games with such consequences of messing up a little during a boss fight. I like challenge I just dislike dieing in one hit, hell that is why I don't tank in WoW. I don't want to be the one with all the pressure to keep agro on a boss in a raid and everything. I guess what other people like as challenging and what I like as a challenge is different. Demon souls and Dark Souls are not the games for me.

I only started playing this one relatively recently - let me get back to you after I complete it. It sounds like you made it farther along than I did, as I kept dying right after finding my first gun in the jail. So far, I really like this one.

I can't really say whether you should finish, but while there is plenty of Lovecraftian fun to be had, it never really stops being a shooter once it transitions into one.

The one goal in T.H.P.S 4 where you learn the misty flip. Yeah that is game breakingly frustrating.

If these instances are indeed few in number, as the quote says, then I doubt it'll be a deal breaker. Many great games have otherwise cheap deaths that do little to affect the overall experience.

Problem is that I've heard people reiterate over and over that what made Demon's Souls so special was its always challenging but never cheap mantra. Seems like they didn't keep that intact with the sequel.

Not a big fan of :banghead: :swear: throw-your-controller-at-the-screen style frustration. It's not fun, it's angering. (Bad for the blood pressure, too.)

Clawing my way through the final half-hour+ boss fight sequence in Final Fantasy 13, only to get slammed by a cheap shot I wasn't ready for due to "having to learn the boss fight"..... wow, that svcked. So angry. Had to spend some time to calm down, and didn't go back to the game until the next day. (After looking up the strategy - I wasn't about to go through that mess again just to try to see if I could detect what I did wrong/what to do right)


So, yeah.... Ninja Gaiden, Demon's Souls, Dark Souls.... not the games for me. :tongue:

These days, I mostly play games for the story, for the exploration, or for the character building. If they're too frustrating, or becoming "not fun", but I still want to see how the story comes out, I'll jack the difficulty down. (Did that with Half-life 2 at a couple points, and a whole lot of places in Dragon Age Origins.... the combat was full of cheap shots, especially if you had a less-optimized party. There was also so much of it, that it got tedious. Another reason I turned down the dif.... I wanted to see where the story went, but the combat just got old.)


Who knows, maybe I'm just getting wimpy in my old age.

Games can be challenging. You say its not that hard. Play super meat boy, IWBTG, etc.

I dont think dark souls will be that bad. But games can be hard. Halo 3 cortana... Even 2 players on legendary. [censored] that level.

Hell I tried playing fallout new vegas OWB, on normal at level 2. I had to turn it down to very easy becuase of mr lobotomite, and his all seeing, x ray eyes. Add in saturnite fists, 2 grenades to kill, and they traveled in packs...

The separation between challenging and frustrating is the how the game is played as a whole. For example, an RPG - in this case we'll define an RPG as having skills, different gear, etc., such as Oblivion or Morrowind - can't be challenging but only frustrating. This is because in a given situation you are dependent on your characters modifiers - we'll define modifiers as given stats and what changes them ( armor for example ), skills/spells, etc. - to overcome the situation. If you cannot overcome this situation the first time, you are forced to retry it again and again hoping for luck to be on your side at least once. That is frustration. Challenging games could be FPS, driving, action, and platform games - of course that is a limited selection, and there are plenty more. Your failures in situations aren't dependent on modifiers, but your own ability to control the game.

This isn't to say both are mutually exclusive. Of course you could have an over the top challenge which evokes frustration. I believe, however, that with RPGs you are put into either effortless situations or frustrating ones; the only factor that makes an RPGs combat seem otherwise is the immersion of the game itself.

I could be completely off here. What do you think?

I prefer a difficulty that keeps my engaged and focused on what I'm doing, rather then a difficulty that punishes me for the slightest mistake, Mass Effect 2 on insanity is really fun, and right now I'm enjoying Space Marine on hard. I don't really get the appeal of making games ridiculously challenging so that every thing you do has to be carefully considered, I play a game to relax and escape, not to work.

That being said, I've never played oblivion on a higher difficulty then the default setting. Mostly because I play mainly archery/sneak characters, and the game isn't really balanced for that play style, especially in the higher levels.

That doesn't mean I like easy games either, I want a balance that keeps me on my toes, but doesn't make me bust out charts and notes just to kill some wolf.