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?
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…
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.
deleted by creator
How can it compromise their vision if their vision is still intact with a “normal” difficulty?
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.
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.
Sure…
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 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?
You’re saying some people shouldn’t get to play a game where difficulty options are an easy solution.
They can play it (assuming they have the money to buy the software and hardware, but that’s a whole other accessibility problem). There’s no guarantee they’ll be able to 100% it. I don’t think it’s axiomatic that everyone should be able to 100% every game.
You’re right that it doesn’t really matter in single player games. I did once have an argument on this topic where the other person said they should be able to change the rules in multiplayer to suit their desires. They wanted more forgiving dodge windows, just for them, unilaterally. That can fuck off.
A book or a movie isn’t an equivalent comparison.
Why not?
Not too mention there ARE simplified versions of popular books or abridged versions and movie guides and so on anyway.
There are let’s plays and wikis for games.
No one is asking for the subject matter to be dumbed down, or for the story to be shallow or transparent.
In some cases, they are. It’s cliché now, but part of the story of dark souls is often cited repeatedly struggling against an uncaring, dying, world until you persevere. If you rip that out and make all the creatures docile, I don’t know if I would call it “dumbed down” but it would certainly be a substantial change. Sometimes the medium is the message. But, often, you are correct that it is not really the case.
Why should someone not get to play through a game because they insisted their hand and can’t dodge anymore?
No one’s arguing against accessibility for controls. I’m not even against well done difficulty options. (The Bethesda style “we just give the enemies more health and damage” is a poorly done difficulty slider, in my view). I just think “I cannot hear so I need subtitles” and “I just want to win on the first try” don’t belong together.
Though, introspecting a little, I think what’s going on is maybe ableism or something like it. I don’t actually believe some of the people who say “this game is too hard. I want an easy mode” are disabled. I read them as just half-assing it. Like someone who wants to play pro soccer but doesn’t want to actually get in shape so run, so they want a smaller field. And, as you say, it doesn’t really matter what someone does in a single player game on their own time, but for some reason it irritates me when someone’s like “I’m just as disabled as that blind guy” when they’re perfectly capable, they just haven’t practiced. Something about “I’ve spent an hour on this task and I haven’t mastered it, I’m disabled” sits wrong with me.
One of your problems is thinking people wanna play “pro football” when they just wanna play ‘football with the boys’ and you are basically saying “you can’t play here” when they show up to the field.
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
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?
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.
Disagree
Honestly don’t care. Because see the thing is, I get to enjoy these games while you gotta come online and whine about them. I wrote my post out of passion because I see something there worth valuing. You wrote your post to whine and tear something down you didn’t understand.
And insisting games can only be for “you” is just as - if not more problematic.
And insisting games can only be for “you” is just as - if not more problematic.
Again, no one has insisted this. The game is for those that enjoy it.
Running out of breath here.
Developer: I have made the game exactly as I intended. The Intended Audience: Wow, this is for us, we love it exactly as intended! You: I hate this game, I do not like it or the decisions you’ve made. You should change it for me so that I might like it.
???
Again, you all keep trying to paint us as the selfish ones as if we’re gatekeeping this game from you, but there’s nothing stopping you from picking up and engaging with the game exactly as it is, as we’ve all done, other than that you do not like it. The notion that ALL games MUST be for EVERYONE seems much more selfish and unhinged in my opinion.
Expecting every developer to cater to every possibility of everyone’s subjective opinion of what is good and bad difficulty is impossible.
I enjoyed difficult games a lot more back before I got a job.
Exactly. I’ll play Dark Souls if they pay me.
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”
The problem is with artificially enforced barriers.
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.
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?
Nothing about the difficulty level of From Software games is artificially enforced. Like the exact opposite, really.
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.
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.
Does the Vietnamese restaurant make the food more difficult to eat for certain customers?
Are the video game companies paying me to “play” their games?
“I’m allergic to wheat and they don’t carry gluten-free bread for the banh mi!”
Yeah bud, the world be like that sometimes. Eat somewhere else.
If anything there is spicy then yes, definitely more difficult for some people to eat, and obviously they have spicy shit it’s a vietnamese restaurant. Restaurants don’t pay you to eat their food, but they also don’t take requests beyond relatively minor variations on their pre-selected menu. Quit expecting the world to revolve around you, put some effort into finding the developers that are doing what you want and patronize them instead of complaining about the existence of games that are not made for you.
They will literally ask you how spicy you want it
And if you order something spicy then you get something spicy, yes, and if you complain that the restaurant serves things that are spicier than you enjoy you will be politely asked to leave. If you don’t like Dark Souls then don’t purchase and consume goddamned Dark Souls, simple as.
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.
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.
This just is not true for souls like games. The difficulty is a core part of the experience, and lowering it would literally compromise the artistic vision
I don’t have the time to get into any sort of flow these days.
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.)
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.
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.
Basically they have a super fragile ego.
They want to feel special.
It’s basically just a digital age version of the wanna be thugs acting like they grew up in a broken home on the mean streets when in reality mommy and daddy still wipe their ass in a suburban home.
Even if the game is single player, some games are a social experience. You discuss in forums, with friends, about your experience, and when I want that kind of experience difficulty levels cheapen the social aspect of the single player game.
This is not new either, I remember talking to friends about how I beat the water temple in ocarina of time as a kid. Everyone who beta it had to go through beating it and it gave them something to talk about. It just wouldn’t be the same if there was an easy mode, it’s not the same shared experience.
I guess my answer is that no game is truly single player because humans are social creatures. And again, there are games catered to your interests so it’s not like either of us is suffering from a shortage of enjoyment.
It just wouldn’t be the same if there was an easy mode
What’s the difference between saying, “I beat that level” for a game with only one difficulty setting and saying, “I beat that level on hard mode” for a game with multiple difficulty settings?
Multiple difficulty settings never stopped people from talking or bragging about accomplishments in Doom.
It doesn’t feel the same. I enjoy knowing that when someone on the internet or on forums complains about X that my experience matches theirs without having to look for the difficulty they played on. It’s not really bragging rights, but knowing that everyone in the community is having the same shared experience, no need of tags or anything. It’s a social thing for me more than anything.
Then there’s the matter of Devs being able to fine tune things better if they don’t need to care about multiple patterns, progression levels, etc. I won’t get to those because while important, the point I wanted to make is that single difficulty games allows for a shared experience between players which facilitates more community. You can have it with different difficulties but that breeds elitism and fuck that, everyone on the same field and that’s it.
I mean it both ways btw, some games are easier and that’s how you are supposed to experience them, ex: Slimer Rancher
Every time there’s a multiple diff game I always search for the one devs “intended” originally because it’s the most fine-tuned and the expected experience (usually the one before the hardest diff), but I prefer not having to make that choice.
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
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.
Apparently I need to check Celeste out. Thanks
It’s an amazing platformer!
It’s fantastic
You might also like „Journey of the broken Circle“.
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.
Some of the newer FE games suck at that too, Three Houses in particular apparently.
Older games give you very good prepromotes in the midgame, and the 3DS games have the child recruits (it makes sense I swear) scale up to current story progress and scale off stats/skills of parents.
Oh, can totally relate to winning that final battle or overcoming that boss in a fight.
My best favorite was in Horizon: Zero Dawn when I worked out how to take down a Thunderjaw with just the bow and arrow. I’m too easily visually overwhelmed by fast motion and end up just mashing buttons in melee fights, so the long, tactical takedowns are the cat’s pyjamas for me.
(I’ve been told that I would love Skyrm based on my play style. Will have to check that out at some point.)
Right now I’m on an ultra hard playthrough using just the Banuk Powershot Adept bow, (which is a mean weapon) and if done in the right order, you can disassemble the machines you’re hunting, get all the parts off, kill it then make fat bank picking up the pieces.
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.
You certainly can make them easy if you know enemy positions, boss attack patterns, strategies and you tailor your skills and items for it. And before you say “I don’t have time to learn all that!” There are guides, and if you don’t have time for that either, do you even want to play the game? It doesn’t have much of a story, if you skip learning, fighting skills, optimizing, what are you even enjoying?
You certainly can make them easy if you know enemy positions, boss attack patterns, strategies and you tailor your skills and items for it.
Do you hear yourself? Like, actually hear yourself? Those things are not easy to do. It’s great that you enjoy the game and want more people to try it if they’ve gotten discouraged but don’t call it easy when the caveat is doing all of that. Needing to do all of that is precisely why it’s difficult.
I do hear myself. It is easy to know that stuff, it might be annoying for some, but it’s certainly easy. I can get all that info in 30 seconds tops. You don’t need to do all of this but knowledge lowers the skill barrier by an absurd amount; I know that because I’m bad as fuck and beat the games because I search (in-game) for cheese strats, but if something annoys me a 30s google search usually gets me an optimised cheese strat. I enjoy playing like this.
I don’t really want more people to play it or whatever, if you don’t enjoy it don’t force yourself please, games are for entertainment in the end.
I can get all that info in 30 seconds tops.
It’s easy for you but it’s not an easy game. That is not the normal experience.
But I’m the main character damnit, everyone else is NPCs.
whatever part of your brain that’s supposed to make you feel satisfied or accomplished when you beat a hard game isn’t present for me, the only thing I got out of finishing dark souls was relief that that annoying game was over and I could finally get my friend to shut the fuck up and stop telling me I just didn’t like it because I hadn’t finished it.
I just hate backtracking in general.
Any game that makes me watch a long cutscene after dying can go to hell and stay there.
Personally I don’t like replaying games, so this wouldn’t work for me. Generally, story-driven games are easy, so it’s rarely an issue.
If you don’t enjoy a game, there are countless others to play. Not saying this as a ‘fuck off, this isn’t for you’. But genuinely - there are so many games, and no single game should be for everyone. It’s perfectly normal that we all have our own unique preferences.
There are a few games that I’ve dropped due to their gameplay, but wanted to finish the story. So I watched playthroughs of them. Was it at all an issue for me? Absolutely not. Do I wish the game fit my preferences better? Uhh, I guess? But then it would have been ruined for everyone else, so it doesn’t really make sense.
I watched the playthrough of Death Stranding, as it got too depressing for me about halfway through. Totally get it. I paid a lot for it though, so felt kinda bummed that I’d dropped that cash and couldn’t muster the energy to play it to the end.
On the other hand, I’ve got over 2,000 hours in on No Man’s Sky, (I’m playing in creative mode now and having a blast building cool bases in breathtaking locations) which I got on sale through GOG for 10 bucks, so I suppose it balances out.
The one that I’ve come to a complete stop in is The Talos Principle, and I love it but just can’t seem to finish it. Has been as frustrating to finish as Firmament, which was built for VR so playing it in 2D leaves a lot to be desired - there’s a ton of items that require exact placement and it’s hard as hell to see how to manipulate then w/o the 3D… Oyyyy.
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 a game where difficulty is based on reaction time then it is accessibility.
This describes literally any action game.
It’s a little bit pathetic actually when all people are asking for is a slider
And I’m telling you, sliders are not always structurally viable to the game or efficient for the developers to implement. By your arguments here, what do you want? A literal speed timer that slows down the entire game? Should Super Mario Bros. have had an easy mode that runs the game at half frame rate?
I know it’s a quote, but there’s a big difference between inclusive public infrastructure and interacting with games.
Yup, that’s the thing with analogies… they don’t always fit.
A café is a public place that should accommodate a wide range of guests.
A work of art doesn’t need the same amount of accessibility. Restricted access might be part of the experience.
Access to food is more essential than access to niche art.
There are plenty of places that aren’t essential that are accessible just to be inclusive. A theatre for example.
I’m not even disabled and I struggle with games without a difficulty slider. I can’t imagine to be actually disabled and excluded just because someone’s ego prevents them from adding a single slider to their game.
A theater is a social event and experience. Lots of video games are solo experiences. That’s a huge difference. Social events and activities need inclusion much more.
A dense philosophical book doesn’t need to include a „for dummies“ version. Tarot cards don’t need their meaning printed on them.
I think it would be illuminating for you to try making a game where the difficulty slowly increases, such as Tetris. Once you’ve done so, add a slider to it so that the difficult does not slowly increase.
You will find the experience completely different when you play. Difficulty in games isn’t just about accessibility.
I’ve worked in and run my own game companies. The request for a slider isn’t based in any kind of misunderstanding about how it would be implemented.
For your example in tetris it would be a global multiplier on the speed. The speed would still increase by the same rate but the actual speed is always multiplied by some constant.
The Tetris speed is already multiplied by a constant anyway even if the difficulty isn’t exposed. And this constant has to be picked by a designer. All I’m asking for is to expose it with a slider. There is pretty much always a constant like this in any game
What an insane attempt at an analogy lol
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.
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.
Lol I dont understand why y’all are so focused on dark souls. Is that the only game available?
I suffered through a lot of butthurt comments in this discussion where the people against “easy mode” are acting like all anyone cares about is dark souls having easy mode.
Sure some people are only arguing that. The majority are just arguing about difficulty options in general
Like I already said there are relatively “few” games where the difficulty is core to the game but a shitload more where the difficulty doesn’t really matter. And of that 2nd bunch there is a poor selection of difficulty options in most of them.
I couldn’t care less about dark souls. Even if it had difficulty options I wouldn’t waste my time on it.
Yeah, I love easy mode mods.
I’ll play my games the way I like it. I don’t care about their or even the developers opinion.
What wild, malformed, and disproportionate response. Blight even. My god my eyes can’t roll any harder.
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.
break into my house and steal my computer?
SWATTing is a thing in Murica, so there’s that.
Also, cheating is just moronic and it’s not you have to play the game anyway.It’s a thing on the Internet, it’s not specifically only in one country
SWATTing in other countries?
Is there a comparative statistic for that as opposed to Murica?
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
Ah, may I introduce you to No Man’s Sky permadeath mode?
Which is unfortunately far easier than you’d think it is. I’ve gotten to the core in permadeath.
I’ve gotten to the core in permadeath.
Before or after you figured out the game?
I’ve had it sinse day one. I’ve had to refigure out the game many many times.
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.
This is the entire problem with modern gaming meta though. There basically is an assumption that people will look up the walkthrough, so you need to scale difficulty with that in mind.
I am like you, and this is a big part of why I’ve almost entirely stopped gaming. Either the game is too hard, or it has like 20 minutes of cir scenes per hour, or it requires an hour of supply grinding any time you pick it back up.
modern gaming meta
Like cyberpunk? The borderland series? Elder scrolls series? Expedition 33? Assassin’s Creed series? Tons more hyper popular games I’m not aware of because I play mostly arpgs too.
There’s plenty games that try to offer easier playthroughs, unless you wish for a game without easy mode but an easier baseline experience, in which case… Pokémon? The TLoZ games from Wii onwards? Idk, there’s plenty and plenty more I don’t know of.
I found expedition 33 to be difficult even in the story telling mode. It suggests a focus on the story, but you absolutely have to scale your characters correctly, learn boss fights patterns etc. I don’t like the fight gameplay (not my cup of tea), so I tried to avoid them, but I couldn’t progress past a certain point. Love the story and universe, but wish they’d made an even easier mode because I don’t want to spend time learning all the mechanics and combos etc.
Weird, I beat everything but the last optional superboss (Simon) in hard (the difficulty before max) and it’s not like I learnt character combos much. Yeah I did learn enemy movesets, sorta, but I always dodged, fuck the parry. Enemies did hit my characters a lot and almost half the turns were spent reviving them, but the revives recover post fight so it’s whatever.
I did reach a point where Maelle and Verso were so strong that enemies hardly got a turn though.
I put exactly 0 thought to the characters builds, so I know it’s my fault and I suspect it’s not that hard. But I literally have no interest in the combat system, so of course the game is not entirely made for me. However, this story mode shows that some devs don’t consider difficulty as a pre-requisite to enjoy their art.
Why not just watch a video of it on YouTube at that point?
Because the game is prettier/smoother running on my computer native res at 100fps, than watching compressed videos on YouTube.
Otherwise yeah I would have watched a play through instead.
Also going at your own pace and being free to explore the environment is more pleasant than watching someone do it for you
Maybe there’s a mod that autowins the battles for you if that’s something you would enjoy? If all you want from the game is the story and the art but go along at your own pace, so not game play videos, god mode cheats might give you what you want. I’m being 100% serious.
I’ll man up at some point and try to beat the game “fair”. But not a bad idea if I still get stuck to just cheat.
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.
I love ULTRAKILL for many reasons, but this is one of them. I would never have completed the Prime Sanctums if I had to wait longer than 1 frame to reset to the checkpoint.
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.
Fair point. I always associated those with the fact video games were relatively newer media at the time but you are correct. Some times they would give you maps and instructions.
Respectfully disagree with your stance (which is fine, as fushuan said, there’s games enough for all of us.) When I was younger and played more games, I would frequently look up how to get through them on GameFAQ. The joy wasn’t in figuring out puzzles, it was in getting to see the story unfolding.
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)
And for those who don’t want to play it, but still want to experience its world and themes, HBomberguy made a fascinating 2-hours video essay about the first game: Pathologic is Genius, And Here’s Why
Oh you tried to mess with my saves? This isn’t a battle you want to start, out come the VMs.
I don’t know if that was the intention, but this is great marketing for Pathologic 2. In fact, I’ll look into this game later today.
Well now I want to play it
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.
Does anyone remember the devs of Diablo 3 saying that the internal team found the game difficulty is too high and then they doubled it.
That’s weird, I don’t remember that game being very hard, at least on the normal difficulty
On launch it was quite “difficult” in that good gear was rare (and why wouldn’t you sell a good piece of gear for 20 bucks instead of using it), and the damage being very one-shotty on higher difficulties.
Yeah I remember the travesty of that game at launch. Competent gameplay hamstrung by devs leaving room for their micro transactions. But, you didn’t need to spend real money. You could grind for 20+ hours with pitiful low magic time until you find something mildly better or sell the good items you do have on the auction house to try and close loop to get better stuff.
It wasn’t. But then you got to Inferno on act 2 (like 4 times through the game) and died over and over to flies.
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.
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.
And then theres LASO lol
That’s for enthusiastic masochists. 😅
And then there is Expedition 33 which added the story mode so that Jennifer English could play it.
And some people STILL can’t beat it without parries.
Granted, I’m in Act 2 (Expert), and I think the ludicrous level factor into damage is to blame. The fact every other (mini)boss you fight is overlevelled, and just a few levels seem to be a 2-3x damage difference, is so stupid, I imagine someone running into 3 in a row and just giving up.
Someone on YouTube made their first playthrough an all-hit run without parries or dodges. On Expert. They had to grind a bit but made it work. I think the Curator fight where he teaches you jumping was the hardest because his damage scales with your level.
spoiler
They even beat Simon without one-shotting him. Impressive stuff.
It really proves that the game can be a normal JRPG, albeit a grindy one in the beginning.
It really proves that the game can be a normal JRPG, albeit a grindy one in the beginning.
It’s unrelated to difficulty, but, is it a good one though? Being grindy to me is generally a pretty terrible thing in a JRPG. Part of marketing for SMTV’s rerelease was nerfing the impact of level on damage, and basically everyone loved that.
I also don’t see many defensive options for the half of the game I’m at besides Maelle’s redirect, or maybe absurd defense/HP stacking, if defense even works.
I absolutely hate parry systems and cheated my way through it, although I lost interest once something spoilery happened to the main character you’ve been playing as.
I was actually optimistic, because I like Mario&Luigi, so these combat systems CAN work. The problem is, the parry systems in E33 are 80% of your success (if you don’t grind), yet are more shallow by comparison, and most of the depth is in the RPG parts that are just a supplement (unless you grind + play on easier difficulty settings, but it seems you need a Picto for AP on damage to let you have fun then)
Both Mario RPG and the M&L games have timing systems I don’t mind. They have pretty generous windows and don’t punish you too severely if you miss them. E33 was brutal on both fronts.
That’s also because M&L requires more attention to get the timing right. You need to look for cues who the attack will go to, see if you can jump on the attack or only over it, hold the dodge button rather than press, or multitask when both bros are being attacked. Or sometimes, DON’T jump, because you then take damage. The games are puzzle/action games with JRPG elements slapped in.
E33 is extremely telegraphed (barring the very rare jukes) so it needs to compensate with tight timing and erratic animations, requiring both higher skill + trial and error. Sometimes have to press another button, but you don’t even need to figure it out (I tried to jump some attacks because of Elden Ring habits lol), the enemy or whole screen telegraphs it. It’s a JRPG with action slapped in, at its core at least.
For another example, Deltarune and Undertale are basically action games too, but do a lot of stuff with their dodging, sometimes even switching genres to platformer/shooter etc.
I “cheat” in M&L by pressing A+B or Y+X at the same time so whichever brother the attack is going to will jump/hit it.
I didn’t mind Undertale and Deltarune’s systems, either. They usually utilized full movement rather than “press the button RIGHT NOW!!!”
Parries is why the game is fun imo
Without it you would just click abilities and win every time I guess. That’s something for someone too.
Some games I’d rather just take the game out of. Like expedition 33 I’d rather just be a TV show to be honest if your are making it that easy
- This goes for every JRPG: if clicking and winning is bad, how is chess popular? It’d just mean the RPG part isn’t balanced (or is not your type of game)
- Mario&Luigi, the only series close to this I’ve played, just does it way better, some dodges require holding, almost all include figuring out who to dodge with, different effects depending on when you jump etc. Parries in E33 come down to timing one button, and occasionally pressing the others with very clear telegraphs. And dodging seems barely more helpful
Of course… You’d need to balance the game entirely different.
It’s just that the game is made for parries so if you take that out its kinda bland
JRPGs live or die depending on how the combat works, so I think that first point is a little reductive.
If you’re an actress and your previous game was Elden Ring, I can see the appeal of trying to put a story mode into your contract.
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.
You don’t see this kind of attitude as often in games these days. Maybe indies.
I’m all for easy difficulty options in games, but I’m never, ever going to use them. I just can’t motivate myself to play if I’m not accomplishing something.
Do you feel like you’re accomplishing something by playing a difficult game?
Personally I do not, and that’s fine. I play games to take a break from accomplishing things.
This is the thing, everyone is different. What is difficult for some, will be easy for others, and it will even flip for the same people on different games.
The best option is having a wide array of difficulty options. In stone games I get bored of it’s too easy, in others I get bored of it’s too hard.
I tend to err on ‘normal’ to ‘slightly more difficult than normal’. But some games I don’t want difficulty at all because I’m there for the ride.
Absolutely, yes. Good video games have a reward structure that real life is lacking.
In real life, you just get fucked over and over with no rewards.
Some of us aren’t even have sex either, I just get no rewards.
Well that’s not true either. I mean sometimes, sure, but in general if you know what you want and you work towards it, you can accomplish things and be rewarded.
Have you seen the world lately?
It’s still the world. Most of us still have the power to change our circumstances.
Are humans better off than we were 20 years ago? In many ways no, in some ways yes.
Are humans better off than we were for 99.99% of human history? Yes, without qualification.
If you have enough money to start with, then yes.
I didn’t understand it personally, until I played and beat Sekiro. It is honestly a feeling like no other.
I keep on getting told this by people, especially fans of FeomSoft and soulslikes.
I figured I’d take a crack at them this year, and also Bloodborne is my boyfriend’s favorite game, so I played it. And that feeling that everyone describes about the satisfaction and accomplishment… Never happened. I beat the bosses and was just like… Okay, on to the next one then I guess. I did have a much better time playing through co-op with him, but I still wouldn’t say I felt accomplished by it.
Yeah they’re not for everyone.
I don’t really like tower defense games, but I would never dream about trying to tell devs that they’re doing it wrong because I don’t like how they do it. I just don’t play them.
Well… You totally can. I like towerr defense games too, but I’ve never played one that I would call perfect. Even my favorite games I could dig deep and give design notes on. Where it’s feasible a lot of games have mods or hacks. A lot of people like Pokemon romhacks more than actual games. I put hundreds of hours into Civ 6 starting vanilla, but mods can fix a lot of the little inconveniences and add new content to the game. I think I’m in the minority of Skyrim players who prefers to keep it vanilla- most people mod the hell out of it.
Bloodborne was still fun, especially on subsequent runs and with co-op. I think it would be a way better game overall if they designed any sort of real onboarding experience. A training dummy in the hunter’s dream, maybe the ability to try out different weapons there before investing resources into them. Using better language (shooting someone is not a “parry”, and why does the axe do blunt damage while the hammer does piercing damage?). An actual goddamn map. A journal system to keep track of what you’ve done in the game so it’s easier to pick up again 3 months later. Clear item descriptions that include numbers. Explanations for what the stats actually do. None of this is what I would call “difficulty”, and once you gain the initial knowledge and experience these problems aren’t as big of a deal, but it does make the game a lot less accessible for new players.
And I question how much value their absence really adds to the players who do stick around to push through and get that experience. It seems like more of a marketing gimmick to be “different” and foment an elitist, hipster-esque fan base. Or maybe it’s a question allocating of the development resources. It’s a shame because there’s a lot of great design too, it’s just hidden behind these frustrating problems that the rest of the industry solved decades ago.
If I wasn’t motivated to play it for my boyfriend I would have just dropped it early on. I don’t feel like I accomplished anything by suffering through that frustration, I just feel annoyed that I had to deal with these problems I feel like I should not have existed in a 2015 game.
DOOM and DOOM eternal on nightmare mode hell yeah
As a fan of logic puzzle games (Baba is you being imo the best of these) difficulty levels are a foreign concept ;)
Meanwhile Baba is You is one of the hardest fucking games I’ve ever played.
That game makes me feel so fucking stupid lol
return of scenic pond D:
For me, good story and/or fun gameplay is the accomplishment, whether it’s difficult or not. If it’s too difficult, I just won’t bother. I don’t have time for that.
I recently played the new silent hill and I didn’t hesitate to put combat difficulty on easy, it was a matter of my own health at that point.
I could endure a horror story, but the stress of getting beaten up and having to run away from grotesque monsters while trying to solve cryptic puzzles was too much for me.
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.
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.
Yoshi P (FFXIV): “Yeah, the game was a huge cultural hit that grew more successful with each expansion, so I thought to myself… now that we’ve brought in millions upon millions of players, why not nerf all of the overworld content into absurdity to bring in maybe forty or fifty noobs? So I did. And then I changed all of the classes again once everyone had reached max level. Nobody liked that. So I thought… why not do it again?”
Zenimax (ESO): “So I just kind of made up whatever and then dialed the difficulty down to about a tenth of what it used to be. Now overworld content is on par with swinging an aluminum bat through a pile of packing peanuts. Also, the Second Era was filled with superhero sky ninjas with lava wings who rode around Tamriel upon lightning horses and mechanical spiders. Deal with it.”
