This is something I had dismissed when I first saw the news bit you posted - I was super excited for Below but fell away from it the third time I died, I didn’t even give it much of a chance, and so a new “casual” mode sounded awesome to me - but you raise a great point as playing this on my big TV would maybe be even cooler. Tempting.
Sure, there’s space for medium to hard games… The question is is there commercial success for those types of games? Would you guys consider souls to be a hard game? Looks hard to me… I’ve never played it but I’ve seen plenty of videos and it looks like I hit my frustration level from the beginning so I’ve never played it.
So of course they are free to make the game as hard as they want but it’s unclear to me it would be a commercial success if it’s punishingly hard.
The Souls games are quite commercially successful, though. “Hard” isn’t sufficiently descriptive to cover all games.
The souls games give you plenty of resources to conquer its challenges. Below does not, and it brutally punishes you for dying by removing your lantern, effectively shutting you out of the later levels which require lucky speedruns (though randomly generated rooms) to get the lantern back which is the only thing that can stop the continuous damage there.
When you die, you also have to grind for supplies to go back and retrieve your lantern. Grind bandages, potions, torches, all this bullshit that takes like 30 minutes before you can try again. It’s just tedious.
Exactly. The secret to the Dark Souls games is they aren’t actually hard, they just “feel” hard and then they feel rewarding. Honestly there isn’t any meaningful penalty for death in the later games - sure you lose some souls, but they are an endless resource that are very easy to obtain in huge quantities. You don’t really lose progress - if you unlock a short cut, or find some cool items in a chest, or talk to an NPC and advance a side story, that stuff is always there, even after death. You are always making progress, in a way that a game with quick save/quick load doesn’t provide. Some of those bosses are bullshit hard though, but then, you can summon help, too (something you can rarely do in other, more traditional games).
By comparison, Below is just mean and unfun. I hope this new mode makes it the game I would have enjoyed originally. Also, Below needs cool stuff to make me want to play further. I want to find magic arms and armor, rings, powerful potions. Brogue type stuff, basically. I don’t think it has that kind of stuff, so I lose some incentive there, too.
I think that’s a really good point. People don’t mind hard so much as they mind something they perceive as unfair. Or perhaps punishing.
There’s a reason Blighttown is considered the worst part of the Souls series. It’s just some shitty swamp that punishes exploration. They fixed that in later games by giving you more ways to deal with poison. Below is like if Blighttown was half the game.
did they though
In DS3 at least, poison is just annoying and not a death sentence. Toxic is the old poison, and much rarer.
Toxic was there in the first game, though, and every single game, including Demon’s Souls and Bloodborne, has had An Extremely Annoying Poison Area, ugh. Actually probably DS2 was the least obtrusive in this regard.
Dark Souls created the modern standard for difficulty. Many players judge other difficult games relative to that. If you do something different than Dark Souls, you’d better know what you’re doing.
Especially when you’re making an “experience.” On the the hand, Traditional difficult platform games are a separate vector with their own set of rules.
Finally gave this a shot after promptly putting it on the backburner for other things. Wow, what a mistake that was. The sense of adventure in this is incredible. I stayed up all night Sunday (big mistake) playing this and have started a notes document for my mapping of the world and its mechanics. I haven’t quite figured out some key mechanics regarding the meta-progression, so I might look those up, but otherwise I’m trying to keep this a totally solitary experience free of spoilers.
I’m rubbing up against limitations in the combat system and inventory space, but the world is so lovingly put together and the core Souls-like gameplay loop so compelling that I don’t mind. I just save my good arrows for the hard guys I can’t go toe-to-toe with. Also, I just hit floor 8, for what it’s worth. I have no idea how far that is.
EDIT: Argh…this game definitely lets you put yourself in an unwinnable state. I could be missing something but I got locked into a place (as part of the story progression) that could not be left with my current loadout. I saw no other option but to let my character slowly starve to death so I can try again with a new character (as far as I can tell, there is no suicide option. On the upshot, I learned what things in my inventory I am invulnerable to.)
I don’t know if you saw (up thread) but a new exploration version is coming in a few months.
I did, as well as your comment. You are right - if this game, which is beautiful and atmospheric, had the mechanical depth and level layout panache that Brogue has, it would be transcendental. I do feel hopeful though - I think that game is coming, and it will be Unexplored 2.
Is this an example of the “atmospheric roguelike” genre?
I would put it in the “warning against blind loyalty to a trusted developer” genre.
I think you can in some very rare cases (more than trusting a developer, trusting an individual developer), but to me Below screamed “game that should have been gutted but nobody had the gut to do it” right from the early gameplay previews they posted.
Edit: hey, that’s actually what I typed. Either I’m really me, or I’m just too stupid to change over the years anymore.
I agree if you refer to the standard gameplay, but when it comes to bosses, it is dfferent. Some of them are really hard (O&S), lucky there is multiplayer.
I am interested in Below, how hard can it be? What happens on death? Do you lose all your stuff? Can you regain it or do you start from scratch every time?
I would like to play this on the switch