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 like to relax when I play. My days of stressing out over games ended when I had stress in real life.
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 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.
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“.
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.
With mods it’s an option and it definitely wouldn’t have hit the same way. The whole point of souls games is overcoming challenges with practice. Too many people avoid challenging themselves and it’s a real problem I’ve seen in many people. That’s why you see people who waste away at the same job and same level for years instead of taking chances and risks and pushing themselves to try something new. I’ve known people with budding talent in things like music that gave up because they weren’t instantly the best at it. Not everything in life will be easy, or instant, or convenient. Too many people either forget that or don’t realize it. Some things take hard work and practice and they are extremely rewarding when you put in the work.
Would you complain that a rubiks cube is too hard or a crossword puzzle or anything else that’s designed to challenge you?
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 just hate backtracking in general.
Any game that makes me watch a long cutscene after dying can go to hell and stay there.
Those players aren’t forced to buy those games.
And you wouldn’t be forced to play on a lower difficulty
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Maybe but tomonobu itagaki Fucks.
I just read his wiki, and uh yeah. Unfortunately he was a bit of a sex pest.
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
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 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
I know it’s a quote, but there’s a big difference between inclusive public infrastructure and interacting with games.
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?
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
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.
It’s fine to do your own thing if it effects nobody else.
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.
What wild, malformed, and disproportionate response. Blight even. My god my eyes can’t roll any harder.
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?
All game devs should be forced to play their own games all the way through.
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’m going to make this point again because it went unnoticed due to the sheer amount of comments, but you wouldn’t complain about a Rubik’s cube or crossword puzzle being too hard or anything else designed to challenge you. I’d argue that without the difficulty of solving a Rubik’s cube that toy would be lost to time. The only reason it still exists today is because it was so hard to solve for children when it was released. Souls games are the same. The only reason we still talk about them and the only reason they gained the popularity that they did is because of the difficulty.
I remember distinctly picking up dark souls on sale on a whim before it started really entering mainstream discussion. The guy working at Gamestop warned me that people kept returning it because it was too hard. I took it home and played it and really learned the mechanics then I brought it to my friends to try. They learned the mechanics and since then we’ve had an unofficial race to see who can beat the newest FromSoft game fastest. It was the difficulty of the game that made it so addicting. Without that the game would be boring and no one would know what it was in 2025. If you don’t believe me install the easy mode mods and come back to let us know what your experience was like.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.”
Finally good content.
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.
