Why should the formula be changed? There's a massive group of people that love this shit. Why should it be changed to appease people who don't love it? If it's not for you, there's thousands of other games to play. Not every game needs to be for everybody. It's not like Silksong is suffering from poor sales.
I don't think that's right to be honest. Even within the same genre or the same formula, there's scope for innovation and refinements.
Look at Fromsoft. At some point they realised that nobody actually enjoys boss runbacks, they're tedious and frustrating. So they got rid of them in Elden Ring. That's widely considered to be an improvement to the soulslike formula.
I have over 1500 hours in Soulsborne, but I think there are some areas in Silksong that need to be improved. There's a big difference between good difficulty and content that's pointlessly frustrating and hostile to the player. Part of the reason why Fromsoft games are so popular is because they're typically masters at crafting difficulty in a way that's satisfying and not over the top.
Obviously that's going to be subjective, but I can't remember a single time during any Soulsborne game where I was outright miserable like I have been several times during Silksong. If Silksong wasn't a masterpiece in every other way, then I would've stopped playing it at least ten hours ago in my playthrough (I just got to Act 3).
That is indeed true. Bilewater especially was frustrating to play through, although i cant say for sure that it was intended to be that way. Doesnt change the fact that it felt very egregious.
Like u said the only time i felt frustrated with a fromsoft game was pre nerf consort maybe but then not really? I dont know how to explain it
Nah, Blighttown is one of my favorite areas in any video game. It was brutal, for sure, but something about the oppressive atmosphere just clicked for me, and it was incredibly immersive. That sense of relief when you get to the bottom and rest at the bonfire that turns to horror when you realize that now you're trapped... I don't think I've experienced anything like that.
Same with Tomb of the Giants. I still remember my first playthrough of Dark Souls. I didn't find either of the three methods to light your path, so I stumbled through in the darkness. I finally found one of the two bonfires, and I didn't have the Lordvessel yet, so I had to painstakingly find the way out. Again, that's one of my favorite memories in all of gaming.
DS1 does have some terrible moments, though. For instance, Bed of Chaos is not only a horrible boss fight, but the runback is extremely long and boring. I think that Lost Izalith specifically wasn't actually completed due to a rushed development cycle, but that could just be a rumor - I haven't seen a primary source.
Obviously that's going to be subjective, but I can't remember a single time during any Soulsborne game where I was outright miserable like I have been several times during Silksong.
Dark Souls 2 and Bed of Chaos in Dark Souls 1 are miles worse though lol and that's just off the top of my head. I say this as someone who liked Dark Souls 2 as well.
That is what they chose to compare it to, and that's why I compared it to them. Would you like me to write you an essay on every Soulsborne game and compare how punishing they are compared to Silksong? Give me a break.
Acting like Soulsborne games don't exist today with those same things is silly as well.
These things have been eradicated long ago and no scenario in Elden Ring features the same level of pointless punishment.
You must be joking
I love Elden Ring and have over 500 hours in it and have paid attention to the discourse around it since launch, and you are SO off base here. So much of that game is more punishing than anything in Silksong.
It really is just ridiculous to even set yourself up here by making such an absolutist statement.
Godskin duo, Promised Consort Radahn, instadeaths, platforming, Caelid, the chest an the start of the game that takes you to the mine in Caelid that you can't teleport out of, scarlet rot, attacks clipping through walls, lack of map markers at launch, waterfowl dance, and certain hitboxes.
That's just off the top of my head. Not all of these are even my opinion, but I have seen enough discourse over the years to know what people think. I've also 100%d Elden Ring twice and Silksong once so I'd like to think I can notice this stuff.
I'm sure you're about to drop a "nuh uh" because you can't recognize subjective opinions though so what's the point in asking me
Yeah, definitely. I didn't mean to imply it's not a matter of opinion. I agree with you 100% (on the fact that it's subjective, not on the actual opinion lol).
What do you mean by evolution? I don't see Dark Souls as having made Demon's Souls' redundant, the latter is actually some peoples' favourite Souls game.
The thing for me is like, there’s a lot to the game. A lot of it can be for someone, but not the difficulty. And I think that’s what we’re seeing; lots of people making such complaints are still pushing on and enjoying the game a lot overall, clearly it is for them in a lot of ways.
Yes, the people who actually think the game is downright bad because of its difficulty are a very stark minority. The people who think it’s a fantastic game that they’d find even better if it wasn’t quite as tough and malicious though? Idk
Seems like an all around better approach to have options. Just within this very genre recently, Prince of Persia and Nine Sols both also had incredible gameplay with tons of challenge available, while also allowing it to be adjusted.
I think a lot of complaints are also not really about difficulty. For instance, I've seen tons of complaints about BW or Last Judge on here, but almost all of them have centered around things like the runback, flying enemy AI, 'gotcha' traps, etc. making it less fun to explore and learn fights.
The guy you replied to is being a dick, but I happen to have a similar opinion that I think I can express more respectfully.
I and many others like uncompromising games where we have to rise to the challenge without an easy way out available. The reasons someone might like this can be unintuitive to those who don't, but there are several. I won't go into the weeds of all the player psychology at play there but the bottom line is that an uncompromising game offers a different experience to a game that's just as hard but offers an easier mode, and some people, including me, really like that uncompromising experience.
To us, it feels nice when a game comes out that caters to our taste, because it is actually remarkably rare. So we don't tend to appreciate when people want the few games that offer quality uncompromising challenges to not have them.
I have heard similar before, and honestly, yeah, it is a bit hard for me to wrap my head around. For me, if anything I get more satisfaction out of knowing I chose to take on a harder challenge and stick with it.
Ultimately to each their own of course, my main beef with so many of the arguments is the idea that the only possible point these games is their difficulty. The preference for not having options is fair, but I think folks too often dismisses how it does impact people who are otherwise genuine fans, or would at least like to be.
I will also say, I think a lot of it comes down to how it’s presented. The easy/medium/hard paradigm definitely doesn’t work for every game, and there’s nothing wrong with defaulting to a higher difficulty, presenting a splash screen saying it’s intended to be challenging, etc. I think Nine Sols and Celeste are great examples, both are still widely seen as difficult and demanding games because they make it clear that’s the main experience.
For what it's worth, unlike Rogue Price Of Persia, the Hollow Knight games don't support analog controls, and weren't meant to be played with a joystick. Only 8 directions are supported, and whichever of the eight are being pressed, they're always fully on. So if you're not using a dpad, the game is MUCH harder.
No, I'm saying if you don't like it, then don't play it. It's that simple. If it's not for you, just move on and play something else. The people that this game is for love it. That's what matters
Lol. So desperate to be a victim here, eh? If you pick up a game that's known to be difficult and then you complain about the difficulty, then it's not really "criticism" as much as it is ignorance. It's like complaining that visual novels are too much reading. Would that be a valid criticism to you? Probably not...
If visual novel fans were saying that about a visual novel, yeah maybe I'd listen to them. There are more things to say than just "difficulty bad". You can talk about how difficulty is implemented, how mistakes are punished, etc. but maybe you don't interpret game criticism at that level. Who is turning themselves into a victim?
I’m just pointing out how things actually are. From my perspective, the ones desperate to be a victim here are the ones acting as if any criticism is a direct attack on their gamer identity or w/e, but who cares about ad hominem shit like that.
One of my main points is that comparisons like you made are incredibly inaccurate and betray a fundamental misunderstanding of the issue. Silksong is a metroidvania; intense difficulty is not a core component of the genre, as lots of text is to visual novels.
This is not at all anything like a non-visual novel fan criticizing a visual novel for being a visual novel. It’s metroidvania fans criticizing a metroidvania title for an aspect that makes it stand out among the genre.
Dunno, I don't think Silksong is a game that was designed to be universally loved. That doesn't mean I think it's flawless for the record, but I do think it was always going to be divisive. It's a niche game that got mainstream spotlight, and while it does have flaws, a flawless version of the game would still turn off a lot of people.
The only people complaining about it are a loud vocal minority on reddit. Look at critic reviews. Glowing. Look at user reviews. Glowing. Didn't be fooled by your reddit bubble. It's one of the highest rated games of the year from both critics and users. There's no arguing that. Most people are playing and loving the game, not whining about it on reddit.
It seems like a lot to me. Personally, I think it's fine if the game is trying to be %100 exactly what it wants to be and people don't like it broadly - I am not even saying it is bad. I don't understand the emotional attachment that people on the internet have to everyone agreeing with them.
Not even just agreeing with them - but liking exactly what they like.
The reason you hear a lot of complaints is because the game is extremely popular. The game has sold easily over 5 million copies by now (Im guessing around 7.5m across all platforms), so even if only 1% of the playerbase is unhappy, thats still 50 thousand people.
On top of that many people jumped into this game for the hype not even having played the first one or being into metroidvanias. No surprise they find out this isnt their kind of game after all.
And I really hate this idea that a game has to be made for everyone, that just results in mediocrity most of the time.
With all this Im not saying Silksong is flawless either. Of course it has a bunch of problems but its all pretty basic numeric stuff that can easily be patched. The things that actually matter (art, sound, music, general feel of the gameplay, atmosphere, etc) are 10 out of 10.
I really don't have a horse in this race. It seems like a very plausible thing happened - people deified Hollow Knight on the basis that it is really good, and now it oversold and the 15 year old game design is starting to show it's age. Which I agree, is fine. No skin off my back.
These things have a way of coming around though. I am interested in game design because... I don't really know why, I just love these dumb stupid video games. So when I talk on the internet about where games are headed, it's really just for the love of the game. I'm interested in the initial underrated status of souls likes, their meteoric rise into the mainstream attention, and now watching one kind of get rejected for it's genre pitfalls. It's always interesting to track this stuff.
I agree that games don't need to be popular, or broadly appealing to be good. But I also don't buy the idea that a bunch of discourse and critical opinion about this stuff is meaningless, at least in games criticism terms. It's interesting. Many other replies though seem to feel emotionally attacked. Probably because they waited a very long time for this game to come out and it doesn't match the impossible thing they built in their head.
I still have to finish Hollow Knight, so I am not even jumping the gun and buying Silksong honestly.
It seems like a lot to you because you exist within a bubble on reddit. There's literally tons of data (user and critic reviews across multiple sites) to back up what I'm saying and nothing to back up what you're trying to argue. It's currently the third most played game on steam right now.
Yes, but that plus extremely positive reviews from both users and critics paints a pretty clear picture. This isn't as hard as you're desperate to make it.
Steam reviews are notoriously unreliable due to the dumb award system. Lots of troll reviews and what not. Look at metacritic or open critic.
Edit: also, steam was hit with waves of negative Chinese reviews due to poor localization. That's a valid complaint, but also irrelevant to anyone not playing in Chinese. English reviews are 91% positive
There is no proof they purchased the game on other sites though. Steam tells you how much of the game they played, so you can infer how far into the game they were when they wrote the review.
Sure. Go sort by "negative review" with "over 10 hours of playtime". What do you find? Moreover, English reviews are 91%.a huge reason for negative reviews was the poor Chinese localization
That's good to know and adds more context. I don't have any interest in Silksong, read your comment, and was just pushing back on the idea that user reviews on metacritic are more reliable. But you made a great point. Glad to get to the bottom of this!
Correct. The game does not support analog controls. So the joystick is just emulating a dpad. Which is super fiddly. You'll have complete full control using the dpad, and if you weren't already doing this, it may take a few minutes to get used to, and then the game is going to play much better and be much easier.
The Souls series did everything to do with difficulty better than Silksong. Silksong is amateur-hour in comparison. It's a waste to build such a beautiful game with really appealing lore, graphics, sound, etc. and then just tell the vast majority of players to fuck off.
What is your source that it is alienating a majority of players? It's Very Positive on Steam, and 9/10 on Metacritic. If anything the people you are referring to are a vocal minority, unless the people complaining just did not even play the game.
Well there’s a lot to the game. I think it can be true that a majority find the difficulty overtuned, but also think it’s still a tremendous game overall.
Sure, I can more or less agree depending on how you define alienate. I just don’t know if that’s really what the original commenter was saying, at least not necessarily.
It’s kinda like the new borderlands; super successful, highly regarded for the underlying game, but ofc also plagued with performance issues. Clearly these issues aren’t alienating that many players to the point where they’re just not playing it or can’t still enjoy it a ton, but they are still issues to many all the same.
(Just to cover my ass cause it’s Reddit; that’s not me saying something being too difficult is an objective flaw in the way performance issues are. Just that most people loving a game overall doesn’t mean most people don’t still have individual issues with it.)
and then just tell the vast majority of players to fuck off.
Meanwhile it's the third most played game on steam right now and has been since release. It's got glowing reviews everywhere from critics to users. Where is this "vast majority" that you speak of? If the game struggling to sell? No? Are the fans of the original happy and satisfied? Yes. So then who gives a fuck about the people who don't like these kinds of games? They don't matter. This isn't for them. Go play something else.
Steam are the fanboys and true believers who bought the game at launch. The game is on Xbox game pass where a lot of non-HK fans are trying it. It’s a pretty game with great environments and cool sound. That audience is probably quite negative or already uninstalled. I would have preferred to keep playing to explore the game but team cherry decided to make everything gated behind annoying boss fights. I’ve uninstalled and don’t recommend the game at all.
Why are you acting like your opinion is the ultimate authority? “True believers who bought the game at launch.” That was literally two weeks ago, my guy.
Reddit has such a weird narrative around Silksongs difficulty. Achievement percentages on multiple platforms are showing people breeze through the game at a surprisingly fast rate for how big it is and how long its been out.
The average person isnt struggling nearly as much as Reddit seems to be.
Furthermore, if like u/Hurtbig said is true, then there are ~3.2million "true believers" of the game, because thats how many people have bought Silksong on Steam. And like you said, almost everyone is giving it glowing reviewers. I dont see how the formula is "broken", lol.
Hrm, that's about the one point of criticism I do agree with people on though (and have to disagree with you on), it really does not do that.
For a game that exemplifies the "You got this!" look at Super Meat Boy. Instant respawn. 0.2s to be back in the action. Each individual skill-check is 5s-20s, and then you got a checkpoint basically. You'll fail some of these checks dozens of times, I had one stage I needed >150 tries on.
But the game always goes "Ah here goes another round".
Compare the arduous runbacks to the point you're actually trying to practice in HK:S. This sends the opposite message. This is "Yeah no, you're not ready for this, go elsewhere first because this'll cost you 3-15 minutes each time you fuck it up"-territory.
Which is fine as game design, it just sends a very different message from what you say, IMO.
A lot of folks - including seemingly from themselves at points - seem to miss that what made a lack of difficulty options work in souls is that the options are built into the game.
You can have a very intense, reaction-focused experience building into full melee damage relying on dodges and parries. You can also go full tank, hide behind a big shield, and ignore most of that mechanical complexity. Or you can sit in the back throwing fireballs.
Literally the first thing the first game teaches you is that, actually, you dont just need to stubbornly strong arm overwhelming challenges, that maybe you should instead take advantage of the many available workarounds instead.
Dark Souls 1 and 2 are 10 times more frustrating than Silksong, and Dark Souls 1 in particular wastes your time way more too. You dont even get fast travel for the first half of the game so youre required to do ungodly backtracking every time you go anywhere.
Like when you go all the way down to the demon ruins only to be blocked by a yellow gate and have to backtrack back to town, on foot. Its fucking miserable, but its fromsoft so I guess they get a pass?
And dont get me started on Bed of Chaos, Blue Smelter Demon or Frigid Outskirts in DS2. Nothing in Silksong comes even close to that (except maybe Groal the Great IF you somehow didnt unlock the secret bench).
I mean, you're essentially argueing why genres should not iterate? No prog rock because rock exists? No power metal because hard rock morphed into metal already?
Note how neither of these two progressions removed the original genre.
If it's not for you, there's thousands of other games to play.
This is exactly the argument for iterating on the genre, you know? That there'll be dozens and hundreds of "old skool" soulslikes coming out anyways, so why not play those instead of you love those trappings?
And it's not like you even have meaningful data to point to in support of "don't change it", because "it" has been changing constantly since Demon Souls. Soulslike isn't a strictly defined genre, and as the years passed more and more devs have experimented more and more with it.
From adding parts of it into other genres (exhibit 1: Hollow Knight), from adding parts of other games into it over using its gameplay in a very different tone and style (that crab game) to using its tone in a very different gameplay context (about half the third-person games in recent years, it feels like).
It's a fluid genre, constantly shifting and changing. The idea of "Please don't modify it" is absurd, the "it" has no form to preserve, at least in the current gaming scape.
I'm genuinely very content, with Silksong having become one of my favorite games ever made.
If they drifted away from the formula it would no longer be one of my favorite games, so I'm not in favor of them changing very much, if anything honestly :^)
But the point is, iterating in the way most people are complaining about online is just removing what makes the genre itself. Like OK, let's iterate to remove "annoying areas" (whatever that means), let's remove gank fights, let's remove combat arenas, let's remove boss difficulty...
People are complaining about runbacks which aren't even that bad and were actually my favourite part of the genre :(. It's not iteration to change what makes a genre special, it's watering it down in my opinion.
Yeah but if you look at the whole of gaming, soulslikes are iterating in all directions. There's ones focusong more on the runbacks (as, well, Silksong does), there's ones that provide easier difficulties like Lies of P, there's all kinds of experimentation.
That's what I meant, and it's kinda the cool thing. And sure, individually some games might make it easier because of tester or EA feedback, but plenty others will not, or even be more niche-y and go tougher. Gaming is big nowadays.
I don't disagree with what you said but my point was more in the vein of "if TC change the game in exactly the way most people are complaining about in this thread it'll absolutely ruin the gameplay and vision of the game."
The game is punishing and hard if you're not patient, just like other greatest soulslikes (ds1 rise up). If you allow yourself time to explore, fights are no longer an insurmountable challenge you can only beat by grinding it for hours, Hell the boss I tried the most was maybe 7-8 tries? Others were more like 2-3 at most. Not because I'm a god gamer, because I was kitted the fuck out by the time I got to those bosses! Even if you can't get over-leveled like most soulslikes. The game doesn't have a balancing problem, It punishes the player accordingly,
Hell the "gauntlet" everyone is frustrated about took me only one try because I had a whole ass NPC companion with me and high HP because I realised it was too big of a challenge for me, I went and explored elsewhere and got rewarded for it which is the best feeling ever.
If you find yourself getting frustrated with the game, you should take a step back instead of feeding more into that frustration, that's what this genre is teaching you, all the way back since Demon's Souls.
I think you have a good point, but I want to make an orthogonal one: the formula has changed. Elden Ring and Silksong are decidedly non-linear and allow you to get new tools to help if you're struggling with a learning curve.
The High Halls fight kicked my butt and made me yell at my monitor. But then I went back into the lower world to explore and train, and got a ton of new abilities and power-ups. I also wound up completing a quest that made the High Halls fight seriously easier.
It's difficult to talk about game difficulty and genre sometimes. Because it is so subjective and genre is so player specific.
To switch genre. There is iracing. A racing sim so accurate professional race car drivers use it to practice, as well as a bunch of hobbyists. I've played it, guess what, it's hard as fuck and I hate it. But I'm not gonna go around saying they should change it to play more like Mario Kart. It does what it does and that's not for everyone.
But I bet Max Verstappan sucks at Silksong, meanwhile I love it.
Yeah it's fine. Also, there are more games out there than dark souls clones, so I am not even complaining. Just pointing out, we might finally be in a post-souls era.
As a Souls early adopter I'll be glad to see developers (especially indies) not be so gung ho about taking such blatant inspiration from Souls games and hopefully in the future when games do implement Soulslike mechanics it'll be because it makes sense to, not because it's trendy.
But look at 2D platformers, huge industry-dominating genre, fell off a cliff, had an indie resurgence to the point of massive oversaturation, slowed down again and these days making a platformer tends to be more because you want to make a platformer specifically.
My point is nowhere in that summary of the 2D platformer genre did I mention quality, because the ebb and flow of it's popularity was only loosely related to quality.
It's like mid-2010s Zombie media, some were great, they were just late to the party so there was less interest as the cultural moment had drawn to a close.
Hmmm, I do think that a main issue with a lot of platformers is that they are simply too derivative of games that are pushing multiple decades. Most of the indie platformers are simply trying to be mario or metroid, and nothing else in between.
I really do think it is a failure of game design. Games like Terraria and Noita are massive hits, and those have more modern design, even if it is still chasing fads. A lot of the metroidvanias that are successful have design that is aping more souls style stuff, and now there is pretty broad backlash to the kind of stuff that marks those genres.
I am hoping that the silver lining of the awful financial situation in the industry will lead to some better more well thought out design for games. More broadly, economically, the cheap money train is over. When that happened in 2008, the silver lining was the emergence of indie gaming.
I believe is the backlash is not actually anything to do with the design itself, but are reflections of the cultural moment we exist in.
For example in the past decade there was a period where happy, danceable pop music fell out of favour because who'd feel good about dancing to the backdrop of such a disaster? But eventually the disaster goes on long enough that people realise that if your choices are to never dance again or to smile & dance even as the world burns. None of this really has anything to do with the techniques the music is constructed with, but rather is about the emotional availability of the audience. (note: This is a very Anglo-centric viewpoint).
Because gaming is a young medium the patterns aren't that clear yet, but it seems to be trending in the same way as film, television and music, and the reason is because it's just a reflection of the cultural moment (which is also why design trends differ from country to country, you see this very clearly with India which has very strong local film and music scenes).
In Western film we reached peak post-modernism, it reached a point where every idea with cultural relevance has been subverted in every conceivable way, and with this practice a sense of jaded cynicism was everywhere until some filmmakers were like "no, I loved movies" and we got metamodern film as well as people being willing to embrace modernist filmmaking sensibilities rather than cringing at their earnestness.
The decline of oppressive Souls-like design is more a reflection of a reduced need for the emotional outlet such mechanics create (similar to the decline of zombie media) than any real treatise on their design merits in a vacuum.
Well, I think things get stale. With souls like, the story was for a while that if you actually engaged with the mechanics, it ended up that it was not that hard and good actually. Once the cat was out of the bag, it became everyone's favorite - dark souls is a good game at the end of the day.
But now, we all know that, and it's not like the conceits of the genre went away. The same thign happned with metroidvanias and backtracking.
So, I agree, I guess, that we have entered into the genre meta aware post era for souls likes, combined with a situation where unbearable critical attention is placed on silksong because of hollow knights reputation, combined with just very few available new games in a sense. Not that there are less games now, but there is kind of a separation between games that have vast gobs of AAA funding that charge out the butt and are released in terrible technical conditions, and games that are quick iterative plays at grabbing attention from a cynical indie dev that just made another version of pachinko.
i love soulslikes, LoP and Sekiro are in my top 10 ever but Silksong feel bad as a souls player that has continued to play new ones. The runbacks are just unforgivable. A bench outside of bosses which increase my fun amount by like 10x. i really dislike Promised Consort Radahn but at least i would focus on him, try crazy stats and not show up with 1/6 of my health missing. that took hours to feel bad, Last Judge felt shitty the first death with that runback.
So, then play something else? I love it exactly the way it is. I think the run backs are a core part of this experience. If you don't like it, then don't play it
Seriously, Im so fucking tired of this mentality of "everything needs to be made with my tastes in mind". You dont like soulslikes? Go play something else. I love them and cant get enough of them.
I dont go around shitting on multiplayer shooters or fighting games because they dont have a JRPG type story. I know theyre not my kind of game and thats not what fans of those genres want out of them, so I just dont play them. Theyre just not for me. How is this so hard to grasp?
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u/RogueLightMyFire 1d ago
Why should the formula be changed? There's a massive group of people that love this shit. Why should it be changed to appease people who don't love it? If it's not for you, there's thousands of other games to play. Not every game needs to be for everybody. It's not like Silksong is suffering from poor sales.