Experience for yourself:
1. Go get ClipReader
here.
2. Add the launch option -useclipboard (or -useclipboardsound which will make a sound anytime anything new is copied to the clipboard, which you don't really want with ClipReader).
3. Run the game.
There were hella articles about this stuff back when I did it.
Souls games aren't really hard insomuch as they're different.
Nope, they're basically standard for beat-em-ups.
Here is a very-difficult-to-read article wherein the author goes through what he likes about Souls and Bloodborne by reinventing terms for things that fighting games have had terms for forever:
http://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/240839/Bloodborne_You_are_the_experience_points.php
The joy that a person gets from a souls game is from acclimating to those different systems and learning commitment.
While Indivisible, on the otherhand, would really be more about optimization of attack cycles. Not everyone can really do that, or feel satisfaction from that.
Er? You don't have to optimize nothin' to play or enjoy Indivisible. Plenty of people told me, "When I finally learned blocking against the boss, that was when everything really clicked and the prototype became a ton of fun."
In both games, the point is that the player improves, rather than that the game improves the player character and the player themselves doesn't get much better.
And really, you can fine tune the difficulty all you want, someone somewhere is gonna want to get invested in the world and experience it themselves but their experience is going to be hampered by the fact that they just can't understand the combat.
Or maybe the platforming, or maybe the exploration. Or maybe the fact that they understand but don't LIKE the combat, which is what happened to me with the Souls games.
I think you're hung up on something dumb, honestly. Tons of people quit Super Metroid after getting to Norfair the first time and getting lost. (Or even after getting Bombs and not figuring out what to do...but that's a different level.) There's no way to predict what a person's tolerance level will be. For any given thing that has player interactivity, someone somewhere is going to want it removed so they can "just do the other things".
Instead, I have to make the decision of, what am I comfortable forcing players to learn vs what can they skip?
Example -
the wall of spikes section in Doppler 2 of Megaman X3. The argument can be made that that section is too hard for most bad-to-intermediate players, and should not be critical path. In that vein, if you needed to use something in Indivisible to scale a wall of spikes - that wouldn't kill you, but they'd knock you down to the bottom - the argument could be made that people who don't care should be allowed to skip it if they wanted, if they spend more than say 15 minutes on it and can't be arsed to continue.
I might not necessarily agree, but I just wanted to point out that it's not strictly combat that one has to consider.
That's why I think something like UNIEL's auto-combo would be useful. Hell, think of it as a fighting-game. You give them the auto-combo and that takes away the tedium and difficulty of combos but they still get to learn and enjoy the neutral game themselves.
The prototype has that, though, it's called "mash buttons". You're still gonna die without blocking. Even with auto-combo in UNieL, you still have to defend. It was the neutral game that people didn't understand. :^P
Remember, the goal of this particular discussion was: If someone were really just going to watch a Let's Play, what can we do in the game to get them to buy and play it themselves, instead? The answer to THAT is, remove as much of the gameplay as possible. Again, I may not necessarily agree, but it's a good discussion to have.
