Dark Souls has Artificial Difficulty

prove me wrong Sup Forums

youtu.be/dR2CU3tKPzg

Define artificial difficulty.

All videogame difficulty is artificial by definition. If you want natural difficulty, go climb a mountain.

>urgh, trying and failing before succeeding and learning mechanics is artificial difficulty
Just fucking kill yourself already. You're garbage at games when you think you're good.

This is artificial difficulty

>Game mechanics, challenges, or otherwise that are either poorly explained, logically unfair to the player or poorly developed as part of the games difficulty

>urgh, trying and failing before succeeding and learning mechanics is artificial difficulty

who said that?

curse

the game is made artificially harder by cutting your HP in half, therefore things that would've left you at less than 50% before now kill you instead, regardless of mechanical change in the gameplay.

It's the only explanation you faggots give for artificial difficulty.
I'm not watching the video, I just disliked it and closed it.

Great example.

>your margin of error cut in half is "artificial difficulty"

Oh fuck off, your margin of error is specifically determined by the developers initially anyway, if it had been that small from the beginning would you be complaining?

If it was that small they would have developed it with that in mind. Instead some things kill you and some things don't depending on your health bar being cut in half or not. That's shitty game design.

Cry more faggot

>poorly
>unfair
>poorly
You know you're just bitching about the game being difficult/game design when you use terms like these.
If you want ACTUAL artificial difficulty, try UMK3 on Master. Any action you do is countered by the NPC immediately in addition to the NPCs being able to do special moves instantly. It's literally impossible to complete the game without exploiting the AI.

thats horrible logic. margin of error being measured by HP fluctuates greatly between starting classes, levelup allocation, item discovery, armor, etc. cutting a player's margin of error in half means a great deal when all these factors are taken into account, meaning someone's margin of error could be twice as large as someone else's regardless of skill. it's artificial difficulty to cut the player's margin of error in half anyway, because it doesn't build on the mechanics in any meaningful ways, but instead just punishes the things the player might have gotten wrong in any other instance twice as harsh. its a dumb mechanic and theres a reason it doesnt appear outside of dark souls 1 in any of the souls-like games

So you're just reskinning what I said and instead of calling something unfair you call it impossible. You're backing up my argument more bud.

This is why I never paid for any of the Dark Souls games.

>poorly explained, lorgically unfair, or poorly developed as part of the games difficulty

that's exactly what happens in the example you give

This mechanic also appears in Demons Souls (Didn't DS2 also cut your bar down every death?)

i like dark souls its pretty fun

demons souls doesnt count because the game was balanced under the assumption some players would always be in this mode, including ways to circumvent it (cling ring, stone eyes being more prevalent and comparable to humanity as opposed to purging stones where they were found on easy to miss npcs) and a difficulty curve that allowed players to adjust to the difficulty spike after the tutorial

dark souls 2 cut your hp by about 10% every time you died, which was fairly negligible until it piled up and easily countered with human effigies, which you could also get by completing co-op, and on top of that they still included a cling ring equivalent

since these were more tied to multiplayer elements and had actual balance around them relative to core gameplay, its not really equitable to dark souls 1 curse, which is artificial difficulty without purging stones, and just a nuisance once you stack 99. it doesnt add anything to the gameplay otherwise than just punishing the player more harshly than they should be

Unless your game requires bullshit RNG or exploiting the game mechanics it isn't artificially difficult. Dark Souls is perfectly playable without doing either of these. You just need to git gud.

Artificial difficulty is when something is in a hidden or secret location and there's no way of telling where it is. Like if you need a star to progress, in Mario, but it's on the edge of the map and behind a wall. You wouldn't think you'd need to fall off the map to find a star, would you?

That's a classic case of artificial difficulty. You could spend hours looking around for it and never get a single hint about its location. Your only choice is to search online and hope to god that someone else was lucky or thorough enough to find it.. Or shared a walk through. It's just another way for developers to get their money and say "fuck you".

Dark Souls has artificial difficulty in the sense of unpredictable attack patterns and enemy spawns. I'm sure you laughed just now because memorizing enemy spawns and attack patterns is a quintessential part of the game. However, that does not make my claim inaccurate. You play through that section of the game, most likely dying several times, in order to memorize every enemy's attack pattern and spawn location. You do this each time for each section of the game. It would be extremely rare for someone to play Dark Souls, for the first time, and just have a cake walk, without dying.

Here's a good example of Dark Souls artificial difficulty. Now I'm sure you might complain but please think about it.

>You enter an empty room for the first time, unaware of what awaits you
>You wander in, hoping for the best but dreading the worst
>Nothing has popped out at you, as you turn back to leave
>Suddenly this lands on/in front of you
You might consider this a jump scare but this is indeed artificial difficulty and it happens All. The fucking. Time.

Hellkite Dragon is a pretty big exploit, and something that is utterly cheap to do as a player.

Mindflayers in Demons souls and large mob rooms can also fall into this category. Because at that point you're no longer playing the game, you're playing against the developers.

>implying dark souls would be better if enemies would only be in obvious spots and would never ambush you
why the fuck would you want to beat any souls game blind without dying

I'm not complaining. I'm stating a fact. It has artificial difficulty.

Enemies can be in obvious spots without being in the wide fucking open and providing challenge at that same time. Boreal Valley is a good example.

>

>Pontiff second phase
>Artificial difficulty
Bullshit. Yes, Ponty does summon a ghost of himself to assist him, but his moveset becomes much slower in tandem, and rarely do both pontiffs attack at the same time. Hell, I'm pretty sure the ghost actually does the real pontiff's attacks a couple second before the real one does them, making it much more possible to avoid the real pontiff's attack

But none of those events require exploits or random acts of chance to be completed. It's not artificial difficulty, but rather a matter of skill and memorizing how the game works.

So basically ambushes and unpredictable attack patterns are artificial difficulty now. Retard.

Ring of Binding exists for retards like you.

Calling someone a retard doesn't make the argument any less true. If the claim is weak and wrong, then debunk it with counter points.

inb4 "but I like it"

actually, you're right. his attacks both become more telegraphed and the attacks only ever come one after the other with a set amount of time between them. not to mention they're almost always next to each other or at least on screen together. the most this really does is makes it impossible to parry, and force you to mix up your dodges with the altered pattern. but as for raw hp or damage change, not much really happens to that in the fight

>there's nothing wrong with assassinations
Ninjas did nothing wrong.
Viet congs did nothing wrong.
Nothing matters but results! :^)
Achievement Unlocked: WELCOME TO DARK SOULS :DDD

are you a fucking idiot? like, actually clinically retarded?

first off, there is no ring of binding in dark souls 1. second off, read this where i specifically explain how demon's souls avoids the bullshit that is dark souls 1's curse by implementing it in the game in a balanced and fair way instead of just plopping it on you at random points forcing you to go out of your way to get restore items that are most likely hard to find for new players, otherwise be punished twice as hard for mistakes than usual.

The whole thing is artificial. Every game is artificial

You just ramble on for so fucking long. This video is fucking pointless, just play the game and git gud.

Your argument is so stupid I don't even know where to begin. Should enemies always be out in the open? Should every enemy move be highly telegraphed?

Actual artificial difficulty is when something is unreasonably hard for no reason, or something kills you with absolutely no indication that it's about to happen, basically trial and error. Even if the spider ambushes you, you're not insta-killed. You can fight back, or even run away through the door, which incidentally the spider can't get through. Far from artificial difficulty.