Uploaded April 2019 | Updated September 2026, 3 weeks ago
How Sekiro's Difficulty Is Designed
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This fatigues the brain but unfortunately, there’s no alarm for the tired brain. Especially when the body ignores it because it is high on adrenaline. Instead what happens is the player keeps playing and the fire keeps growing until the factory has burned to the ground.
I believe the difficulty is in our minds. The weakness is decision fatigue.
First, let’s start with purpose of this difficulty. What is the purpose of Sekiro? Let’s find out what Miyazaki has to say about this.
“Well, there were of course several moments where I had to stop things and take a step back and consider the difficulty, but it’s not necessarily that I say ‘oh, this is too difficult,’ but instead the term I usually use is ‘unreasonable.’ So, that’s the term I tend to use when I have these conversations with the development team.”
Miyazaki wants difficulty to be a part of his games, but he seems very concerned about the difficulty being reasonable. That got me thinking, is Sekiro a reasonably difficult game, or are we becoming used to easy games?
While playing Sekiro, and dying time and time again to bosses that I swore I blocked, and struggling with a camera that would break at the absolute worst times.
COMPILATION OF CAMERA BREAK MOMENTS
I decided to do some digging into frame rates, reaction times, and the various types of input lag, to see if I could find out why I struggled so much that my shipping floor was always on fire.
How Sekiro's Difficulty Is Designed
Second Channel: youtube.com/user/pfassett
Patreon patreon.com/stratedgy
Twitter twitter.com/pfassett
Discord discord.gg/ts7JWHa
This fatigues the brain but unfortunately, there’s no alarm for the tired brain. Especially when the body ignores it because it is high on adrenaline. Instead what happens is the player keeps playing and the fire keeps growing until the factory has burned to the ground.
I believe the difficulty is in our minds. The weakness is decision fatigue.
First, let’s start with purpose of this difficulty. What is the purpose of Sekiro? Let’s find out what Miyazaki has to say about this.
“Well, there were of course several moments where I had to stop things and take a step back and consider the difficulty, but it’s not necessarily that I say ‘oh, this is too difficult,’ but instead the term I usually use is ‘unreasonable.’ So, that’s the term I tend to use when I have these conversations with the development team.”
Miyazaki wants difficulty to be a part of his games, but he seems very concerned about the difficulty being reasonable. That got me thinking, is Sekiro a reasonably difficult game, or are we becoming used to easy games?
While playing Sekiro, and dying time and time again to bosses that I swore I blocked, and struggling with a camera that would break at the absolute worst times.
COMPILATION OF CAMERA BREAK MOMENTS
I decided to do some digging into frame rates, reaction times, and the various types of input lag, to see if I could find out why I struggled so much that my shipping floor was always on fire.
