Switchsayer wrote: ↑February 28th, 2022, 11:03 am I've not played a Souls game before- will I like this? I'm getting put off by the difficulty. Some say this is the hardest Souls game they've played.
I love open-world games, such ask Skyrim and BOTW. I'm currently having a blast playing Horizon: Forbidden West. It's a vibrant, beautiful game with so much to do and explore...whilst Elden Ring looks washed-out and bland in comparison. I don't mind that in theory, as long as the gameplay is good and by the looks of it, yes it is.
But as a newcomer it all looks very daunting!
When I first played Bloodbourne, I spent a good few hours unable to make any progress at all. The initial path led me to a gang around a campfire and there were too many of them for me to handle. After a few deaths and a lot of swearing, I decided to try and slowly pick them off one by one. I still died a lot, but I finally managed to kill every last one of them on my 100th go. Less than a minute later, before I had made it to another checkpoint, I was mauled to death by some kind of giant wolf! I was swearing a lot again and all of my "I'm just gonna stick it out until I get through it!" energy had been drained entirely.
The next day, my Souls-fanatic friend came over and I asked if I could watch him play. I was super-curious to see how he would deal with this challenge, because I couldn't imagine having the skills needed to off the gang with enough life left to keep going. So he started it up, killed the first couple of enemies he encountered and then, as I sat in stunned silence, ignored the rest of the gang entirely and merrily skipped right on past. Soon enough he found the next checkpoint, levelled me up with the exp he got off the first few guys and opened up a shortcut.
Obviously I was swearing a lot again, but I had an idea of what to do now. From then on I would slowly chip away at it. I opened up new paths, found smaller gangs to practice on, ducked out of fights if I needed to and banked experience points whenever I could. I came up against a lot of mind-numbingly frustrating barriers later on, but I never felt like walking away again. And I beat the first big boss within a day or 2, which I would never have believed possible on that first evening.
The point is that these games can be very difficult, but sometimes the difficulty is of your own making, and part of what makes them so rewarding are the times where you figure out how to overcome whatever obstacle you are stuck on. Sometimes you just need to walk away and do something else. Sometimes you're looking at the situation from the wrong angle entirely. A cliche in reviews/writings about FromSoftware is that each enemy is a puzzle you have to crack.
And sometimes the difficulty gets overstated a bit, or just not very well explained, which gives newcomers the wrong impression. I didn't think I could run past that gang, the simple solution didn't appear to me because in my head I was going "ah, this is exactly what they say about these games... and I hate it". I assumed it was meant to be as impossibly hard as it was because it's a FromSoftware game and they are only for the elite, super-tough, ultimate-hard-game-playing-dudes.
The other thing that story shows is that it's actually quite hard for the initiated to assess the difficulty for a newcomer, there is a certain savvy you acquire from playing these games to where you are intuitively clocking what to do in a way that a newcomer wouldn't. My friend had no idea he was blowing my mind, he didn't even think twice about skipping over that gang. Whereas in my head, skipping the gang wasn't a viable option, surely it would only make things harder down the line (stupid head!). I personally can't tell whether this is the hardest or "most accesible" entry, so far it feels about the same as the others to me. But the fact it is an open world provides you with more options if one particular area is giving you too much trouble. Of course, you may wander into a deceptively peaceful forest that turns out to be full of giant killer bears, but fingers crossed!
This is my long-winded way of saying that it can be daunting. You will die a lot. You will swear a lot. But these games aren't insurmountable for most, and the only way you'll know if it's your thing is to give it a chance... and then maybe a few more chances. They require a fair amount of patience and a willingness to die repeatedly, make mistakes and die some more. But If you can get over those initial bumps and get into the flow of things, if it clicks with you, you will find the gameplay is about as rewarding as it comes. And if something feels impossible, maybe it kind of is impossible the way you are trying to do it, or maybe you just need to walk away for the time being and look for something else. Maybe just avoid that maniac on the horse for now...
They aren't for everyone, though, so don't worry if it's not to your tastes. You'd only be missing out on an experience you don't enjoy.
Might go back tonight and try the other way though to see what happens. Found a cool shortcut to an area I'd not seen after a couple of hours in the castle, and got royally spanked by some knight with a lance. Fortunately cheesing tough enemies has never been easier so I plugged away with arrows till he took one in the knee and died. Not found the big boss in the area yet, but stumbled across a horrific spider thing that I think was the same as the very opening area boss (but he didn't have a boss health bar this time). There are just so many directions, paths and doorways to explore in this place, I don't think I'll see the end of it even after another whole evening at the castle.
