Demon’s Souls may get easier on December 21st
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Broken, beaten and in some cases battered to an inch of their lives, RPG fans of tough-as-nails Demon’s Souls will undoubtedly be regaling fellow mortals with more than a few horror stories over the upcoming holiday festivities.
Yes, we know, Demon’s Souls is hard.
It seems the powers-that-be know it, too, and they may be coming to your rescue this winter solstice.
Or not. Here’s what the official Sony PlayStation Twitter account hinted at yesterday:
Heroes of Boletaria, take heart: rumor has it the Old One’s power will falter in the days following the winter solsticeb40b0b; padding: 0px; margin: 0px;" title="#demonssouls" href="http://twitter.com/search?q=%23demonssouls">#demonssouls
Winter soltice is December 21st (a Monday). Could a new difficulty setting be coming in an effort to maintain the collective sanity of gamers over the festive period?
Let us know what you think the tweet could mean in the comments below.
I wish I had the opportunity to try this already so I could comment. What makes the game difficult? The skill of using a controller or solving puzzles?
It’s more of a trial and error thing. Enemies can easily send you home crying. you need to learn how to make your way through a level, what weapons work on certain enemies, when to level up. When you die you loose all the souls (currency) you have gathered. You have one chance to make it back to the spot you died to get them back. If you die before making it back to that spot, they’re gone forever. That in itself can be VERY FRUSTRATING!!!
Yup. According to OPM UK, you can lose HOURS of gameplay when you die. And I quote:
‘One fan contacted us to say he imported the puzzling role-player as soon as it came out, and can confirm the rumours about killer difficulty levels are true. “It took me about five or six character resets just to get the gist of the game mechanics,” says Lee, “and I’ve been gaming since the 1970s.”
“One of the hardest things is that wherever you die, you have to find your way back to that spot to respawn. You have to find your bloodstain on the ground to become human again. Say you travel an hour across a level and get killed, then you have to go through the whole level again, fighting the exact same enemies.”
Even worse, until you return to human form you’re in a weakened ghoul state, and on top of that, all your equipment degrades over time, making it even harder to survive.
So it’s brutal to the point of absurdity.’
I was slightly interested in the game, since I liked the idea of being able to receive messages from, and leave messages for, other players. But I’m not that big an RPG fan anyway, and the thought of having to re-play hours of the game just doesn’t seem like fun to me.
Early on in the game, the only difficulty can be found in the clunky combat system and the fairly average camera (often gets stuck on corners or in the Valley of Defilement, behind boards, obscuring both yourself and your opponent – _great_ work From Software!), and the odd cheap kill. But I wouldn’t classify this game as difficult (at least based on my experience – and it’d need to get a lot harder than it was in the first four hours to get up to a ‘MW2 on normal’ difficulty level, where difficulty is how hard the gameplay is. The difficulty in this game is in dealing with the tedium of possibly the worst core game design in terms of flow since…. well, forever – I’ve never seen this combination of tedious gameplay and repetition. It’s almost more fun (and more challenging, and almost as interesting) entering numbers accurately into a spreadsheet. It’d be alright if the combat was up to PS2-era hack-and-slash games, or if the enemy AI as this gen as well, but it ain’t. As noted below, I cannot understate how overrated this game is. When you break it down and look at the actual ‘game’ component, there’s nothing here that hasn’t been done better elsewhere.
I thought games were supposed to be fun?!
Oh please, don’t reduce the dificulty! Sure it’s hard, but it’s the fun kind of hard… most of the time… and you feel damn good when you’ve beaten that last boss!..
I had the fortune of borrowing this from a mate the other day, who loved it, to find out what all the hype was about, and was _bitterly_ disappointed. I’m not sure what everyone who goes on about this is on, but I gave it a good four hours before I put it down and moved on, and was never stuck once. While I clearly only played the start of the game, the combat is as easy as tying your shoelaces, and almost as exciting. The first boss is also straightforward. However, the camera is clunkier than on a PSP platformer, and the main reasons I died was because of a shonky camera or me getting lazy because I was bored off my tree. The other main cause of death is working out enemy attack patterns – which is easy, because at least early on in the game they’ve got fewer dimensions than Paris Hilton’s personality.
From my perspective, I can’t overstate how overrated this game is – and how much of an RPG it isn’t as well. It’s a clunky hack-and-slash game (there’s almost no story, and other than different armour/weapons and upping your stats/buying spells, the character development’s fairly bland as well), with mediocre and slow combat (you can’t throw throwing knives or firebombs up stairs, game doesn’t allow it – you can’t swing up or down, even though a small but significant number of battles are up and down, which means that a lot of the battle is just making sure you’re at the same level as your enemy. You can only strafe in combat around a single combatant, so in the many group fights your movement is severely limited (and the camera seems to wig out more when it’s locked on). All in alll, most of my deaths were cheap (there are a few areas near the start that are designed only for higher-level characters, but you don’t know this until you walk there and are hammered), or due to the camera. Can’t say how much fun it isn’t to trudge back through a level, fighting the same enemies with the same patterns using the same clunky and one-dimensional combat system, until the next cheap kill, and repeating it all again.
The atmosphere is great, and the first boss is imaginative, but it’s not enough to redeem what at a core gameplay level is a boring, tedious game. I was never once stuck on this – no single moment in the first four hours killed me more than once (which isn’t difficult at all – most games have a point early on that knocks me over a few times while I work it out), the run of the mill enemies for the first part of the game you can fight in your sleep. I was really looking forward to a hard-as-nail RPG when I got this, but after persevering for four hours with a clunky, repetitive (and, up until I threw in the towel, pretty easy) hack-and-slash, I couldn’t go on. There are far batter Hack-and-slashs (God of War, Heavenly Sword) and there are far better RPGs (FF series, Dragon Age, Baldurs Gate: Dark Alliance). I don’t mind hard (I love OF:DR on Hardcore), I don’t mind repetitive (hell, racing games are built around repetition), but the core gameplay’s gotta be good – it doesn’t matter how hard or easy they make this game, the core gameplay just isn’t up to snuff and you should _only_ play this if you enjoy the combat system. If after an hour or two you don’t, give up on it, as I’m reliably informed it’s just more of the same but harder (which you’d bloody hope!) later in the game.