Game balancing and relative difficulty

I'm a big fan of the souls games but they are actually easy.....I'm not even skilled, I find OoE a harder game than any dark souls game. Thats because I have the reaction speed of a snail (bullet hell games are impossible for me). Dark souls is about information, if you know how to fight, where to fight, and with what set up, the games are a cake walk. The notorious difficulty of Dark Souls games comes mostly from the game telling you almost nothing useful. Once you learn the mechanics, its a far easier game. #1 tip, be super cautious, slow moving, alert, and constantly scanning your surroundings (and keep that shield up!) and you'll rarely ever die.

Yes, that means I like to play tank builds in dark souls and yes bloodborne is harder game because you must dodge but its till not that hard.

On the other hand, OoE and CotM are games that require me to actually dodge enemy attacks and again, I have terrible reflexes. I still find the challenge fun but those two Castlevanias are harder for me than any Dark Souls game ever was. OoE normal certainly feels like AoS hard.

I guess my point is that the Souls games are nowhere near as hard as people think they are. Souls games being hard is purely a meme that doesn't match reality. On the other hand, OoE lvl 1 hard mode is a real nightmare. lol

Whats more important to me is the level of Grind. Ginding for souls in DoS really killed my enjoyment of the game. It feels like the drop rate is far worst than AoS. I would prefer soul drops in Bloodborne to be more like AoS. Some souls were annoying to get but nothing too bad. And more importantly, my weapons weren't tied to farming souls.

Oh no, you made a perfectly valid point with Dark Souls. I'm just being nit picky because it bugs when people say its such a hard game. I'm a terrible player and even I can beat Dark Souls 1 with very few deaths, heck even zero deaths if I'm lucky in boss fights.

However, Death seems to like to trash me in Castlevania games and then I watch speedrunners crush him without taking damage and I feel bad about myself. lol So yeah, which is the harder series again?

On a related note, IGA has said that DoS and PoR are easier games because of complaints his games are too hard. And then he got the opposite reaction after those games so he made OoE. So clearly he knows how to make a Metrovania game both easy and challaning. And since Bloodstained is having difficulty modes including nightmare, which I believe will be selectable right off the bat, I'm sure both casuals and hardcore players will be happy with the challenge in the game.

One thing I disliked about DoS is that you have to craft the best weapons. Some of my favorite moments from games like AoS are discovering the best equipment, such as the cleverly hidden Eversing and Claimh Solais. The feeling of accomplishment and progression through discovery is a big part of what makes Metrovania games fun for me. The crafting didn't ruin DoS for me, heck I love CotM where your alt weapons are from magic, but still its a negative for me. Its one reason why I prefer OoE (or heck even AoS).

the reason why dawn (and crafting) was a pain was drop rate of souls.

If the main game is easy, I want Nightmare mode to be available from the get-go. I don't wanna have to beat the game on a ridiculously easy leisure just to get to a harder difficulty. Otherwise if it's not the case, don't make the initial game super easy. 

Difficulty options ? it is not that complicated.

Easy for uhh easy ?

Normal for a balanced difficulty

Hard for.. guess what ? more challenge! and you unlock the Nightmare after you beat the game for the first time, I don't want the game to be SOTN easy for sure.

I'm all for an easy mode. Not everyone wants to have a hard game.

But I hope it would be an easy mode and a normal/hard mode. Not that the game is easy by default.

Normal SotN was to some of you guys "easy". It was normal to me. Just say'n.

Good difficulty design isn't merely a numbers game: It includes it, but is not encompassed by it. Simply making numbers bigger or smaller relative to other numbers as the only means of changing difficulty in a game usually ends up with the game being a lesser gameplay experience somewhere along the road. There are two examples of well-designed difficulty levels in games I'd like to bring up to illustrate this:

First up is Gunstar Heroes on the Sega Genesis (and available digitally on ... most platforms now - including the fantastic Sega 3D Classics version for the 3DS). While there are baseline numbers changes between all of the different weapons you can pick throughout the game, some have higher or lower relative DPS to others simply based on what difficulty setting you chose - generally-speaking, the harder-to-use weapons are more powerful, but the proportions change to emphasize their usage on higher difficulties, whereas homing weapons that are easy-to-use and allow you to focus more on evading enemy attacks are at less of a numbers disadvantage on lower difficulties. Bosses do have more health on higher difficulties as well.

But here's the big thing: Enemies in general are more aggressive at higher difficulties. Bosses have more attacks and more complex patterns at higher difficulities.  One boss in particular, Seven Force, has seven different forms, but the number you have to fight scales with difficulty setting (all seven forms on Expert difficulty, while you only fight four of them on Easy - the order of forms is completely random outside of the first one, and which of the remaining forms are absent on a lower difficulty setting is as well).  This does mean that you're getting a simplified gameplay experience on a lower difficulty level, but the important takeaway of this is that it still gives you the brunt of the gameplay experience:  You're not skipping mechanics due to killing a boss too quickly at low levels, nor are you getting bored from a fight just dragging on and on at a higher level.  It's easier - or harder - based mostly on the fact that there are some attacks you may or may not have to worry about dodging, but the overall feeling and intensity of the fight is preserved relative to the difficulty setting.  Importantly, you can't just sit and trade hits with the boss until you win on any setting - it's just that it's easier or harder to keep yourself alive while dealing the damage you need to deal throughout it, meaning the amount of player skill required changes, not simply the time it takes to kill something.

The other example of note here is Mega Man 10.  Mega Man 10 features a Hard Mode, which instead of upping numbers on things (which you can still inflict on yourself by playing as Proto Man - who takes double damage, but has other gameplay features associated with him), has three major effects:  It alters enemy placements so that they're trickier to deal with, environments are changed slightly to make platforming more difficult (usually in the form of "there's spikes here now"), and boss patterns are changed.  The result is that Hard Mode feels like a "legitimate" step up in difficulty, rather than simply tilting some numbers against you (and a lot of this was necessitated due to the gaming needing to not have more number granularity than an NES Mega Man game could).

Though not entirely relevant here, it's worth mentioning the (current) latter half of the Resident Evil series (4, 5 and 6) and God Hand all feature a sliding difficulty, that changes based on how well the player is doing at it (in the latter, it's actually reflected on the UI as well, so it's more obvious that it's happening)...  And what it actually causes is changes to the number of enemies, how aggressive they are, and the variance of things they try to do against the player.  It's another example of great difficulty design, though the sliding difficulty mechanic isn't necessarily suited to all types of games (hence these as a footnote here).

I would absolutely prefer to see this game go the route of having multiple difficulty levels that are well-designed instead of being only numbers tweaks - I prefer to be challenged in a game, but unless there are other mechanics or features justifying numbers changes, then the additional difficulty settings might as well not exist.  Self-imposed challenges, like low-level runs or runs where the player themselves imposes restrictions (or uses in-game items to restrict them) are fine and all, but shouldn't be considered as part of the normal scale of difficulties, as they're pretty much always a separate modifier for the experience (and sometimes don't even exist through any sort of in-game imposition).

Making the game as hard as OoE and CotM would be gravy for me. I dont think it will be, but as long as its not as easy as, say, Harmony of Dissonance I'll be fine.