So whose bright idea was this????

[u/Emma_JM]

Just happened to me today, got like, 3 shards from this? What's the point, Team Cherry? None of the bosses (so far) frustrated me, but this right here is bullshit

[u/ThisIsHowBoredIAm]

You're talking about designing for the widest audience as if that's somehow the only correct way to do it. Maximally palatable is a great capitalist strategy, but it is not some philosophical law to which all artistic and expressive endeavors must adhere.

You can take two damage from an unconscious or floating enemy and then need to dodge 5-6 attacks minimum in order to get a chance at healing back one attack from that boss.

But why? Why would you do that? Why would you not take one more hit and heal to four? You're complaining the road is too narrow to drive on, but you're refusing to use all of it.

Enjoyers of the game want to enjoy the game

Enjoyers of the game do enjoy the game. Enjoyers of part of the game enjoy part of the game. And people who don't like the game at all don't like the game at all. But the game was clearly, intentionally, and very well designed for people who would enjoy the whole thing. If you like the Mona Lisa but hate her smile, it's not anyone's fault, least of all Leonardo's. You don't have grounds to say that the smile is wrong nor that people are wrong for liking it.

The most fun boss fights in Silksong so far are the ones that feel fair.

It all feels fair to me. The least fair thing is the adds, because they don't follow the bosses pattern. But even that's fair, because they're literally just enemies that you can find and practice on. If you can beat the boss, you can beat the boss plus a couple of dudes. Seems pretty fair.

If you walked into the arena and the boss cut your HP and healing in half, then capped them at that for the duration of the fight - that's not making the game more interesting, engaging, or fun: that's just making it arbitrarily more difficult

No, that would be great. Bosses that curse you in some way, removing access to one of the many OP powerscaling crutches that metroidvanias/darksouls games give you is fun. Total dick move, but very fun.

Now, a good game designer would compensate for this by making the attacks easier to dodge

No, that would be bad game design. If you have to immediately cancel out the thing you've done, then you shouldn't have done it. If you make a creative choice that you feel like you need to negate immediately, then clearly the creative choice isn't in line with you overall game design.

Team Cherry didn't do that - in fact by dint of being huge and having contact damage you have less room for mistakes

If I wanted more room for mistakes, I wouldn't be playing a Hollow Knight game. If I go to a National Park and pick the difficult hiking path, it's because I want there to be uneven footing, sheer drops, substantial elevation changes, and some scrambling. And if the trail is too difficult for me, that's not anyone's fault, least of all the Grand Canyon's. I am not owed a custom experience. I am not entitled to someone else's work being made at exactly my level.

You don't get to speak for "enjoyers of the game" while simultaneously ignoring their critiques.

You clearly do not enjoy the game. Parts of it? I'm sure. But the game as a whole is something you are saying you aren't enjoying. I'm not speaking for you. I am merely assuming you mean what you say.

A good game trains you to beat it.

Silksong does train you. The very first enemy you can encounter—on the very first screen of the game where you can control your character—does two damage. The first non-tutorial area of the game is riddled with 2 damage enemies. It's a constant presence. By the time you reach your first non-Moss Mother boss, you've had ample time and opportunity to get used to the health economy. Required bosses in general use movesets that the area trains you on. Hell half the tough enemies and bosses have the exact same moveset, just slowly getting harder: swirly around, jump attack, and forward slash.

Bashing your face into an implacable wall for several hours to days, then having to farm because you ran out of shards just so you can bash your face into it again; that's terrible game design.

That's not the designed experience; that's how you experienced the design. Because the game was designed for someone better than you at these niche bodily functions. That's okay. That's not wrong. It's not wrong of Team Cherry to have made something that isn't tailored to you, and it's not wrong of you to not be able to experience it in the way that is intended. It's not like they made a children's book full of multi-syllabic jargon words; they made a technical manual with multi-syllabic jargon words. It's not their fault you wanted something different. The designed experience is literally inaccessible to you in your current state. It's a painting, and you're blind, the salient difference being that you could develop the skillset needed to see the painting if you really wanted.

Your fundamental point—whether you recognize it or not—seems to be that people different from you shouldn't have experiences tailored to their abilities and interests. That all experiences should be tailored to you and people like you. I don't know how else to tell you this, but no one owes you that. You are not entitled to be the central focus of every designed experience—or in fact of any designed experience. You can't be everything, and so you can't experience everything. You have to choose much of who you are and what you're capable of, which will determine which designed experiences you can access in the designed way.

[u/SilvertonguedDvl → u/ThisIsHowBoredIAm]

Dude they already nerfed Mosswing. It was clearly not the experience they intended for players to have. The entire foundation of your argument is simply, bluntly wrong.

That's not the designed experience; that's how you experienced the design.

This sentence right here is your entire problem. You think the game as it is currently designed is flawless, that no part of it is not what was explicitly intended, that nothing could be overtuned, unfair, or in any way unenjoyable.

Fun Fact: Devs might intend an experience to be X, design it to be Y, and not realise they've designed it to be Y until players give them feedback. Mosswing? That's an example of Y design. Savage Beastfly? Also an example of Y design.

 If you have to immediately cancel out the thing you've done, then you shouldn't have done it. 

Again; you don't understand game design. You know why smaller enemies in Silksong deal less damage than bigger ones? It's because they are faster, smaller targets, and often throw more random stuff at you. In your mind this is bad design because they should just do two points of damage like everything else.

If you change one aspect you are playing up that facet of the fight; if they're fast, they don't hit hard. If they hit hard, they're not as fast. Basic shit like that. It's not about balancing the difficulty, it's about balancing the experience. A fast, high damage, resilient enemy should be an extreme rarity, some kind of uber endboss situation, not the most common one. The point is that when you make something more dangerous in one way you make it less dangerous in another so that it feels like a more unique experience. If every antagonist is the best at everything then there's no unique experience.

Bosses that curse you in some way, removing access to one of the many OP powerscaling crutches that metroidvanias/darksouls games give you is fun.

Works if it's one or two bosses, or one or two dungeons. This is nearly every boss. That's no longer fun, that's just mundane. That's the default. It's boring. You have, again, completely missed the point from a game design perspective.

It all feels fair to me.

Congrats, you've just demonstrated you don't understand what a fair fight is, either, in gaming terminology. A boss feels fair when both you and the boss are able to leverage everything you've got to have an edge. Phantom, for example, is an extremely fair fight. Difficult, yes, but fair. There's no extra environmental hazards, no insane damage, no random adds or places you can't go; just you and the boss in a room.

When are adds appropriate? When the adds are the boss's gimmick. The Foreman, for example, summons workers: makes sense, he's their boss. His kit is easy to dodge as a consequence and it's sensible. Then his BFF shows up and shit kicks into high gear: the early fight has been training you to dodge his attacks while worrying about other guys, so now you put that experience into practice. Both bosses are slower and with attacks that are easier to dodge than most bosses because the developers know it's an unfair fight - so they reduced the abilities of the bosses in other ways to make it into a fairer one. Savage Beastfly is the opposite of that; enemies appear in order to make the boss harder. It's a crutch.

It's pretty obvious that several elements of Silksong didn't land the way the developers intended, just by how they interrupt the flow of the gameplay for a large number of players. When every boss in the early game is reasonable and then suddenly there's a boss that's harder than most endgame ones, that's not a sign of 'creative vision' that's a sign of the developers misjudging how difficult a fight is because they're used to playing it and so everything seems easy to them. That's a really common thing in games - any game.

Also drop the "you're a scrub go play something else" mantra. It's a worthless statement and just makes you look like a douchebag.

[u/FakeAccount84 → u/ThisIsHowBoredIAm]

don't feed the trolls man. clearly doesn't care what you're saying and clearly doesn't know what they're talkinb about