Does anyone here have any recommendations for games that are challenging but the practice part is easy?
I recently started playing a game called Terraria again. I played it modded. I realized that while I enjoyed the difficult boss fights the mod adds, I hated the grind to get to the boss fights. Eventually I ended up cheating some progression elements in the mod to just get to the next boss fight. Kinda felt weird doing that so I dropped the game for now (I didn’t cheat on any boss fights, kinda defeats the point of what I enjoyed), but I want a game that is easy to practice and is challenging.
I’ve played games like Dark Souls III and Hollow Knight. I got reasonably good at them but when I wanted to get better at them I found the process a grind. Now I don’t remember if it was a me issue or not. In terms of skill I mean. I don’t think I got too annoyed at how bad I was. I remember distincly certain bosses in DS3 being fine because retrying them took two seconds versus other bosses would take forever to get back to making it annoying.
It really depends on what you find hard or easy about practice. Do you have any thoughts on that or examples of what you think would be easy for you?
Also do you have in mind certain types or genres of games like real time action/fighting games with bosses? There are also multiplayer games, shooters, platformers, turn based strategy games, speedruns, challenge runs, board games, all sorts of stuff.
There were some old discussions at FI or curi.us where people were practicing Mario Odyssey or Smash Bros. Melee.
I think fast retries is one of the things you want. I like that too.
I like Hollow Knight. One day Silksong will come out
PS Did you ever try Toki Tori? I like it. But it’s a puzzle game, not something you really practice in the usual way. And some of the puzzles are pretty hard (but the gameplay is easy to control, you can rewind mistakes, and some early levels are easy).
You try Helldivers 2? That game started out hard for me, but gradually got easier learning to survive. It actually got to the point where I think the game is too easy now and needs more difficulty to be fun.
I liked auto remembering the inputs for the stratagems. Also learning to use the best weapons and strats against each enemy faction.
Played that game too and modded it with Calamity. Beat it with a friend and I think he carried us especially with the grinding and boss prep stuff. I wanna try it out at some point on my own.
If you asked me if there was a souls game where you got to the boss in a jiffy I think I would say Sekiro. In that game u could jump, wall climb, and run at fast speeds away from the enemy and to the boss. I find that game to be one of my most favorite besides Bloodborne.
Cuphead. But you have to retry from the beginning of each boss though. You’ll figure out strategies for each boss and repeat the same actions each try. After beating a boss you can try to get better grades by not getting hit and such.
Hmm. I guess off the top of my head when it comes to video games specifically I like being able to easily retry the part I want to retry. Hmm. I guess I can’t blame anyone for that, bur I guess it depends on the game. Like I mentioned Dark Souls and how some bosses took a bit to get back too. I remember disliking how if I’m trying to fight a boss and failing the respawn point would be really far away. Or lets say your doing a boss fight with a consumable. I find it annoying to go have to refarm a bunch of money or whatever to go get more of that consumable to keep practicing.
Hmm. I’m kind of open on the kind of games I like. Just not into PvP. I stopped playing compettive games like League of Legends and Counter Strike years ago because I got into a had habit of always blaming my team, the enemy being way better (smurfing), and stuff like that. I like playing against computers because I feel like there’s no one to blame but myself when I lose.
Conceptually I don’t think I like speedruns because I feel like if I don’t get a good time whats the point. I like the idea of challenge runs (like no hit and stuff) but not speedruns. Though I could treat some challenge runs as speedruns.
Ye.
Hollow Knight is by far one of my favorite games. I think the path of pain is an example of something I liked that was challenging. It was pretty easy to retry and stuff.
I wonder if Silksong will end up getting too hyped because its taking so long. Regardless I think it’ll come out good.
I did. The issue I have with puzzle games is that I get annoyed if the reason I’m struggling is from step 1 or something. I hate doing a bunch of steps only for the 1st step to be wrong. I don’t know why Baba never bothered me like that. I loved that game. Probably should play it agian soon.
Nah. I think at the time it came out I didn’t have a PC that could run it. Haven’t been interested since. Looked cool though.
Oh yeah thats the mod I was talking about. My favorite way to play the game is the calamity mod pack.
And yeah thats why I haven’t asked any friends to join me in my recent play-through. Its not fun being carried sometimes and also some bosses become way more easy with more people, especially when you just juggle respawn timers.
I’ve played Sekiro. I really liked it.
I liked Sekiros fast paced nature and I don’t remember any of the bosses being tedious to retry.
Hmm. I played Cuphead before but I think at the time I was overreaching and trying to do stages no-hit and dropped the game. I’ll probably try it at some point without trying to be perfect or whatever on my first playthrough.
A great feature for this is save states, which are available in many emulators. And some games let you save anywhere and can both save and load quickly. I’ve never looked into third party tools to add save states to games that don’t naturally have them like dark souls or hollow knight.
Silksong is way overhyped and has a large, toxic community that has harassed the developers and trolled various video game announcement events that didn’t say anything about Silksong.
I can tell you a large number of games I like but I don’t know how useful that will be. Many have some sort of downside. I’ll mostly skip multiplayer games.
In no particular order: Exile trilogy and its remake Avernum (original remake of first trilogy on GoG, not 4-6 and not the more recent remakes) from spiderweb software. Quest for Glory from Sierra. Chess, Go and some board games that have video game versions (e.g. I played D&D Lords of Waterdeep on iOS). Warcraft 3, Hades, Curse of the Dead Gods, Nine Sols, Cuphead, Diablo 2, WoW classic, Vindictus, Baldur’s Gate 1 and 2, Pillars of Eternity, Celeste, N the way of the ninja. Various Zelda and Mario games.
Yeah, it’s not fun being carried sometimes. And you right it is easier with more people.
Yeah, I saw there are mods for elden ring mod for boss rushes. That looks interesting to try cuz you don’t have to deal with walking through the enemies.
I’m currently playing Let’s Revolution, which is a turn-based rogue-like with inspiration from Minesweeper. It’s a strategy and puzzle game, not an action game. As usual with many games, I’m open to discussion if others play it and want to talk strategy.
I actually started playing it on my phone. Seemed fun. I knew of the game beforehand but it was hard when I first played it years ago. I t don’t know if its a new feature, but when I started playing recently it felt that it was showing me places that were easy. Made it easy to get in the game, since my geography knowledge is t e r r i b l e.
Watchers of the Abyss took a bit getting to the fight and there’s all those droves of enemies in the way. Deacons took a while(thru the mud, up the stairs, n past the knights, Aldritch(it’s dark navigating there), yhorm and down that big ladder, and lothric!( the elevator and all the knights).
It’s fun beating all the enemies a few times, but if you didn’t want to beat them every boss attempt you had to find a good strat to get to the boss quick and unscathed.
Sometimes i just wanna get to the boss and practice them. Like use save states. Idk tho maybe getting to them is part of the experience?
I beat it. I beat all the bosses in the base game and got stuck on the boss in the ashes of ariandel dlc. started, but never got far, in the ringed city dlc.
Yeah, I remember getting mad when I messed up my quick pathing to the boss. Like going through that whole sequence for the deacons to end up getting in a fight with a knight by accident for example.
Maybe? Its a frustrating experience and I think some games do go for that.
Something interesting I noticed is how mods typically will get rid of stuff like that. idk about ds3 mods, but in terraria for example: boss summoners are one time use, calamity mod will make them infinite use. mods usually make quality of life changes that make the game, imo, more enjoyable yet sometimes it feels like devs don’t want a good qol if that makes sense.
I was one of the main people who worked on The Kingdom of Kaliron, a Warcraft 3 rpg, after Vexsin the project leader. I particularly worked on items, balancing hero and enemy abilities, playtesting and bug finding/fixing. The map takes a lot of inspiration from WoW and has zones, regular enemies and major bosses.
Progressing to certain points permanently unlocks teleporting to various friendly outposts so you don’t have to replay earlier zones to get there.
There are also town portal scrolls which let you teleport back to town, at which point you can one time teleport back to where you were (dying prevents returning, too).
There is a waypoint teleporter system too which means if you get to certain spots during a game, you can teleport back to those spots during the same game. Note that bosses don’t respawn; you have to start a new game to kill the same boss again. So it helps if you die to a boss but doesn’t help you farm the same boss repeatedly for loot. We don’t have waypoints in all zones, but added them in some places for convenience.
One large zone also has two special teleports you can unlock to skip a bunch of regular mobs and get closer to bosses, and they cost a pretty low amount of gold.
And there is also a special teleporter NPC who sells very expensive teleports that are shortcuts to some bosses. You have to pay for each teleport, and you lose a lot of gold when you die, so you probably won’t be able to use the skip twice in one game. It’s common that people don’t save their progress after using that teleport unless they get an item from the boss, that way they only lose the gold if they actually get new gear (which is super worth it). The special teleporter NPC was at the end a set of 3 trials that were part of the plot progression and how you access one zone, and you’d have to redo them when you wanted to use him. When I made minor updates to the map after many years of activity, I moved that NPC to a town so you don’t have to do the trials first. I figured people had done the trials enough by now. The trials have pretty good replayability and are pretty short if you know what you’re doing.
Why don’t we just give unlimited respawning right next to bosses or unlimited free teleporters to anywhere in the game you might want to go? To raise the stakes of fights, to raise the difficulty of the game, and because fighting regular enemies is supposed to be good gameplay (particularly in some of the higher level zones, the regular enemies are hard and fun). Note that it varies by zones, like some zones have respawning enemies but some don’t, so in some zones you can just walk back to the boss without fighting anything if you lose. Note also that some zones have multiple bosses and some expensive teleporters skip a boss to let you get to a later boss in the same zone; they aren’t just for skipping regular enemies.
There are tradeoffs. I think Dark Souls (and tons of other games including a lot of more “open world” games) makes lots of mistakes like making it way too easy to just run past and ignore enemies, which makes a lot of the regular enemies seem boring and low stakes and just like a minor hassle. In TKoK we gave some regular enemies slows, snares and stuns so you can’t just ignore them and run past with no danger. I think more games should do that. We also have a lot of regular enemies that randomly wander around the map so you can’t just memorize where they are and go around them or anything like that. Also, some enemies will chase you all the way into friendly towns instead of giving up and resetting back to their spawn point if you run away for a while.
We tried to design all parts of the game to be good and worth playing and replaying, not just bosses are fun and the rest is boring. Yes the best loot comes from bosses, so lots of people want to skip because they want loot, but in terms of game design you’re supposed to go through certain challenges to get that loot that includes the zone and the boss. If we added unlimited teleporting to every boss, people would farm boss loot faster, so we’d just have to lower drop rates on gear, so then it wouldn’t be faster, it’d just bias playtime more towards bosses away from everything else. I think it’s reasonable to have the regular enemies not drop the best loot but still be good gameplay that you don’t almost always skip. We do have multiple skips available but we designed and limited it.
Elden Ring makes it easier to run (ride!) past most regular enemies than Dark Souls, and has more respawn points at bosses, and a ton of the dungeons have a shortcut so once you reach the boss normally you also unlock a shortcut to get back to the boss fast, so I guess maybe they were partly just admitting their regular enemies are mid and giving up on improving non-boss gameplay? Or maybe they believe in a lot of player choice about what parts of the game to do and what to skip. TKoK is a pretty linear progression without player choice, and it’s a curated experience where we designed it to be good.
A player often isn’t actually in a good position to know what to skip or not, or how to design their own good play experience, so having curation from intelligent game designers can be better, but certainly there is room for a variety of games. I run into a lot of games that are too easy, so I have to add self-imposed challenges (by adding extra rules to restrict myself), and I find it’s hard to figure out what would be good challenges on my first playthrough (which is often my only playthrough) because I don’t know enough about the game to design a good experience for myself that the game creators didn’t figure out for me; I don’t know what rules will be too hard or too easy, or how the difficulty scaling is throughout the game, etc. And adding self-imposed challenges clashes with the fun of doing my best to optimize and figure out the best most powerful strategies which is something I generally like in games.
Bit confused on how I’m reading this. Can saving be done at any time? I’m unfamiliar with Warcraft 3. Also from what I understand you made a map for this game, right? Not a mod or anything.
Point is: I’m just asking if any changes were balanced around save-scumming. Sounds like what you wrote is cented around save-scumming?
What’s the thought process behind having that kind of stuff varying?
Hmm. Everything you’ve shared makes sense to me more-or-less I think one thing that you may be missing here is boss difficulty. I think maybe some of design choice in a game like Dark Souls or Elden Rings where you skip to the boss is because, at some point, you put your focus on fighting the difficult boss. In Dark Souls 3 I remember really liking the world and enemies on my first play through. I especially like the maps on the DLC. I never beat the boss and stuff, but I love The Ringed City map. I share this because I think the reason why, at some point, they give ways to easily get to the boss is because people just keep retrying the boss.
Thats what I run into when I mentioned Terraria earlier. I wasn’t just wanting to keep fighting those bosses over and over for fun or for loot or whatever. It was because those bosses were difficult and I needed to keep retrying it. How would you go about thinking on this? I assume your target demographic of gamers matter. Some gamers (I assume like yourself) probably could figure out these difficult bosses after a few tries. Some others (such as myself) may not.
