Feel free to replace “friends” with “anyone you know in real life” or even online groups you trust or are close with.
“They”:
and my own personal experience; most games I have bought in the past 10 years have been off of recommendations from r/gamingsuggestions before Reddit went to crap and Lemmy came into existence; and even moreso when it is a personal friend recommending things to me.
Mods, feel free to nuke if this feels too close to advertising or better-suited for [email protected] (my own community); I mean it more as a discussion piece but I don’t run the place.
EDIT: The “not” in the title is optional; I’m asking about both successful and failed recommendations.
What exactly do you see as a punishing death? Erasing someone’s save file? The only other thing I can think of besides permanently taking consumables that won’t be restocked is sending you back a long distance to redo a bunch of fights again - and DS does literally that. DS2 even lowers your max HP as an additional Fuck You.
You’re not the first person to say dying is “not so bad” in those games and I still can only view those as the ritualistic statement of an insane person. Every other action game I play, I rarely die, and when I do it just has me retry the singular thing I was attempting in that past minute. Even other hard games, like Super Meat Boy or Ori and the Blind Forest, don’t force large area repetition, or take away items as punishment. The mastery of completing 18 tasks perfectly in succession is for speedrunners - it’s not something I or most players are interested in, and it’s solely a source of stress, not excitement.
Heck, Tunic had the money-loss system during development. The dev took it away before release (you just lose a paltry amount and can still get it back) and the game was still great.
Dark Souls 2 gives you a very large amount of human effigies that can restore your max HP, and in a very early game area there is a ring you can wear that limits how low your max HP can go. It’s in a chest in a very early game area that you will walk by and see guaranteed in order to progress. What I think is more interesting is how you think it’s the norm and expected that you should be able to play through an action game and rarely die. It’s okay to enjoy power fantasy games, where dying means you fail - and you just get to retry the part you failed. But that doesn’t mean that enjoying the process of learning an enemy patterns and overcoming adversity is insane. Those games are not power fantasy action games, you are supposed to feel weak. Because when you feel weak and then you kill that damn boss anyways, it’s one of the best feelings ever in gaming. On top of that, a lot of the consumables that you’re talking about you can buy infinite of. Like I said, the games aren’t that hard, enemy patterns are usually pretty simple with only a few attacks, and as you move through areas you learn what gimmicks the enemies are going to abuse and can just adapt to them. Most enemies can be easily parried, or you can kill problem enemies with poison arrows or magic from a distance. Often I think that the people who are convinced that souls games are brutal and not fun are people who try to play them like they are some kind of action hero instead of taking advantage of the tools the games give you to use, especially the summons.
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