this post was submitted on 10 Apr 2025
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Mechanical difficulty is how difficult it is to play it
Number difficulty is how easily you die or how hard it is to kill enemies
Dark Souls is mechanically easy (just learn patterns and dodge) but it has high number difficulty because you can die in 1 hit and it takes more than 1 hit to kill enemies
Mechanically difficult would be those fighting games where you have a list of 100 different button combos
Edit: Note instead of kill/die I should say win/loss to apply to more genres
I see it as the opposite.
Dark Souls is mechanically difficult because you need to get good at the mechanics to succeed in the game, gaining levels really won't help.
In short:
Maybe players view it differently because we’ve moved away from making games mechanically difficult
There are still plenty of mechanically difficult games, such as:
There are plenty more, but each of those is mechanically difficult and there's no way to grind to make up for lack of skill. Dark Souls is an honorable mention here because you can make up for some lack of skill by finding better gear, but it's still more on the end of "mechanically difficult" than "numbers difficult."