The tale is as old as time itself. Would you rather keep playing a title after dropping the difficulty down for an easier run? Or would you drop the game entirely? With the large number of people that play video games nowadays and people that like to enjoy their games in peace, the question that always gets asked about the souls like players is “drop the difficulty or drop the game?” And if you are the kind of player that would rather drop the game, then have we got news for you.
The First Berserker: Khazan creative director Junho Lee has spoken out about the hard conversation and, as he has seen the rundown of the title, statistics don’t lie! The recently released title has had an update as of late June. The update came with a settings tweak where players could change the difficulty if they found the default experience too hard.
Lee said, “At launch, we set our intended standard experience as ‘normal’ and added a few more accessible options labelled as ‘easy’. We figured that if players found the game too difficult, they’d simply switch to easy. But when we looked at the data, we saw that many players just quit the game without ever-changing the difficulty.”
And as per Lee’s research, along with his team also looking into this, he believes there is a simple reason for this. He believes that players feel like “they’d rather quit with dignity than drop it down to easy.” This brings to light the player retention for the title developed by Neople, that people are simply putting the game down rather than switching to an easier mode, and Lee also believes that people would have felt okay about “switching the difficulty down to ‘normal’ from a ‘hard’,” difficulty. With this in mind, this may have reflected directly on players not picking the title back up as they would rather quit with their pride intact.
In the most recent update for The First Berserker, they did add multiple difficulty modes along with easy (which Lee has said is “the hardest easy mode” he has ever played). There is a hardcore mode which will have you facing the bosses in their most brutal forms, which provides players with a pure die-hard Souls-like experience if there ever was one.
Bringing us back to the topic of drop or drop, given there are multiple games which have you literally grasping at straws on ways to defeat enemies, such as Elden Ring, Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice and Bloodborne, to name a few. These titles simply want you to die as part of the games’ learning curve. As Hidetaka Miyazaki, the creator of Dark Souls, said that turning Elden Ring’s difficulty down would “break the game itself,” opting for players to soak in their dying breaths as vows to “git gud”.
However, if we look over the recently released Monster Hunter Wilds, veteran players of the franchise are actually complaining about needing harder fights as they breeze through their foes with no pushbacks in the post-game. This proves that not all these Souls-like titles have players itch for utter death and destruction.
A title that has done this beautifully is Lies of P. When the new DLC dropped, they added three difficulty modes to which you could select from, and this made the game more accessible to a wider audience, with the publishers noting that the fans of the game loved the difficulty (this coming from undoubtedly the Souls crowd) and some fans were discouraged as the title had a punishing world and story. Hopefully The First Berserker can follow in the footsteps of Lies of P and bring in more players or even retain the players of old.
Do you think Souls-like titles need a difficulty setting? Or do you think that Souls-like games are pure without one? Let us down in the comments below.
