does this game have an easy mode?

[Zoob Mer]

I just watched a review, and this game sounds phenomonal! the one thing never brought up that I need is an easy mode. I simply need a bit of extra leeway to mess up defence timings; a bit of extra leeway with trying to find attack oppertunities; and to know there are no enemies with complete nonsense attacks or defences like the Diggernaught, and I'm sold.
edit: okay! 1/4 damage taken and 4x damage dealt should be good enough. I got the game wishlisted! although I may rather play on Switch.
edit: you all convinced me! I'll set it to 5% damage received and 200% damage dealt.

[Leaf™]

Game has "story" mode and standard difficulty, story is described as more forgiving but I haven't played on that mode so I couldn't tell you how different it is.

[Skater901]

The final boss is absolutely crazy and may make you rage quit. :P

[Vic]

Yeah, the game has a story mode that allows you to set your damage taken/damage dealt multipliers.
So you can either take half damage and deal full if you want an easy but still relatively fair game, or just go full one punch man.

[Gat]

The game has a "story" mode... But not an interesting one. Here, you can't increase the time-window for a perfect parry nor set the aggressiveness level of ennemies nor anything; all you can do is increase your damages and decrease enemy damage.

If you don't like the timeframe of a perfect parry with the normal setting, reducing enemies' damages won't help you to appreciate the same timeframe. So in the end you just reduce enemies damages to 1%, increase your own damage to 1000%, and don't bother about all the QTE nonsense.

[sylenz]

Story mode is what you need. You can adjust the mutipliers of your damage and you taken damage to your liking there.

[Shiro]

Originally posted by Zoob Mer:

I simply need a bit of extra leeway to mess up defence timings.

When you parry too soon, you get an "imperfect parry" which still rewards you with 1 qi, and also reduces and downgrades damage to "internal" that isn't lethal and heals over time (there are several other ways to heal it). Its basically blocking, and its generally quite liberal. Combine this with invulnerable dodge and you're fine for the most part. You'll also naturally get better as you play.
As for attack opportunities, there surely will be. Just don't get into 5v1 nonsense; kill enemies one by one whenever possible.

[Zoob Mer]

Originally posted by Gat:

So in the end you just reduce enemies damages to 1%, increase your own damage to 1000%, and don't bother about all the QTE nonsense.

those numbers sound way to drastic!

[Gentlecat]

It's your own choice. You can set the damage you take anywhere between 1% and 100% and the damage you deal anywhere between 100% and 1000%. (Personally, I only ever used it once, to cruise past a slightly annoying section I'd already completed, and here I discovered that even at 1000% damage, not all enemies die in one hit...)

[Gat]

Originally posted by Zoob Mer:

Originally posted by Gat:

So in the end you just reduce enemies damages to 1%, increase your own damage to 1000%, and don't bother about all the QTE nonsense.

those numbers sound way to drastic!

If you don't like the parry timing with normal settings, you won't like the parry timing with 150% damages and 75% resistance. And you can't change the parry timing, only your damages and your resistance.

Another way to get a feel of the game is to set your resistance to 99%, but not increase your damages. With those settings, and if you're able to get success rate of ~75% with your parries, some enemies will reduce you to half health - because their health and their damages are nonsensical. The game is all about getting a success rate of 100% with your parries during very long fights.

[Zoob Mer]

Originally posted by Gat:

Originally posted by Zoob Mer:

The game is all about getting a success rate of 100% with your parries during very long fights.

wait, seriously? I could do 5% incoming damage and 400% outgoing damage. we'll see!

[Gat]

Originally posted by Zoob Mer:

wait, seriously?

Maybe there's something I don't understand in the game, but let's look at the first big boss (the centaur).

a/ He kills you in 3 hits.

b/ Actually, usually if he hits you once, he sends you to the ground and hits you another time. Hence, you can only afford 1 hit.

c/ That's assuming you make only perfect parry. If you make some imperfect parry, he will 1-hit you thanks to the internal damages.

d/ Theoretically, you can heal. In practice, you have only 2 or 3 heal, you need 2 heals to be full health and prevent the risk of being killed in one hit, and the only safe time to heal is at mid-fight - if you try to heal at any other time, you'll probably lose focus on his move and get hit. It's safer to assume you can't heal, but start each part of the fight full-health.

e/ Your most powerful attack at that point of the game is the 2-qi-talisman (and the bosses' patterns are designed so that you make two parries, before using your talisman), and you need maybe 10 such talismans to go to phase 2 and 10 more to kill him ? You need more than 5 talismans, that's for sure.

f/ Considering e/ and a-b-c/, your options for first phase are : either succeed 10 or 20 perfect parries in a row with only a room of one mistake (between 90% and 95% of perfect parry success rate), or succeed at 10 or 20 imperfect parries with no mistake (100% imperfect parry success rate). For second phase, the calculation is harder because there are some windows to hit him with a 3-hit-combo, but stay assured that a success rate of 75% on your parries will be far from enough for second phase.

... And this boss isn't even hard. I mean : after that, there are regular enemies which are harder than this boss. And as you progress, you get other moves that counter other attacks from enemies - at some point, you have to decide within a split second if you parry or do an unbounded parry; if you guess wrong (eg if you start an unbounded parry while the enemy begins a regular attack) you won't have time to retaliate and you'll get hit.

The game is all about having 100% success rate in your parries - if you don't have 100% success rate on your parries against regular attack, why would you want to make the game more complexe with the introduction other kinds of attacks with other counters ?

So yes, I'm dead serious. The difficulty is completely nonsensical, it comes from people who don't understand why the difficulty of a Souls is interesting, fun and challenging, and who think the Souls games are liked only because they are hard.

[Sir_Sam_Vimes]

You are completely wrong lmao, you don't need to get 100% parries to win fights.