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View Full Version : Dark Souls is NOT Old school difficulty



ShinMaruku
Oct 7, 2011, 09:16 PM
It's a very new school type of difficulty. It's unforgiving but it is very fair. It allows very little room for error. But when you died you can see how you died. Animations are very deliberate.
Old games were hard because they were not very long, and the computer is a cheating bastard, the level design was deliberately made insane. Why it's a hold over from Arcades where most of these games came from. The harder/more unfair a game is the more quarters put in.

Randomness
Oct 7, 2011, 11:31 PM
The same is true of Demon's Souls. The first time I played, first level kicked my ass. Second character, I reached and dropped Phalanx without dying.

You can say this of a lot of games with brutal difficulty though... Viewtiful Joe, Ninja Gaiden, etc.

Volcompat321
Oct 8, 2011, 12:03 AM
I agree with Randomness...

After you repeat something, even only the first level/area... it gets a lot easier.

Demon's Souls was best for this.. the harder difficulty only meant they hit harder, and AI was a little smarter... but the same movements would get you away..


After playing Dark Souls for about 10 hours total, I see it does get easier after a bit.
Then again, with different characters... maybe..

Dre_o
Oct 8, 2011, 12:12 AM
Someone watches TotalBiscuit! But yes, old school is designed to make veins bulge, teeth grind, and coins dissolve into the machine.

Randomness
Oct 8, 2011, 12:12 AM
Well, the problem with Demon's Souls is that ranged is just far superior to melee... Melee is too dangerous, compared to stocking up on mana restoratives and slinging high power spells all over.

Kent
Oct 8, 2011, 06:23 AM
I wouldn't say Dark Souls doesn't have old-school difficulty - it's just transcended the polygon ceiling, which you can't do with an old 2D game without changing things around significantly, and this includes how difficulty is handled.

I would say that (having not played Demon's Souls, mind you), the game has a very good appropriation of "old school" difficulty compared to any other 3D game that comes to mind - especially when you consider that old-school difficulty generally doesn't rely on things like cheating AI, but does rely on things like hostile level design and just-plain-mean placement of enemies and things such as spikes or pitfalls.

The big difference, of course, is the way that this game not only encourages you to keep playing, but also does its best to facilitate death as a learning mechanism, which is something that is generally a lost cause on a lot of new-age gamers in the first place.

Keilyn
Oct 8, 2011, 07:08 AM
I agree with the opposite.

When I played Old School Video Games, I mean Second Generation which lies on the path after Atari and the days of Original Nintendo and Super Nintendo. The thing was....at the time except for many adults I knew and most kids who played them...

...they were able to beat their games. I remember renting video games and beating them overnight during the rental period and few games did I rent more than once after I beat them.

I remember the only games that gave me some trouble were vectorman, castlevania 3, bubsy, battletoads and one of the Alex Kidd games. Thing was, with the exception to Battletoads and bubsy I beat the other games during the rental period.

Games are much broader and more complex, but these days a game is made so that a player can choose their difficulty level in certain ways. If you go through a game at its max difficulty today, some will give you a real workout.

Old Games = Pattern Games, so much so that you literally can replay a game so long that eventually you will win without dying and in some games being hit. Battletoards was a game where I literally managed to win at one point without a single death and going through all the levels. *high five to anyone who loved that game...specially the Clinger-Wingers*

The games that were Quarter Crunching Games at the arcade were the fighting games. Friday nights at the Arcade I would see LINES of people at those fighting games pop in endless amount of quarters and when they reached 2 - 4 quarters a play on some elaborate contraption that did not stop the lines from forming.

I don't judge RPG difficulty due to it being system dependent and if you die, you can just kill a bunch of monsters and get stronger....but I judge action games and shooters because you only won if you had the skill and brains to actually win. The other alternative is to beat the game on Easy....where the game literally lets you win...and that is no real fun.

Finally, the challenge in games deal with PvP and FPS multiplayers. You are guaranteed that surviving in ladders and playing vs other human players will for the most part (specially when you get to the top of the ladder) be a lot harder than playing any singleplayer out there. You really can't compare challenge....I mean look at fighting games...fighting against a great human player is a lot tougher than playing through any fighting game title on max difficulty....

Weeaboolits
Oct 8, 2011, 06:36 PM
I think he was more getting at that Dark Souls, while unforgiving, is at least fair, unlike a lot of early games which were difficult due to a lack of proper play-testing or poor game design, to say nothing of arcade games designed with the intent of robbing you of as many quarters as possible, sometimes a combination of the three.

ShinMaruku
Oct 11, 2011, 05:12 PM
Most likely a combination of the three with heavy leaning to the computer being cheating bastard to rob one of quarters.

So when somebody looks fondly at 'old school' difficulty is not nearly as elegant as people imagine it.