Dark Souls Experiment #1 - Increasing game speed

 Hypothesis - increasing the speed of the game would make it unfair and not fun with having to re approach the design of the game and how to tackle things and the kind of builds you can use.

Tool used - Cheat Engine

Speeds times chosen

Speed times chosen are of the following;

1.2 times

1.3 times

1.35 times

Results for all 3

Nothing really different happened between them and playing each speed for an hour back to back did produce the same result with little to nothing changing difficultly wise between them, perhaps I didn't increase the speed enough.

Fun factor

It stayed fun and was more heart pounding with traveling between areas and having to react and act with the buttons I had to press, with the faster gameplay I had to be more on my toes and parrying felt more rewarding with the attacks being less telegraphed.

Amount of work gotten done

I was able to get more task and objectives done and having it where close calls were much more heart pounding and thrilling.

Difficultly

Was difficult with a low stamina build, however; increasing the stamina and improving the armor did improve the fun factor I was having with this game and the way I could actually tackle challenges. The game felt fast but fair.

To note

I had drink 6 cups of coffee through out the day

I only did this experiment for 3 hours

I already have plenty of time under my belt playing this game.

I had a bias against the fact it would be fun and was pleasantly surprised so perhaps my expectations were set too low.

However; I do enjoy faster gameplay type of games so would explain why increasing the speed for me at least made it more enjoyable.

I had been using the spear + long sword build with the warrior shield with focusing on strength, dexterity and endurance.

I used the speed up to help me grind for souls and humanity.

My old post on the subject

I made a post about the speed of the game pace and how it affects the fun factor and the flow of the game; with speeding up the game didn't ruin the flow factor, this means games must have a flexible space for speed in terms of fun and less rigid for those rules.

Meaning there is a goldilocks zone, not an outright hard number.

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