[STEAM] 'What Connects Soulslike Players Is That They Are All Struggling' — Valor Mortis Dev Says It Won't Have 'Tens of Difficulty Options' So Players Can Have 'Similar Experiences'

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, the first-person soulslike action game set in an alt-history Napoleonic era, is out next year. And with developer One More Level especially pushing the “Soulslike”-ness of the whole thing, it seems only natural that at some point before or after launch there’s going to be a discussion about the game’s difficulty - is it too hard? Is it hard enough? Should it have an easy mode, or something else?

The difficulty discussion, of course, is one that crops up every time a new Souls game is released. What makes difficulty fun, and what makes it obnoxious? Should games have easy modes? What sorts of accessibility features are helpful to ensure everyone can play the game and experience its design friction as intended, without experiencing other, undesirable friction due to controls or other functions?

I played Valor Mortis at the Game Industry Conference in Poznań, Wielkopolska, and while I’m only of middling Soulslike skills, I can confirm it’s pretty tough! I also spoke with game director Radosław Ratusznik, who says that the team is still in discussions as to how they will approach all this. For now, he says, Valor Mortis just has one difficulty setting. But that may change in the future.

“If we decide at one point to change it, I think we will change it for easy mode and normal mode, just two of them. Because I think that players should have similar experiences when they're playing these kinds of games. So personally, I'm fine with the easy mode, if someone wants to just experience the story, learn a little bit about how the game works. But if we have a lot of options, like there are like tens of difficulty options, then each person can play a totally different game. I think what connects Soulslike players is that they are all struggling in these games. If they manage to succeed in this game, they can share this experience with other players. And this is something that has a huge value I think for them, for this community.”

But there’s nuance here, because while Ratusznik may be against having ten difficulty options ranging from Story Mode to Ultra Hard Giga Death Difficulty, he agrees that discussions around difficulty often don’t take into account the

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. He’s not a fan, for instance, of games that let you turn on and off certain mechanics (such as parries), because he thinks that players “lose something from this experience.” But he also adds that, as far as accessibility goes, “we can have a lot of things that can assist you without lowering the difficulty of the game.”

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Ratusznik isn’t alone in this belief. FromSoftware’s Hidetaka Miyazaki has

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, “We are always looking to improve, but, in our games specifically, hardship is what gives meaning to the experience. So it’s not something we’re willing to abandon at the moment. It’s our identity.” But also notably, Elden Ring was far more flexible than FromSoftware’s past games in the ways in which it allowed players to eventually conquer challenges. You could outlevel bosses to make them trivially easy if you wandered off and defeated enough weaker enemies, there are some builds that turn certain bosses into jokes, and there’s so much to do in the game and so many paths to victory that if you’re struggling with something, Elden Ring encourages you to leave and do something else. Another recent Soulslike, Hollow Knight: Silksong, is similar in this structure.

How Valor Mortis will ultimately handle its difficulty remains to be seen, as Ratusznik himself says that the team is still working out what they want to do. We won’t know til next year when the game launches on PC, PS5, and Xbox Series.

We also spoke to Ratusznik at GIC about Valor Mortis’ soulslike credentials, and why it’s challenging to make a game in that tradition in the first-person.

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Rebekah Valentine is a senior reporter for IGN. You can find her posting on BlueSky @duckvalentine.bsky.social. Got a story tip? Send it to [email protected].

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