Bloodstained's difficulty

Well I read about half of your posts before I realized you hadn't made a satisfactory point. Making some sort of ridiculous analogy or simply rebutting a statement or idea doesn't really mean your point was adequate.

Furthermore, I made the point, in a fraction of the time, that I don't mind harder difficulties, but they should be distinguished by actually harder opponent behavior and performance than simply expanding the stats, which will only result in preforming the exact same actions for a longer period of time...

The simple fact is that writing a lot and having an preference doesn't elevate your arguement. Making obsurd analogies about playing blindfold and with your feet compared to changing your equipment is an exercise in obstinance, not a valid point.

To put this in perspective, in SotN, the Alucard Shield will still kill everything effortlessly no matter how the stats are changed because it functionally makes the player invulnerable while dealing obsurd damage. Stat changes only prolong the time you stand effortlessly over the foe, it doesn't make it harder.

Further supporting my initial point, having different characters to alter difficulty, Richter mode made you play with a totally different character who had none of the growth and attack variety Alucard had, and had to face the castle classically.

As a player who plays roguelikes like Rogue Legacy and smashes all over it well into new game +++, I understand that changing the way the opponents behave changes difficulty way more than stat changes. Stat changes are a frivolous exercise in making the same content more time consuming rather than harder, and something that the player can produce by customizing the equipment he chooses. Achievements, or even limiters which lock you into those selections are easy ways to make the game harder.

What a player can't do is make the opponents attack with new patterns and moves. These have to be designed and programmed into the game by the developer.

The foe isn't going to have air checks, and projectiles, or a great variety of actions, unless it's designed. Even games like Diablo understand this as they ramp difficulty more through randomized added effects rather than plain stat growth.

If you grow stronger, then they grow stronger, then you grow stronger, then they grow stronger, over and over again... your essentially playing the exact same game with a cheap escalation mechanism, gamers lose facination with those mechanisms once they realize how simplistic and trivial that gameplay is.

I'm sorry if I overshot your observation by a mile and didn't resort to tagging back and forth to gain your recognition, but as I said already, the idea was self evident, I don't need to explain it for it to be a superior observation, and if you waste people's time soliciting comparisons, you should be prepared for the fact that not all observations are equal, even in the realm of subjective opinion.

I'll leave you with this. SotN is the most popular Castlevania even though it was the easiest, and is the primary inspiration for this game. If harder more challenging gameplay was the key to it's success, they never needed expand the original Castlevania into Metroid/RPG elements which made the game exponentially easier.

SotN didn't need to be hard to be successful, it succeeded on the sheer variety of ways you could play the game, including several broken ones which trivialize the game completely. That's not to say that easy methods and gameplay are a necessity for Bloodstained to be enjoyable, but difficulty isn't the primary attraction of this sort of game. There are slews of roguelikes which can satisfy those fans, and we expect to see some sort of roguelike mode for Bloodstained, so it may have harder modes of some sort anyway.

But know that Iga has a pretty firm understanding of the qualities that made Castlevania and SotN popular, and he's marketed this game based on that appeal, it's not going to change much based on this sort of subject, whether you like it or not, which is why is not worth complex deconstruction of the games features and in depth arguements about what's "right" for the game. It's wasteful to exercise that level examination, which is why I didn't put that effort into discussing it.

Enemy behavior as the base for difficulty would be the ideal, the thing is that this option usually remains utopic involved the complexity of the task, not because it is hard to implement but because the time consuming issue (time is money), every new behavior is like doubling the effort on creating that single enemy.

However i can think on a few solutions for that, like changing behavior of bosses only and common enemies are changed by the traditional stats changes. Another solution could actually change common enemies behaviors, but only for the choosen ones (key enemies for some reason), like a certain percentage of them would be chosen to have the AI changed, while others could just change stats, this way we can save most of the time and work to do such an implementation.

That would be pretty cool, but i do not believe on that, specially from the first game of a new game series, where there is more details and work to define and no ready material to use to speed things, meaning less time for specifics like that. But who knows, i would like it.

There's no disrespect in appropriately dismissing a pretentious challenge, if your going to question the value of a superior design and pretend like it needs to be validated through your approval to be satisfactory, than your misguided and vain, and deserve the treatment you received.

There are a great many Metroidvania games made all the time, I contributed to the master of the genre with a Kickstarter which offered the advancement of the genre with unparalleled features to realize a master craft, not a minimally viable product. And while I don't believe basic stat escalation difficulty is a serious problem, the most simplistically basic feature ever does not merit conversation.

It's like scrutinizing the water at a wine convention.

And in case your truly oblivious, a veiled insult is still an insult, it's beneath me to entertain such insincerity.

I think that the game should have a difficulty a little easier than OoE, something like the difficulty of PoR

I am fine with PoR, still in my opinion OoE has the best difficulty, i died quite often on both before i got better equipment, but nothing in excess, this kind of games are supposed to test both players battle abilities and strategy on finding and wearing the right equipment, the right dificulty is where most players (who didn't played yet) cannot beat it without dying a couple of times (they need to learn enemy/boss behaviors by battling them).

One of my complains is that some monsters kills you by high atk damage instead of hard to predict behavior, it could be nice if creatures has higher HP/DEF and lower ATK power, requiring more skilling than brute force. Also i hate the point where you can beat a strong enemy with 1 or few hits like it was nothing at all, against a supposed high Lv enemy this should never happens even if you had the best weapon, and if it makes harder to grind just increase the exp given as well, the point is to give more interesting common enemy battles than classic keeping going in and out of rooms killing enemies on a single blow... it becomes boring, it is better to increase the exp given by 3 to 5 times but increase battle time to kill it by the same ammount. I would love to see more attention needed to defeat the basic enemies than running straight giving blows without any need to avoid their attacks, this really bothers me sometimes.

I've already said most of what I'd like to on this subject, but I will add...even though it may not be feasible for this type of game:

I just want it to be challenging even if you're someone that looks up where to go/what to do/where the most powerful thing that you can get early on is. The main reason that SotN WAS actually challenging to us on our first playthrough is because we didn't have a guide, with the game and even the genre being new to us. Unfortunately, so many players now watch Let's Plays before they even own the game (or completely instead of owning the game, lol), so the potential difficulty and mystery of just not knowing is diminished. Even trying to media blackout myself like I usually do for games, it's hard to avoid someone in my social circles tweeting or offhand mentioning something in-game I'd rather not know about yet.

Some games are less susceptible to this than others, like fighting games--you can read/look at what to do for years, but only through experience do you figure out to apply the information and win. Souls games are similar, most of the time. Order of Ecclesia, the popular benchmark in the poll here, is a decent example, too. There may very well be a god-mode weapon combination in that game, but I didn't find it, which I can't say for late-game SotN, which has at least a dozen flavors of steamrolling everything.

I think we're living in a time where games need to actually be "harder" by necessity, just because of the internet. Ideally, not "harder", necessarily, though, but just not a game where you can Google "beat x" and the first result is "get y". I want people to play Bloodstained and feel like they learned and accomplished getting better at it. It's not like I'm pushing some masochist hardcore gamer ideal here--try to play an NES Mario game now. You've played that game and seen that game played for years, so, elementary, right? Not really. You have to actually adapt to playing it again, re-learn the physics of jumping and avoiding traps and enemies. You have to get better at it, and a youtube video isn't going to help.

My only hope for this game is the bosses being rewarding to kill and hopefully none of the whole oh here is a boss that takes up 3/4 of the boss arena like gergoth or Boreas for Dawn Of Sorrow I hate bosses like that because the difficulty is all in the size of the room and not the boss. Order of ecclesia could be very difficult if you were trying to blaze through the game but if you took your time and leveled up you would be fine. So my vote is for OOE difficulty. Because in that game there was not as many bosses that had the issue I was talking about before and I am hoping Bloodstained does not either.

I want to have a choice. Having the choice to make the game as comfortable or challenging as I please would work best for me.

I chose a different reference as far as that. If I had to spitball a game for this to be close to in terms of difficulty, how about Portrait of Ruin or Cave Story?

Scared to really delve further into the nuances of how higher stats can mean more than just everything being the same only longer.

For example, just a theoretical example... imagine a room with several units of easy trash enemies that typically would only take a hit or two to dispatch on a normal setting, and in that room there may be one or two 'strong' enemies that require some effort to kill safely for awhile. Under most 'normal' conditions, the player can just generally dispose of all the trashy enemies with minimal effort in a short period of time without really risking any danger from the 'strong' enemy. However, if say on a harder setting, these trashy enemies take longer than an instant to kill. All of a sudden they become a factor in the fight with the 'strong' enemy, and you cannot safely deal with the trashy enemies without being very careful about when it is safe to do so.

So even if a harder setting wouldn't modify either of those enemies AI per say, it does affect how the player will have to behave in that fight beyond taking longer to beat in a 'boring just do more of the same thing' way.