 So, I'm a huge fan of Soulsborne games. They're basically the only games that I actually replay, and I replay them quite consistently. I've got one Bloodborne character in NG plus 7, and aside from Dark Souls 2, which I think sucks, regardless of how many videos try and convince me it's actually awesome, I think these games are almost all nearly perfect. Now, I think the difficulty can sometimes be a bit over the top for no real reason, but overall, I think all of them are just fantastic. So good, I can't even pick a favorite. Dark Souls 3, Dark Souls, and Bloodborne are all of equal quality in my eyes. Each of them has things they do better than the other, but when all is said and done, if I had to be locked up with only one game forever, I would pick any one of those over basically any other game ever made, and no game had me more excited for 2019 than Frum's new title, Sekiro Shadows Die Twice. Now, when I heard I was being produced in partnership with Activision, I admit I got a little bit nervous. The simple, objective fact is that Activision Blizzard games are amongst the most shitty, anti-consumer games released today. Call of Duty routinely pushes the envelope to the brink of what is acceptable. This time, going so far as to not even be fucking bothered to include a campaign. And who wants to bet that there will be a campaign sold separately as DLC? Hell, even though I played World of Warcraft Hardcore for its first 8 years in existence, I basically stopped playing Overwatch when I got sick of the loot box thing during events. But I have an awful lot of faith in the value that Frum's software games provide. Their DLCs have, for the most part, been uniformly fantastic. Even the Abomination that was Dark Souls 2 was nearly redeemed with the excellent DLCs, so I'm willing to give Frum the benefit of the doubt and assume they would not have worked with Activision if their integrity was going to be compromised. But that's not what this video is about, that's just your quick little reminder that Activision is a festering pustule on the face of gaming. This video concerns something that was revealed at Gamescom recently. Frum and Activision brought a gameplay demo of Sekiro to Gamescom, and while it looks really cool and was raved about from those who played it, there was for me a troubling bit of news about the game. You see, Sekiro is not an RPG. Apparently there's no leveling system, there are no weapons or armor to collect, there isn't a deep character customization system. Sekiro is a third-person action game. Souls Distilled, if you will. Activision Souls. I love how deep and complex the RPG systems are in Dark Souls. I love the more streamlined, action-focused Bloodborne, and I love the middle road between those two, that is Dark Souls 3. The RPG elements of all of these games are a tremendous part of what makes them so endlessly replayable. There are still weapons and spells that I want to try out in Dark Souls 1 that I haven't gotten around to yet. The only reason Bloodborne isn't far and away my favorite of the series is that there really isn't any build diversity. I mean sure, you can end up using a few of the magical items for shifts and giggles, but for the most part, RPG elements aren't afterthought in Bloodborne, and instead, the leveling system serves more as a kind of difficulty slider that allows you to adjust how hard the game is, by either over or under-leveling for areas. Case in point. I, coincidentally actually, have been playing Bloodborne again the last couple of weeks while I wait for this ridiculous release schedule to get underway, and this time around, because I've gotten pretty darn good at the game, I ended up getting to the old Hunter's DLC at level 55. This was too much for me. Almost all of the Hunter enemies could one shot me and they absorbed just annoying amounts of damage. I'm not good enough and I'm certainly not patient enough to enjoy playing the game like that. So I ended up going and doing the Chalice Dungeons and some of the other optional areas, and voila, the difficulty becomes balanced. And that serves as a pretty good example of something I touched on in my long-ass video on difficulty in games. The Soulsborne RPG leveling system isn't just a great way to add replayability. It isn't just a fantastic way to have diverse gameplay styles. It isn't just a really deep game within the game. The Soulsborne RPG systems are those games' difficulty sliders. Those systems are the reason my 7 year old son can play Dark Souls. Now I despise the elitist get-good mentality that sprung up around Souls games. It's childish and silly. How can my 7 year old get good? How can the disabled clients I work with get good? How am I going to get good when I'm 66 and even more broken down than I am now? And why should only the good get to enjoy games? Should I not be allowed to play Souls games when I'm 65? Soulsborne games are more than their difficulty. I'd argue that the focus on their difficulty above all else has done them a tremendous disservice and almost certainly hurt their sales. Everything in these games is awesome. The animations and level design alone is worth the price of admission. The music, enemy variety, fantastic combat and memorable bosses, the lore written into the item descriptions, the joy of figuring out their secrets. These games are almost perfect and deserve to be played by everyone. And implying that they're so punishingly difficult that only a handful of people can deal with them is a pretty bad business model in my opinion. So the lack of an RPG leveling system leaves me wondering how Fromm is going to balance a difficulty curve on this game. Is Sekiro going to have an actual difficulty slider now? Normally I would assume this wouldn't be the case but there were other things I noticed during these demos. There are tooltips and tutorial pop-ups that are coming on the screen which makes the game look more like Neo than Dark Souls. Now I don't have a problem with a little bit of tutorial text or contextual pop-ups but I think the presence of these is a major design departure for the studio that can be taken in mean there's been a fundamental shift in priorities. Fromm's games have been lauded for the way they reveal themselves to the player. The games provide minimal direction and instruction. They basically create a fully realized world, use music, visuals and rock solid controls to immerse the player fully and then leave the player to figure things out for themselves and that's a tremendous part of their appeal. In order for this to work, Fromm has had to create deeply immersive games that players want to figure out. It's become a kind of feedback loop. The more fully realized the game is internally, the less immersion breaking messages from the developer need to be dropped in from outside the game world. The lack of tutorials drove the designers to create a game that could be understood without tutorials. The fact that this game looks to have actual tooltip pop-ups speaks to a change in philosophy that I think might just chip away at the overall experience even if only a little bit. And it changes like this I think that show that something has changed here. I've argued before that a difficulty slider would be fine in Dark Souls. That it would only allow more people to enjoy the games. But I've also said that Dark Souls manages to have dynamic difficulty scaling by meticulously being designed around letting players figure out ways to advance without the slider. Overleveling, magic use, bows, cheesy AI pathing, learning parry timings. Players who were enamored with the world can figure out how to make the game easier on their own organically. And while I think a slider would have meant that more people would have given the game a shot, I also admit that the way Souls balanced difficulty was pure genius and exceptional design. My only complaint is that more people didn't realize this kind of difficulty adjustment was in the game and probably gave up early before figuring out the systems. But with no leveling, no new weapons to find, and from desire to make the games hard I'm nervous that this title might be too difficult for new players. This news for me either means that Sekiro will absolutely need to have difficulty settings to succeed or that it will be just too hard for new players to enjoy. And the presence of tutorial messages, the addition of stealth mechanics, the new publisher, and the complete removal of RPG systems means that Sekiro isn't the Souls game in Japan that I was hoping for. Now I have zero doubt it will feature great level enemy design and kick-ass combat. I have no doubt that mechanically it will be a blast to play. But I also deeply hope that this isn't the start of a whole new direction. Because I think the RPG mechanics of the Soulsborne games add more than people realize. They aren't just a hidden difficulty adjuster. They aren't just a replayability system. They are a way that each playthrough becomes your own. They allow for each player to make their way through the game in a different way from other players. And it's that depth and complexity that's a big part of what made me fall in love with Souls games to begin with. Now I'm sure I will love this one too, but I have to admit to being a bit disappointed. From has certainly more than earned the benefit of the doubt. Activision hasn't, but from has. But this news hurts a bit. I don't know, what do you guys think? Alright, I'll see you later this week for Forsaken. Thanks. Bye.