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.
Well, that would explain a few things if the dev doesn’t even play games himself …
Also, simply playing a game doesn’t make one a good analyst or designer. It may very well be that DH
thinks he’s just making a difficult game in the vein of
Dark Souls, but the reality is quite to the contrary.
In my opinion, making a difficult game engaging is a matter of balancing adversity with player agency, and in
Dark Souls, the player has
all the agency. There might be a few random factors here and there—such as the way mobs can gang up, or if a boss spams a certain attack—but player skill and choices dictate everything. The core of the game is recognizing attacks to block or avoid them, then identifying windows of opportunity for a counterattack or healing; these are all skills the player can improve on. Moreover, there is no cap on mastery, which is why people can successfully complete challenge runs, such as no-hit, level 1, no weapon upgrades, etc.; it is possible to reach a point in the game where you take no damage whatsoever.
Breeders of the Nephelym has no similar mechanics: the core of the game is breeding mostly via RNG.
Even barring mechanical skill, player decision plays a huge impact in
Dark Souls: while a veteran player can roll around naked and never get hit, a less confident player can use a shield, or even magic spells and summoned allies, which reduce difficulty drastically. Knowledge provides some advantages in
Breeders—knowing to open the desert area first, to access the portals early, for instance. But even then, in
Dark Souls the player can gain knowledge organically; it’s fairly easy to try fighting an enemy with a weapon, fail, and try again with another; all of the secret mechanics, like illusory walls, can be reasonably found out during regular gameplay; and the information thus gained will help with future enemies and suspicious doorways, in the same playthrough.
Breeders, on the other hand, does none of that. There is no way to deduce or learn that the desert area holds the portals, and knowing this in any case can only help with a new game; there is no knowledge gained here that can be put to further use. The other useful knowledge in
Breeders is either completely hidden, or would be prohibitively difficult to actually learn via gameplay; this includes pregnancy chance, the way traits are passed down, how to raise world level, etc. The only way to learn these things is to read the (out of date) wiki. Other advantages that can be gained are via
settings (e.g. using futa to make trait selection more efficient), which is about as far from “organic gameplay” as is imaginable.
The other sources of frustration you mention are similar to
Breeders in the the player has no agency: overcomplicated combat that is blatantly unfair (health regeneration and enemies that significantly outrange you are especially unforgiving—note that
Dark Souls has none of the former, and very little of the latter; note also, with the exception of some bosses maybe, the lack of “bullet sponges”), or reliant on deterministic yet unpredictable factors like element-types or attributes (enemies in
Dark Souls have weaknesses, but exploiting that weakness is never necessary to defeating them); visual novels that progress too slowly; etc. The problem with these situations is that the player can’t do anything about them, other than cheat if the game permits it.
There are definitely players who can get frustrated with
Dark Souls—because they don’t think they’ll improve, because they don’t have the patience to let themselves improve, because they’re not used to adversity, or any other reason—but I think in general it does a good job of showing you how much agency you have. Even when you die to a boss, you’ll notice you were more confident in dodging that attack you were getting bodied by earlier—and you’ll feel as though you were close to dodging the one after that. Whenever you breed a Nephelym and it doesn’t get the traits you wanted, you have no other choice than to do the same thing again, with the same odds, until it just works of its own accord.
