r/Games • u/AutoModerator • Nov 22 '24

Discussion Daily /r/Games Discussion - Free Talk Friday - November 22, 2024

It's F-F-Friday, the best day of the week where you can finally get home and play video games all weekend and also, talk about anything not-games in this thread.

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WEEKLY: What Have You Been Playing?

MONDAY: Thematic Monday

WEDNESDAY: Suggest Me A Game

FRIDAY: Free Talk Friday

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u/Blenderhead36 Nov 23 '24

I feel like there was a wave of indie games trying to be, "The Dark Souls of [Genre]," that missed some pretty important things about Dark Souls. Namely, what failure represents in those games.

If you die in Dark Souls, you're set back ten minutes, tops. Barring some of the nastier boss runbacks in older games, that's about it. You'd lose the souls you were carrying, sometimes forever, but you were never reduced to a state beneath when you died. I've been playing a lot of indies that pride themselves on being difficult, clearly patterned after Dark Souls, but lose sight of the magnitude of what a failure represents.

The two that come most to mind are The Last Spell and They Are Billions a turn-based and RTS game of roughly equivalent mechanics: build up the city during the quiet cycle (and in They Are Billions' case, expand it), then defend it during the loud cycle. Both games use a single autosave with no means to manually save or load. And it sucks. It's very common to reach a mission where there's an inflection point 45 to 60 minutes into the mission, and if you fail, you start over from the beginning. That's not Dark Souls. Dark Souls didn't make you start over at the start of the level if the boss killed you (Demon's Souls did, and all the games that followed abandoned that plan).

I find myself wishing that more of these games prioritized being fun over being difficult. Adding an Iron Man mode is great for people who want it! But I'm currently on attempt 6 of the both the maps I have available in The Last Spell and am considering uninstalling rather than seeing if the seventh time is the charm.