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.
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
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
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.
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?
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
All game devs should be forced to play their own games all the way through.
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
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.
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.
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.”
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.
Finally good content.
Some poor bastard actually buys a Kojima game to watch the cut scenes.
Da Wei: gives step by step instructions only for players to ignore them and get stuck (reading is hard).
Also Da Wei: designs a fast, strong and tough endgame boss only for some psycho to hit-stun her, yeet her around the arena, kill her by fall damage and post it on Bilibili for the lolz.
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.
I know a cheat for that! Try dating apps. The other dating apps. 😏
Or just meet me in the alley behind the bar
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
So you never watch movies because there you also don’t accomplish anything?
No, but I’d rather watch a movie than play a game that feels too easy.
Then bump up the difficulty
So I remember once “playing” a visual novel.
Over the period of ~10 hrs of reading (maybe ~ 4 hrs for a normal-speed reader), there was exactly 1 (one) point, where I had a choice to make.
The rest was just clicking “next”.That could have been a PDF (or 4, because there were 4 options in the choice) instead of a Windows executable.
Then there is this thing in scripted events, that some of the high budget games are guilty of.
It’s stuff like pressbuttonto open door or sth, where you are essentially stuck in place with nothing else to do other than press thebuttonand whatever action is done, doesn’t end up increasing immersion in the least, because it is just like a cut-scene getting paused in between, just to say, ‘press button to continue watching the cut-scene’.I watch movies with my wife or my kids, but I very rarely watch a movie alone. I’d rather play games most of the time.
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.
