difficulty levels

[sir stanley]

does this game have an easy or even a 'story' difficulty level? i'm not into leaping or rolling but from what i have seen the gameworld is awesome

[Enderspoons]

No, Dark Souls does not have explicit difficulty levels. How challenging your experience with the game is depends very much on what kind of character you want to roll with — spellcasters and mixed-type builds generally have a much easier time of it than melee-focused ones.

Dark Souls as a franchise is built primarily to deliver on the fantasy of overcoming challenge and adversity, and if you do not want to engage with this premise then you may wish to look elsewhere.

[JellyPuff]

If you're looking for a story-heavy experience, soulsgames actually don't tell you a whole lot directly, as it's mostly environmental in nature as well as from item-descriptions. Honestly, there hardly is any exposition in soulsgames and piecing together what little there is often leaves lots of room for interpretation to the point of the publisher holding a contest back in the day, where people had to make sense of the lore, offering $10k to the winner. The meat of the game is the visceral, methodical combat.

Soulsgames are dripping with (an oftentimes oppressive) atmosphere though, but it does work best, if you're struggling, so will the more light-hearted (online) components, like quirky NPC's or player-messages on the ground, which help lift the spirits.

The game's de facto easy-mode is summoning NPC's or players, but you can't always do this. And of course, being a RPG means, you can just "use the things that are super strong" or brute force progress with high enough stats, but some of that requires to read a guide which would also eliminate one of these game's largest contributors to difficulty: Obscurity. Dark Souls tells you even less about your objectives, than it's lore.

If you just want to explore a visually stunning gameworld, Elden RIng might be better suited for you, since it has more mechanics (like "Spirit Summons") that make the game much more approachable and allow you to brute force progress, no matter how much you're struggling.

[Edgarek]

If you need easy brainrot gameplay, just play mage.

[Dexter]

oh boy here we go *grabs popcorn*

[Koros Antavo]

*checks profile*

Have you managed to find a relaxing rts with less multi tasking demands than age of empires series? Asking for a friend

[sir stanley]

many thks for yr very thoughtful, helpful replies. hv played strat and rpg for a long time but the 1st person exploratory stuff seems v appealing. the conscientious fanbase is apparent

[svoulzor]

Wrong genre.

[Yal]

I'd say that the best story in a Souls game really is YOUR story - there's so much room for expressing yourself and doing weird unexpected shenanigans (especially in multiplayer) you're bound to pick up a couple memories of that one really weird incident. My favorite DS2 memory was the one time I tried that stupid schoolyard rumor that something special happens if you light every torch in The Gutter (turns out it's actually true!)


If you want to have the easiest possible starting point (and your PC can handle it) you might wanna consider Elden Ring instead, it's got a bunch of systems that makes it easier to pick up as a complete newbie (most notably the open world aspect lets you just walk around places/bosses you're stuck on and come back later, and the "spirit summoning" system means you always have NPC help for boss fights without ruining ALL the fun for you)