Maybe you haven’t been convinced by a good enough argument. Maybe you just don’t want to admit you are wrong. Or maybe the chaos is the objective, but what are you knowingly on the wrong side of?

In my case: I don’t think any games are obliged to offer an easy mode. If developers want to tailor a specific experience, they don’t have to dilute it with easier or harder modes that aren’t actually interesting and/or anything more than poorly done numbers adjustments. BUT I also know that for the people that need and want them, it helps a LOT. But I can’t really accept making the game worse so that some people get to play it. They wouldn’t actually be playing the same game after all…

  • @MrJameGumb
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    58 hours ago

    Why wouldn’t the developer want as many people as possible to buy the game though?

    • comfy
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      04 hours ago

      Why wouldn’t the developer want as many people as possible to buy the game though?

      I’ve never made art (incl. games) with the intention of having as many people view it as possible. Many developers make games as a hobby rather than for mere profit, and some try to draw a compromise in the middle.

      I know this doesn’t apply as much to major well-known games created by professional game development companies, but there are other incentives guiding development beyond maximizing purchases.

      • @MrJameGumb
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        13 hours ago

        And how many boutique niche Indy games made solely for their artistic merit have you played that actually had an easy mode?

    • @[email protected]OP
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      17 hours ago

      From a purely financial view, they don’t. There’s a reason why games have become as handholdy as possible. And one of the reasons why the Souls series stood out was because it went in a different direction.

    • Semperverus
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      7 hours ago

      Games used to be art and done for passion.

      Having to include an “easy mode” in your game has powerful knock-on effects that change how normal and hard difficulties play too. Timings and quantities that would normally be finely tuned and hand-crafted suddenly need to be highly-variable and detract from the freedom of developing for just one difficulty.

      • @SpaceNoodle
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        37 hours ago

        That sounds like an entirely surmountable engineering problem.

        It’s not like games are being written in assembly any more.

        • Semperverus
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          -15 hours ago

          It goes deeper than just simple engineering though. It affects tone and overarching game design. It is multiple extra dimensions that have to be considered across every aspect of the entire game. If it is done poorly, you get paper dolls on easy mode and damage sponges on hard and nothing of merit to compensate for these facts. The difficulty of the game goes from being genuine to artificial.

          • @SpaceNoodle
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            15 hours ago

            That’s why you design for accessibility, and don’t try to cram it in at the last moment. It’s not actually difficult, it just requires engineering discipline.

            There are also plenty of Dark Souls clones for people like you who demand nothing but punishment.