God mode is the only option I can easily puzzle out working for people who are unable to use existing mechanics.

Like if the character takes reduced damage but the player cannot dodge, parry, maintain stamina while blocking, or otherwise avoid or mitigate attacks, they’re going to spend most of their time knocked down or staggered.

Increasing player damage would be redundant as most weapons can already be made to do enormous amounts of damage to enemies and bosses using existing systems.

You could increase xp gain I guess but you can already grind out xp relatively quickly.

The game already has auto-targetting, auto-aiming attacks, plenty of aoes of various kinds.

I don’t often see people specifying what accomodations they need to play the game. Like people who ask for a generic “difficulty mode” are treating it like an fps game or arpg game where you can fiddle with player health and damage numbers and make the game relatively straightforward. Idk how you can apply that kind of trivially easy “difficulty mode”, just applying some modifiers to damage and defense numbers, to all of the things going on in souls games - poise, status effects, spacing, dodging, parry, target priority, punishing attacks.

That’s the part where I think a real disconnect has crept in. Like with DnD you can give the player’s +10 to all roll and they mostly can’t lose. With fps games you can simply make the player not die when they lose all their health, and have enemies shoot infrequently and miss a lot. With soulslikes enemies deal damage to whatever they hit during their attack animation. Their aim doesn’t work the same way it does in an fps - they start the animation and if you’re in the way during the animation you take damage. There isn’t really rng the way you’d get it in D&D. Under the same conditions every action has the same result.

Giving players more ammo like you do in lower difficulties on fps and tps games doesn’t translate as the player already roughly has control over their resources through levelling up, managing flashs, and consumables. And all your resources are restocked whenever you die or reach the next checkpoint. And then on top of that ER has several mechanics to keep you topped off while exploring, and if you run low you can almost always return to the last checkpoint to top off and start that segment over.

Giving people “more powerful” weapons “earlier” doesn’t fit bc you have access to almost all weapon types at the start of the game through different classes, merchants, and drops. And there aren’t really more or less powerful weapons, rather weapons determine your moveset and playstyle with most players picking something that feels good to them. As all weapons can be levelled up and most can have their special abilities changed there isn’t any clear equivalent to giving someone the rocket launcher a few levels early.

When people say they want an “easy mode” I don’t understand what they want. They game is “easy” if you accept that going through the same areas over and over until you win is the core gameplay loop and you make use of all the tools you have.

Like if you’re R/G colorblind, or need visual cues for audio due to impaired hearing, I get that. But in the context of a souls game what do people mean by easy? It’s not an fps or arpg where enemies are just a bundle of hp that you click on until they die. If you have god mode you can ignore all game mechanics and click the enemy until they die. But short of god mode no amount of fiddling with stats is going to get someone past Malekith or Radhann.

Maybe some kind of time-dilation thing where you can slow the game down dramatically?

There’s a saying “a game for everyone is a game for no one” and I think at some point the souls hater crowd needs to sit down and chew on the idea that soulslike games have specific features that make them different from other genres of games and that the “story mode” or easy mode or whatever that can be relatively easily implemented in to crpgs, arpgs, fps, or tps games cannot easily be translated to souls games due to differences in core gameplay mechanics.

The best analogy I can come up with would be sim games. You can set all the conditions to optimal and make enemy jets fly in a straight, level line, you can turn off damage to your aircraft and fuel, but at some point the player does need to know how to fly the simulated aircraft. And if they cannot do that they should consider other genres than simulation.

Maybe I’m just overthinking this. I’m trying to work this out from "how do you make the game “easier” and still have a souls game. Maybe the folks who want an “easy” mode don’t care and just want to toodle around in god mode in a game that would otherwise be totally unenjoyable for them.

The idea that any player should be able to play any game however they want, though; hard disagree. Single player games are not sandboxes. God mode is fine, but like, idk, i see the idea a lot that players should be able to use whatever weapons or skills or whatever they want and everything should be equally, uniformly viable for all gameplay. Lots of talk about “power fantasy” and “there’s no wrong way to play”. That’s not a good attitude to approach games with. Do whatever you want within the limits of the engine, but if you’re trying to play the game in ways it was not made to be played then you’re making a decision to do so. I’m seeing this a lot with Helldivers, with people complaining that the game requires them to take a variety of weapons to deal with different kinds of enemies instead of taking whatever they think looks cool and having every weapon be equally effective in every situation. And there’s also a great many players refusing to learn basic game systems and complaining that the game is too hard because they don’t understand how to use those systems.

When a person selects a game to play they should be ready to invest a certain amount of time learning the game’s rules and systems, and they should engage with the game in good faith. That means accepting the goals of the game - fps games are about shooting things, arpgs are about character builds and clicking monsters, puzzle games are about solving puzzles, simulation games are about simulating systems, platformers are about jumping between platforms - and engaging with the games on those terms.

Elden ring isn’t a walking simulator, it’s not a ttrpg adapted in to a crpg, it’s not a conventional arpg, it’s not a zelda game or a metroidvania. Soulslike games are their own thing. If you want to vibe and enjoy the scenary, just walk around and look at things, you’re asking the devs to give you options to play an entirely different genre and style of game. All the scenery and vibes are in a soulslike game to give substance and flavor to the core of fighting from one bonfire to the next bonfire. Putting in options to completely ignore that and just wander around isn’t a mode to make it easier to play dark souls, it"s a mode for not playing dark souls. “I want to be able to engage with the combat in a way that is within the limits of my abilities” is reasonable. “I want to play a walking simulator and i want options to make ds or er a walking simulator” is unreasonable. If someone feels they cannot enjoy the game they should not buy it, and instead find a game in a genre they enjoy.

Sort of? It’s not really a roguelike because you keep your character when you die and at most you’ll lose the experience points you gained since the last checkpoint. Checkpoints are usually between 5-20 minutes apart, with the time between them really heavily dependent on player skill and game knowledge. On my first playthrough one section of maybe 200m took me several hours of fighting through it over and over again until I cleared it. This playthough took me five minutes bc I had much much better game knowledge and understood how all the systems worked. And I cleared it in five minutes using an archery build that isn’t really supported by the game, and I did a lot of screwing around.

Also this isn’t a secret it’s the absolute core of the entire genre. Almost all soulslike games pit you against a big gnarly boss at the absolute start of the game that will beat the crap out of you many times specifically as a tutorial on how the game loop works. That boss is there to kill you so you know that death isn’t a failure state or you “losing the game”, it’s just a normal part of gameplay. Ds1 has asylum demon, i don’t recall is dsii has one, dsiii has iyudex gundyr, sekiro has that guy in the field, elder ring has the grafted scion. They’re all there right from the start of the game to kill you so you learn that death is at most a temporary setback and a chance to regroup and test new ideas. It’s the first thing the genre tries to teach you.

What kind of accessibility options would you add, were you given a team of developers and tasked with doing so?

Totally agree, i love the story and background. But the way it’s presented - item descriptions, weird shit you find lying around - doesn’t really track with what people expect from a traditional crpg.

: (

Maybe give Sekiro a try? It’s not not ac6’s frantic flying around combined with Tenchu’s fun ninja toys. I

Yet baiting attacks is a core tactic in soulslikes. Curious…

:curious

Throw books about abolition of the family at him?

So like i dig a trench in the yard and do something with straw and then somehow avacados?

I am having intense deja vu and i would like you to know you were being reasonable and correct in all the weird maybe memories i am having of that conversation, too.

Tried to explain socialism to a smart but startlingly ignorant us military person today. They thought socialism was when the federal governments military procurement has an entrenched and inefficient bureaucracy. I tried, i really did, but they had some weird libertarian “i want freedom and meritocracy” thing going while also being shockingly politically ignorant. : p