Game is difficult = "[game] is [genre] Dark Souls?!"

It's very simple, they are casuals and have little experience with video games so they use the only games they know as reference points to describe all the other games that come after.

check them because why not

this is the correct answer. The average journo has the vidya knowledge of your 10 years old cousin

No one has ever said this. Prove me wrong.

normalfags lack references because they only play what their circle of friends and streamer tell them to play, they don't like to think for themselves and try new things

Sounds about right to me.

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I was wrong.

It's called analogy user.
I guess they don't teach it in school now.

casuals who haven't played anything but the next big thing use those as their reference.

I want to impregnate Maka.

do these count? minecraft is practically a genre now

Because they are newfags to vidya

But Breath of the Wild is truly like Skyrim, except no mechanics have changed and someone modded in Zelda textures with a shitty pastel filter.

Its just because games journalists don't actually play games nor did they grow up playing games so they have very little else to compare it to. They just latched on to vidya because its popular.

Hence why they compared Crash Bandicoot to Dark Souls, let alone the implication that they even found Crash Bandicoot difficult, a game that I played and beat when I was maybe 8, but the comparison stems from a complete lack of knowledge of any real video games, I mean hell they compare the game to Dark Souls but the majority of them probably never got out of Undead Burg.

It also spreads because normalfag retards on reddit, neofag, and other places spread their MEMES JACK either ironically or unironically.

Hearing this repeatedly for three years was a true hell.

hurpahurpahurrr.

Also, I've seen numerous threads about rimworld, but I've never played. Is it just a more casual dorf fort with actual graphics?

Yes

yes, it's the same as Towns, Gnomoria, and every other DF clone that removes the reason why people play DF.

Yes? Thank you for proving my point?

are you retarded or have you literally never played skyrim before?

Well, I don't know about the second one, but the first one is easy enough to explain. You see, Dark Souls has managed to achieve unprecedented popularity, and there are dipshits out there that want to ride along its coattails in order to get their share of success. When you merely invoke the name Dark Souls and associate it with your product, you will garner interest. At least, this is what the people who uses such phrases believe. Of course, there may be other explanations, but this is the one I find most sensible.

Whoa, calm down, Jose. I know it sucks to be wrong, but sometimes you just gotta accept it. BotW = Skyrim: Hyrule Edition.

Describe a game in sufficient detail as to properly explain its intricate merits without unnecessary vagueness while simultaneously capturing the interest of your intended audience - without using comparisons.

When you say a game is "brutally difficult," for example, you actually have no control over what people will associate that to. Some may think of Breath of the Wild and how the game will punish you, even though the game isn't actually difficult because of all the resources you have to completely ignore punishments. Others may think of Dark Souls and how the game is full of artificial difficulty. Yet others may think of, for example, Super Meat Boy, despite that game being a game for children.

Comparisons to a game are practical if done appropriately.

Alright like what? And lets be clear here you said FULL of artificial difficulty so dont go listing bed of chaos and call it a day.

lmao that was bait user xD

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For a serious response, it's not full of artificial difficulty but it does have its few problems. They aren't hugely worth mentioning to some of the other more serious flaws like the god-awful status of the PC port or just the controls in general.

I don't think dropping currency actually added much to the game, and deathruns to bosses pissed me off for the few bosses that did stump me - not hard, just time consuming. I hear they got better in their later games but I tried DaS2 and just couldn't stand it and I have no interest in returning to the games. They honestly should have stayed a cult classic instead of becoming wildly memetic.

Well for one most enemies and bosses are dumb as rocks, but will take your health down to half in one hit or stun lock you to death. It isn't making you think harder, but just punishing you more severely. It's like when games have a hard difficulty, but just make it so enemies are damage sponges and you are made of tinfoil. Also enemies are almost never subject to stamina.

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weapons don't have durability in skyrim you unbelievable idiot. it also doesn't have temperature mechanics or horse stats. fucking retard.

webm related on enemy AI

They do in the modded Skyrim released by Nintendo, tho

Using a catch all term like "it's the [Dark Souls] of [x_genre]" doesn't do that, though. If anything, it demonstrates that you are incapable of doing what you just described. Dark Souls is a very specific experience, and it cannot be the standard by which you can compare any and all games on a universal scale. Instead, the term only recognizes one perceived quality of the game and uses it to its absurdity. "Hurr the game is hard therefore every game that we want to describe as hard must be compared to Dark Souls." That reasoning is retarded even if we ignore the fact that Dark Souls isn't even as hard as it's marketed; Dark Souls' perceived difficulty is arguably derived from two of the game's features, one being the rate at which your character loses health, and two being the unforgiving environment that poses challenges in the form of traps, enemy ambushes, and boss encounters. Even if your game is genuinely difficult, you cannot say that its features will be sufficiently explained by comparing it to Dark Souls, unless your game's difficulty is derived from the same challenges that comprise Dark Souls. Most of the time the comparison is unwarranted.

You may blame your audience for being mindless dregs who have attention spans shorter than the enter life cycle of a housefly, and you may be right to do so, but you cannot blame anyone else for your own personal inability to use your language - the thing for which you're fucking paid, presuming your are a game journalist - to come up with a succinct description that meets your criteria.

yeah and minecraft is a factory building game with mods :^))) fucking idiot

I remember years ago some guy was talking about a succubus, for whatever reason I can't remember, and the thread was immediately swarmed by faggots posting "LIKE THE DESIRE DEMON FROM DRAGON AGE!?!?!?!?!". It's a shill tactic to desperately keep their game in the spotlight for as long as possible.

It has an echantment durability. If it runs out you have to repair it.
Yes. It's used in A LOT of quests. It's one of the few machincs in the game besides levers.
Of course it does. But no one cares because shadowmere has such a high regen that it needs a lot of damage at once for it to die. IT CAN KILL DRAGONS. (I don't know why you have to do it. They could have trained an undead horse army)

Remember the quest with the dwemer projector and the map of tamriel? You had to warm some parts of the machine up and cool other parts down in order to repair it.

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And remember all the survival mods where you can't wear a bikini in the mountains. REAL != GOOD Why would anybody want this… Wait a sec, I know why: 'cause you're a fag!

Nigger, are you saying Skyrim was made by nintendo? God I fucking hate summer fags.

Ah, the lack of reading comprehension gambit, a respectable start.

In the case of these comparisons where someone uses a catch-all term like "it's the Breaking Bad of Lost television shows"is to quickly distill an accurate impression.

Key Word: Quickly.

Now, I can go into extended detail about the intricacies of the difficulty of Breath of the Wild, where it's not exactly *difficult* but that numbers are greatly overexaggerated so that a single mistake is incredibly punishing, but that this punishment is heavily diluted by the incredibly vast amount of tools the player has at their disposal to avoid, mitigate, or recover from these punishments. Flurry Rushes are incredibly powerful and very easy to execute for offering absolute invulnerability; defense can very easily be stacked to obscene amounts especially thanks to food, as well as Daruk's Protection negating all damage; and the player is able to just chow down on hundreds of apples instantaneously and has several revival tools at their disposal. While getting hit by a Silver Lynel will take out most of your hearts, it actually doesn't matter in the way that getting destroyed by a Lynel in previous Zelda games did because of your recovery tools. On the other hand, while you have effectively unlimited health to tackle any problem, you have a very, very restricted amount of damage you can deal to any one monster (through weapon durability), which is made worse by the fact that they have thousands of HP relative to your sub-100 attack power.

Dark Souls, on the other hand, has a completely *different* flavour of difficulty. They are similar, in that a small, slight mistake can easily demolish most of your health, but unlike BotW, your recovery is not instantaneous, infinite, or accessible. You have less true options for mitigation, and your ability to avoid damage requires significantly higher precision. Yet, your ability to deal damage is nigh endless - the concept of repairing your equipment is rather non-existent for the first playthrough, and even then enemies have a tendency to take damage about as much as they dish it out, leading to quick interactive duels as opposed to horrendously boring slogs.

I, too, enjoyed Dress-Up Link: A Skyrim Adventure.

I'm saying Breath of the Wild was made by Nintendo. Which is just a modded version of Skyrim.

If you're looking for a quick way of describing a game's fundamental components, then use plain language to achieve that goal. If a game is difficult, you should just explain that it's difficult. In fact, this is what Dark Souls' fame was built upon. It was notable for its difficulty, and people reflected that while using simple, albeit flamboyant, language. There were no comparisons to older games, even though those comparisons could quite easily have been made, and yet people still ultimately understood the game's appeal. In short, the catch all terms are less effective at communicating a concept than simple language, so their use isn't even justified from the perspective that they're "time savers" or "efficient descriptions"

At any rate, the type of person who is only interested in a quick description of a game is also the type of person that would not care to appreciate a game's finer intricacies; They're the type of person that plays a game and then drops it so they can move on to follow the newest trend on the market. They're normalfags. Fuck normalfags. If you're truly interested in a game, you will take the time to become familiar with all it's components, so the quick descriptions are unnecessary. That's all I'm saying.

But you want their money.

They dont wanna think of any really usable analogies, you can certainly
compare tons of games to dark souls or portal or shit. But they just look at the surface of the game,

This, though I'll say some of the comparisons are getting pretty stupid ("LE CRASH IS DA NU DANK SOULS"). It's not inherently a bad thing (especially since they inspire rip-offs Like Lords of the Fallen and Nioh) and you can use it as a standard. But slathering it like ketchup over a bunch of fries is dumb.

Nah, I think my 10 year old cousin had more vidya knowledge then these cunts.

WOW KILLER
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This is where the differences in which market you're trying to break into matters the most. For example mobile games the women and people that play mobile games don't like any serious complexity, those mobile threads on this board are an extreme minority and note how those mobile games are designed for pandering to waifu faggotry. Any and all games that breakthrough the threshold for acceptable complexity die immediately in the mobile market, pretty much nobody even considers themselves a gamer and their demands for games is quite clear tetris, puzzles, and farmville.

And then there is the money distribution itself, only 10 top dogs get the vast, vast majority of money while everyone else makes like $50. On top of that your game will die quickly in about a week tops, so you need to be constantly churning out new games. The top dogs are cemented firmly into the market and other top dogs of other game markets will not be able to usurp them so easily and likely die as a result of over estimating their odds and value.

Terrible writing skills from game journalists mostly. It is easier to just say "It is like X" instead of describing the unique characteristics of something. That and normalfags/retards always think that "if x has something from y it is just like x!" My worst example of this is when one of my step brothers called Starhawk a gears of war clone because it was in third person.

Is Stardew Valley the Dark Souls of colourful games?

Game reviewers are retarded and don't know anything about videogames. Being a videogame reviewer isn't about knowing anything about videogames but instead being lucky enough to know someone in the industry.

What's the cinematic open world dark souls of twin-stick roguelike metroidvanias?

Stardew Valley is the souls-like Citizen Kane of farming games

Crash Bandicoot is the new dark souls.

More like the NSMB of them.
When the entire complexity of the farming system in your farming game can be summed up as "plant in season with enough days left" you have a problem.

It's not just e-celebs and journokikes. A number of years back on halfchan, I used to see anons calling Xenogears "The Evangelion of Vidya", The Last Remnant "The Dwarf Fortress of JRPGs", etc. Granted, some of that could very well just have been meme spouting of a sort, but it seems like youtube trash and reviewers have been quick to adopt that sort of comparison for shit, especially in regards to difficulty being equated with " Dark Souls-esque" (which conveniently ignores that Demon's Souls came prior, perhaps in favor of a more accessible comparison).

It's an old fucking marketing trick.
Back when the first or one of the first wah pedals was made they paid some famous trombone player to use his name and market it as "it sounds like that guy", the reason why they marketed a fucking guitar pedal with the name of a trombone player was simply because everyone knew about that guy, but no one knew about the pedal. People are scared of new stuff, but they're retarded. They wouldn't buy a new pedal they had never heard about, but they're more likely to buy it if they know of it as "it sounds like that popular thing you know and like".
Now, apply that to vidya. Even if the game is fun, if people don't know about it, they aren't likely to even look into it. However, if you put a recognizable brand name into it, I.E. "it's the dark souls of walking simulators", people are more likely to buy it, so the fags that take half a game's budget to shill it started using it. Eventually "it's the X of Y" catches on and people describe the game as such because it's easier than to explain what the game actually is about.
tl;dr marketing and retards

That's exactly 100% right on the money.

okay that got me

Too many normalfags use CoD when mentioning what a bad game is, almost as if they know nothing of vidya to choose from the hundreds of shitty games out there.

Nothing wrong with using popular titles as references.
If it triggers some autistic channers - more the reason to do it.

The dark souls games are a literal fucking cancer

this is bait

Even though I've come to appreciate DaS1 more over the years, at launch I was pretty disappointed by it. It's a solid game with the DLC and once you come to terms with it, but it will never quite have the spark that Demon's Souls had. Bloodborne was solid but it's biggest weakness was limited weapon variety, which the DLC fixed very well.

Would Undertale be the Cave Story of Dark Souls or the Dark Souls of Cave Story?

Mother 3 is Dark Souls of Undermeme.
Cave Story is Dark Souls of metroid.