Fromsoft games aren’t designed for masochists. Their difficulty has only ever been in service of pulling you into their worlds and making you interact with the games mechanics. The thing that makes these games special is not that they are hard, but that they are carefully designed, handcrafted experiences, that while allowing you to approach them in a myriad of different ways, that allow you to struggle with and against them, that put up resistance against you in trying to explore them and that allow you to get lost in their world.
It’s obviously completely fine to criticize specific parts of these games for being too hard, or that are just unfun. If you can only beat the bosses in the Elden Ring DLC by constantly switching aggro between yourself and whatever summon you choose to use, meaning you don’t actually have to engage with the bosses themselves, that sucks. Melania is probably mechanically broken. That’s obviously something you should criticize. You could definitely argue that these games would be more engaging if they were overall easier. The level of mechanical execution these games require has definitely risen over time, but they’ve also simultaneously given you many more ways to regulate what level of execution these games require: Elden Ring has turned NPC summons into an actual mechanic and made it much easier to play multiplayer with friends and has lowered the barrier to online play much more than any previous game. If you just added a slider that changed around enemy health and player health (which is what most videogame difficulty settings are) you would have made a game that is much less engaging and interesting no matter if you touch that slider or not. These games would no longer be the handcrafted experiences that they are.
If you read a book that has words in it that you don’t understand you look them up. If you are at an art gallery and see a piece of art that you do not understand you can ask someone about it. If you can’t beat a boss in Elden Ring you can ask for help online and you could probably even find someone who’d help you with it in co-op. That is a much more engaging, interesting and most of all fun way to engage with the difficulty in a video game than simply moving around a slider (although there should obviously be ways to modify the game itself to move slower or faster etc. videogames should all be open-source and moddable by default).
In this shitty fucking medium that is videogames under capitalism, where the vast majority of games either bend over backwards to keep you engaged, being mostly occupied with hitting your serotonin receptors at the optimum level for completely braindead and lobotomizing play, or even worse, use pressure against the player and frustration for the sole purpose of getting you to hand over more cash, FromSoft is a genuine and rare relief from the shit one is usually served.
Fromsoft games aren’t designed for masochists. Their difficulty has only ever been in service of pulling you into their worlds and making you interact with the games mechanics. The thing that makes these games special is not that they are hard, but that they are carefully designed, handcrafted experiences, that while allowing you to approach them in a myriad of different ways, that allow you to struggle with and against them, that put up resistance against you in trying to explore them and that allow you to get lost in their world.
It’s obviously completely fine to criticize specific parts of these games for being too hard, or that are just unfun. If you can only beat the bosses in the Elden Ring DLC by constantly switching aggro between yourself and whatever summon you choose to use, meaning you don’t actually have to engage with the bosses themselves, that sucks. Melania is probably mechanically broken. That’s obviously something you should criticize. You could definitely argue that these games would be more engaging if they were overall easier. The level of mechanical execution these games require has definitely risen over time, but they’ve also simultaneously given you many more ways to regulate what level of execution these games require: Elden Ring has turned NPC summons into an actual mechanic and made it much easier to play multiplayer with friends and has lowered the barrier to online play much more than any previous game. If you just added a slider that changed around enemy health and player health (which is what most videogame difficulty settings are) you would have made a game that is much less engaging and interesting no matter if you touch that slider or not. These games would no longer be the handcrafted experiences that they are.
If you read a book that has words in it that you don’t understand you look them up. If you are at an art gallery and see a piece of art that you do not understand you can ask someone about it. If you can’t beat a boss in Elden Ring you can ask for help online and you could probably even find someone who’d help you with it in co-op. That is a much more engaging, interesting and most of all fun way to engage with the difficulty in a video game than simply moving around a slider (although there should obviously be ways to modify the game itself to move slower or faster etc. videogames should all be open-source and moddable by default).
In this shitty fucking medium that is videogames under capitalism, where the vast majority of games either bend over backwards to keep you engaged, being mostly occupied with hitting your serotonin receptors at the optimum level for completely braindead and lobotomizing play, or even worse, use pressure against the player and frustration for the sole purpose of getting you to hand over more cash, FromSoft is a genuine and rare relief from the shit one is usually served.