So, games should have options so they suit a wide range of players and preferences?
Controversial.
Gonna assume a lack of sarcasm here but yes. Dark Souls and Street Fighter embody this debate
Okay, but only if we compromise and you give me “balls in belt sander” level difficulty in casual games too. None of this skyrim “just double the enemy HP and damage” crap either, I want to be fighting for my fucking life trying to avoid tom nook’s bankruptcy beam.
It’s only controversial if you want the game to have easier options. ;)
It would be a lot to ask the devs to include a variable for the basic functions 😁
I think the irony is, there’s a huge overlap between gamers who don’t have a lot of time to game because of work and the gamers who have money because they work.
A market for those who want to enjoy games in an easier way that doesn’t require practice 😏
It is sadly. Go to a from soft forum and watch the reaction you get for asking for an easy mode. The sweaty nerds start screaming about not a game for you and artistic intent.
Edit: Christ it’s second comment in this thread 🤣 didn’t even need to leave
Their games already have an easy mode. You can summon a partner for any situation you get stuck on, and if that’s not enough you can grind levels until it’s easy enough for you.
Peak sweaty fromsoft. Just grind away on mobs for hours! Have a random person do every fight!
That’s shitty design.
You can summon a partner for any situation you get stuck on
Yes. Shitty. Design.
Or you can look up good weapons and where to find them, or items/spells that may help in certain situations, or weaknesses a boss/enemy has, or how to avoid attacks that you’re struggling against…
There’s tons of options if you don’t just… give up lmao
👌👍
Yet another thing that’s impossible to discuss without being strawmanned by both sides. I’m not a hardcore gamer and for the most part play on medium or just slightly above medium difficulty in most video games.
I don’t think a dev should have to accommodate customers that they don’t want to accommodate, and this goes beyond difficulty. Souls games don’t need a difficulty choice in the same way that Firewatch doesn’t. Gacha games don’t need to improve the f2p experience because those are games for whales.
It’s like asking for sex drugs and rock&roll in disney movies and pg 13 horror movies.
I agree in that it doesn’t need to be required, but I think you’re leaving money on the table and intentionally limiting who can experience the art you’re trying to share with the world.
You don’t HAVE to include more than the basic colorblind option and maybe some extra visual cues, but games that go farther and allow more people to enjoy their product are better products for it.
Souls games are great. I don’t want to ‘get gud’ so I haven’t bought one ever, and with no difficulty drop I probably never will. I don’t have time for that. It’s not a bad game because they don’t have features to make it more accessible to me, but it COULD be a better game if they did.
That’s a paradox. Games are in the unique position to make hardship part of the experience.
If you take out the hardship you wouldn’t experience the art in the intended way anyway.
Different people have different skill levels, so will experience different levels of hardship. Someone who’d played every Dark Souls game ten times (which isn’t that rare) would find Elden Ring much easier than someone who’d never played a soulslike before. If the difficultly could be scaled to normalise for that, then everyone would have a more consistent experience closer to the intended one. It’s probably not remotely practical to achieve that in every case, though.
The intended experience is to overcome seemingly insurmountable situations. That can be through brute force (just dodging, attacking) or through deduction (there is a item which kills a boss in 4 hits).
It is about catharsis.
You don’t need to have the best reflexes, you need to be involved in the game/world. And that seems to be the problem with people, they don’t want that.
It is not about the experience, it is about finishing it. Else I can’t explain what “I don’t have time for that means”
Like saying I don’t have time to read animal farm so I just read the cliffnotes. It is completely absurd because you take time for that other wise you would be missing out on nuance.
Not everything has to be for anybody. But saying “makes this more for people who didn’t like it in the first place” is just entitled and rude.
There is so much that is already like everything else with little that makes them stand out. So why take something that is special and make it more generic?
I think you’re reading things into my comment that I intentionally didn’t put in it. I’m just making the point that games already don’t get to control the amount of hardship the player experiences because some players start out better than others, and some improve faster than others. If a game has a fixed difficulty level, there’ll always be people who find it easier than the developers intended, and people who’d still be unable to finish it with thousands of hours of practice (and plenty of people will play for ten or twenty hours before deciding they don’t have time to find out if they’d eventually get good enough). On the other hand, if a game’s got several modes, then there’s a good chance a player will pick a difficulty level that’s too easy or hard for them, so it could make the problem worse, but, critically, it wouldn’t be what introduced it in the first place.
Regarding your point about Animal Farm, it’s a bit more like deciding not to read an encrypted copy of the book. It might be a trivial Caesar cipher that could be easily broken, and you could be reading about some animals being more equal than others in a few seconds, or it could be modern AES that can’t be broken before the heat death of the universe, or it could be anything in between. If you don’t quickly make enough progress to see that you’re actually going to get to read it, then you’ve no way to know whether it’s seemingly insurmountable or literally insurmountable.
If someone’s saying they don’t have time to get good at Dark Souls, they’re agreeing with you that not everything has to be for everyone, and they’ve decided that Dark Souls isn’t for them. They don’t have to be happy about that, though, especially if they’ve had to pay for the game to find out.
I think you’re leaving money on the table
For some people that is ok
intentionally limiting who can experience the art you’re trying to share with the world
Almost every musician, painter, or sculptor ever has done that. It is ok.
You don’t HAVE to include more than the basic colorblind option
I think most devs could include stuff like colorblind options or rebindable control schemes and such, and I definitely think they should
better products for it
Difficulty is not the same as colorblind mode. Colorblind mode is the same as creating closed captions for movies, difficulty is the same as changing the movie to fit another audience. Difficulty is part of the game.
it COULD be a better game if they did
It would be a different game, that they are not trying to make.
It’s not a bad game because they don’t have features to make it more accessible to me, but it COULD be a better game if they did.
They already have this feature. With the exception of Sekiro, you can summon a partner to help you defeat any challenge as long as you’re outside the tutorial area.
That, or you can just find enemies you’re comfortable with defeating repeatedly and use them to level up until the game is easy enough for you. Or you can look up good weapons and where to find them. Or items that may help in certain situations, or weaknesses the boss/enemy you’re struggling against has…
I highly doubt that making an easier difficulty will net a higher cash flow. Maybe short term but the souls games sell as they do because they are known for their difficulty. If you take that away they lose their marketing gimmick.
They’d get immediate sales from me I can tell you that much. And I personally know several people who would buy the games if they had difficulty settings.
Games are rarely art someone is trying to share. They’re money machines now.
If the hard mode merely makes everything into a bullet sponge with huge HP bar, no thanks. I’m perfectly fine with some games just being easier and others just being harder. Or having multiple well thought out difficulty options, but only if they are actually well thought out.
Agree on the bullet sponge thing, god I hate that. Helldivers 2 does it best, IMO. Not deadlier or more resilient enemies, just more of them and deadlier types.
When games go too far with this, it can encourage exploit or cheese strategies, or at least strict adherence to a meta build. This can actually mean resorting to a solution with less skill needed, since the game has already been effectively solved. A still-challenging situation that doesn’t demand perfection can be reasonably done with unoptimized preparation and adaptation.
Yup. This is the lazy devs “difficulty” setting. Harder just means, “Enemies take more damage / Enemies deal more damage.”
Or just let the developer decide what they think fits their game best? Not every product is for every person, and that’s fine really. Trying to broaden appeal is good, but you don’t want to spread resources so thin that you end up with a mess.
We aren’t forcing them.
But we are allowed to have the opinion that we would enjoy the game more if we could choose ourselves how difficult we want it to be.
I kinda agree with you, tbh. Tho I’d apply that logic to more than just difficulty.
That said tho, I’d also be okay with the devs putting the most work into normal mode but also tossing in barely tested, unbalanced easy and hard modes with a “this is not the intended experience, use at your own peril” warning. I know no AAA dev would do that but I’d honestly be okay with it.
Easy mode is in overwhelming most of cases just a few numbers change.
I would say making game harder is much more difficult and resource consuming, but most of it is, like many other comment noted, just cranking up those same numbers up.
Nah, they just lazy. Add simple quest log and make the weapons hit harder in easy. It’s straight up nerdy sweaty gatekeeping.
Do you know the amount of work it takes to balance things? Sure you can just make every weapon hit 10% harder, but is the game still fun? Playtesting is a huge part of game development, and just slapping something half-baked in will just make the game worse
No it’s not. Everyone does it these days. You tune at the top level normal mode and add a attack, defense, and drop slider. Add an option for explicit directions on where to go. Done. People who want casual can tune down as needed and sweaties are just fine except for the gatekeeping.
I love from soft but they are a curmudgeon team who hasn’t updated their engine to support even a consistent 60fps, just now caved to fast travel which was bitched about by the sweatiest, and still builds obtuse traps for new players to absolutely fuck themselves with no guidance. The only reason ER was as successful as it was because it softened up the series considerably.
You are kind of confusing difficulty for quality of life. Lack of quality of life / polish can also be super frustrating, but that’s not because it’s hard, that’s because it’s poorly designed and because of that, frustrating. A good difficult game will not do that.
And despite the conversation so far not being specifically about FromSoft, I do agree that their games feature many poor quality of life decisions. And yes, I’ve seen people try to justify those under the banner of “just get better bro”. But if we’re having a conversation about difficulty specifically, that’s separate from quality of life.
Also, the fix you are suggesting and how easy it would be to implement is honestly, quite naive. And I highly disagree that “everyone does it these days.”. If you’re an indie game with a dedicated fan base that’s an option. But just adding something like that when your game is being played by millions of both casual and hardcore players, that can effectively mean that giving that option will destroy the experience for a significant portion of them. Judging how difficult a game should be to be enjoyable before playing it is not easy. It’s why game designers do that for you. Once the novelty of the game wears off and the game was played when it was too easy or too hard, they are just going to refund your game and rate it 1/10 because “it sucks”, not being able to articulate why exactly.
Game designers should try to cater to as many playstyles and experience levels as possible. But just like point and click adventure isn’t going to entice someone seeking a difficult experience, neither will a game from which it’s enjoyment is derived from the higher difficulty appeal to someone looking to not sweat a little. Trying to go beyond that requires actual design changes or the game will fall flat. You’re free to mod the game yourself and such to create that experience, but asking game developers to go above and beyond to make something enjoyable not within their design scope is not something they should reasonably have to do.
Thanks :)
Actually, even easier cuz I judt had to copy the link and paste it in my app and it auto formatted so I really didnt need to do anything
“I got a 3 second video as a reward for beating this game on the hardest difficulty. It took me hundreds of hours and I hated myself the whole time. You can look up the video of the ending online, but I’ll be DAMNED if someone else can watch it from having FUN while beating the game.”
-These butthurt game bros, probably
Personally I don’t care about the rewards. If I’m playing a tough game or a higher difficulty it’s more about the sense of accomplishment that comes from finally overcoming the challenge. That being said, some people don’t get their dopamine from that sort of thing so I totally think more difficulty options is always a good thing.
The thing is, games have a minimum difficulty to be somewhat generally enjoyable, and the game designers have often built their game around this. The fun is generally in the obstacles providing real resistance that can be overcome by optimizing your strategy. It means that these obstacles need to be mentally picked apart by the player to proceed. They are built like puzzles.
This design philosophy - anyone who plays these games can tell you - is deeply rewarding if you go through it, because it requires genuine improvement that you can notice and be proud of. Hence why there is often a limit to how much easier you can make games like these without losing that because you forget the obstacle before even realizing it was preventing you from doing something.
It’s often not as easy as just tweaking numbers. And often these development teams don’t have the time to rebalance a game for those lower difficulties, so they just don’t.
Honestly, the first wojack could be quite mad too, because often making an easy game harder also misses the point, where the game is just more difficult, but doesn’t actually provide you with that carefully crafted feeling of constant improvement. Instead some easy games can become downright frustrating because obstacles feel “cheap” or “lacking depth” now that you have to spend a lot more time on them.
But making an easy game harder by just tweaking the numbers is definitely easier on the development team, and gives existing players a chance to re-experience the game, which wouldn’t happen the other way around. But it’s almost certainly not a better option for new players wanting a harder difficulty.
At the end of the day though, often there are ways to get what you want. Either by cheating, modding, or otherwise using ‘OP’ usables in the game. Do whatever you want to make the game more enjoyable to yourself. But if you make it too easy on yourself you might come out on the other end wondering why other people enjoyed the game so much more than you did.
I’m a hardcore gamer. I’ve 100% all Souls games (no summons), Isaac Rebirth, Hotline Miami 1+2 and lots of other bullshit hard games.
I’m unironically the second wojack. People complaining about wanting certain games to be easier, is like people watching an unfamiliar series and complaining that it doesn’t suit their tastes.
Imagine you like Star Trek and your new friend who hasn’t seen anything watches a few episodes with you. Then they start complaining that it’s too wordy, or there’s not enough action, or Star Wars is better.
It wasn’t made for you!
Almost everyone has had the experience of a franchise we love being adapted in a way which has been the result of compromise.
The sense of entitlement required to ignore the fact that you want this to happen to both a creator and the fans, so your tastes are accommodate to, while never wanting anyone to do that to something you love - is what is rage inducing.
Okay, but the same applies to easy games, and nobody tears people asking for more challenge a new arsehole for some reason.
Maybe it’s the circles we find ourselves in, but they’re not exactly opposite situations.
If a game is too hard then casual gamers consider it a barrier to entry (because it is). In these cases some people feel like they’re entitled for the game to be adjusted for them.
But if a game is too easy people generally just say that the gameplay is boring. I don’t typically find people complaining that the devs should make the game more difficult. These people just tend to not play easy games in the first place because there are better games.
The Witcher 3 is a great example of how difficulty improves the experience.
You can play on Easy, and play just for the story, if that’s what you want. But you can mash the light attack button for every fight and win without any challenge.
If you play on Death March though, you will need to carefully consider your armor set, swords, oils, potions, mutagens and skills for each fight.
Playing on anything less than Death March (or the hardest difficulty you can manage) will rob you of the experience of being a Witcher; someone who takes time to prepare for battle in unique ways.
If you were a developer and saw a reviewer trashing your game for being “a button masher” (which actually happened at release), then you might have regretted adding an “easy” difficulty.
In this sense, I would never want to see FromSoft creating multiple difficulties.
I still wouldn’t advocate for being the second wojack though. The presumption that hard games are not made for the other person can also make you blind to genuine flaws in these harder games that prevent people from liking to play those games, because sometimes the frustration isn’t worth it. Harder games have a far higher bar for being fair and feeling good to play, because frustration can genuinely kill people’s desire to go through that effort even if they have the mentality required to play harder games. And sometimes you are circumstantially lucky and reach the bar for you to get hooked, but someone else gets turned off by unfair or rough edges in the game’s design. Those flaws should still be resolved to allow more people to enjoy the game.
Do you realize you can post actual pictures here instead if links?
I tried, kept getting errors. :/
Meme about fun police g*mers
Comments full of fun police g*mers
Right? :P
I’ve still not really seen issues in just including options for total overthrowing of difficulty. I’ve enjoyed some hard games that have prompted frustration from some Dark Souls players; eg, Furi, Tunic, . The options menu include capabilities for infinite stamina and invincibility, and I just ignored them.
Even though I can beat those games without those options, I consider them better for having them because each player plays differently. It is not a tremendous ask for the developer to decide on the best way to address playability concerns, even if they go for something extremely simple that removes challenge and lets them explore the world.
On topic: A new Spongebob-Souls game is out called “Another Crab’s Treasure”. It has positive reviews, and its own implementation of this (aside from being generally a bit easier) seems to be an options menu box which gives your crab a gun.
I have never seen it framed as “it is an absolute disgrace that this game does not have a hard mode, and if you think otherwise you are an idiot and/or ableist (or whatever the opposite would be)” tbh. Which is pretty much what the easy mode advocates were saying about Sekiro the last time I followed that debate
This is a fair point. I have seen violent reactions to casual statements, but I have not seen hyperbolic calls for hard modes nearly as much as for easy modes, it`s true.
For hardcore gamers don’t exist an easy mode
This is peak Torment Nexus energy.
It’s almost poetic, when the last thing you see is the Game Over screen.
While accessibility always is nice, games are a kind of art, and art is not always for everyone.
Some games are made to be hard and even impossible to beat (Tetris till recently), so asking them for an easy mode is not unlike asking Rolex for a 10$ series, which would ultimately tarnish the brand’s name.
I feel like you’ve missed the point, which is only to point out how it is somehow not controversial to suggest a game needs a hard mode while the opposite will get you angry responses.
As far as my personal opinion on whether games such as any of the Soulsbourne titles should be made easier, I’m appreciative of the fact that they don’t have difficulty sliders in much any regard. If I beat Dark Souls 3, there isn’t a question about if I beat it on the easiest mode, anyone who’s gone through the entire experience knows what I also went through. While I agree that most of the FromSoft games are sorely lacking in accessibility options (even more so their older titles), Difficulty is only one of many accessibility options. I would rather they add other accessibility options so that players who struggle with the games as is can have an easier time getting the intended experience than reduce the intended experience down to allow for the lowest common denominator.
As an aside, many of the Soulsbourne games already have something in the way of “easier modes” via alternate weapons, different combat systems, and different play styles. Playing almost any of them primarily using ranged combat reduces the difficulty in most every encounter in the game outside of boss battles. Boss battles often have their own gimmick that you can exploit to make them easier to fight. Often the level design, nearby items (and descriptions), or enemy positions are used as clues to make finding these exploits easier.
As an example, the Taurus Demon in DS1 can be killed fairly easily by baiting him to where the skeleton archers are above the fight, then using a plunging attack on him several times in a row. The intended experience is that you would go into the arena, you may run directly towards the other side, spawn the Taurus demon once you run about halfway through the arena, and notice you’re being shot at from behind. You’ll likely die, but in the next fight against him you can try to take out the archers via your own ranged weapons, but doing so shows a cleverly hidden ladder that leads up to the archers. The ladder isn’t visible when entering the arena but the moment you turn around to look at the archers you can clearly see it next to the doorway you entered from. You can go up the ladder and easily dispatch the archers. I don’t remember if every following fight you have to run halfway through the arena to spawn him again or if you have to run halfway through only the first time, but regardless an observant player will notice after taking down the archers that the drop back down the ladder will look very similar to the plunging attack the game teaches you in the tutorial boss fight. If you make the connection and perform that attack on the Taurus Demon it’ll take out about 30% of his health depending on your class and weapon. Scramble around his legs (now that you’re on the same floor as him) back towards the ladder, climb up, and repeat a few more times for an easy victory. Alternatively you can wait up where the archers were for a few seconds and the Taurus Demon will jump up and fight you there. You now have an alternate wider arena better suited to strafing around him instead of the narrow bridge he spawns in on.
Other games would do things like give a prompt to lower the difficulty, reduce the health of enemies in the background after repeated failures, or give you optional power ups after X defeats. All of these reinforce the mentality that “what you’re doing is right, but you’re lacking the skill to do it” when often in Soulsbourne games that’s a harmful mentality to have as it’ll lead you to keep repeating a tactic or playstyle that’s demonstrably not working. In my opinion, that’s the core of what fans of harder games like myself want to keep experiencing and why so many are against “easier modes” because it subverts the intended experience we enjoy: recognizing what’s going wrong, correcting it to make things go right, and overcoming great challenges.
You’re presenting the two options as similar when I’m not entirely sure they are. You’ve explored making an easy game harder and a hard game easier, but let’s look at the other two results from your presented options: making an easy game easier and a hard game harder.
Making a hard game harder is often met with praise because the people who beat or otherwise enjoy the hard game already want and expect a challenge out of the game, so giving them more of that is almost what they expect already.
Making an easy game easier can be met with praise as much as it can be subject to criticism. The Pokemon series has long been critiqued for continually making every next installment easier and easier for the last several generations.
Obviously in your example of making a hard game easier there are people in favor of it but also people against it. The fact that we’re having a discussion about this controversy is proof enough that many people want it, but dedicated fans are often against it.
And just like in your example, I don’t think I’ve ever seen someone against allowing an easy game to have harder modes as long as it doesn’t negatively impact those playing the easier modes.
The trend I’m seeing amongst these 4 outcomes is usually that allowing the option for a harder mode than the game already allows is often agreed upon by the wider gaming community, but asking for easier modes is often controversial. The trend I’m also seeing is that this remains true regardless of if the game was considered easy or hard in the first place.
Your original post seems to imply that players and fans for hard games are being obstinate and resistant to allowing the same concessions that players and fans for easy games do, when you could use the other two results I brought up to make players for easy games seem just as obstinate. “Us players of hard games are allowing for harder games to be made, why do you fans of easy games seem to be having such a controversy over if easy games should be made easier?” or something to that effect.
In my opinion, the controversy isn’t whether hard games should be made easier, it’s whether games that fans enjoy should be made easier.
I think that stems from the developer’s intent. Making a hard game easier waters down the journey the creators intended, but making an easy game harder only adds to the experience. Like, the 2D Mario games are generally really easy, but there’s still lots of value in those games. But then there’s the bonus stages which are generally really difficult, and that adds even more value to the journey.
Then on the other hand you have From Software’s games, where the creator has said many times that the experimentation, adaptation, and the subsequent deep sense of accomplishment cultivated by the difficulty is a key part of the experience he wants his players to have. (There’s also the sense of community that comes with helping others with advice or cooperative gameplay) Relieving the player of the difficulty with an “easy mode” only serves to water down that experience.
I don’t think it’s fair to point at Mario’s challenging bonus levels as examples of adding to the experience by adding challenge, because they are part of the original experience. They are part of the developer’s intended product.
Tetris is beatable?
Well, it was sadly not the original Tetris by Alexey Pajitnov for the IBM PC, but the NES version was indeed beat recently.
that’s fair but it suggests that the games for which difficulty is a key feature are not the ones with grand storytelling/visuals/music/diegesis, in which case it makes perfect sense for souls likes to have easy modes
Related: Crusader Kings fandom reacting to perceiving Crusader Kings 3 to be slightly less intricate than Crusader Kings 2
Check out this video that discusses the difficulties in balancing difficulty (ha) for games with configurable levels of difficulty.
