I wish people in this chat stopped comparing the difficulty in this game with that of Dark Souls …
Dark Souls difficulty is based on player knowledge and skill; Breeders of the Nephelym difficulty is just grinding.
BotN is developed by a dev that is barely a gamer and the only games that he's known to have played are precisely the Dark Souls ones.
And BOTH happen to deal with frustrating "do and repeat until you suceed" playloops that get annoying until you get to that point. You could also say that knowledge in BotN shortens the grind time MASSIVELY, as well as the skill to optimize the freakton of things that can end up happening at once so you can get each ingame day to be squeezed out of every profit that you can make out of it to minimize.
I know that in terms of style they're VERY different but you cant deny that both can potentially be just as tedious/frustrating to play as the other, specially when like I said, one is developed by a diehard fan of the other. And if my experience testing indie games have showed me is that devs with that kind of likeness tend to add some element of frustration into their game's playloop, such as:
- One fatal day totally overhauling the enemies to have abilities that make the combat 40 times more annoying to deal with than before cause some can regenerate faster than Volverine or snipe you with a handgun across the screen, and if you get knocked out you get fucked (Could be a nice thing to have as an outcome but if you add its bondage options is straight up frustrating as hell).
- Have an overcomplicated turn based combat and character atributes check that feels like trying to beat Pokemon's League with a Magikarp, in which if you fail to succeed at those your character literally gets assraped.
- BotN with its endless grind and the dev's active refusal to add QoL features like something as basic as being able to have saves compatibility, specially on a game that can take hours or days to pass from having one area locked to having it available.
- A visual novel that takes a century to get into ANY sex interaction at all with a harem-ish story that doesnt properly showcase you that unless you go the "lest fuck everyone" youll advance at a quarter of speed, however the whole dialogues pushes you to believe otherwise.
And so on and on. Meanwhile the devs that tend to like more simplistic games with less overcomplicated mecanics as the Souls games, they tend to be much nicer to deal with from the get-go without the whole frustrating aspects of the others. That's pretty much the reason I compare them. I know they are very different in their style but the annoyance they can bring at times can be quite similar.