Both times I managed to equip it right before getting ambushed by a difficult boss 
Don't think I'll bother with the fragile charms anymore. The busywork they punish you with for dying isn't worth it.
I will be so happy when the "soulslike" genre goes out of style and we can just have saves again
This is misunderstanding how saving in Soulslikes work, because typically they let you keep everything except the currency and one other resource (humanity in DS1, the full vessel capacity in Hollow Knight, etc.). Nothing else is undone by death, so you can keep items, defeated non-respawning enemies*, and so on. In many respects, it's much more generous than conventional saves.
*Yes, most enemies reset like in basically every game, but some just die and they stay dead even if you die right after, unlike in most games.
I understand how it works, I just hate it
So you want games to be less forgiving?
Dishonest wrong framing
Weren't you and your friend just complaining about people calling you a bad person for feeling differently about a video game thing? Now you're attacking my character for an honest opinion about how a design choice impacts difficulty?
You can just say that my characterization is "dishonest and wrong" you want, but you yourself admitted just a second ago that the DS system is in several respects more generous than those in most games. Normal saves mean much more frequent brick walls in terms of difficulty. If you're already out of currency and whatever the other resource is, then what you get is all upside, and that's even more true in a game like Silksong where doing the corpse run gets you full silk irrespective of what it was at when you died.
I have not attacked your character. I stated that your framing is dishonest and wrong.
I have also not "admitted" that a soulslike system is in any way more forgiving than saves.
I have not attacked your character. I stated that your framing is dishonest and wrong.
You're accusing me of dishonesty
I have also not "admitted" that a soulslike system is in any way more forgiving than saves.
If that's your perspective, you didn't communicate it very clearly, because I said, emphasis mine:
This is misunderstanding how saving in Soulslikes work, because typically they let you keep everything except the currency and one other resource (humanity in DS1, the full vessel capacity in Hollow Knight, etc.). Nothing else is undone by death, so you can keep items, defeated non-respawning enemies*, and so on. In many respects, it's much more generous than conventional saves.
And you simply replied:
I understand how it works, I just hate it
So it sure reads like you tacitly agreed with what I said and just dislike it anyway (which is fine). Perhaps that's not what you meant to convey.
This is misunderstanding how saving in Soulslikes work, because typically they let you keep everything except the currency and one other resource (humanity in DS1, the full vessel capacity in Hollow Knight, etc.). Nothing else is undone by death, so you can keep items, defeated non-respawning enemies*, and so on.
This part I understand and hate
In many respects, it's much more generous than conventional saves.
This part is dishonest and wrong
If you die without saving after several hours of progress in say final fantasy vii when you bump into a boss unexpectedly, you lose all your progress for those several hours. If the same happens to you in dark souls you just respawn at the nearest bonfire with your estus back and all you lose is your souls, if you can't make the runback, and the travel time from the bonfire to the boss room. How is that the "less generous" system? It's fine if you don't like it but dark souls with the same structure but bonfires converted into traditional save points would unironically be a much harder game. Saying someone is dishonest for disagreeing with you is unironically extremely gross.
Thia framing is dishonest too. Yes, if you never save your game, dying is worse in a game with manual saves. But if you actually use the feature like most people do and save frequently, you may lose less progress on death.
But that's an argument of autosaves vs. manual, which is aside from corpse retrieval, which could exist independently of auto/manual saves
It's not "dishonest", I have lost hours of progress, many times, to forgetting to save or not realising a difficult section was coming up. How is that "dishonest"? What are you getting out of being so antagonistic? I considered this but genuinely didn't think anyone would be such an asshole about it.
Okay, it's not dishonest. You're right that I don't know how earnestly you hold your position.
But it is a misrepresentation of the arguments. It's a false dichotomy. You're conparing as souls-like corpse retrieval against manual saves at save points, when there are games that autosave near bosses without requiring corpse retrieval, that don't erase progress or impose a death penalty.
I dislike corpse running, especially in games like Hollow Knight which are supposed to encourage exploration, but otherwise I really like how the genre handles death. It prevents save scumming, which I am always very prone to, often making my experience worse.
I do think basically any game should have difficulty options, and in case of a soulslike an opt-in easy mode (that maybe prevents getting some achievements) is perfect. Nine Sols did it quite well with customizable sliders for received and dealt damage, except for calling it "Story Mode" like there is no reason you might want to slightly lower the difficulty other than just wanting to breeze through.
In general I wish the discussions on soulslike difficulty were more chill, there is merit to both sides.
I have never had an experience made worse by save scumming. I have frequently had an experience made better, or a game made tolerable at all, by save scumming.
The game I save scum the hardest is Rimworld, because it's made to be a tragicomic story generator but I like to play it as a happy commune builder. Rimworld pretty much always has a way to fail forward, it'll send more colonists whenever you're running low, but it would be absolutely unplayable for me if the designer had thought that meant it didn't need saves.
Yyyyyep.
For real how did "Hey let's waste the player's time if they die" ever catch on. Starting in the 80s we spent like 3 decades moving away from that.
Not just "let's waste the player's time if they die" but "let's make a game where the player is supposed to die a lot figuring things out then waste the player's time when they die"
And then when you say this some Soulslike fan will jump in and say "No, you don't get it, that's the point" and probably imply you suck at video games
Literally this but replace "capitalism" with "Soulslikes"
Imply? Soulslike fans will say it to your face, then suggest that sucking at video games also makes you a bad person.
The major innovation of soulslikes is, counterintuitively, that they provide a safety net to let players fail forwards instead of just resetting. Just like the conceit of their enemy design is about creating consistent rhythms, clear telegraphs, and ways to actually avoid taking damage. For all that people meme about the genre being hard or unfair or whatever, its core is the exact opposite: giving the player enough QoL features and fair design that the rest of it can be dialed in tighter without it becoming just annoying the way jankier games are.
That's why every game that's actually improved on the formula has moved more in that direction, with more "consumables" that just refresh to full on death or rest instead of being farmable or limited.
Although Hollow Knight is also a metroidvania, which are usually kind of the opposite of that design philosophy, hinging a lot more on farming bullshit and resetting to savepoints. I understand Hollow Knight leaned more towards the soulslike QoL stuff, though? I've never played it though; I don't like metroidvanias in general and every time I've seen someone playing Hollow Knight it has not looked particularly appealing.
Failing forward can work in tabletop with a living dm. Failing foward in video games just means fucking up saves on purpose.
Failing foward in video games just means fucking up saves on purpose.
What do you mean when you say this?
In order for a failing forward system to work as designed, the game has to not include a fully functional save system, otherwise players would just revert to a save before the failure that the game wants them to fail forward from.
See my other question, I guess
If soulslike fail forward were actually more forgiving than saving, soulslike games wouldn't have to remove the save feature to force people to engage with it.
Your wording has a lot of weird question-begging in it: "not include a fully functional save system," "remove the save feature," etc. This isn't an accurate representation of what it's doing and makes it harder to talk about unless I just ignore what you actually say. The games do save, and typically they save constantly, though HK and Silksong don't save your location in an up-to-date way, they tie that to designated save points (like almost all games with save points do). Dark Souls though actually saves your approximate location anywhere in the world so long as you're not in the air or something, which is more than most games do. Regardless, both series do save lots of other information about the world, like gates opened, items retrieved or spent, non-respawning enemies and bosses defeated, NPC quests (but typically not if they died in a fight alongside you, which again is generous), and the currency isn't "not saved," the information isn't lost, you just get a penalty that you don't like. It's fine to not like that penalty, but it makes things difficult when you describe it incorrectly.
Trying to address what you're saying here particularly: I don't think that makes sense as a criticism. Games usually aren't made with a bunch of modular parts in the core mechanics to switch out, and they are designed based on the systems that they use. Dark Souls would mostly become harder if you had conventional saves instead, because you would need to make it back alive to a save point for your progress to be saved and otherwise it's just dust in the wind if you open a shortcut but you get killed right after. If you could toggle systems, that would be confusing and harebrained for basically a trivial benefit if you understood the system, because as DS is designed it usually wouldn't even be a good idea to use normal saves for boss runs, because you still might die after you beat the boss and then you need to fight the boss again.
The bare minimum for a fully functional save system is a way to fully record a previous game state and then later return to it.
This is not present in soulslikes.
So you don't like that you can't have a selection of multiple save slots like in, for example, Skyrim? I think I probably have, by coincidence, a bias toward older and more primitive games that functionally couldn't do that on the fly, but that doesn't mean that they don't have save systems. Not having a save system means that when you turn the game on, there isn't save data there and you need to start from the beginning or use a code or something. Certainly, to say that not having multiple save slots is "removing the save feature" is silly. They do save.
I suppose it wouldn't be the end of the world to have a "Continue" or "Reload" option when you die, but given the auto-saving that means there would need to be a separate save for the last time you were at a bonfire unless you want to reload to .3 seconds before the death blow, and then you'd be motivated to return to the bonfire for every little thing in case you want to reload (like in any game with freely-accessible save points) or else you need to just eat the reset because again, reloading the save is usually disadvantageous and otherwise is usually trivial. That means there would probably need to be manual saves to avoid that issue, and then that gives the game a perverse incentive for constantly saving and immediately redoing every encounter until you get a perfect take. idk, it just seems like a less interesting game to me, but it's fine that we like different things.
The bare minimum I described as fully functional is present in Super Metroid. There is only one save slot for each playthrough, loading that one save brings you back to exactly the same game state you last saved. This is perfectly fine.
It's even better to have manual saving to unlimited files accessible through the host machine's filesystem as well as dedicated hardware buttons for an additional quicksave/quickload slot but that all goes well beyond bare minimum fully functional. Autosaves can sometimes be okay as long as they don't overwrite anything.
Soulslikes don't even have the bare minimum save system that Super Metroid has.
For real how did "Hey let's waste the player's time if they die" ever catch on. Starting in the 80s
To answer seriously, a major part of the reason it started off that way was because video games were for a while mostly the purview of arcades and that sort of time-wasting death mechanic was the most obvious way to get kids to keep pumping in quarters. Make sure the game was hard enough that death was likely and frequent but if you wanted to keep going from where you died instead of starting over, just pop in some more money. Even for home consoles though, that sort of death mechanic was a way of padding out the game, making what was actually very little content seem longer because you have to keep redoing the same stuff.
As with the majority of shitty things in this world, when you trace them back far enough, you discover the profit motive (therefore capitalism) at their root.
I would say though that with the way games are played now in a very different set of circumstances compared to the 80s, the time punishment for player character death is used mostly just as a way to make the stakes feel high. I know I'm not saying anything that everyone here doesn't already know, but if there are no negative consequences for dying, then there is much less incentive to avoid death and the tension the game relies on to feel meaningful would just be sucked out. The soulslike solution to making death consequential actually works pretty well imo in a lot of cases, but still can be very annoying (and sometimes detrimental to a game) depending on a lot of other factors, ranging from how well it fits with the rest of the game's mechanics to individual player skill.
As with the majority of shitty things in this world, when you trace them back far enough, you discover the profit motive (therefore capitalism) at their root.
Well, that and technical limitations. On the console side of things, at least, password systems and then save batteries proliferated fairly quickly once they became viable.
if there are no negative consequences for dying, then there is much less incentive to avoid death and the tension the game relies on to feel meaningful would just be sucked out.
I never really bought this as an argument in favor of Soulslikes because a negative consequence for death was codified long before they emerged as a genre: you fail whatever challenge killed you and have to try again if you want to progress.
I never really bought this as an argument in favor of Soulslikes because a negative consequence for death was codified long before they emerged as a genre: you fail whatever challenge killed you and have to try again if you want to progress.
Well sure, that's one of the more obvious consequences and it works great for some games (someone mentioned Super Meat Boy, and another example is Celeste though those aren't soulslikes) and works great even in some scenarios within soulslike, such as losing a health pip when you hit spikes but start back immediately where you were before hitting the spikes to try again. But that doesn't mean other penalties can't further improve the kind of tension that a creator of a game wants to evoke or the kind of risk vs reward that a player is meant to consider. With games where longer term exploration is a big part of what is meant to drive the player, a mechanic that penalizes multiple or continued health losses with being set back a ways in exploration is often a good way to maintain that tension. It's not some evil thing that developers are trying to do to make players mad, it's a balance they're trying to find to varying degrees of success. For example, I love metroidvanias, and I love it when they are difficult in terms of putting high demands on a player practicing a platforming sequence to get it right, because when as a player you do get it right, it feels really good, but in my opinion, as I said in a different thread, Silksong has gone too far in towards heavily punishing players by giving them too little health, making enemy damage too high, and payer-character damage too low, with the runbacks are usually too long. But I can still understand why it is that way and what the game's creators were trying to do, I just think they missed the mark by overshooting too far on the penalties. It's not an either/or kind of thing. The soulslike death mechanic works better in some games than in others, though I'd agree that it's probably being overused at this point and often put in games where it's a lot harder to justify its presence.
the kind of tension that a creator of a game wants to evoke
I might just not have the right psychology for this, because the only tension Soulslike mechanics have invoked in me is a kind of weary "Ugh, if I lose this fight I'm going to have to do so much shit before I can try again." My brain just processes the whole thing as an unwelcome interruption of my attempt to beat the challenge in front of me. It doesn't matter how fun I normally find the core gameplay loop, in that context it feels like having to fill out and submit paperwork to get the approval to retry the challenge I just failed.
payer-character
I know this was a typo, but I'm going to pretend it was a pun about how Silksong constantly makes you spend ingame money to do routine tasks.
@BeanisBrain@hexbear.net you called it lmao
What did I say that he "called"?
He said elsewhere in this thread
some Soulslike fan will jump in and say "No, you don't get it, that's the point" and probably imply you suck at video games
But I didn't do that.
the time punishment for player character death is used mostly just as a way to make the stakes feel high. I know I'm not saying anything that everyone here doesn't already know, but if there are no negative consequences for dying, then there is much less incentive to avoid death and the tension the game relies on to feel meaningful would just be sucked out. The soulslike solution to making death consequential actually works pretty well imo in a lot of cases, but still can be very annoying (and sometimes detrimental to a game)
"no you don't get it that's the point"
depending on a lot of other factors, ranging from how well it fits with the rest of the game's mechanics to individual player skill.
"probably imply you suck at video games"
Tabletop, DnD, board games, and minecraft. Also Animal Crossing.
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