You know there’s ways to add difficulty settings that aren’t Bethesda sliders, right?

No I’m not lmfao do you think I’m demanding that they make the game easier for everyone? Why don’t Fromsoft fans understand the concept of options? The whole point is that you should be able to play the game at whatever level of difficulty is appropriate for you

I don’t need you to be part of the conversation.

Too bad, I guess? I’m here anyway. If you don’t like reading my comments you can always block me

How exactly do you think your analogy works? Because I think it actually makes perfect sense to let people put less sauce on their pizza if they want less sauce on their pizza

Fundamentally we have not.

Nope, fundamentally we have. I am not conditioned to eat very spicy food. If you are conditioned to eat very spicy food, then more capsaicin is less spicy for you. The nociceptors in your mouth get less overwhelmed, and you experience more of the actual flavor. You are able to taste it in a way that I am physically incapable of.

But hey, I don’t actually eat hot sauce. I’m just assuming that the strong stuff has complex flavors. Is the pain literally the only reason you eat hot sauce? Does it not taste like anything? Because Fromsoft games do have flavor, and I think that whether or not you’re physically capable of handling the spice should not factor in to whether you are allowed to taste them or not

That’s the wonderful thing about options, is that they’re optional. Me having the option to make the game more fun for me does not remove the option to make the game more fun for you.

If your stated goal with a hot sauce eating party is to “bring everyone to the same level of discussion and the same level of enjoyment,” are you going to feed everyone General Satan’s Colon Evaporator, or do you think that would bring some people to a different level of discussion and enjoyment? Personally I think if someone has a heart attack and dies because they ate the same hot sauce that you had no problem with, then you did a pretty bad job of bringing everyone the same level of enjoyment.

If you extracted the capsaicin from General Satan’s Colon Evaporator, it is no longer General Satan’s Colon Evaporator, and you can’t actually contribute to the conversation.

What an incredible insult to Miyazaki’s writing. If you took some of the health out of Ebrietas, you’d still be playing Bloodborne. If you and I both beat her at the same level of relative difficulty, what’s stopping us from having a conversation? Why am I only able to join the conversation when I have a harder time with her than you do?

I did git gud. I beat the fuckin games, and at a harder level of difficulty than you had to deal with. I just want more people to be able to enjoy these games too. Do you have anything to add to the discussion, or are you just looking for a gate to keep?

I wasn’t talking about Hot Ones the show. Those are just the first names that came to mind in terms of people who can handle spicy food.

I’m just going to have to restate the exact same analogy and hope you get it this time. If you feed a spoonful of sriracha to someone who’s used to eating hot sauce in the hundreds of thousands of scovilles, and to someone who irregularly puts a couple drops of Tabasco on their pizza, the two will have wildly different experiences of the same sauce.

Miyazaki’s stated goal was to bring everyone to the same level of discussion and the same level of enjoyment. In order to do that, the experience must be tailored to the player’s ability. Giving me access to mild hot sauce does not reduce your access to the extra spicy stuff. Letting me reduce the Guardian Ape’s health by half in my save file does not reduce the Guardian Ape’s health in yours. It just ensures that we both have an equivalent experience to each other.

Sure, and what counts as a ridiculous challenge depends on the player. I can promise you that you have an easier time beating the Dancer of the Boreal Valley at 5,111 health than I would if she only had 2,500. We are playing at different difficulty levels already. The challenge is harder for me.

Let me ask you this, why do you think every game should cater to you?

I don’t. I don’t like visual novels because there’s not enough action, so I don’t play visual novels. I don’t care for sports, so I don’t play sport games. I don’t enjoy the basic mechanics of fighting games, so I don’t play fighting games.

I do enjoy Fromsoft games. I apparently like the stories more than you do since you’re actively insulting them, and everything between boss fights is fantastic. Literally the only thing I’m asking for is the ability to play a game that I already like at the same level of difficulty that you play at. Again, it would not fundamentally change the game if the Ancient Wyvern had half as much health.

No, it’s still wrong for the games that he has designed and created. Let me attempt an analogy.

If you give Sean Evans or Chris Schonberger a spoonful of sriracha, it will not be spicy to them. The same spoonful of sriracha would be overwhelmingly spicy if you gave it to someone who doesn’t use hot sauce. Same capsaicin content, wildly different experiences.

You need to add difficulty options if you want everyone to have a similar experience. Otherwise, you’re just making the game harder for some people for no reason.

Some people enjoy a more challenging experience. Give them options to make it a more challenging experience. Nobody is asking anyone to take options away from players who like the games to be excessively difficult.

Like hell. I hit my skill ceiling in these games a long time ago, and I’m not getting any younger.

I think Mortal Kombat does it best. When you die to a boss, that boss becomes ever so slightly less difficult. Unnoticeably so at first, but as you die more and more and more, they get slower and slower and slower

Do you think the entire artistic value of soulsikes is in their difficulty? That it would ruin them if players with worse reaction time were given the ability to progress at the same rate as players with exceptional reaction time? That Dark Souls would be essentially the same if instead of Gwyn, Lord of Cinder, there was just a floating hitbox with 4,185 health? What a fucking insult to Miyazaki’s writing

Yeah maybe we should have even more accessibility settings too. Things that don’t fundamentally change the game like changing the time signature on a piece of music changes that piece of music. Like, it wouldn’t fundamentally change Bloodborne if there was an option to make Rom the Vacuous Spider take fewer hits to kill.

It wouldn’t even have to get in the way of players who enjoy spending 5 hours slashing at a blob of flesh. That’s the beauty of options! They’re optional!

I mean we literally do have accessibility settings for most art lmao what do you think subtitles and sign language interpreters are

It’s absolutely not right. I am not good at soulslikes, so the games are harder for me. If you have fun with it, that’s because the game is easier for you

Yeah fuck letting new players have a similar experience with the game as more experienced players. If you haven’t spent 20 years playing Halo then you don’t deserve to have fun with it

Difficulty options aren’t there to offer different experiences with a game, they’re there to offer the same experience to players of different skill levels. People who are better at Dark Souls are playing it and its clones at a reduced difficulty compared to people who are worse at it.

Still violates the laws of physics

You and I are in two conventional spaceships traveling at 0.86c relative to each other. In my reference frame, you are traveling through time at half the rate I am. This is due to time dilation, not speed of light delay. After I experience one year on my ship, you will have experienced 6 months on your ship. In your reference frame, the opposite is true. After you experience one year on your ship, I will have experienced 6 months on my ship. This violates no laws of physics, because even though there is no universal “present,” the limited speed of light ensures that causality is maintained.

Both of our ships have away shuttles with Alcubierre drives. These away shuttles can move arbitrarily fast, far in excess of the speed of light, without ever leaving their parent ship’s reference frame.

After 60 years, my ship has a cyclospirosis outbreak because someone didn’t wash their hands. The last pilot not suffering from explosive diarrhea hops in our away ship and instantaneously warps some distance in front of your ship (reminder: in my reference frame, you have only aged 30 years). He sends you a message explaining the situation. This message reaches you after you’ve only aged 30 years.

Swapping to your reference frame now. Causality must be preserved, so since you received that message after 30 years in my reference frame, you must receive that message after 30 years in your own. But in your reference frame, after 30 years of passed, my clock is only at 15 years. You decide to send your own away shuttle to warn us about this future outbreak. Your away shuttle arrives arbitrarily fast, sending us a message about a future cyclospirosis outbreak that arrives 45 years before that outbreak happens.

You can dress your FTL technology in whatever sci-fi snake oil you want. If you can get information to a destination faster than a photon could, you can break causality.

There are more american citizens than there are prison cells and cameras