Below, or How I Learned to Stop Being a Baby and Love Punishing Games

I can't wait for this game to unleash!

there are levels of punishing. Grinding, overly hard bosses, cheap deaths are not fun in my opinion.

I didn't care for Dark Souls, spending 20 hours doing nothing but killing the same small batch of enemies over and over only to die again and have to do that same area again was boring. It was hard to the point there was no point to trying to play it.

If others like it great I hope you enjoy it, but I didn't.

I know I've been babied along playing campaigns like Halo, Battlefield, etc. Where even on the hardest difficulty, it's pretty easy. Now when I play a game that is truly difficult, and unforgiving, I hate it. I like to play a game and have fun, not be brutally punished over and over again.

Reading some of these comments cracks me up. "Oh i dont like hard games, games should be fun" or "I like hard games, games should challenge you", Its like they take it as a personal insult if they dont like a particular game. I think its great that some developers are making more niche games. Thats how it should be .There is room for all sorts of tastes to be catered for. Unfortunately in recent years my tastes havent really been catered for as most publishers want to make as much money as possible, so they appeal to the lowest common denominator. I look forward to a time when developers make games because they have an idea for a game, a game that has set parameters that arent necessarily going to appeal to everyone, but they make it anyway. Why because some people like that kind of thing. :-)

I skip "hardcore" games because I have a life, and ain't nobody got time fo' dat.

UGHhhh...

In the beginning... there was light and darkness, wait... too far back.

Early in gaming, games were difficult because they were in a machine that required you to put a quarter in. Problem was is that highly skill built games could let someone play for a really long time, like pinball and a few video games. So the answer was to make the game incredibly cheezy and cheat either to get the person to put in another quarter or move on, and let someone else get taken in.

When video games came to home systems there was a bit of a change up. No great call to need quarters, but they still had a major issue, memory. Games had to be small, challenging and still offer, a way to move forward, through mastering perfect timing through very repetitive action.

I skipped a lot of this because I owned a Commodore 64 and was playing Zork, Archon, Boulder Dash, etc.
I am a long time gamer, and I never really was fond of most of these types of games. Occasionally though I fire up MAME and play some old classics.

When I want to play something hard I play Killing Floor, or L4D1 or 2. I enjoy the group dynamics and if you want a difficult experience try KF on Hell on Earth, or L4D on hard with realism setting on.

Plenty of games can be made more difficult, IF people want that, just slide the scale to hard.

Most of the time I don't want to have to retrain my brain to become an expert in said game, I want to use what I have to enjoy and hone the skills I already possess.

Games that artificially make things hard are stupid. Replaying something over and over again getting nowhere isn't making me enjoy your game more. Games that intelligently make things more difficult can be really fun.

Games are a time sink and balancing things out, between life and relationships are going to determine what is better for you. It's not just about what you think you prefer. Your wife telling you, this or that needs to be done now, is going to make a difference just like jobs, kids, school, money. It's hard to enjoy a hard game if you just don't have the time to put into it, it's going to make Angry Birds look appealing if you only have a few minutes to play something.

I love that hard games are making a comeback. Too many snore fests out there right now. It has been a long time since a rewarding game has been released. I hate having my hand held through a game, and I hate not having to think or hone my reflexes to win. Games that you can breeze through between 5-15 hours without dying or having to adapt and learn are just.... sigh, so boring.

It's hilarious to me how nerds are all 'be a man' when it comes to hard games. Who gives a crap? Honestly! It's a game. The point is to have fun. If you're into being the best at a thing with a life of like 2 months (until the next game comes out) then great. But there are some people who play games to relax, enjoy ourselves, or switch off; not because we want to challenge our reflexes. Stop feeling so smug just because you've completed some really hard games. It's not even a minor life achievement.

Its sad that this generation is shocked and surprised when a game is not easy and doesnt hold our hand every moment of the game offering us constant waypoints and respawns.

I don't always enjoy having my ass kicked, but when I do...I play Dark Souls. Point is, we need games like DS, it scratches the itch we all get sometimes for a real challenge.

"stop being a baby" and with that mentality you'll be one of the rude elitist who think anyone who doesn't play hard games is a cause for insult and trolling. By calling it "being a baby" you are insulting people right there. Its a GAME, not a ego testosterone contest. Get over yourself man. Seriously. I am sick of people like you and with these "hardcore" attitudes. Some people play games for FUN. To set back, relax, and escape....not worry about being "better" than some other guy or boosting your childish ego.

The way new games should be is like THIEF.
Before you start you get a checkbox where you can costumise your gaming experience. Stuff like

-no saves and checkpoints outside of level start

-You can't kill any enemy , you have to sneek your way through the level

-You can't use any of the OP weapons

etc.

Or biowares 1990 mode where if you die and you dont have coins its game over.

This way some one who likes games for the chalenge, can costumise the dificulty and people who dont can play them for the story. Its genious and i dont see why its not implemented in every game

I don't think the character is small enough.

I farted wetly.

So glad this game is coming to Steam now. I'm a sucker for atmospheric visuals.

Can we please stop with the whole punishing and hard games thing? For f*cks sake, yes, the Souls series is hard as hell, that is true, but I'm completely sure that the difficulty is not all that everyone love about them. I don't care how difficult the games are, it's the sense of discovery, exploration, dread and so on that make them so good. How there's pieces of lore hidden all over the place for you to find if you want to. How it has the single best use of multiplayer out there. How it feels like From Software pick up Diablo as it was, and turned it into a 3D action camera game, and made the whole experience way more intense than it was just by that simple fact.

Now, who wants to face my Dual Katana Pyromancer!?

More Hyper Light Drifter pleassssseeeee ..........................

'Hard but fair' is the real way to make challenging games, not arbitrarily upping enemies' health and damage and doing other gamey things to increase difficulty.

Dark Souls is one of my favorite games of all time. I loved it when I started, and I still love it 400 hours later.

Sounds and looks awesome! Really looking forward to this :)

Cool. Now play EVE Online.

Remember that those super-hard games of the past were often motivated by two key things: to cover up the short 3 hour game lengths, and many were arcade port, and arcades want to turn customers quickly, either getting more coins from a different customer or getting the current customer to keep dying so they had to keep paying to play.

This new hardcore-only games trend hurts other gamers that don't want it. Payday 2 developers mentioned making the game "Dark Souls" difficult. And they kind of did, ever try hard difficulties by yourself, or fail a long hard mission and get basically nothing for xp or money (a punishment for trying harder and longer heists)? And I can't play something else, there's not other games like it.

And the difficulty of Payday 2 and it's limited xp & cash rewards makes it a very unfriendly online community (the worst I ever played in), thank God I had an actual friend to play with online. But it's not like it's all jerks playing, the way this game is designed inherently leads to online conflict. People are so dependent on the random people they play with to perform well, and be on the same page, since failure is time wasted (since there's only like 8 short levels in the game, you want to earn when you replay each level 25 times). This leads to a lot of booting, rudeness, and other frustrations.

And yet, vocal hardcore fans get their way when they cry PayDay 2 is still not hard enough, so they add patches to make this game even harder and further slow down leveling up (which was already quite slow). A bunch of crap, why didn't they just add super-extreme settings and let the hardcore folks play together in their non-fun difficulty?

I think I'll skip this, same as the Dark Souls game and the FIRST Ninja Gaiden (from the current era), and yes I did try Souls and Gaiden. Thanks for giving me a heads-up on the difficulty, so I waste no time or money on this.

I just have to say this. This new trend of hard games, it´s just one more smoke screen, developers use to hide other underdeveloped aspects of their games. Anyone can make a extremely difficult game, and imo that´s so easy for developers as making an easy one.

As for Bellow, in last E3 was among my favorite games. I´m really happy that it´s coming to PC. But now that I know how hard the game seems to be, it turned me a bit off. I was hoping for something more atmospheric.

Nothing against hard games. DS is one of the best games I've ever played. But to me how easy or hard a game is, shouldn´t be among the fundamental characteristics of any game.

Pass.

That is not why I play games that are primarily singleplayer in nature. I play them to enjoy the story, maybe die a few times on the way to the end, and have an interesting journey maybe even enjoy doing whatever I want in a sandbox game like Skyrim. Banging my head against a wall for hours at a time isn't my idea of enjoyment. That why I don't play games like DS, Below, or MOBAs for that matter. They hold no enjoyment for me.

In my lifetime will I ever be able to view this site without a headline article that references a Stanley Kubrick film? Will that ever be possible?

I won't be playing this or DS ever again. It's one thing for a game to be a challenge but it's another when a game is cranked so high in the difficulty that it's almost unplayable.

The whole point to any game, most any game is to survive. There should be hope however unlikely. A way out. But when a game forces you to die repeatedly as a game mechanic...that's not challenging, it's stupid.

Playing games like these doesn't make you "hardcore", it means you're bored and stubborn enough to stick around.