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Hollow Knight: Silksong devs address difficulty concerns: “You have choices”
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You’re describing the horrid souls-like experience embraced by every gamer in these times. It’s unpopular to dislike being annoyed and frustrated with your game, didn’t you hear?Seriously. I love Hollow Knight and what I have played from Silksong thus far, but this elitist "game must be ultra hard and exclude people that can't do it" shit is and always has been a garbage take as far as I am concerned. Having some sort of option to allow people that aren't that good or have accessibility issues enjoy the game seems like a fine thing. Having those be **optional** should in no way prevent people that like the hard default settings from enjoying the game. Maybe have those options disable getting achievements/trophies if it prevents these elitists from enjoying the game knowing that their "lessers" are also able to enjoy the game.
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Holy shit did they do that on their first try? Or did they spend basically the entire time since it came out just grinding those exact levels to dial in as close to perfection as they can? Cos like the rest of us got real jobs
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Difficulty and fun are orthogonal, one doesn't exclude the other. Look at something like Celeste, it gets brutally difficult in farewell but never feels unfair. A difficult game should motivate the player to get better, and that can happen while still remaining a fun experience. Nine Sols has a difficult combat system, but the combat feels fluid and fast-paced. Learning how to parry an enemy's attacks and get in counter hits feels amazing, also you get lots of meaningful upgrades and rewards from everywhere. Meanwhile in silksong you have a character with insane horizontal movement, then you repeatedly get pushed through narrow vertical platforming sections with flying enemies above, spikes on the sides. Killing a bell guy by agonizingly hitting them 1 hit at a time before they dash away out of reach again is not a fun combat paradigm and doesn't create the power fantasy Hollow Knight excelled at. The boss fights and >!Mt.Fay!< are fantastic but exploring the map just feels frustrating, especially when 90% of zones don't drop any rosaries.Why drop rosaries when you get killed in 3 hits (for about all of act 1 at the very least) and come across a dozen enemies that bait and dodge every input you make and spike traps within a couple screens every time you die and you get killed a second time on your runback anyway
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I hope they don't nerf anything else. I was grinding through Sister Sledge (or whatever the boss is called) and I'd nearly done it. Then patch 1 came out and I did it first time. I feel robbed of the achievement. Tweaking the rosary economy is _ok_ however there is a clear lore reason why it is less generous initially.
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It depends on the context. Let's say their is a hard boss that you need 10 attempts for. It makes a huge difference if there is a checkpoint before it or if you have to do 5 minutes of chores again (I agree that these are extreme examples...)20 minutes of challenge becomes 5 minutes of chores becomes 2 minutes to blaze through flawlessly once you get it down And it breaks you out of the headspace. You can't just dive back in, every attempt has weight, even if not much Also most people who complain about this seem to not understand that this is not random, these are well thought out design decisions. If it feels impossibly hard to just get to the boss, there's probably an easier way. There's tons of shortcuts, there's often an easier route to another bench, and when there isn't the boss is probably an easy one when you're not anxious about having to repeat the section Plus, platforming is a huge aspect of the challenge in itself. Sure, it's annoying chores now, but what happens when you need near perfect movement for long stretches with no platforms to rest on?
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I avoided all Silksong articles and posts until I finished Act 1 and probably shouldn't have been surprised by the response, but I was. To me, this threads the needle of that difficulty curve I'm looking for. It's hard but none of my deaths have felt cheap - I made a mistake in my read or hit the wrong button or I'm old and my reflexes are slowing down. The high you get when finally learning the boss patterns and beating them is fantastic although... ::: spoiler act 1 spoiler when I landed the final blow on the Last Judge I dropped my controller and threw my hands in the air only for the corpse to explode and drop me down to one mask. It was 🤌 :::
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The high points of the game are very good. The low points ruin it, in my opinion. I get that frustration might be fun for some people, but I find it discouraging and I don't feel like Silksong *wants* me to be successful. It feels like it wants me to feel frustrated and angry, and that's not an experience I want to have. I doubt I'll finish the game, which sucks, because I loved Hollow Knight, and I love the parts of Silksong that aren't just making me mad.
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Seriously. I love Hollow Knight and what I have played from Silksong thus far, but this elitist "game must be ultra hard and exclude people that can't do it" shit is and always has been a garbage take as far as I am concerned. Having some sort of option to allow people that aren't that good or have accessibility issues enjoy the game seems like a fine thing. Having those be **optional** should in no way prevent people that like the hard default settings from enjoying the game. Maybe have those options disable getting achievements/trophies if it prevents these elitists from enjoying the game knowing that their "lessers" are also able to enjoy the game.
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Silksong makes me want to cry sad tears of defeat. It's so melancholy and difficult sometimes. Yeah, there's the whole 'get good' argument, but there's a lot of arguably unnecessary tedium involved that starts to feel like difficulty just for the sake of being difficult and nothing else. That's definitely been a bit of a detractor for me, as well as a lot of others it seems.
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Once I switched from my steam deck to a platform where I got more than five frames and switched wireless controller surrounded by two separate wireless routers It became one of if not my favorite game but while I was playing with an unknown handicap I saw a bunch of unavoidable flaws that were not the fault of the player at least on the bell beast, there are instances that are impossible to escape like entirely impossible, you can avoid them and I did eventually beat it even with the handicap but the game definitely has flaws that the difficulty accentuates but the later upgrades and tools definitely eliminates most of them.>there are instances that are impossible to escape like entirely impossible I expect to see the 100% no hit speedrun hit the internet by the end of the month
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Nine Sols did this perfectly. It's another very hard metroidvania, but it has some options you can enable if you want to that adjust the difficulty in a variety of very tangible ways. I wish that was standard.Nine Sols is great, and I agree completely that they did a good job of adding those options. I didn't end up using them, but I bet it let a lot of people enjoy the game that could have hit a wall in Hollow Knight or people that just couldn't grasp the parrying mechanic.
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I'll repeat a comment I posted on another article. It has been 14 years since Dark Souls and yet, the holy words still stand. Git gud.Everyone heard Hornet say git gud. If you say you didn't, you either didn't play HK or you're a liar. Silksong is the git gud game. It is the Bloodborne 2 we never got.
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Seriously. I love Hollow Knight and what I have played from Silksong thus far, but this elitist "game must be ultra hard and exclude people that can't do it" shit is and always has been a garbage take as far as I am concerned. Having some sort of option to allow people that aren't that good or have accessibility issues enjoy the game seems like a fine thing. Having those be **optional** should in no way prevent people that like the hard default settings from enjoying the game. Maybe have those options disable getting achievements/trophies if it prevents these elitists from enjoying the game knowing that their "lessers" are also able to enjoy the game.And the idea that every game should be for everyone is the reason why Elden Ring is... kind of a bad game. Great open world, beautiful scenery... bad boss design, which yes — that is the game. Like, think about this in the real world setting. Think about how this hyopthetical would play out, person becomes disabled and has to sit in a wheelchair. Everyone agrees 'it's not fair that they can't walk, no one should walk because this person can't'. Does that make sense to you? Because it doesn't to me, I'm sorry if there are people who can't beat these games — but damn, at some point you have to recognize life isn't fair and just enjoy the shit you do enjoy. If being good at a video game isn't important to you, *ok* that's your prerogative. Do not play the hard video game. But this constant whining about difficulty settings and nerfs is just obnoxious.
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Everyone heard Hornet say git gud. If you say you didn't, you either didn't play HK or you're a liar. Silksong is the git gud game. It is the Bloodborne 2 we never got.
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Nine Sols is great, and I agree completely that they did a good job of adding those options. I didn't end up using them, but I bet it let a lot of people enjoy the game that could have hit a wall in Hollow Knight or people that just couldn't grasp the parrying mechanic.
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I have been pleading with my husband to do exactly this. But no, he will continue to bash his face off enemies until they die by some kind of miracle. He has 5 masks, does not use red tools (but uses the poison polyp in his one blue slot), does not pogo or hit enemies above him, not use running attacks, or heal in the air. Just straight on hit with nail while face tanking and ground heal. I am DREADING him somehow reaching Bilewater. I absolutely KNOW he is not the only person playing like this, and suspish this is the main source of the difficulty discourse...
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>there are instances that are impossible to escape like entirely impossible I expect to see the 100% no hit speedrun hit the internet by the end of the monthThat's entirely possible, that's who I said "you can avoid them" if you don't get in the far corner you never get in those situations but if you do you can get chain hit all the way to zero hp. You would have to be clairvoyant to see them coming which of course you can be by replaying the level so a hitless run is entirely possible but that doesn't make my it fair or good game play.
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Every time I read about players bitching about difficulty, I wonder why they're so persistent. There's plenty of games out there to play instead. I tried dark souls and realized that kinda game isn't for me. Neither is getting over it, or anything like that. I just want to lean back and relax, and I don't want to mess with tight timings and stuff like that. I just play puzzle games because of that, and I thoroughly enjoy it. Why do they feel the need of forcing themselves through an experience they don't enjoy? FOMO? Bragging rights? I really don't get it.Too much of Silksong's difficulty is just numbers. Shitty peon enemies hit for two health because fuck you. Touching a boss *while it's stunned* hits for two health because fuck you. And then there's the whole shard system, which straight-up doesn't need to exist since it just makes you never engage with tools. Until you use them to nuke a boss in its final phase, of course, because the alternative is playing RNG roulette against the boss's 3 adds (that each hit for two damage, naturally). It's a great game, but it definitely isn't a perfect game. They need to remove shards, tweak (lower) the power of tools, and adjust outgoing damage (ideally through armor-like upgrades you earn). Oh, and crests were not the right call. We all just use the Reaper (unless we're further exploiting tools with that other crest).
