>>720200529
You can actually pinpoint the moment game design forever took a turn for a worse when it comes to difficulty, and it's when Fromsoft mistook memes for reviews, and got high on their own supply during the window of time when Dark Souls achieved moderate success in the west.
Something must've gotten lost in translation back then, because they clearly took those jokes about YOU DIED, Sen's Funhouse, or the comics poking fun at how hard the skeletons next to firelink would beat the kind of player who'd assume them to be weak because they're right next to the start, at complete face value. And then they just kinda ran with the mistaken thought that people weren't poking fun at how DaS played with expectations, and would sometimes throw you for a loop, but instead enjoyed being brutalized by the game constantly surprising them with cheap shots and inflated damage/HP numbers, which increasingly became the design philosophy for those games going forward, and then became the design philosophy for every game with aspirations of being "difficult".
I sometimes wonder what games would look like now had Miyazaki not been an idiot, and just taken away from those memes what they were supposed to convey. The enjoyment of not having your hand held every step of the way, of traversing a world that doesn't feel like it's trying to accommodate you, of having to be attentive, of being allowed to actually make mistakes. I think games would be much different, and much better off.
