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Introduction: There is no difficulty to go up, and there is a difficulty to change the mage profession to overcome the difficulties.
Recently, "Eldon's Circle of Law" has set off a wave of "suffering" among the player base, and the game has exceeded the 5 million mark in less than a week after its release. In addition to those who have been baptized by games such as "Dark Souls" and "Only Wolf", this time, there are still many new players who think they are handicapped, in the way of purchasing games, bidding farewell to the outsider camp of "Hilarity is theirs, I have nothing", "temporarily" to join the ranks of faders.
I say "temporarily" because a considerable number of these players have not withstood the high difficulty that soul games have always advertised, and the opening game is slashed by the battle mechanism, roadside monsters, and the three-plate axe of the early small boss, "I see, I come, I leave (after being educated by the game)", which becomes the memory left by "Eldon's Law Ring" to these players.
Before the commercial success of the series of soul games dominated by Hidetaka Miyazaki, high difficulty has always been considered a natural enemy of high sales, and for a while game manufacturers tried to use a "waiting" attitude to try to keep players, but the result often backfired. So how should the criteria of difficulty be defined? Does the difficulty curve go up or down as the game progresses? Why does a game like Eldon's Ring of Law have an appeal? Let's start with the contact with the game in the 1990s and talk about the interaction between difficulty and players.
What these two have in common is that they "never show mercy to their subordinates."
It's really "love to play, don't play roll"
In a recent interview with the media, Miyazaki Hidetaka was asked whether he would try to reduce the difficulty in future works to satisfy the playing experience of "handicapped" players. Hidetaka Miyazaki refused, saying that "difficult" is precisely the characteristic of From Software.
I don't know if you have ever played the pre-Dark Souls From Software games such as "Armored Core" or "Tenra", the former is different from the popular Gundam action games at the time, reducing mobility at the same time, the modular design of the mecha military (Shouya also opened a special IP product line for this) is very challenging the player's battlefield strain and equipment choices; the latter is the ACG works in the flying ninja to do a relatively realistic treatment, the player relies on not Naruto's surreal ninjutsu, It's about how to be cautious and efficient when facing a complex dormant environment.
So those who face the repeated defeats of the Soul series or do not call out with the old players what "Miyazaki Hidetaka took over the FS Society's intangible materialization heritage", when people really do it, you may not be able to play it.
Hardcore Mech Game Armored Core
Hidetaka Miyazaki, including FS's former games in the difficulty of the uncompromising, inherited the development concept of many pixel games earlier, that is, in the early 90s, between players and games, rather than consumption and consumption, it is more like a challenge and challenge relationship.
Although indie games nowadays often use pixel style, but the specific difficulty is often more reasonable, and in the FC, MD, SFC and other host popular pixel era, manufacturers in the setting of game difficulty without compromise, card levels are a common thing for players. The game seems to be naturally difficult during this period, which can be mainly attributed to the following three reasons.
1. Until Sega's MD console broke the supremacy of Nintendo and soared in the North American market, occupying the mainstream of home console games, THE ACT type game (mainly presented in the form of clearing the level and action shooting), also generally has the DNA of arcade inheritance. By artificially setting high difficulty and forcing players to frequently coin, it is the basic commercial law of arcade operation, when these games are transplanted to the home machine, most of them take the "original" as a publicity selling point, and the difficulty is self-evident.
2. The technical force is relatively low, and the developer experience is insufficient. The difficulty of some games is not to deliberately embarrass players, but the imperfection of technology, so that the operation feel, physical engine, screen performance and other game elements designed around the underlying layer, so that players need to spend more time to adapt and control. More classic examples such as the fixed jump trajectory of "Demon Village" and "Mega Man" are "a hammer deal" in the eyes of today's players; the bullet screen of STG games puts forward high requirements for the back version and reaction speed; action games are hit by the enemy to a touch of death, or "Angry Iron Fist" and "Double Dragon" in the face of the fight is difficult to fight back; most of them stem from lack of technology and experience, and the confrontation between players is not only unreasonable, but many even "strong words".
In "Double Dragon", once the player is trapped in a situation of being besieged, a punch and kick is inevitable
To this day, Mega Man is still synonymous with difficult games
3, good "waiting" users. In the late 1980s and early 1990s, video games were still a relatively vertical, even subcultural form of entertainment, and the main users were flesh-and-blood, energetic teenagers, a combination of new things and sensory stimulation, even if the difficulty was high, they (that is, I did not play at that time). I believe that many old players have the kind of children who played the first two levels of the "old four" on FC when they were very skilled, but as the difficulty of the game increased sharply, there was little consensus among the passers.
The difficulty is high, and the situation of "loving to play, not playing rolling" has gradually begun to be changed after Sony entered the home console market.
"Mild users" open up the service awareness of game manufacturers
One of the points that must be mentioned in the various re-analysis of the success of Sony's first generation of PS consoles is that the marketing department at that time carried out publicity and promotion for "light users" (mild users, as opposed to "core users", that is, heavy or called core users, soul games are undoubtedly the latter's dish, but with the help of the second diffusion of the video platform, many light users also have the impulse to try).
Just like its own industry's "mengxin" attribute, Sony changes the track from the inertial thinking of high-difficulty hardcore games, aims at new users, and puts a different casual direction or creative works than traditional video games, as console sales climb, many mild users who were not very cold about games before poured in, the tide is rising, and new users have generated demand for light games or games with lower difficulty.
After that, after the continuous expansion of the game market during the PS2 period, the slogan of "all games gathered here" resounded throughout the industry, and the ecologically diverse user structure allowed the PS2 console to go out of sufficient distance in both the direction of high difficulty and lightweight, on the one hand, it was to serve the public consumers in film and television, anime adaptations and casual games; on the other hand, such as Capcom's "Hand of God", Sega's "Ninja" continued to challenge the level of games that core players were proud of. If some young friends are unfamiliar with these two games, it is because of the high difficulty that leads to poor sales, and there has been no sequel since PS2.
A difficult action game that makes countless old players smell the color - "Shinobi"
After two generations of N64 and NGC less successful home consoles, Nintendo awakened its sense of service to the mild user market after the new president Satoshi Iwata took office. Compared with PS2, Wii consoles take the further sinking "blue ocean strategy" as the main theme, and with the simple and direct operation of the Wii host, games such as Wiisports, Wiiplay, and Lehman Rabbit have become upstarts that are different from traditional classic games. Game manufacturers have found that those games that can meet the lower difficulty of most people sometimes have more ideal commercial returns than die-hard old games, Sonic tossing 3D is not selling, and "Sonic and Mario 2008 Beijing Olympic Games" is simply not too fragrant, which also gives a lot of Wang Eight Fists games that use the somatosensory boom to punch their arms and legs into the factory.
The reduction in difficulty is not only reflected in the number of casual games, traditional masterpieces are also trying to change their creative thinking, from lowering the threshold to serving everyone. For example, role-playing games reduce the player's cost of computing power at the system level (the command combination system of "Final Fantasy 12" is much deeper than the "Sword Method" of "Final Fantasy 15"); the unparalleled action games are flooded; the auxiliary line prompts of the racing game almost teach you to drive by hand; and the graphics and performance effects are full of scores, and in terms of action, they are cheeky and want to be with "Angel Hunter Witch", "Ninja Dragon 2", "Devil May Cry 4" and call the four ACT "God of War 3".
There is no contempt for the meaning of Kuiye, but European and American manufacturers do have a certain gap compared with Japanese manufacturers in Benge action games
Demon Souls, which emerged in this trend, did not attract much attention from players at first, and was dissuaded by the discomfort caused by the difficulty caused by the difficulty of the game (I was one of them), and if someone had told me that the series would grow into "Produced by Miyazaki, it must be a boutique" for the next decade, I would have thought I was talking about Hayao Miyazaki.
From Demon Souls to Eldon's Ring of Law, difficult games ushered in the "Renaissance."
If you're a double-material lover of Monster Hunter and Hidetaka Miyazaki, you'll probably find that these two are now both market-consuming in both the East and the West, and are also in the ACT and A. The free-moving, give-and-take games in the RPG's genre framework have undergone a step-by-step rise from high and low to admired by thousands of people without fundamentally changing their difficulty attributes.
First of all, when the two debuted, the lack of power caused by the endurance slot setting made players who were accustomed to jumping up and down in the usual action game feel that it was not, "Demon Souls" still had a core mechanism for maze exploration, and "Monster Hunter" in addition to throwing the hunter in front of the monster as soon as it came up, so that the former stared at the endurance slot while struggling to avoid, using the PS2 right stick to control the attack button, it is even more confusing, accidents are frequent.
Next, Monster Hunter began to adjust the operation mode, increasing the variety of weapons and corresponding moves; "Dark Souls" significantly improved the fluency of the movement and enriched the freedom of various play styles compared to "Demon Souls". Finally, as a product with the label of "next generation", Monster Hunter World and today's "Eldon's Ring" use the technical power within their capabilities, from the inside out, to apply the open world form, the limited degree of freedom, and the original hard bridge hard horse fight operation, fight the feel, fight the reflection, fight the patience of the high difficulty of the battle, like the so-called "strength" or "unloading" in the concept of martial arts, so that players have more and more ways and methods to deal with the higher difficulty of the game. High difficulty itself is not the main reason for dissuading players, roughly pulling up the value design, single gameplay, poor combat feel and players lack of patience in the face of high difficulty, are the main reasons why difficult games can often "win without fighting".
I personally believe that a game with high difficulty is not necessarily a good game, but to become a good game, the difficulty must not be low, which has nothing to do with whether the manufacturer wants to serve the player well (players who have played the PS3 version of "Demon Souls" clearly know that Hidetaka Miyazaki just wants to put the player to death), but only after the difficulty reaches a certain stage, all aspects of the game design can reflect whether they have enough depth. For example, the reason why high-level athletes are strong, in addition to talent and good training, the last crucial growth factor is to be in a high-intensity competitive environment for a long time, if you don't believe it, recall the Chinese men's football team in the past year.
Conclusion: As Hidetaka Miyazaki said in the interview, the game he dominates will definitely continue to adhere to a relatively high difficulty setting, and the increasing sales of several games such as Bloodborne Curse, Only Wolf, and Eldon's Law Ring prove that even with the cloud players watching the fire from the other side, the handbags "bought regret" lessons, and the market performance of high-difficulty games is easier to get rid of the embarrassment of "applauding or not calling" than a decade ago. Between being served with low difficulty and being respected by high difficulty, more and more players are beginning to tend to choose, or at least try the latter. 17173