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I think Kojima gets it. For a lot of players, esp. on the more cinematic games, the story is the main driver and the action is how it progresses. The games I’ve played that were ordeals are often the ones I’ve given up on. It’s the ones you can start on story mode with, enjoy the narrative and then re-play at the harder levels that I’ve stuck with.
I’ll keep saying it: I already have a job. I want to play a game to unwind.
Implementing a wide gamut of difficulty settings is also an accessibility feature, and allows people with certain physical or mental challenges the opportunity to enjoy your game firsthand. Why would you want to deny your audience this opportunity?
I mean, presumably because it’d compromise their vision for the game or some such? Some games use gameplay as part of the storytelling, so nontrivial difficulty swttings would compromise the story being told (for example if the game wants you to experience a gruelling trek through a hostile area). Now that doesn’t mean a story mode or similar is bad, but there are reasons to consider for a game dev to consider such settings incompatible with their game. Also in a game with more complex mechanics difficulty would be more complicated than player and enemy stats, and a dev might simply consider implementing satisfactory difficulty settings not a good use of their time.
Sounds like a skill issue.
How can it compromise their vision if their vision is still intact with a “normal” difficulty?
One of the big inspirations for Dark Souls was the manga Berserk. A man in an impossibly difficult position fighting against demi gods and the many monsters in that universe. You don’t see how a “normal” difficulty would destroy that vision?
The current difficulty of the game would be the “normal” ya dingus.
How To Miss the Point Completely.
Sure…
I meant that the story/easy mode wouldn’t conform with their vision. To expand on my example, if your game is portraying a grueling trek through a swamp where enemies abound and rest is scarce, the struggle would be an inalienable part of the experience; removing the struggle would fundamentally alter the story being told through the game. It’s not about their vision being intact or not; it’s about not wanting to intentionally make an inferior version of their art.
Then they label the intended difficulty with “recommended” and say that will give the best experience and that if you choose a difficulty higher or lower you might impede the intention of it.
I really don’t see the problem with having options.
Like I love the Kingdom Hearts series and was able to play it and fall in love with them as a kid on normal and sometimes beginner difficulty. As an adult I play critical because it makes me engage with all of the mechanics of the game. But I would have unlikely got to the point of being able to play at that level if I couldn’t work my way up through Normal > Proud > Critical.
The same admiration you have to grinding on a single playthrough to overcome an intended challenge can still be obtained through multiple playthroughs of increasing difficulty.
Then they label the intended difficulty with “recommended” and say that will give the best experience and that if you choose a difficulty higher or lower you might impede the intention of it.
You’re missing the point, which is weird because I explicitly stated it. To repeat, an artist might not want to create an inferior version of their art, irrespective of the utility of doing so. Art is an egotistical affair.
I really don’t see the problem with having options.
Options can make sense in some games but not in others; a developer deciding not to include them has likely either figured they wouldn’t work with the game’s structure, wouldn’t be a good use of their time or both. Difficulty options are simply not a one size fits all solution, for the same reason it wouldn’t make sense to demand all painters make colorblind-friendly versions of their paintings.
You don’t have to play difficult games. Not everything has to cater to a wide audience. Most of today’s re-boots and sequals were from stories that catered to a niche audience only to lose its appeal by going too mainstream…
Adding a difficulty slider is easy, doesn’t take much time, doesn’t change much about the experience, and allows more people to enjoy your media.
So leaving it out is lazy game development.
Niche audiences is fine, gatekeeping isn’t.
Adding a difficulty slider is easy
[CITATION NEEDED]
It seems pretty clear you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about from a game development standpoint. Difficulty is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay and you can’t just add multiple versions of that trivially. Even Bethesda’s classic “bump up the health” stuff isn’t a trivial thing to implement. Just come on with this.Depends on how it’s implemented. Just give the player more/unlimited HP or armour would be easy.
“Game designers should include cheats” is a take
All of them did before, so why not?
Yes
And should be the bare minimum of a game
Let’s take Elden Ring as an example: how do you scale poise? Is the player harder to stagger? Are enemies easier to stagger? How about status effects? Can you trigger hemorrhage with less hits on low difficulty? Dodge frames? Parry timing?
That’s just off the top head, there’s tons more mechanics I’ve never even touched in there.
Combat systems (which is 95% of what difficulty affects) can get so much more complicated than just HP/Armor. And that makes scaling more them just percentages of damage in/damage out.
I’m not saying it can’t be done. But it’s a gross injustice to blame lazy devs for not implementating a system that probably takes weeks if not months to create and balance.
Sure, a complex difficulty system that the user can tweak is nicer to have. But making the player take more hits to kill is pretty simple and could be argued as an accessibility feature.
My citation is myself as amateur game developer.
Game design is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay. Difficulty just plays around with the variables that you already have made for said game design.
Do you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?
It is balancing at most.
Sir you must be a very niche or inexperienced game developer because there is more than tuning variables to impact difficulty especially from genre to genre and game to game. Level design alone for platformer’s can introduce degrees of difficulties. Puzzle games’ difficulties revolve entirely around the puzzle design. You can’t adjust a variable and tune that. These are just two of countless examples.
Game design is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay.
Been a while since I’ve seen a good old fashioned tautology. Stop trying to be disingenuous, ‘difficulty’ (or if you prefer, ‘challenge’) is the #1 factor in game design. You either should know this, because it’s patently obvious, or you should just stop talking about this subject like you have any idea what you’re talking about.
Do you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?
Strawman me harder, zaddy!
No, they don’t redesign a game for every difficulty - that’s absurd. But it does have a huge impact on every aspect of gameplay, and like I said, it’s far far from trivial to alter the abstract concept which defines things like the core gameplay loop.My citation is myself
Yeah… Okay.
I see you have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you think it’s a simple as reducing a health bar? Because games that do difficulty scaling like that are not fun at all and I would consider that lazy.
How can you be niche without a “gatekeeping” to some degree? Again, not every game or piece of media need to cater to everybody.
I designed games myself. It is very easy. Just switch around some variables.
Every game does it like that, whether it is HP, damage, enemy spawns, probability to take a specific action, … it is all just playing around with variables.
It is neither lazy nor not fun.
Did you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?
It is you that has no idea what you’re talking about.
I designed games myself
How do you do, fellow game designers.
it is all just playing around with variables
“All game design is just changing numbers” sure, and all programming is just manipulating two values over and over and over. But the difficult part isn’t changing the numbers, the difficult part is the mechanisms that define how those numbers interact with other numbers. “Magic Numbers” have a place in game design yes, but they are not by any stretch how those systems are defined. If your game was created like that, it cannot have been very good…
Straight up answer which yes, will sound confrontational, but it is made in a blustery manner to drive home the point: People who want games tuned to what they need in terms of difficulty are the same kind that go to a Vietnamese restaurant and complain that spaghetti or chicken nuggies aren’t on the menu. “Why would you deprive a paying customer food they’re willing to pay for??”
That’s what it comes down to. The game wasn’t made for you to unwind. It was made with intentional choices made for other people to play and feel the experience of surmounting challenge.
Difficulty is not simply one aspect of a game that can be adjusted with a slider. Difficulty is the confluence of many different gameplay aspects coming together. Sometimes, those systems allow for easy and discrete adjustment like with the old Doom games where settings can simply vary the enemies that spawn, the damage dealt, or the health and ammo from pickups.
The deliberate decisions and balance that make Dark Souls good also make it difficult, it’s not good simply because it is difficult. Take Blighttown for example, one of the most notoriously difficult areas of the game. It’s difficult because the architecture is hostile and confusing, and encounters place immense pressure on the player through application of Toxic and confined or deliberately open spaces that allow you to dodge yourself off a cliff. How do you make that “easier”? There really isn’t an abundance of enemy placement throughout most of the game, it’s very deliberate. Equipment attribute numbers are all low to maintain a tight balance and even things like parry windows are affected by the specific shield you have equipped. Adding in additional difficulty options is a retuning of the entire game, which also retunes the formula. Look, I’m sorry if it sounds snobby but there’s just no other way to say that if you start making substitutions to a dish at a restaurant it’s not the same dish!
This insistence that all games MUST be for all people is what leads to the bland homogeneity of modern game design. Dark Souls comes from the rich legacy of dungeon crawlers like King’s Field before it and those games are notoriously oppressive and difficult, it’s why people like myself love them. Everyone attributes poison swamps to Miyazaki but go back to Eternal Ring or Shadow Tower: Abyss in the early 00’s before his involvement and you’ll find mandatory poison damage areas there as well. It’s a staple of the genre. Heck, play Megami Tensei (no, not Shin Megami Tensei, MEGAMI TENSEI from the NES) and there’s a whole section of mandatory fire damage that you can’t negate until you’re already 4/5 of the way through it.
I also find the accessibility angle disingenuous and a little insulting even. All props to devs that add difficulty to their game as a means of accessibility when they are able to or want to, but it should not be necessary. This also diminishes real accessibility options like colorblind modes, reading assistance modes, keybinding modes, etc. I do not appreciate that.
Everyone thinks they’re a critic because they don’t like a game or certain things about a game and that it would be better if it catered to them, but difficulty is already highly subjective to begin with and insisting that devs find ways to foresee and cater to all possible permutations is untenable.
If you don’t like the game: fine. If you want to levy valid criticisms about the game in your opinion: fine. But this insistence that the developers are being foolish for creating a game to their vision and not yours is the actual thing cheapening it as art.
And insisting games can only be for “you” is just as - if not more problematic.
Why are you pushing to deprive people of challenging games where they know everyone playing it is playing on the same level field? Even if it’s single player, a lot of games are a social experience.
Your point seems to be like not making an easy mode is being evil, yet you denounce players that specifically want games like that. It boggles my mind, there’s plenty games with all the freaking sliders you want, let us have our games.
Why would you want to denounce your audience this opportunity?
Yeah, that exactly, people who dislike hard games are not the audience of hard games and it’s weird for you to take issue with that. Full disclosure, I tend to cheese the fuck out of hard games with the tools they give me, I like to find the way to make the game “easy as fuck” via tools in the game instead of a slider, it creates the illusion that I’m smart and I like that.
I enjoyed expedition 33 and cyberpunk but they are a different experience than dark souls, no rest for the wicked, path of exile, last epoch… Sorry for the long post.
How does someone beating a game on “story” mode reduce your enjoyment of beating it on “nightmare”? I don’t get it. We can have both in the same game; isn’t that just better?
(Assuming we’re talking about single player, obv.)
For some games, where hardship and strife is a genuine core element of the creative vision, a single level of difficulty doesn’t just create a striking apprehension of the genuineness of that hardship, it also allows the developer to tune that difficulty with great care, further pushing that choice to serve the intended experience.
The game is only “just better” with difficulty options if you have implicitly accepted the idea that you should be able to complete any game you buy. If you don’t feel that way about, say, books you purchase, please investigate that feeling.
For some games, where hardship and strife is a genuine core element of the creative vision, a single level of difficulty doesn’t just create a striking apprehension of the genuineness of that hardship, it also allows the developer to tune that difficulty with great care, further pushing that choice to serve the intended experience.
This is all a very flimsy excuse for annoying gate keeping.
Pretending that difficulty tuning has to suffer if there is more than one difficulty is absurdly nonsensical.
Of all the parts of a game that take significant effort, this is not one.
Studios literally already tune their games for a specific difficulty firstly usually, and tune up or down from there.
You are just imagining that magically one difficulty means higher quality difficulty.
The game is only “just better” with difficulty options if you have implicitly accepted the idea that you should be able to complete any game you buy. If you don’t feel that way about, say, books you purchase, please investigate that feeling.
This is such an absurd prick opinion that makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
Who in the fuck buys any media they don’t intend on being able to finish. What???
You think people are buying books they think they’ll want to stop reading half way? Movies they’ll want to walk out of?
How did you get so deluded you even thought you were making a cogent argument here.
Jesus Christ.
We can have both in the same game; isn’t that just better?
This is the crux of the problem right here: it assumes that adding in difficulty adjustments is zero cost for the dev and can be done without affecting the overall game feel and I insist that that is a wildly incorrect assumption. This isn’t about other people playing the game on “easy mode” reducing my enjoyment of the game, it’s about adjusting the perfect balance and vision of the game reducing the enjoyment for everyone overall.
Difficulty can be, but is not always a discrete series of elements that can just be adjusted on sliders. Difficulty is a derivative attribute of other gameplay elements that give rise to it. Adjusting the difficulty as a derivative element can negatively flow backwards into poor adjustments to the game design if not done properly. Adjustments to the game design that allow for easier control and flow into the derivative attribute of difficulty may undermine the overall vision? Does that make sense?
Given an old school game like Ninja Gaiden on the NES it’s easy to think of how difficulty modes could be implemented by simply adjusting damage values, hit point values, life count, etc. But something like Dark Souls derives its difficulty from item balance, level architecture, encounter design, world puzzles. Rebalancing all of that for one or several difficulty modes is non-trivial! Furthermore, anyone who has played any of the Soulslikes can tell you that no playthrough is the same. One build may breeze through an area because they have specific strengths while other builds may struggle. How do you balance around all builds on multiple axes of gameplay elements?
A lot of people agree that Dark Souls is perfect (or near so) as it is and exactly the kind of thing we want while another group of people says, “I hate this thing and it’s not to my liking but by changing it I could maybe hate it a little less.” Think of it like the audio of a song being too loud and rather than properly adjust the overall range to preserve the entire tune you simply clip the highs and lows. It’s not a good song anymore … for anyone.
Gamers have a hard time properly articulating their critiques and I absolutely abhor the “git gud” mentality, but taken in the most positive light I can, I believe what most of them really mean isn’t just simply practice or skill up. It’s to learn to meet the game where it’s at. And if you still don’t like it, it’s not a game for you.
and I insist that that is a wildly incorrect assumption.
Based on nothing but your gatekeeping feelings.
Gamers have a hard time properly articulating their critiques and I absolutely abhor the “git gud” mentality,
No you don’t, thats literally just one of the excuses you use here for your gatekeeping.
. And if you still don’t like it, it’s not a game for you.
They are absolutely allowed to criticize a game that you believe isnt for them. They’re allowed to review it poorly if they’ve bought it, and they’re allowed to shit on it for not being to their liking just as you’re allowed to praise it.
Based on nothing but your gatekeeping feelings.
Based on the detailed arguments of the entire post you just replied to without responding to any of those points.
No you don’t, thats literally just one of the excuses you use here for your gatekeeping.
This is not gatekeeping. It is explaining why I like the game as it is and implore others to experience and enjoy the game where it wants you to be.
They are absolutely allowed to criticize a game that you believe isnt for them.
For fuck’s sake, yes! Everyone is allowed to criticize but everyone in this thread is trying to “fix” the game and demand the developers do things to cater to them that they have directly stated they do not or have no intention of doing and somehow we’re the selfish ones here?!
Look, I can review a Barbie game, but I’m going to hate it because I’m am must in no way the intended audience. Should the developer cater to my sensibilities until it becomes a game I want to play? The intended audience of any specific Souslike game or other difficult game is a lot blurrier because it could be anyone from any demographic.
If you think the game is bad, say the game is BAD. Say YOU hate it! Don’t make arguments about how the game should be when other people love it the way it is. Sit with your opinion and recognize it for what it is. Your opinion.
Based on the detailed arguments of the entire post you just replied to without responding to any of those points.
They were not detailed arguments at all. You just “feel” like game difficulty has to be this magic thing that can’t possibly have settings without compromising your dream experience. You have no evidence for this. You just want it to be true to justify the gatekeeping.
This is not gatekeeping. It is explaining why I like the game as it is and implore others to experience and enjoy the game where it wants you to be.
Using fancy verbal diarrhea to say exactly the same thing is not convincing.
You are absolutely gatekeeping as you want games not to have options because you think people should play the game how you want to play games.
For fuck’s sake, yes! Everyone is allowed to criticize but everyone in this thread is trying to “fix” the game and demand the developers do things to cater to them that they have directly stated they do not or have no intention of doing and somehow we’re the selfish ones here?!
You absolutely are the selfish ones here. I mean look at that ridiculously bad faith summary of the comments here.
People are 100% reasonable and right to complain about games doing things they don’t like here, on a forum for discussing games.
They aren’t at all unreasonable for doing so. This specific excerpt from you is such nonsensical double speak, where you start by saying yes people can criticize, but finish by calling people selfish for not liking aspects you like.
Im sure youll try to weasel around that being what you’ve done, but thats what it is.
Look, I can review a Barbie game, but I’m going to hate it because I’m am must in no way the intended audience.
This is a bs weasel though, because many of the people are the intended audiences. These arent crazy mismatches, these are developers being stubborn and stuck up in bougie, high artsy, self important ways that a great deal of their playerbases don’t appreciate.
From what you’re suggesting, you basically think all the games you like should get about half the sales numbers they are getting because anyone who doesn’t like any noteworthy aspect of the game clearly just isnt the intended audience and shouldn’t have bought it.
Its a silly, childish black and white view solely there so you can continue to be angry at people for being critical about the aspects of a game you gatekeep around.
Don’t make arguments about how the game should be when other people love it the way it is.
Why? This is you pretending to be for open conversation but not at all being… This is the gatekeepy bullshit I am talking about.
Adding difficulty options does not cheapen the game, it widens its appeal and makes games far more fun for a larger amount of people without subtracting from the experience for others.
For instance, lets say you have a game that has painful backtracking that a large number of people complain about. Who does it harm to have a setting to skip the painful backtracking? Fucking nobody.
You can’t argue even for a second that this ruins the experience for those that say they do like the painful backtracking as this by no means would take away from their experiences, yet you would argue that people shouldn’t complain or ask that developers include that because you want to gatekeep experiences.
Sit with your opinion and recognize it for what it is. Your opinion.
This is a bullshit way of you insisting your (shitty) opinion is objective (where you think people shouldn’t complain about things you like) while pretending people stating their opinions are somehow doing exactly what you’re actually doing.
Insufferable.
Mastering a game and falling into a good flow is unwinding for me. Something easy doesn’t release any tension nor give me accomplishment-dopamine.
And not everything needs to be made for the widest possible audience.
Yes, that is what higher difficulties are for. Why does that preclude lower difficulties?
With difficulty options you will still get that, in fact you may get it better. Maybe for a specific game the difficulty needs to be lower or even higher for you to find that sweet spot.
If difficulty is just hit points, higher difficulties are not really enjoyable. Adjusting hit points, items, weapon damage, etc. together to achieve good flow on every difficulty is not an easy task.
They don’t have to go all out. Shitty easier/harder difficulties that just multiply or divide values in a basic manner is better than nothing at all.
Devs should absolutely just focus on the difficulty specific experience they planned but nothing is stopping them from doing the bare minimum. And if you have good coding practices, it’s easy as fuck to implement with the difficulty menu itself likely to be the hardest part to implement after the fact.
I’ll keep saying it: I already have a job. I want to play a game to unwind.
This is not a universal response. Some people like difficult games for many reasons. Overcoming a challenge can give me a taste of triumph absent from my day job.
Implementing a wide gamut of difficulty settings is also an accessibility feature, and allows people with certain physical or mental challenges the opportunity to enjoy your game firsthand. Why would you want to deny your audience this opportunity?
Sure, maybe, but the devil is in the details.
I suppose it’s not the game maker’s responsibility to stop people from ruining their own experiences. I’m pretty confident that some people would just easy-mode through dark souls and have a vastly diminished experience. “I don’t see the big deal. It’s just an action game”, they might say, because easy mode gave unlimited healing and no monster respawn. The difficulty (which is vastly overstated) is part of what makes it work. People remember Blight Town and Sen’s Fortress because of the ordeal. I can’t remember a single dungeon from Skyrim.
Furthermore, meta game options found in menus is not the only way to do difficulty options. Elden Ring, for example, is very generous with spirit summons.
No one is asking devs to remove hard mode. They are asking them to include an easy mode for people who can’t deal with hard mode. People with physical or mental barriers, people who don’t have time, or really any reason.
This is no different than inclusivity.
YOU might not remember anything that wasn’t challenging but that doesn’t mean it’s like that for others. I remember everything from Skyrim. I love Skyrim. I had fun with it so I remember it.
I don’t remember much from Elden ring cus I never made it. I struggled at it and couldn’t her anywhere.
I can back years later and cheated on a bit more health and more health potions. It was challenging still but I could at least experience the rest of the game.
Gate keeping sucks. Let everyone in.
Elden ring opened the gate so wide that we got newcomers trashing on some gameplay features which have been a staples of those games since from software started making them. At some point gatekeeping ensure that you don’t alienate the players who played all your games and played a big part on your success. Cause the wider you want to open the gate and the more you have to move away from your vision. Imo not all games are meant for everyone and that’s fine.
I can back years later and cheated on a bit more health and more health potions. It was challenging still but I could at least experience the rest of the game.
See, here’s the thing about Elden Ring (especially compared to older FromSoft games imo), you can do this right in the game. A boss kicking your ass? Walk away, go somewhere else and come back when you’ve leveled up more, maybe gotten some extra flasks for healing or upgraded your armor and weapons. Does Elden Ring do it well enough? That’s up for debate and I have some complaints in that department myself (the final boss of the DLC before the nerf is the only time that I’ve ever put down the controller and decided that beating a FromSoft boss simply wasn’t worth the effort - especially after looking at the wiki and seeing one attack that needs a frame perfect dodge to avoid being hit and another where they straight up said “we don’t know how you’re supposed to dodge this attack”), but it is built right into the game.
But after at a certain point, accessibility comes at compromising design integrity. Every piece of media doesn’t have to cater to everyone. I don’t see people complaining about Andy Warhol gatekeeping because colorblind people can’t see all his paintings. Or that Ozzy Osbourne didn’t make enough country music songs. But with games, it’s a different story. People complain constantly about games not catering to everybody. Bennett Foddy made an entire game to talk about this. It’s called Getting Over It, and it’s considered one of the hardest games of all time. If you’ve never seen it, I highly suggest reading his monologue at least, as I think it’s very relevant to any conversation about game difficulty, especially Souls games which are the most frequent subject of this discussion.
This game is an homage to a free game that came out in 2002, titled ‘Sexy Hiking.’ The author of the game was Jazzuo, a mysterious Czech designer who was known at the time as the father of B-games. B-games are rough assemblages of found objects. Designers slap them together very quickly and freely, and they’re often too rough and unfriendly to gain much of a following. They’re built more for the joy of building them than as polished products.
In a certain way, Sexy Hiking is the perfect embodiment of a B-game. It’s built almost entirely out of found and recycled parts, and it’s one of the most unusual and unfriendly games of its time. In it, your task is simply to drag yourself up a mountain with a hammer. The act of climbing, in the digital world or in real life, has certain essential properties that give the game it’s flavor. No amount of forward progress is guaranteed; some cliffs are too sheer, or too slippery. And the player is constantly, unremittingly, in danger of falling and losing everything.
Anyway, when you start Sexy Hiking, you’re standing next to a dead tree, which blocks the way to the entire rest of the game. It might take you an hour to get over that tree. A lot of people never got past it. You prod and poke at it, exploring the limits of your reach and strength, trying to find a way up. And there’s a sense of truth in that lack of compromise. Most obstacles in videogames are fake; you can be completely confident in your ability to get through them, once you have the correct method or the correct equipment, or just by spending enough time. In that sense, every pixelated obstacle in Sexy Hiking is real.
The obstacles in Sexy Hiking are unyielding, and that makes the game uniquely frustrating. But I’m not sure Jazzuo intended to make a frustrating game - the frustration is just essential to the act of climbing, and it’s authentic to the process of building a game about climbing. A funny thing happened to me as I was building this mountain: I’d have an idea for a new obstacle, and I’d build it, test it, and it would usually turn out to be unreasonably hard. But I couldn’t bring myself to make it easier. It already felt like my inability to get past the new obstacle was my fault, as a player, rather than as the builder. Imaginary mountains build themselves from our efforts to climb them, and it’s our repeated attempts to reach the summit that turns those mountains into something real.
When you’re building a video game world, you’re building with ideas, and that can be like working with quick-set cement. You mold your ideas into a certain shape that can be played with, and in the process of playing with them, they begin to harden and set until they are immutable, like rock. At that point, you can’t change the world. Not without breaking it into pieces and starting fresh with new ideas.
One of the things people love about Souls games is the challenge of it - not difficulty, as difficulty for the sake of difficulty is bad design (see my complaints above), but the challenge of learning how a boss moves like you’d learn the rhythm to a dance or a song. You’ll get pushback because Souls games cater to a specific audience who crave that kind of struggle. The story, music, and world of FromSoft games are great, but these gamers feel that without the obstacles to overcome, the games would be missing a core component of what makes them great, and that by removing it you would cheapen the experience for yourself. Like wanting to play a city builder but you don’t want to have to place any roads. At that point, why not just watch a playthrough on YouTube?
For years now, people have been predicting that games would soon be made out of prefabricated objects, bought in a store and assembled into a world. And for the most part that hasn’t happened, because the objects in the store are trash. I don’t mean that they look bad or that they’re badly made, although a lot of them are - I mean that they’re trash in the way that food becomes trash as soon as you put it in a sink. Things are made to be consumed and used in a certain context, and once the moment is gone, they transform into garbage. In the context of technology, those moments pass by in seconds.
Over time, we’ve poured more and more refuse into this vast digital landfill that we call the internet. It now vastly outnumbers and outweighs the things that are fresh, untainted and unused. When everything around us is cultural trash, trash becomes the new medium, the lingua France of tue digital age. You could build culture out of trash, but only trash culture. B-games, B-movies, B-music, B-philosophy.
Maybe this is what digital culture is. A monstrous mountain of trash, the ash heap of creativity’s fountain. A landfill of everything we’ve ever thought of in it, grand, infinite, and unsorted.
…
Everything’s fresh for about six seconds, until some newer thing beckons and we hit refresh. And there’s years of persevering disappearing into the pile, out of style, out of sight.
In this context, it’s tempting to make friendly content that’s gentle, that lets you churn through it but not earn it. Why make something demanding, if it’s just gonna get piled up in the landfill, filed with the bland things?
When games were new, they wanted a lot from you. Daunting you, taunting you, resetting and delaying you. Players played stoically. Now everyone’s turned off by that. They want to burn through it quickly, a quick fix for the fickle, some tricks for the clicks of the feckless. But that’s not you, you’re an acrobat. You could swallow a baseball bat.
Now I know, most likely you are watching this on YouTube or Twitch while some dude with 10 million views does it for you. Like a baby bird being fed chewed up food. And that’s culture too.
But on the off chance that you are playing this, what I’m saying is trash is disposable, but it doesn’t have to be approachable. What’s the feeling like? Are you stressed? I guess you don’t hate it if you got this far. Feeling frustrated, it’s underrated.
An orange, a sweet juicy fruit locked inside a bitter peel. That’s not how I feel about a challenge. I only want the bitterness. Its coffee, its grapefruit, its licorice.
It feels like we’re closer now. Composer and climber, designer and user. You could have refused but you didn’t. There was something hidden in you that chose to continue.
It means a lot to me that you’ve come this far, endured this much, every wisecrack, every insensitivity, every setback you’ve forgiven me is a kingly gift that you’ve given me.
Have you ever thought about who you are in this? Are you the man in the pot, Diogenes? Are you his hand? Are you the top of his hammer? I think not - where your hand moves, the hammer may not follow, nor the man, nor the man’s hand. In this, you are his WILL. His intent. His embodied resolve in his uphill ascent.
Now, you’ve conquered the ice cliffs, the platforms, the church, the rectory, the living room, the factory, the playground, and the construction site, the granite rocks, and the lakeside. You’ve learned to hike. There’s no way left to go but up, and in a moment, I’ll shut up, but let me say, I’m glad you came.
I dedicate this game to you, the one who came this far, I give it to you with all my love.
“If you try to please audiences, uncritically accepting their tastes, it can only mean that you have no respect for them” –Andrei Tarkovsky
I really don’t think that’s a productive use of “gatekeeping”.
Do you apply this to other mediums? There are books and movies that are difficult to follow, but no one demands that authors and publishers release a simpler edition. Video games seem to be an exception.
Accessibility like “let me remap the controls” or “give me subtitles” is a whole different beast from “let me be invulnerable”. Treating those as the same is strange to me.
I’m not particularly against difficulty options. I didn’t have the patience to finish Nine Sols without turning the difficulty down. I wouldnt have felt “gate kept” if I just had to put the game down without finishing it.
How is it not gatekeeping?
You’re saying some people shouldn’t get to play a game where difficulty options are an easy solution.
A book or a movie isn’t an equivalent comparison. Not too mention there ARE simplified versions of popular books or abridged versions and movie guides and so on anyway.
Almost all the time this is brought up it’s for single player games. Why do you care if I need a bit more health to get through it? How does that take anyone away from you? I assure you nothing will be lost by allowing people to play it with double the health, or without a arbitrary grinding mechanic that inflates the games length, or whatever really.
No one is asking for the subject matter to be dumbed down, or for the story to be shallow or transparent.
Why should someone not get to play through a game because they insisted their hand and can’t dodge anymore?
It’s not gatekeeping, in the same way that a painting not having sound isnt gatekeeping blind people
Difficulty options still allow you to play them at their intended difficulty. Letting someone else play the game easier doesn’t stop you from playing it at a higher difficulty. In fact with options you could make it even harder for yourself than you would’ve done otherwise and feel even more rewarded when overcoming it.
But how else do I prove how big and hard my peepee is?
A lot of hobbies like gardening, sports, chess require effort, why is it necessary for video games to be easy?
Forcing some challenge gets you to engage with more things rather than taking the easy way out. It’s like bungee jumping (I’d assume), sometimes a push is necessary to experience something new.
Some of my favourite moments were trying Fire Emblem Ironmans, which initially made me go “this is stupid, I’ll regret this, I should reload”, only to change to “this is peak”
Options don’t stop you from having those moments in fact they make it more possible for you to find the difficulty for those moments. For you and everyone else.
The problem is with artificially enforced barriers.
I’m not sure there’s an agreed upon definition of “artificial difficulty”. The whole game is artificial so I’m not sure what “natural difficulty” would be.
Many, many developers have figured this out already.
Can you share?
A list of every single game with difficulty settings? Or just one example, such as Death Stranding, which was explicitly referenced in the original post?
If the main difficulty is intentional, then it’s not an artifical barrier, the easy mode is an artificial easener. How easy is easy enough? Some people can’t beat Clair Obscur on the story mode (presumably by not doing side content) In case of gardening, it’d be getting someone to garden for you, and just chilling with the results.
Let’s plays/walkthroughs exists, and only lock you out of interactivity. And interactivity doesn’t mean much if every option beats the game.
Case in point, if I see some post-game superboss with lore behind it, I just look up the thing online.
My point is that it’s inherently artificial.
If you think that gameplay is just meaningless busywork in between cutscenes then sure.
But I am of the opinion that games are not movies just because they are on a screen. They are much closer to tactile or kinetic sculptures.
Because it’s their philosophy and they can do what they want. If the game is too difficult, then don’t play. Some of us enjoy difficult games.
Then crank up the difficulty setting. Why feel the need to exclude others?
You specifically should be excluded
You should go back to reddit
The place where you’re not allowed to upvote Luigi memes? Lol no thanks
Are you claiming the only saving grace of those games is the difficulty?
If not, then why not allow people to enjoy the other parts of the game?
Their philosophy sucks. They lose nothing by adding more options.
Exactly, games are art. I don’t go around telling artists not to make things I don’t enjoy. I just buy other art.
Then it should be perfectly valid to criticize poor art.
it is. but if the reason that you think something is poor is because you were not the target audience, you can come across as entitled and clueless. it is not like their games pretend to be easy games, it is clear from the start that that the challenge is part of the design
It’s like placing a statue at the top of a flight of stairs.
No it isn’t
Also Kojima:
“I want people to end up liking things they didn’t like when they first encountered it, because that’s where you really end up loving something.”
Easy games are fine. It can be a nice way to just plow through a good story. However, I’m absolute trash at games and beating Dark Souls was one of the best and most memorable gaming experiences I’ve ever had. (it took me well over 200 hrs because I am a garbage-person) Had the game been easier I don’t think it would have hit the same way.
That’s not to say every game has to be like that but it’s great when it works
I don’t think it would have hit the same way.
You don’t know, because there was no option. That is the point we are trying to make.
Doing Fire Emblem soft Ironmans (not reloading when a unit permadies) made me love the series even more, it went from “ughhhh do I really have to move on without this guy? This sucks, what if I’m underpowered later” to “I lost 40 people and died for the first time at the penultimate map, this is a beautiful, sorrowful story”.
I now let a unit or two die even when playing for the first time, because it basically adds your own personal death scenes to the story. I will always pay respects to wolf boy who died to make that one final push happen, or respect the axe bro who went through his Kratos arc with a dead wife, kid and second dead wife.
Playing Final Fantasy Tactics as a kid basically made me refuse to allow any units to ever permadie because it took so much goddamn time to level them up and develop the jobs, and the thought of having to hire a new unit at level 1 to replace them is enough to drive a child insane.
To this day, I just can’t deal with it.
Celeste is the perfect embodiment of that philosophy IMO. The whole story is an explicit metaphor for overcoming a great personal challenge. And the gameplay’s difficulty is what drives that point home and makes the game an all-time great.
I’ve seen a couple streamers with G4m3r Skillz breeze through Celeste, and the game didn’t leave them much of an impression. But it touches very deeply those who struggled through it because the struggle is the bond that ties the player to Madeline.
Other games it doesn’t really matter. Portal 2 is a great game even if the puzzles are quite easy, because the greatness lies in its writing, atmosphere and worldbuilding. There’s an Aperture miniseries just begging to be made - but a Dark Souls or Celeste cinematographic adaptation would miss the entire point.
I think he’s entirely right for the kind of game he usually makes.
I also think not having difficulty settings is the right approach for souls games, it would destroy the vision.
Different people are looking for different things. Sometimes, the same person is looking for different things. I play story games on difficulties I don’t struggle on, more gameplay-focused games I like making hard and struggling with them.
Those players aren’t forced to buy those games.
And you wouldn’t be forced to play on a lower difficulty
The Souls games are easy. They’re just easy in a way that makes you a part of the game/world. You don’t just click a button in the menu. You earn it by paying attention. The point is, every player comes out satisfied of having accomplished something. Either they directly defeated a challenge through brute force or they looked around and founds it’s weakness, or got stronger to overcome it. It makes it earned.
Sure, story games the story is maintained with an easier difficulty and that’s fine. However, games where the act of playing forms the story are made worse by this. I’m all for difficulty modes in games where it makes sense, but a lot of people would turn down the difficulty in a Souls game and end up with a boring experience, because they didn’t actually try to meet it at its level.
Just like paintings, there’s a place for slop that just looks pretty and things that engage you. If you go into a museum and complain that an artist challenged you, that’s on you, not them.
The Souls games are easy.
To you, maybe.
They’re specifically designed to have easy options for almost every fight. There are very few bosses where you actually need skill, and they’re mostly optional. If you’re paying attention, it’s normally pretty easy to find a pretty easy option to defeat most bosses. Sometimes the game tells you this, like jumping down on the head of the demon at the start of DS1. Usually it doesn’t directly, but there will be hints if you’re reading everything and looking at your environment.
You don’t have to just “git gud” and dodge everything while fighting. That’s an option, but not the only one. Most people hear “Souls games are hard” and they think this is the only option, and they don’t look for more. If this is you, then you were mislead. The community has ruined the game for so many people by acting like there’s a huge skill barrier that you need to overcome, instead of the reality where the game just wants you to pay attention to the world/lore.
Thank you for this post. It opened my mind to giving a souls game a try.
Sekiro was the one that made the genre click for me after trying and failing to get into DS and Bloodborne.
It is still my favorite game of all time, and now I really enjoy the other From Software games.
Sekiro
Sadly, not available for any of my devices. A reason to get myself an Xbox, I guess.
What devices do you have? It’s available on PC, and it looks like PS4 and Xbox One.
I do agree though, it’s probably the easiest to get into. The Shenobi tools are more explicit counters to certain enemy types, and exploration is fast and easy. It potentially has the highest skill level of any of the games, but that’s far from required, even for the optional bosses —only to show off or challenge runs.
God: … I’ll make a game … random spawns … one life … no instructions … no directions … open world … play as you want
And your game difficulty is RNG.
… and you happen to spawn during a period when a game wide PVP session is happening
Sounds sick
If you’ve never gotten it yet, get “Shattered Pixel Dungeon” on your phone. Completely free game. Most of what you speak of, and you’ll feel like you’ve really pulled some shit off after you beat it the first time.
If you beat it the first time.
My first win was around attempt number 45.
SPD is proof that I’m just bad at vidya. I’ve gotten to floor 10 once. There’s clearly come meta I am missing, but I’ve read strategy guides so I’m just kind of lost at this point.
It’s just fucking hard. All the random builds and bad guys. The best hint is to use small walls to your advantage and to sometimes run away and avoid creatures. After you die and die and die you start to learn how all the baddies move around. You can eventually get good. It took me 45 attempts to get my first win, but I had 10 more wins by attempt 70. I was hooked on that game hard for a while.
Ah, may I introduce you to No Man’s Sky permadeath mode?
And then there’s Yoko Taro, who instead opts for the emotional difficulty in his games
And then there’s Electronic Arts, who instead opts for technical difficulties.
Or financial difficulties
Pathologic 2 Devs
My true desire was for this town to never have a direction or goal marker, not even once. It’s intellectually offensive. Who do you have to be thrust a map marker under a free person’s nose, saying "Here is your goal. You’re too lazy and stupid to figure it out on your own, and I am not without mercy towards lesser minds, so I’ll do the work for you. Go there. Go and don’t forget to thank me for choosing your goal for you. Love, The Powers That Be.
Oh you died? Here’s a debuff. Oh you thought you could save scum to get around the debuff? Ha! That debuff is on all your saves.
Why? We’re Russian devs. Life is brutual and hard and so should this game.
You don’t know how hard you’re selling me on this game.
Get it. It’s an experience.
(Don’t bother with 1, the sequel is basically a remake)
Oh you tried to mess with my saves? This isn’t a battle you want to start, out come the VMs.
I wasn’t expecting this post to bring out this kind of animosity in people. Jesus fuckin’ christ.
Video games are not a public service, there is no such thing as a 100% universally enjoyed video game for a reason. It’s ok that there are different types of video games, folks, be them too hard or too easy for your tastes, it’s kind of stupid to throw these kinds of stones about it.
I mean, is every book supposed to be palatable to everyone? Are we all supposed to feel the exact same way about every piece of art? This is like being mad that Guardians of The Galaxy involved sci-fi and super heroes and wasn’t a WWII documentary because that’s what you’d have preferred to watch.
I tried Dark Souls, got my ass kicked, tried again, got my ass kicked again, went “huh, guess it’s not for me” and moved on with my life. I truly don’t get this mentality where people think they’re entitled to play a game that was clearly not designed for them.
Games, like movies, are easily consumed but difficult to create. As a result, everyone and their grandma can critique them and publish on the Internet which only further self-selects for the highly opinionated to do so.
But not all opinions are equal. You can be well studied in your field and generally intelligent, but if you don’t have a relevant background in the humanities and the sciences, you can have complex reasoning but without having the depth, the breadth, and the relevance in the analysis.
Case in point the first replier. The analogy is fine and the deductive reasoning is self-consistent, but they didn’t show the relevance to game design. (Ie. Why must the author make the text size bigger for people who can’t enjoy smaller text, and why must the same apply to games.)
That’s why gamers seem to be notorious for having takes that miss the trees for the forest.
(I am aware that I’m very much at risk of committing this very error with my post.)
Exactly. Not all opinions are equal. If you suck at games, you shouldn’t even get an opinion, you should get a different hobby.
I’m not trying to disagreeing with you. But that’s the thing, being “good” at a game isn’t among the most important qualifications for insightful analysis which is why gamers tend to make poor takes.
The important qualifications are experience with analysis and formal knowledge in the arts, humanities, and some of the sciences. The YouTuber Noah Caldwell-Gervais is a good example. The guy sucks ass at twitch mechanics (ie. playing games) but he’s extremely well-read and has extensive knowledge on many domains so he makes insightful analysis.
Miyazaki doesn’t even play his own games and probably sucks just as much ass at twitch mechanics but he’s able to consistently direct amazing games because of his extensive knowledge and experience apart from playing well.
Some books are written in smaller text than others. Some people have difficulties reading small text. Some people argue the enjoyment of such books is based on the small text. Others disagree and want to be able to experience the book with larger text.
Some texts are too esoteric or hard to understand. Some people argue that the enjoyment of such books is based on the obscure meaning of said books. Others are stupid and should get better at reading comprehension. Git gud, shitter.
This is the dumbest thing I’ve read today
Get a magnifying glass then.
If s game is too hard, get good at it. If you don’t want to do that, then the game isn’t made for you. You’re not entitled to anything
Dumbass - “easy” mode is the magnifying glass.
That would be more like a mod or trainer, which pretty much everyone agrees is completely fine. You can do whatever you want with your property.
Access to color blind mode, input changing, or speciallty is the magnifying glass/fony size change. Dumbing the text down to be more easily understood would be easy mode, dumbass.
Well said, nobody fucks about a book being written too complicated, they just roast readers who don’t understand it while they themself pretend that they understand, after reading interpretations.
Same with games that are hard in my opinion.
And there is a big difference between hard because designed hard, and hard because lazy programmed (stupid hitboxes, glitchy behaviour etc). But same goes for books: a book I would have written would not be hard to understand because it is designed like this, but because I am a confused neurodivergent/ADHS/autism who knows what guy writing my stuff all over the place with dump punctuation.
It may be a difficult debate between accessibility, experience and artistic vision. Though considering how many games are made every year, I think we can have difficult games with no easy mode. People who don’t enjoy them or can’t play them can simply play the thousands of other games.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for accessibility. During my time in the video game industry, I personally paid great attention to options for colorblind people. Unfortunately, pretty much everything else was outside my scope. But it doesn’t make any sense to potentially ruin the entire work just so 3 more people on the planet will play it.
If a game is frustrating to play, but I enjoy the story - I watch a playthrough. If a game contains elements that I don’t like - it’s probably not a game for me, so I move on to other games. If I had some disability that made it very hard or impossible to play some games - okay, fair enough, that would genuinely suck. But again, I’d move on to other games.
Of course, it’s possible to add detailed difficulty settings, so that everyone can customize their experience. Mostly a great solution, if the team has the time and resources to implement it well, which isn’t always the case. However, it may still interfere with the artistic vision of the developers.
Some movies can cause epileptic seizures due to some of their scenes. Should the authors throw their vision and ideas out the window, because some people cannot safely watch the movie? I’d say no, because that would kind of ruin the whole point of artistic expression. I think we need to be able to depict and express all kinds and forms of art, even if some groups will be unable to experience them.
Maybe some time in the future we’ll be able to solve all of this easily and reliably (e.g., some kind of neuralink for people with various conditions). But as of right now, it seems to me that this is practically a non-issue. The impact is incredibly limited, while proposed solutions are either costly, unrealistic or straight up counterintuitive.
Really well put. In general, I find it frustrating how many people use the word “acccessibility” as a means to argue no games like Dark Souls (intentionally having only 1 difficulty for a single intended experience) should ever exist. But to me that’s conflating disability-accessibility with a more literal “accessible to more people” type of accessibility. I’d argue “approachable” would be a better word for the latter.
People with motor skill issues or whatever else beat Dark Souls all the time. Heck, fully abled people are intentionally giving themselves equivalent experiences by beating it with dance pads and guitar or drum controllers or whatever else all the time. So the difficulty isn’t an accessibility issue, the game is actually pretty slow paced (you can make a decent argument that more recent From Soft titles speed things up to an unreasonable degree for some motor disabilities, but I’m talking about the OG here).
What I hear instead, most of the time, is some version of “I’m a dad, I don’t have hours to throw at a boss every night”. And my instinctive response, most of the time is simply… I just don’t think you like this game? Getting your ass beat and needing hours and dozens of deaths to learn a boss or beat an area is the intended experience, and you’re having it, whether you put those hours in 1 or 12 at a time. If you don’t enjoy that, that’s just fine, there are millions of great games that don’t force you into such a punishing experience. It’s a little bit like complaining a puzzle game has too many puzzles in the way of the platforming.
Anyway, my point being, I think centering the From Software “accessibility” conversation around difficulty options, something the devs have determined is a pillar of the game’s design that they won’t change, prevents us from having a proper conversation about accessibility, in terms of actual disability accessibility. I think there’s really cool conversations we should be having about how we can make attack animations more readable to a visually impaired player without compromising on difficulty, for example. None of the Souls games even have so much as a colourblind mode, and we should be putting pressure on From Soft to add something as trivial as that as the franchise explodes in popularity, but “dark souls accessibility” is an entirely unrelated conversation instead, which kinda drowns out any other.
I think there’s really cool conversations we should be having about how we can make attack animations more readable to a visually impaired player without compromising on difficulty, for example.
Good post, I agree with you and the above poster.
This brings to mind the parry system in Metroid Dread. Enemies flashed yellow before a parryable attack signalling you should hit the button at that moment. It’s possible and it works.
So then why don’t all games do this? Because Metroid Dread was designed from the beginning to support this system. In Souls games, parrying is not just a matter of timing on attacks, but if the attack can even be parried at all given the specific attack (not all can)/player stats/equipped items, 3D positioning of hitboxes for both the attack and the player’s defensive parry, as well as variable parry windows based on the specific shield or weapon equipped. Now take into account that Souls enemies often have multiple attacks each and this becomes a very significant amount of developer work. Not to mention that given all these factors, timing a button press to a parry flash may not always result in 100% success rate. Imagine how frustrating a system like this would be if even when you did everything “right”, the physical placement of hitboxes only resulted in an 80% success rate on any given parry. Would players not find this frustrating? The point I’m trying to make is how complex this system would actually be and how much work it would take to implement.
However, it may still interfere with the artistic vision of the developers.
I’m going to be honest here, I did not end up caring for Metroid Dread much. For a number of reasons I won’t go into here, but partly because of this parry system. Parry windows were clearly telegraphed, did huge amounts of damage often resulting in one hit kills AND they guaranteed to drop health/ammo pickups. With the risk/reward system practically non-existent you were so highly incentivized to use them that it made combat feel much more defensive. Rather than attack enemies, it was often more beneficial to approach them, bait out an attack, and punish.
Now I do take some responsibility for my actions here. It was my choice to begin playing the game this way. But I do also think there’s something to be said for design elements that train or at least encourage players to engage with them in certain ways. Difficulty options are not just game design decisions but also attempts to understand how individual players may engage with those decisions. Expecting developers to have the ability or even foresight to anticipate all these different interactions is an extremely high, if not unreasonable barrier.
But in the end, I simply say that Dread was not a game to my liking. I know there are a lot of people who absolutely love it. Just not a game for me.
Reading this thread has re-confirmed that gatekeepers are a blight on humanity.
I will cheat in your sacred games and you can’t stop me. I’ll make my own rules. What are you gonna do about it, break into my house and steal my computer?
If a game is particularly hard, I’ll use mods or cheats to make it easier. Gamers who sweat for difficulty can play it as hard as they want. I just want to experience the story, even if my play style goes against the creator’s vision.
This is all fine and good, it really as.
I hate to keep overextending the restaurant metaphor, but it’s the difference between demanding a world class chef be prepared to make a number of different substitutions on the spot to suit your individual tastes vs. taking the dish home in a doggy bag and then slathering it with ketchup.
It’s fine. There’s no law against it. It doesn’t hurt anyone else (assuming we’re not talking about multiplayer here). No one has to care. No one does. Cheating and mods are a great way for you as an individual to tailor a more personalized experience to your tastes with the tools you have available.
Yep. Fling Trainers usually. I pick one game a year and play it for 3 days, no way in hell am I going to get bogged down on grinding things. I’m there for the immersion, the gameplay, and the plot.
If grinding is the gameplay in the sense that it levels up your joystick skills, then fine I’ll sit and suffer (Souls / Knight). But if it’s grinding for items of all things, no thank you
I don’t think you’re getting the point here. If you buy a game you can do whatever you want with it. Same goes with developers, it’s their creation and they can do whatever they want with it. It doesn’t have to please everyone.
“it’s my cafe, my creation, and I don’t like disabled ramps. I just want to make good food and I don’t have to please everyone”
Seems a bit unfair to me
This is a very bad and damaging take and undermines real accessibility options in games.
You are conflating two different things. The game is the food and the difficulty is a nuanced flavor that results from the individual ingredients. You are arguing that the flavor of the dish or the way it is prepared should be changed for everyone to suit your tastes.
Accessibility ramps are structural and in no way related to the food. I in no way want to be seen as arguing against accessibility because I am a strong believer in it myself. But accessibility comes in the form of color blind modes, subtitles, ability to change or rebind controls. Actual structural issues to the game that allow you to engage with it as it has been designed.
I do not suppose I will get through to people that have already taken up this position, but I cannot allow it to go unchallenged. Difficulty IS NOT (*necessarily) accessibility.
If you want to dislike a game: fine. If you want to critique a game: fine. If you want to say, “I think this game is bad”: fine. But do not try to conflate your own distaste with the difficulty level as some accessibility issue.
For a game where difficulty is based on reaction time then it is accessibility. Your whole page of arguments is based on that ableist assumption and doesn’t hold up.
Food and cafe is just an extreme example, you don’t have to discredit the idea based on the specifics of a cafe. It was supposed to make you think about the problem from the perspective of someone who feels excluded which you didn’t do. You just used to to further your agenda with emotive language like “bad and damaging”. It’s a little bit pathetic actually when all people are asking for is a slider
A game isn’t a public service. There are many games where part of the experience is that everyone has to go through the same or similar difficulty and the learning curve involved in that. If that isn’t something that you can manage then you don’t have to play it.
If anything, demo versions should be more readily available so that you don’t end up buying something you can’t return.
Who decided that only things that are public services need to be accessible? Why is everyone latched onto that like it’s a given.
If your a dev and you have x hits to kill thing x and you don’t put in a tiny bit of extra effort to multiply that by a difficulty slider “because of art” then I’m going to say you’re a bit of a dick.
Games are barely art anyway. Most are just a toy that you play with for a bit to waste some time
That’s not what people are saying, but the entitled attitude here makes it seem as if games are a mandatory interaction.
If you are a game dev and you decide that part of the experience of your game is the difficulty, so be it. Art was never and isn’t something that pleases everyone. You can call them a dick but you don’t have to engage in what they produce.
That is such bullshit. There is such large variety of games out there that still give meaningful experiences to players that calling all of them “barely art” is just wrong.
For me in Cyberpunk, I hated the breach protocol, and hated how by the time you get the fancy gear, the game is done (never meeting at embers btw).
As a result, on my second playthrough I removed breech protocol completely and 10x’d experience. Was a much more fun experience.
I’m so appreciative of games where that is possible. Otherwise its just a slog for no reason in what is supposed to be an entertainment product.
I also like Atomfalls difficulty settings where you could really change a lot about how the game played.
I play Stellaris and Terra Invicta in easy modes basically, cuz I just enjoy nation building and the game mechanics. Tho Easy in Terra Invicta can still be a pain if you ignore certain things.
This was never the argument. Cheat all you want, no one cares.
There’s just a bunch of people in this topic that read these developer’s own words on their artistic takes and were like, “Wow, uh, wrong? Cater your games to me.”
I mean thats how all the people arguing against difficulty options sound.
People need to touch grass. Is your ego really so fragile that you beating a game on hard mode is diminished by someone beating it on easy mode?
The truth is there are really only a “few” games where the difficulty actually matters in that it’s a core part of the games experience, but plenty more games that don’t have difficulty modifiers or really basic ones where the difficulty has zero actual relation to the game.
People need to touch grass. Is your ego really so fragile that you beating a game on hard mode is diminished by someone beating it on easy mode?
No one, least of all me, has been arguing this point. It is not a valid point, I do not give it credit. It’s a straw man that keeps getting brought up repeatedly.
The truth is there are really only a “few” games where the difficulty actually matters in that it’s a core part of the games experience,
This is in fact what is being argued, extensively, yet for some reason you can’t see those arguments as valid. I’m out of breath on this topic, truly I am.
I have gone over extensively why adding a wide and nebulous range of difficulty options to cater to the very subjective notion of what difficulty even is to begin with is not free of development time or cost for the programmers when they are tuning every aspect of their game: movement, stat balancing, enemy placement, level design, attack patterns - to their specific vision. It’s just not.
Of course it’s possible, just like I could wake up and do a 5 mile run every morning but I simply don’t because I have neither the time nor energy to devote to that. Dark Souls was already notoriously rushed - looked into criticisms of the late game areas like the Demon Ruins and the dragon butts.
I like to relax when I play. My days of stressing out over games ended when I had stress in real life.
The director should have reasons for the difficulty of the game. Celeste is a Perfect example. It’s hard but it lets you learn and allows you to try again easily even if what you are doing is hard. Hard games that punish you and make you walk for 20-30 mins just so you can learn a few new moves the boss does can be incredibly frustrating. Many people who play these games eventually look at videos online to help after multiple tries because just “getting there” is extremely time consuming. A lot of games have normalized looking things up and that is disappointing as someone who would rather figure it out on my own. But wasting 30 mins to be killed in 2-3 hits from multiple stage bosses is not enjoyable IMHO.
One can think of it just like about a fastfood joint. Two lines of coordinates: food and service, or user experience and mechanics. We do play clunky old games for their plot or shallow timekillers for their gameplay. Striking the right balance that is fitting your core audience is the goal. There, Kodjima thinks about better service, toning down mechanics so that everyone can eat their burger, while Miyadzaki serves artisan sets knowing their inaccessibility is a part of the deal for their niche audience.
Something a lot of people forget is that looking stuff up is not something normalised recently, older games tended to have a freaking manual that explained most bosses and areas, it even gave hints!
I get that you would prefer that, lucky there’s plenty games for both of us.
There were also printed game magazines with hints, walkthroughs and such.
It’s okay to look things up.
I don’t think I’ve played a game with fairer difficulty options than Halo: CE. On the lowest difficulty, even your grandma with arthritis can beat it, and on the hardest it’s an actual challenge without making enemies infallibly accurate bullet sponges. But if you can’t do it that way, do it Michael Zaki’s way.
Try Nier Automata
You can install chips in your brain that automates gameplay features. Like getting your turret to shoot automatically, making you melee attack automatically when you are in range, dodge automatically, …
You can really customize your difficulty to the point that the game basically plays itself.
The only downside is that you miss out on using other cooler chip abilities.
Halo CE legendary was 100% an afterthought that Bungie threw a couple of multipliers in at the end because it makes like more than half of your potential loadout worthless lol.
It was still fun, but god damn was it borderline annoying like you’re playing a really unfair zombie survival game.
Just allow users to mod the game to whatever difficulty they want and don’t be dicks about it.
Devs get to stick to their original vision and gamers get to have whatever difficulty they actually want to make things fun for them.
That’s just having actual accessibility and difficulty settings, but with extra steps.
I appreciate the ability to mod games, but decent difficulty options really should be first-class citizens that the developers have put some thought into. Accessibility is important.
I had read some posts on Usenet back then with some players saying UV wasn’t as tough as they hoped it would be. (…) I thought “Oh really? Ok then. You’re all dead.” (…) It wasn’t meant to be fair, or even finishable. I can’t even get past E1M3 in nightmare. Any level with backtracking would be almost impossible.
- John Romero
There is a secret level in Doom II described in the biography Masters of Doom by David Kushner. It was made as a prank, where the boss had the face of one of the Johns and moved at 200% faster speed than the player. I’m not sure if this made it into the retail or shareware versions they shipped.
All game devs should be forced to play their own games all the way through.
Oftentimes, devs are practically the only person who can. Especially small hobbyist devs. They’ll spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours playing their own game as they build it and forget they have to then circle back and tune it for people who haven’t.
Like Mario Maker level design rules.
All games should have difficulty settings as fleshed out as Atomfall.
The idea that games should be a set difficulty with the set annoyances that game includes is stupid.
LIke I personally, would delete all minigames, fuck em, and have hard combat. Thats my preference.
I fucking hate creatives who believe super deeply they’ve created some masterpiece meant to be played one way.
Nah, difficulty settings would ruin From Software games imo. It really is genre, or even game, dependent
Lets say they keep everything as it is right now, like they literally have the games they already have and add some difficulty options like less annoying backtracking. How does this “ruin” your experience?
Every one of these arguments is based on the entirely made up idea that sacrifices must be made to achieve these improvements.
The difficulty is a key part of the developer’s vision for the game, and changing that compromises it.
It’s interesting you literally cant answer the question.
Its because there is no answer. The truth is its 100% about useless gatekeeping.
It’s not ‘useless’ gatekeeping. It’s literally the whole deal, you spend some time learning how to progress the game
You’re objectively wrong. I just wanted to make sure you understood that.
No one cares what “you” want, unless “you” perfectly describe the purchasing power of 100k potential customers.
FROMsoft doesn’t care if you play their game, which is great for me because I like their artistic vision unfettered by useless contrarianism.
Oh, and to answer the question you think is a gacha - I’d rather the team spend every second making the game they want to then to spare even one developers afternoon to add “difficulty settings” - that employee could have been doing something actually useful to the game and its target audience.
What question?
The only one posed in the question this spawns from??
Lets say they keep everything as it is right now, like they literally have the games they already have and add some difficulty options like less annoying backtracking. How does this “ruin” your experience?
Oh so literally the question that I just answered.
What makes you think every game should be for every person?
No, it absolutely isn’t a made up idea that allowing barnacles to glomp on to an experience so that they can feel included cheapens the whole experience.
I do not want McDonald’s Souls. I get that you’re fine with it, I’m not.
What makes you think every game should be for every person?
What makes you want to make such a clear strawman argument?
No, it absolutely isn’t a made up idea that allowing barnacles to glomp on to an experience so that they can feel included cheapens the whole experience.
I love that you literally cant answer the question because you know its immature gamer gate keeping. You just completely avoided it.
I’ll repeat:
Lets say they keep everything as it is right now, like they literally have the games they already have and add some difficulty options like less annoying backtracking. How does this “ruin” your experience?
Shrugs
Git gud
Edit: for a real answer, since the advent of video games there have been people like you claiming that they’re too hard. Video games are meant to be beaten. They are literally designed that way, just because you can’t seem to beat them doesn’t mean everyone should conform to you.
Seriously, go pick a different game. Thousands of games exist with difficulty sliders. Pick one and shut the fuck up about the ones that don’t.
for a real answer, since the advent of video games there have been people like you claiming that they’re too hard. Video games are meant to be beaten. They are literally designed that way, just because you can’t seem to beat them doesn’t mean everyone should conform to you.
This is not a real answer at all.
This is you first poisoning the well by insinuating that I’m bad at games firstly, and then pretending that these settings only have to do with hardness in 1 dimension. Its not remotely a good faith effort to answer.
Thats my preference.
Then play the games you prefer.
I don’t like romance movies. Can you guess how I solved that problem?
What a trite, immature, troll like response this is.
Not having good difficulty settings is not a genre. It’s a lacking.
This tired response of pretending any criticism of anything means a person “must clearly not be the target audience” is extremely thoughtless gatekeeping.
It’s such a bad argument on its face too, as if someone disliking a flaw in something means they clearly must haste the thing in its entirety. insufferable people.
I don’t know where all your hatred is coming from. My comment was a genuine suggestion to a problem you’re facing that worked for me. Do you need to be able to consume and experience everything there is? Personally, I don’t. If a game is not for me, then it’s not for me and I move on. It has never stroke me as ‘gatekeeping’.
Furthermore, what you’re expressing are neither criticism nor preferences. It’s just pure hate towards anything and anyone you don’t like, as displayed here:
I fucking hate creatives who believe super deeply they’ve created some masterpiece meant to be played one way.
Sure, ‘hate’ doesn’t have to be literal. I sometimes say it too, without meaning it literally. However, I’d argue that the second comment has clearly showed the intent and meaning behind the first one.
In this context, though, yes, you are obviously not the target audience and that is specifically your issue with it. You really are just being a crybaby about something not having a specialized programming element to allow you to customize the game to make it just right for your specific taste and play style preference.
Should every restaurant make sure to have everyone’s favorite food available even if it’s entirely antithetical to the intention of the menu?
In this context, though, yes, you are obviously not the target audience and that is specifically your issue with it.
It literally isnt at all. You know you’re wrong too and thats why this is a frustrating argument. You aren’t arguing with your real opinions here.
If you made your restaurant analogy honest, it would be like a restaraunt has peanuts sprinkled on a dessert you like, so you ask them not to sprinkle peanuts there, and some other patreons flip their tables and bark like dogs at the idea that you would dare ask them not to do that, acting as if it must mean you don’t like the dessert if you don’t get the peanuts.
You really are just being a crybaby about something not having a specialized programming element to allow you to customize the game to make it just right for your specific taste and play style preference.
This part is just childish.
No, it’s more like they told you no, they don’t do that here, and you flipped the table.
Jesus Christ go back to Reddit.
Difficulty is a way some devs express their vision - nearly anything by FROMsoft, for example.
Why would you want to limit their artistic expression to suit your needs? Just play something else. Or mod the difficulty down if it’s so important to you, but it’s not their job to make sure you, personally, enjoy the game, because that’s how you end up with mediocre catch all by-the-numbers fests like GTA.
Yeah and I’m pissed that expedition 33 isn’t a survival crafter.
See how ridiculous I sound?
I fucking hate that Apex Legends doesn’t have a “peaceful” difficulty. Can’t we all just get along?
You sound ridiculous because you’re making a cartoonishly bad faith argument where you pretend not having good difficulty options is a genre.
“Git gud or die” literally is a genre. It’s called soulslike.
Also “every game should have difficulty options” and “every game should be a survival crafter” are both fundamentally “every game should be what I like.”
