Fall and Winter are typically the season for this, but I’ve noticed more people than usual have taken up interest in what amount to gyms. These very, very expensive gyms, which market themselves as almost exceptional in how they can help you regain yourself. All the while these “miracle body regimes” are advertised everywhere. Suspicious industry much?
Some neighbors of mine were headed there. I remember this because they were about to get into their vehicle, and I asked “the location is right around the corner, you don’t want to walk and maybe save transport money” and they responded “no, we’re old, we can’t do that” before they rode there and gained entry so they can run on the machine, and returned having used their whole wallet due to the journey/destination. Though not as memorable as the fact they came back with a brand of potato chips with the same name as the place they went to. Nothing like feeding into what you’re there to fix.
How about you though?
Videogames that intentionally break their difficulty curve with the intention of seeming elite and prestigious. I’ve suspected for a long time that games like Darksouls and Kingdom Come deliberately try to manipulate their players into getting caught in sunk cost falacies, trying to get people to blame themselves for any failure of game balancing.
Over time they’ve fostered communties which are so toxic that they will lash out at anyone trying to criticize the game. This then frees the developer from all fault and casts any grievance as the players lack of understanding, skill, or hardware. Eventually, any mistake the devs make becomes seen as an artistic choice and will be defended tooth and nail by the players.
Funny enough the souls borne games are actually really great examples of actually balanced gameplay. While not perfect at all times they’re generally games where, if you’re having an issue, it’s actually you
Of course, Lost Izaleth and a few other places are famously just bad, but the community can actually admit to that so it’s not like they’re safe from criticism
Other games have absolutely hidden their bad game design behind the “were like dark souls” line though and yeah, we see through you The Surge and others
I never got the chance to play Bloodborne because of Sony but I’ve heard its the best one. I did play through their other games after Elden Ring came out, and i wouldn’t say the problem is always the player. Fromsoft does an absolutely abismal job telling new players where to go and how to play. Elden Ring especially just expects that you already have experience with the series and that you’re going to have the wiki open on your second monitor to follow a basic questline. Personally i just dont understand that philosophy.
Or, they just give you a playground and let you explore. Not everyone likes having their handheld all the time. From soft games give good players a chance to be good.
I did zen training involving koans. At an abstract level, koans are a practice of trying repeatedly in the face of thousands of failures, without getting impatient. It’s the mental equivalent of Lucy’s punch-through-the-sign training in Kill Bill.
Try try try ten thousand years nonstop. That’s the mindset it takes to make progress with koans, and in the process break some of the mind’s longest-held assumptions.
Ever since I spent some years doing that, I love extremely hard video games. I don’t mind trying dozens or hundreds of times before I pass a level.
I’ve written a whole spiel in response to your comment before I realized you were talking about the difficulty curve, aka new player experience, not the difficulty of the game as a whole.
And yeah, that tracks; the new player experience in both those games you’ve mentioned (along with many other Souls-like games) is kinda bad. Sometimes, some hand-holding at the start is nice.