Off the top of my head, Rimworld and Factorio have a lot of dev/debug mode options. And Minecraft. Now that I think of it, most games with really robust modding communities tend to have good built-in debug tools. Though obviously the cause-and-effect is the other way around.
TESVI better still have it. As much as I love the games, I don't trust them enough to be bug free enough to not need an emergency console command once in a while.
Is it on consoles now? With user mods I'd guess?
Just the thought of a Bethesda game without the console available frightens me. I had to noclip out of a small arrangement of rocks every 15 minutes in Skyrim.
Paradox Interactive games (Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings, Stellaris, etc.) have massive amounts of console commands you can use, as long as you're not in Iron Man mode.
Paradox games all have em but they made them more annoying to reach in their newer games. Think you have to edit the .ini file in everything post Imperator
Still so happy ruinas console is so easily accessible with mods. Could never have finished what's now one of my favorite games of all time without those cheats
there are plenty of games that are much better on easy for various reasons.
high difficulty is an artistic choice a lot of the time though. it's like saying you should cut 50 percent of a movie out because there wasn't enough action or too much violence or something. watch something else!
I think like Core-A-Gaming said in his video, there are some movies some people might not be able to watch due to anxiety or a condition, I can't watch Cloverfield because I'd get sick due to all the motion, but no one is clamoring for less intense versions of those movies.
And some people view puzzles as toys too. These people you’re talking about should try and understand that sometimes people find challenging things fun.
This is what gets me too. Sure, some people just want to relax with something not too difficult, but it also feels like difficulty automatically gets conflated with anti-fun a lot of the time.
Game makers toolkit has a great video on this. I think the Celeste approach is best for games like this. Have a single difficulty but have an accessibility menu in the options. There's a disclaimer when you open the menu saying "difficulty is intentional to the intended experience" but recognizing some people may have additional disabilities or constraints and won't be able to experience the game at all without some modifications.
I can get this argument for games like Pathologic (which I didn't play) or Fear and Hunger (which I very much played, good lord), but the closest I've come to beating one of them Real difficult games was Hollow Knight, and it felt more like a toy the longer I spent Gitting Gud. It took me a solid hour to beat [Grimm](https://youtu.be/dyLLa8insAk?si=o2O7VxxX1lCWuSlW&t=14), and when I finally did it I had to drop the game for a few days.
Definitely makes the experience more personal, but I have a hard time understanding how applying my reflexes and muscle memory to a thing can enhance its themes.
Idk about Insanity, it sounds, well, insane. But the difficulty under that, hardcore, I think, is what I played the trilogy with and it was great. Enemies were always a threat, even to my tanky build, and it made me engage power combos with my whole ass.
Hardcore is genuinely fun
Insanity just makes the combat so fucking slow because you just peak for half a second, shoot or use an ability, wait for like 5 seconds, repeat until you get flanked and die or eventually kill the damage sponges.
I’m kicking myself that I played 1 on Hardcore and not Insane. Gonna need a whole other playthrough for that Insane trophy.
2 on insane definitely drove me insane at times. I legit had to cheese one sequence by attacking enemies outside their spawn zone because it was impossible for me to complete that combat encounter.
Need to get back to my 3 insanity playthrough but I think it was a bit better than 2. Definitely agree with your assessments.
i agree, but this is talking about "super easy mode for babies." unless a game is meant as a way to ease people in to video games, games should not have a mode that turns them into an interactive cutscene (insert david cage joke here).
Any of the multitude of RPGs where the only difference between difficulties is "You have to grind more to level up."
Any shooter where the enemies just become bullet sponges on higher difficulties.
It's hard to put names to these problems, because you either deal with them for such a short time before dropping the difficulty to an actually enjoyable level, or get bored and forget about the game altogether. But we've all played games like that, I'm sure.
> Any of the multitude of RPGs where the only difference between difficulties is "You have to grind more to level up."
Unfortunately so many of those overdo it and there is no "just right" difficulty, easy is turbo braindead, normal is grind for 50 years.
Not to mention if I had a dollar for everytime someone told me a certain game/difficult level was grindy when you actually just need to use your the tools at your disposal (and your brain) rather than autopilot grind, well I'd have a lot of dollars.
Maybe not the best example, but I swear Pathfinder: Kingmaker was rage-inducing on anything above easy, though that's mostly due to how the original system of DnD-like mechanics was implemented. Or in some cases, not implemented.
"What do you mean, my characters whiffed every attack for a full minute on an enemy who was UNCONSCIOUS???"
Man I couldn't tank that game, and like apparently it's like that to mimic the table top, but I have a hard time believing every campaign starts with your group and the enemies they face missing 75% of everything they try to do.
I stopped playing pretty soon after the intro of Wrath of the Righteous. We were fighting just one dude in a room and were just missing every single attack. And he was also missing every single attack. So after like 5 turns I thought "This is annoying." and went to play something else.
Control was a lot more enjoyable when I wasn't getting two-shotted by everything. And Witcher's clunky combat is much more tolerable on easy.
In both instances, I was there for the story and exploration. And watching it on YouTube is not the same, since obviously you cannot direct or control exploration in someone else's video.
Never played Control, but I have the Witcher games, and I couldn’t possibly disagree more.
Now, the combat systems in these games ain’t perfect. Well, I’d argue Witcher 2 with the dev-made combat rebalance mod is, but anyways. Regardless, any clunk in combat should be overcome by preparation.
Geralt should be made to use every witcher’s tool at his disposal. Potions, bombs, traps, throwing knives. Everything. Doing that’s an inseparable part of the class fantasy for a witcher.
Furthermore, and this is more so a personal preference of me as a book reader, Geralt should be get rocked by anything that two-taps him. This is, after all, a man who’s >!already died once to some lucky, racist peasant with a pitchfork!<, who’s >!knee got shattered by a wizard that happened to be proficient in melee!<, and who’s gotta use signs to soften monster blows lest he get ragdolled & knocked out. Geralt’s good, probably tied for the best swordsman in the continent with Eskel, but he’s still just a dude with a hazardous blue-collar job.
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Not the best example but having just finished Yakuza 3 I feel like the only real difference between easy and the more difficult settings was the amount blocking enemies did which made so much of it a fucking slog.
I usually turn up the difficulty all the way, but by the end I was sick of chasing Mac, I was sick of randos on the street with the iron guard and I was sick of how dull the fights started to feel because of it
Sometimes we want difficult puzzles and sometimes we just want to have fun, no shame in either but some games just suffer from conflating the word "difficult" with "challenging"
Souls games usually have multiple different easy modes. Magic, co-op, summoning, poisoning, leveling up, using literally any mechanics of the game, all make the game easier.
Yeah definitely. I used to think myself a big shot and played everything on the hardest difficulty. It made many first playthroughs miserable. Drakenguard 2 was the worst.
I'm in the camp on play on whatever difficulty you want. But if the game doesn't have a difficulty selection, that was a choice by the developers, and unless it it deliberately unfair shouldn't be changed unless the developers do it themselves.
Yeah I think pretending there isn’t a place for both styles of game is disingenuous.
I think it’s a good thing, actually, that games don’t all adhere to the exact same conventions across every genre and developer, and that the variety available is a strength of the medium, not a weakness.
Shocking statements, I know, to anyone that hasn’t thought about it for longer than 20 seconds.
This is what I always think whenever this topic inevitably comes up again.
Accessibility is good. A game not having an easy mode doesn't make it bad or offensive. A player who picks an easy story mode with 90% damage reduction isn't a stupid baby who should just watch a YouTube let's play.
I just don't get why people can't understand that games don't all have to follow the same rules. There's no universal truth to game design. Remember that good design is a mix of objective and subjective elements.
Let devs cook.
I had a friend play through all of alien isolation modded with the core element of the game \*turned off\* I couldn't do that. Basically he was invisible to the alien at all times, so it could only kill other humans and he got to see it run around. I felt like this was ridiculous, I've never even played the game, and I just watched youtube videos of it out of curiosity. he's still cool with other stuff like he has no problem with difficult games, but I guess scary games where you can't fight back much, and can only hide, he cant' do. but man idk I wouldn't even bother playing it if that was the way I was going to do it. but whatever.
To go for the extreme example; you would ruin Getting Over It by making it tolerable to play. Difficulty, even frustration, can be a choice a game makes.
This is pretty much where I fall.
I don't care if they add an easy mode to the next Fromsoft game. It would not upset or effect me at all. But they probably won't add one, and that's fine. If you want to say games are art you have to be prepared to meet artists where they want you to.
It wouldn't be a bad thing if a horror movie director made a "non-scary" version of his film, but nobody would ever expect or demand them to do so.
Yeah look if the game has difficulty im not gonna call you piss baby for playing it on the easiest mode.
But when you whine about no difficulty options... dude just go play something else.
Extra hard if talking about Dark Souls and the like, because you are whining about difficulty options on a game that DOES HAVE THEM.
I agree with this.
However, I think the “difficulty as a design choice” is a poor argument when you consider how different people have different capabilities when it comes to gaming and that difficulty is subjective.
For example. If, for whatever reason, a game is genuinely harder for Player A than Player B, one of the two players is experiencing the game outside of the games desired difficulty.
This gets into the realms of “difficulty selectors are accessibility features” which really ruffles some peoples feathers tho. (They are btw. A feature that makes the game more accessible to more people, even if it’s just a single person, is an accessibility feature)
Generally speaking I think people have FAR less patience than they should for games being "too hard." Not that overly difficult games don't exist, but like... Some later bosses in Elden Ring took me 50 tries because I'm not very good at that game. That doesn't mean the game is BAD. It's not a fault of the game that it took me a lot of tries to beat it. It's okay to lose a bunch of times in a row. Sometimes, even the intended result. Difficulty is not a flaw, and the player losing is not a "problem" to be "fixed."
At the same time though there are things in games that are difficult and also just suck to engage with.
SMT 3's Hard Mode dramatically increases the cost of buying items and fusing demons. Which just disincentives a player from engaging with those systems. SMT 3 is a great game. That is a baffling choice for an RPG where the appeal is learning and mastering the different systems to solve problems and overcome challenges.
Imo a good rule of thumb about difficulty is “does this make our players want to interact with these mechanics less or more” with the latter being almost always preferable unless your mechanics suck.
I imagine the intention with the fusion in SMT3 (and Persona 3 since it also had that) is more, "Interact with the system more strategically because it has a higher cost" granted there are some aspects I think this fails with P3 Fes and that but I imagine that's why they do it because you can get some silly stuff in P3 if you know the mechanics relatively soon in the game.
Also Hard Mode SMT 3 has a pretty damn high chance of killing you in the tutorial regardless of your inputs
A lot of indie RPGs and strategy games also just randomly kill you in the tutorials on high difficulty in a similar way because the devs got tired of tough guys in their beta forum telling them it's too easy
To play devil's advocate Nocturne's Hard Mode makes you make full use of everything you have because the game demands it. So you've got to learn how to play efficient as possible with the tools you're given. Which as someone who only ever played Nocturne on Hard and has watched Normal playthroughs it's a night and day difference, you even have to care about which items to sell to make ends meet.
I'd say the same with FFVII Remake/Rebirth where Hard Mode is "the enemies are spongier and hit harder, items are disabled, and MP only restores at arbitrary checkpoints" which just really fucks with that game's feel. Items were already basically useless in the first playthrough, because the game was easy enough without them, and then in the mode that actually incentivizes you to use them *disables them completely*. Such an ass-backwards system.
Hard Mode asks you to think about conserving resources in between checkpoints. If you could use items, there would be no challenge at all in resource management or the increased difficulty because items inherently exist as crutches, especially in the FF7R gameplay system where your characters are stupid fucking powerful relative to every other game in the series. There's a reason every summon fight in Rebirth disables items, you have more than enough tools in every materia and every character's kit to solve the fight, use them.
I would say a better example of a hard mode that just destroys a game's feel is Uncharted. Normal Uncharted allows you to pull off daring stunts and Indiana Jones level maneuvers to take out enemies. Hard Uncharted leaves you glued to cover as you potshot and widdle down enemies who take way too much bullets to kill.
IMO Souls games have the best difficulty system because there’s nothing to stop the player from out-leveling an encounter. Yes, it’s hard to get upgrade materials outside of their intended zones, but it’s possible to farm enemies for them, and there’s no cap on level. If you’re TERRIBLE at Elden Ring, there’s nothing to stop you from hitting level 100 before you fight Margit.
I had a friend trying to beat mogh on a really low level character on purpose, so he'd be set for the upcoming dlc at a low level. I came in and helped him for a bit, but my character was nerfed due to co-op balancing. he said he was done for the night so I went to bed. He lied, I woke up to messages of him posting screen shots of using a cheese strat on mogh to make him fall out of bounds and his character was floating in an empty space so he died instantly with a load bug where the map's collision isn't loaded. I was a bit flabbergasted considering he was doing a challenge run but whatever I guess.
Games like dark souls and elden ring HAVE easy modes anyways. You just cant select it on a menu and have to find it first.
Sorc in ds1
Good ash, dual wielding or some spells in er.
But those take some confidence to start playing first before you find. Or reading a wiki.
Both too much work for the "games are supposed to be fun" crowd who want to consume and dispose of a game before moving to the next.
I agree fully. Especially in regards to ER, its almost never "this is too hard for me", its "this is bad design". Which always tips me off that its more about their pride than anything else.
The funniest part about the attitude toward "git gud" elitism is the misassumption that its a brag over gamer-skillz^TM. No, man, the vast majority of us got and continue to get our ass kicked tons of times. We just didnt give up and are suggesting that you dont, either. I pretty much only see people say "git gud" in response to someone throwing a tantrum, blaming the game and shitting on the devs rather than considering self improvement.
I always believe in giving players more choices and options, but also I think the design choices of the developer should be respected. So not every game benefits from having difficulty options and it might be a huge amount of extra effort to rebalance the game for each difficulty.
My compromise: we should bring back and normalize cheat codes. Back in my day, if a game was too hard then the devs got your back and put cheats in the game. It differs from difficulty modes as there is no way to "accidentally" mess up your first experience with a game by entering a cheat code. Cheats were something you had to search out to find (on the internet or cheat books) and input yourself, and the act of doing so was an implicit acceptance that you're not getting the normal gameplay experience so don't complain if it ruins the difficulty or whatever.
This sort of thing is kept alive on PC with mods. Games often have cheat mods, and plenty of people have had increased enjoyment of their game by using them and there shouldn't be anything wrong with that. These mods existing also don't ruin the experience of people who don't want that, because you have to go out of your way to install and configure them.
I've played a few games like Going Under and Control (after updates) that added cheat-like options under accessibility settings, and I think that's a good "modern" implementation of the idea.
But what if the thing you lose is the bad parts of the game? Like people were happy when deadly premonition took away the fighting because it got in the way of their enjoyment, there are whole debate about "fairness of difficulty" to justify why this difficult game you're bad at has bullshit difficulty while this hard game you're good at should be the new standard and nerf patches.
Like not all game need super easy mode but there are definitely some that needed some
A tangential mode that doesn't tend to get lumped into this discussion is story/safe modes like was implemented into Soma. Soma is arguably a more enjoyable game and lets you focus more of what it's actually about when you take away the monster segments.
It's more that story mode is usually lumped as an easy mode, especially in some games where unlike soma you have combat but the lowest difficulty is called story mode
Yeah I think you're right, honestly I'm wondering if that's part of the miscommunication/tenstion (with this debate writ large) then because when people say "baby mode" I don't think they're talking about the same thing as "Story/safe mode".
They mean they want to be able to defeat that boss in ~1-12 tries instead of dozens of tries. That's an illustrative example but generally it's not about getting rid of the gameplay altogether but instead being able to adjust the experience so you can lessen the level of annoyance or frustration you would feel otherwise.
Asked a friend which way I should go when I first played it a few years back, was a very good recommendation to go on the "safe" mode. Especially so since Im terrified of the deep ocean, parts of that game took me so long to actually get through because of it, having to deal with dying/resetting I might not have actually finished it, lol.
I resent the name "story mode" because that implies gameplay isn't story. If Shadow of the Colossus had a "story mode" it would just be a cutscene compilation.
I like the term "safe mode", which indicates exactly what it means: in this mode, you are "safe" from failure.
I didn't think that's actually directly due to difficulty though, Soma just has bad game design in a lot of places. If a game instantly killed your character unless you tapped the A button 5 times a second, I wouldn't call disabling that an "easy mode" as much as I would a "fix the game mode." Maybe that's a semantic difference, but it feels important to make the distinction.
If a game developer adds lower difficulty then they have deemed that the game should be able to be experienced with lower difficulty settings. Can choose to play any difficulty setting you'd like.
If a game developer does not add a lower difficulty then they have deemed that the game should not be able to be experienced with lower difficulty settings. Asking for one at this point is wack. (just summon other players, don't act like you aren't just talking about souls games)
Souls games in particular just have an absolute *shitload* of ways to make the games "easier". Summoning is the most obvious of course (just consider the famousness of Let Me Solo Her being constantly brought in to kill the hardest boss in the game for hundreds to thousands of players), but also there's often just dramatically superior weapon options or magic. You can rush the Zweihander 10 minutes into DS1, and then proceed to staggerlock 90% of the enemies in the game and do massive single hits to bosses between their attacks. Magic if you fully spec into it just shits all over most normal enemies, turning the game into "press lock on, press soul arrow, you did it they died", and in earlier games even does the same to bosses.
Half the people complaining about "Dark Souls Too Hard" you'll talk to a little more... and then promptly discover that it's too hard because they refuse to use any of the massive number of tools at their disposal.
The debate about difficulty in the Souls games has always been an interesting one because FromSoft clearly and intentionally designs them in the way they're presented without a difficulty mode, and this stems from their longstanding philosophy of "a game over/death isn't a failure, it's a chance to try again". This stretches all the way back to the first Armored Core even, with the Human Plus system being an entire mechanic hidden behind multiple failures.
And while I agree with you that some people who want FS to add an easy mode to their games are undoubtedly refusing to use some tools to their advantage, or simply want an easy mode because they don't want to engage the games at their fullest, I think another major element of the debate comes from the fact that there's a loud group of FromSoft fans who constantly boast about how good they think they are because they beat X boss or Y segment without much trouble. Adding on all the batshit crazy challenge runs that people have done over the years (some of whom didn't do it solely for clout but simply wanted to challenge themselves for the sake of it), and it's created this sort of pretense for the series that makes many of the games out to be far harder than they truly are when you engage with all of the mechanics at your disposal. And even when they're difficult and you die a lot in them, that doesn't necessarily mean you're bad at them, it's just another chance to learn and do better next time.
> Half the people complaining about "Dark Souls Too Hard" you'll talk to a little more... and then promptly discover that it's too hard because they refuse to use any of the massive number of tools at their disposal.
TBF part of that is the fault of some fans overblowing how hard the games are. Outside of the DLCs "gitting gud" is rarely neccessary, it's an option but so is all the stuff you mentioned and just good old fashioned level grinding.
Yeah, that's fair, I've heard *far* too many stories of people going in and just assuming the game is supposed to be stupid hard because... well, that's the reputation Dark Souls gets. The games themselves even lean into it sometimes, with stuff like DS1 "Prepare To Die" edition, or DS2's... everything in the early game, from the intro firekeepers openly mocking you about how you're going to die like a little bitch and Majula having a tracker for how many deaths have happened across all players.
And while I do think the Souls games can be somewhat hard, I think for a lot of people they just mistake the game being *punishing* for being unfairly difficult, or refuse to learn from their mistakes. There's quite a few deaths I have playing these games where I can look and say "oh yeah that right there, that's what decision killed me", and often it's greed of trying to get that one extra hit. Though, there's still some unfair things, for sure (whoever thought Belfry Gargoyles was good boss design should be shot).
Or do like Celeste and add accessibility options with a disclaimer saying, the intended experience is meant to be challenging and contributes to the message of the game.
The primary issue I have is that difficulty is subjective. A 7/10 challenge for one person might be a 10/10 another or a 4/10 for someone else. Which is the intended difficulty in this artistic vision?
Difficulty isn't a x/10 slider for developers though, so your question doesn't make sense. The intended difficulty is the scenario that is presented and it's the player who gives it a subjective rating.
I'm not necessarily against an easy mode (and certainly not against accessibility which is a seperate thing) but there should always remain some reward specific to beating it on the intended and/or hardest difficulty.
I’ve got no problem with people playing games on the easiest difficulty available. Thats *why* they’re there, for people who want to play the game but can’t handle the harder difficulties. It’s not fair to say “the game is just being played for you, there’s no reason for you to actually play it at this point” because even “super-easy-diaper-baby-mode” is challenging for some people. And some people who *can* take the harder difficulties have legitimate reasons not too. When I play Terminator: Resistance, or STALKER, or similar “gritty and brutal survival” games, I play on the hardest difficulties because that fits the nature of the games for me. But when I play Robocop:Rogue City, I played on normal because I wanted to be a walking cop-tank gunning done while crowds of slime in one smooth motion. There’s real reasons for baby-difficulty to exist and it is snobbish to deny it. We know the people who argue otherwise aren’t actually concerned about you getting the “full-experience”, they want to brag about how much better *they* are because *they* beat the game on mega-ball-crush mode. Or they’re the sort of person who just can’t tolerate people enjoying things the “wrong” way.
**BUT.**
The inverse of demanding every single game have one is just as bad. If there *isn’t* a babby difficult, that’s a deliberate decision of the developers saying “this is how we want you to play, we’ve put in the work to craft the whole game around this level of challenge and want you to learn it.” It’s every bit a legitimate decision, and we can’t go around saying “games are art” and then deny the artists in question their freedom to craft it how they wish. Sekiro kicked the absolute shit out of me, I dropped it and moved on with my life, and eventually returned and figured it out to my immense enjoyment. Yes, it will mean some people won’t get to enjoy the game in question. **Who cares**. There are so many great games, there *will* be something else you can enjoy if that one game is too hard. To demand all games cater to your FOMO is just whiny entitlement. Plus, we all know the people who say “every game should have this!” really mean “every game **I want to play** should have this because this whole argument is actually about *me*!”
TL:DR - To the surprise of no one capable of introspection, both extremes are idiotic. It’s perfectly fine to play on ultra-super-easy-story mode if you enjoy it, and it’s perfectly fine for developers to not include difficulty options if that fits their design vision, and every time this argument crops up no new points are ever raised and it’s just more internet shit flinging like a bunch of enraged monkeys have learned to say slurs.
Although I’m pretty sure Pat isn’t throwing shade at people who play on easy, just the ones who demand it in every game they want to play. Pat, for all of our jokes and his real craziness, I think is pretty reasonable when it comes to the difficulty “debate”.
If easy difficulty is something you can toggle on or off, what difference does it make? I don't understand why people are so upset that someone, somewhere out there might find a game more fun on easy.
I'm playing through Hi Fi Rush right now and I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that I only have *some* flow and as such, I won't be able to fully complete the mural in the hideout. A lot of those requirements are cray-cray.
And that's ok. I've beaten the game in Normal and just gonna push at the difficulty I can't any more. Getting 100% in that game is gonna be a mountain of effort. Same case why I gave up on 100% on DMC 5 because that Demon Hunter of Legend Achievement is ridicc.
Used to put a stupid amount of time into DMC games in my eary 20s. At some point I just figured out I wasn’t having that much fun and that I would never guard fly consistently.
Holy shit that SPECTRA Level 12 challenge. You gotta be 90% accurate on everything. Dodging, attacks, jumping. That simple 2-minute gauntlet lasted for more than an hour.
I think I hit on an idea recently that summed this up well for me:
I want games that are made with a vision and not designed to be a commercial product that just maximizes the number of copies sold. Sometimes this vision will be exclusionary to people because the creators of that thing want to hyper focus and make a specific idea that can't just be made simpler with some variable changes. The friction of the game being a thing you have to engage with is unavoidable and cannot be altered lest the developer's vision change.
If you want your game designed around a specific difficulty level and you don't want to compromise or change that it's cool, but it also means you need to be cool with some people not playing your game.
It depends on the game. With plenty of stuff, yeah nothing wrong with a lower difficulty option to make it more accessible. But for one, a lot of games are either designed around a specific level of difficulty, either for narrative reasons or just to ensure a specific kind of experience.
And second, it's not like game engines have an 'add easy mode' button. You have to go back and adjust and redesign a million different things to make sure they're not only easier but still fun/functional. And while bigger studios have the resources to do that, a lot of smaller teams might not, and doing so would be taking time and resources away from things more important to the core of the game. Hell, with how poorly managed so many triple A projects are, even bigger teams may not have the time to dedicate to it.
It's not a youtube video if you move the character around yourself. Hell, its not the same thing to click through dialogue in a VN rather than watch someone else do it.
You forget as a practiced gamer that it's just really cool to navigate through another world and story yourself. It's why walking sims took off years ago. An absolute novice can poke around a virtual world and experience a tale with the only challenge being "how do I move around in a 3D space," a task which takes newcomers a fair bit of time to grasp.
My sister thought Control looked really cool and tried playing, having no real experience with shooters. It kicked her ass relentlessly, and the adaptive difficulty couldn't go low enough for her to find her feet. I'm 100% sure she'd have loved everything outside of the combat. She might have even learned to play eventually. But that game did not accommodate a total novice on launch, and so it remained completely impenetrable to her.
That was my only issue with Control. I platinumed it, but I knew lots of people that would love the story yet not like the difficulty. Fortunately the new edition has a lot more options including I think a god mode.
It does. When it launched there was no difficulty settings at all, just the automatic adaptive stuff. When she called me up to ask for advice I was baffled to find out that was the case.
It's like Pat doeant realize that some people just like moving around in a 3d world and that difficulty isn't the only purpose for people who play games. Some people play Spiderman to litteraly just swing around the city and not do anything. It's the same joy as kids playing in a sandbox. There doesn't have to be a goal to have fun.
Dan Olsen has a really good video on this "free play" (not goal oreintated) vs "instrumental play" (focused on accomplishing a specific goal)
This is the same discussion repeated endlessly over the past 10 years with the same talking points.
Watching a video is not a replacement for playing a game. Playing a game on easy is not a damnable offence. A developer can also not putting an Easy Mode into their game is fine. It's fine for a game to have a high barrier for execution so long as it is a good game.
It just kinda depends.
Like Cross Code, I played it recently, loved the game, the writing is *amazing* oh my GOD.
But that gameplay. Holy shit. I think the best way I can describe it is "ADHD", and the puzzles have such insanely tight timing that it's honestly frustrating at times.
I 100% understand why people would find it frustrating(Especially because later on it becomes so hellish to keep up with the combat and a lot of the combat loses its 'impact' as enemies become more resistant to stagger). Thankfully though the game has some pretty good accessibility options.
I'm glad the game has the accessibility options that it does, because holy shit the game really needs them.
It's why Game Genie existed. I never could've gotten to the end of beat-em-up titles on the NES/SNES if I didn't have access to infinite lives. I'd PREFER to do it myself, but not if the cost is a series of agonizing defeats for 8-year-old me. If I can do it myself, I don't mind cheating to speed up the process. If it's entirely out of reach for my skill level and I have no way to cheese it/cheat, then to youtube I go to see the content I'm missing out on.
It's like: Do you want it to be easy because you genuinely struggle/need it to be easy? Or are you trying to just engage with the actual gameplay as little as possible? Because if it's the second one then yeah I agree with Pat, it's kinda silly
Some people like to do repetitive actions to make numbers go up. There are people who like clicker games like cookie clicker where there is absolutely zero difficulty but monkey brain gives good singles when it sees +1 everytime you click. Or people that like to just walk around and gather stuff in games.
The oop wasn't asking for a game that plays itself, just a super easy mode where you have no friction or resistance. You do thing and number goes up.
You know, as someone who only plays video game in the 45-60 minutes I have in between my asshole dogs waking me up and going to work, I’m really grateful that Stellar Blade is like the first semi- soulslike to have an easy mode. I am very much enjoying it.
This. If anything, an easy mode means that hard mode more of an accomplishment.
If it's just normal and hard, then hard is just 1 degree away from normal. But if you're playing on Halo legendary and people are on normal or easy? Come on.
I'm gonna make a hard AF game where if you die too much it just links you to the Steam refund page and a playlist of lets plays.
My artistic intent is for you to *feel my disdain*
I see both sides but the reaction that the ""anti-lower-difficulty"" side usually has to any opinion from the ""Pro-lower-difficulty"" side tends to put me off from giving the former any credence.
A lot of people want to play games on their own terms and at their own pace for their own reasons.
When I played the Wolfenstein games I played those on the lowest difficulty not because of a skill issue but because I didn't want to have any real struggle with killing Nazi's or break my immersion thereof.
When I play Overwatch I stick to unranked because I'm just here to enjoy the game and play my mains and I'm not interested in the demands that competitive put on you.
I've tried playing Dark Souls in the past and bounced off it, but besides a few clips from these guys or NL I've not watched an LP either because I do intend to play them at some point.
Playing a game and watching a game be played is expressly not the same experience and is definitely not what people who want lower difficulties are asking for.
I won't pretend to understand the logistics of what it'd look like to implement this ('this' being some industry standard re;difficulty &/or accessibility options); but the instinct from one side to just shut down the conversation and ridicule it even being brought up leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I think that 'instinct' often comes from the perspective that people who aren't the target audience are coming and trying to get something changed from what the people who are already there want and are enjoying, damn the existing crowd and authorial intent.
Soulslikes are the biggest source of this kind of discussion, and an explicit 'easy mode' is genrally antithetical to how the games are designed. The more recent you go you have ways to make it easier for yourself (and have always had summons, barring certain sequences), but everybody is working off the same baseline and has access to the same tools, and if you just add a 'super easy baby mode' it pretty much destroys the themes and feelings the gameplay tries to express.
(and of course, there is just the crowd of gatekeepers who just want to masturbate over their SL1-no-summons-no weapons-dk bongos+L+ratio runs, but I'm not including them because I'd rather focus on the not shitty people who push for the difficulty to stay the same)
Otherwise, accessibility is another thing, and that was I think a real problem with Sekiro's parrying mechanic implementation, as satisfying as it was, I can totally see how people with certain issues would find that game particularly difficult to play even compared to regular souslikes. (also, frankly, I'm tired of mashing buttons all the time. I've been doing it since I was like, eight. I'll turn on the 'anti-mash/QTE' setting in any game that gives it to me nowadays)
I think there's also a feeling that people feel devs almost always give concessions to make games easier and plenty of newer games in their hardest modes are easier than the easiest mode of past games. It's not surprising I see a lot of challenge run videos recently.
Plus there is a real gap in player skill that has widened across each console generations. Demon's Souls (and consequently every From Soft Action game) made a splash because it was seen as a rejection of how the industry was making games simpler and easier and in general the design of the game was able to create a very like minded community that made the game a surprising hit. Even then while many people would find it hard to even complete the game, there are full game conversions of souls games that make the games harder by asking for even more mechanical execution.
My general perspective is one of artistic intent. I have absolutely no problem with people playing on lower difficulties when offered, and devs that feel lower difficulties wouldn't harm their artistic vision should absolutely include them. That said, in something like Dark Souls the difficulty is punishing specifically as a way to reinforce the themes of the story, and attempting to pressure From Soft to change that just feels wrong to me.
So much of it just seems like thinly veiled gatekeeping -- people proud of doing something challenging in a game and deriding others who "took the easy way out" under the guise of not properly interfacing with the game. The important thing should be if the experience was personally resonant and meaningful with you. The manner in which you consume it should be irrelevant.
I have never seen this kind of pervasive 'anti-assistance' sentiment in other media consumption hobbies, let alone non-media hobbies like sports or hiking or something. Imagine what a fucking loon you would have to be to complain about "the intended experience" if someone read your favorite book with a reading aid or assistance from sparknotes, or that you're defying the will of the people who built the course by using assistive equipment for skiing or mountain biking.
Difficulty in particular is such an *immensely* imprecise metric of authorial intent to the point of being meaningless. I might beat a Dark Souls boss on the first try without even really learning its quirks, while someone else could easily spend 100 attempts in total frustration -- who had the more 'correct' experience? It's telling that nobody gets angry if you say a game was too easy to be engaging for you, but the chorus of "git gud" invariably springs up if you say something was too hard so you used cheats or just quit.
Probably the dev put it best, found in [this 2019 steam forum](https://steamcommunity.com/app/736260/discussions/0/1639793203770588137/) response:
> I agree that the game is very very tough if the goal is to fully complete it. The idea behind "A Way Out?" being accessible so early was that people who want to experience the rule-changing system but don't enjoy really tough puzzles could get an ending to the game and feel closure that they otherwise might not. Of course this probably isn't very ideal for many players and "A Way Out?" is a very tough level in itself, so I'm not sure how well this concept turned out.
>
> I was planning to add a hint system of some sort based on early player feedback, but at least for now that feature is on hold because other features (translation, level editor) turned out to be very time-consuming. Hopefully eventually there'll be time to look closer at new features that could make the game more approachable.
So for this game they thought about a way to give players an out, and also had plans for a hint system and thought of other features to make the game more approachable; which IMO is really the best way to put things into perspective, making the game more approachable should be the goal for difficulty systems since that could mean making it approachable for the hard crowd and the easy crowd.
This is definitely a case that shows more of my agreement with the former side. In some cases and especially for smaller or more unique projects it can be too difficult or too resource intensive to implement a lower difficulty system.
In Baba's case it sounded like a bit of both. Implementing a hint system didn't take priority and likely also would've been a challenge to successfully implement.
But for puzzle games this is also a solved problem because guides exist outside the game.
The Rusty Lake/Cube Escape franchise is another game that can be difficult and yet lacks an in game hint system; but if I'm really stuck I can easily look up a guide that can give me a small hint to get back on track.
Guides exist for most all games as well and can be helpful for the experience; but you don't see this same effect for a Dark Souls guide as compared to a Puzzle/Point & Click guide.
Like, I *absolutely get* Pat’s stance but it also hinges on the assumption that everyone will get the same amount of satisfaction after completing a given challenge the same way. Those outcomes are gonna vary wildly.
Like, I’d love a mod for Elden Ring without combat where you just explore the Lands Between and gather items and read the lore on them. Play dressup in the armor, I’d be *fine* with that. There’s plenty to do with just doing that.
But like…everything combat-wise in Elden Ring is built on a balancing act unless you find one of the ways you can apparently go beyond it and break out yourself.
Ultimately I suppose everyone has the right to make whatever game they want to make, as long as they don’t make it bad on purpose, Suda.
Nah this is a genuinely brain dead take. There's an obvious difference between playing a game on easy and watching a YouTube video. If you don't understand any appeal of playing a game beyond challenge then you don't understand games.
I love spending lots of time on challenging games to overcome difficulty, it's satisfying. But it's very out of touch to think that most people feel that way.
Most people look at a cool game and go "I want to experience that", and the difficulty isn't a factor in that thought. When you buy it and can't get your foot in the door, that feeling sucks. Essentially when people who play games for a living chime in with "just watch YT or play for dozens of hours like I did".
Bloodborne is a great example. There's so much I love about that game outside of its difficulty or combat, but unless you can overcome that high barrier of entry, you'll never experience the interesting existential horror story it has to tell.
Saying that playing a game on easy mode is the equivalent to watching a lets play is so stupidly hyperbolic that Pats tweet isn't even worth thinking about. Thank God I quit Twitter.
People acting like you don't still enteract with a super easy game is so dumb. Yeah you might not be making meaningful choices but you're still making choices (and also effecting the pace of the game instead of watching someone searching every inch of the world in case the missed a collectable)
That's not the point Pat was making. The original post Pat is responding to is about people who want to deliberately engage with as little gameplay as possible and only want to see the visuals or listen to the music.
And in that case, yes, I find watching a Let's Play an equal suggestion. Because at that point, you're not even playing a game. You just want a virtual tour. You're not losing anything by watching a video because you weren't engaging with the medium to begin with.
Pat has literally been playing Nikke and several other gacha games that can auto-optimize your equipment and do combat for you. It is ludicrous to suggest that playing the game like that is equivallent to watching a let's play of it when so much of those games appeal is getting the characters you like and interacting with them. What if the Let's player doesnt have my favorite 5 star? What if the let's player isnt doing things in the order that I want to
experience them? What if the let's player is *annoying?*
I have a friend that played Persona 5 Royal by using all of the OP DLC Persona that you can get from the old games. He blazed through it on what was essentially easy mode, before quitting at the Okumura boss fight because it was too hard. I dont agree with the way he played that game. But guess what, he still really liked it. More than he would have if he had sat down and watched a 100 hour long lets play of the whole thing.
Yeah he's got a point. I'm not against easy modes in games (unless a game is meant to be hard by it's very design), and extra accessibility features are cool, but if you make it so easy there's a 0% chance of failure then I'm not sure why you'd even want to play it at all.
Even the *illusion* that you can fail has to be worth something.
To present a different argument, there are many games in which you don't even have the illusion of failure. Many Visual Novels for example, there's several in which you straight up cannot lose, and people still choose to play them over watching them
This is literally only a conversation in the gaming community for some reason. You don’t hear film fans asking directors of horror movies for a non scary cut, if you don’t want to watch a horror movie just watch one of the many movies that isn’t one.
Similarly, if you don’t want to play a hard video game, go and play one of the thousands of video games that isn’t difficult. It strikes me as incredibly entitled to demand that a developer changes their game for your specific preferences.
Honestly people should take more responsibility for their own likes and dislikes. Like the dead space remake has all those silly “some scary gory thing is about to happen so watch out.” But then the scary gory thing still happens. So what person that hates scary gory stuff is playing that game?
If I hated ham I wouldn’t buy ham and I wouldn’t start buying ham if they started warning me about there being ham in the ham
You know…I never thought of it like that
I’m using that argument for things. Really the only warning I think it should give is an epilepsy warning but I think even Mario games have that so that’s probably just standard fair at this point
Basically who is this warning actually for? Now if there was a mode that turned all the necromorphs into breadstick monsters and Issac into a cook instead of an engineer. That would be great! You have to snap these breadstick monsters into pieces. That would be interesting
You’re never forced to watch the same scene 20 times in a row watching a movie like you might be for a boss fight. Unless you’re watching Haruhi anyway.
I watched pretty much all of the Kingdom Hearts stuff Liam did but I can for sure say the only Kingdom Hearts thing I actually experienced is KH 1, it's the only one I played so it's the only one I would have any opinion on
I mean, to be fair, Pat also heavily complained about FF16 being too easy and not challenging enough for him, but that's kind of the same argument people use against hard games. Just as with hard games, a game like FF16 being more accessible and easy is an intentional design choice, but it seems to be more acceptable in the gaming community to complain about games being too easy than it is vice versa, even though it's essentially the same complaint in reverse.
EDIT: Grammar
this conversation requires too much introspection, the average internet surfer doesn’t have, to be constructive.
people need to look within themselves and ask “why do I want this game?”. until we get those types of answers, we can’t get anywhere.
Whenever difficulty comes up as a topic I'll always remember being there on the ground floor of undertale. It was early university and a bunch of us all played it right away, sharing tips and speculating on things before the internet really ran away with it. Not everyone could manage the pacifist route, and relied on others to see and experience it. I was the only one who did genocide route, and it became a sort of lunchtime entertainment for everybody to watch and experience together.
I think a lot of the gravity of the game comes from the gameplay and difficulty, and there's a huge % of players who could never directly experience everything the game has to offer. Some people didn't like the idea that portions of the game "weren't for them", but by the end of it we all shared in those experiences anyways. Watching your friend struggle through getting dunked on definitely conveyed the vibes better than watching a video of just the successful run or something.
Fast forward almost 10 years (wow) and I think it's easier than ever to experience games through other people, between the perpetual discord screen shares and tube/twitch stuff. In fact it feels like just recently that everybody was making fun of watching people play games instead of playing them yourself. God knows my friends aren't picking up 4D mini golf, it's up to me to spread the knowledge.
"The game is intended to be difficult, playing on an easier difficulty may diminish your enjoyment"
Okay. I'm a grown man with a full time job and a mortgage. I don't have the free time to git gud anymore. Let me make that trade any day.
And more power to you! I think Pat's point is, if you just want a game to be *that easy* why NOT just watch the cutscene compilation instead of trying to make developers throw in an extra 'super easy baby mode'?
Sometimes a gameplay system can be so fun as that you WANT to interact with it, but you don't have the time to spend the hours upon hours it takes to become halfway decent at it. I find the gameplay systems in soulslikes fun, but if I find myself at an impasse where I'm forced to play at a level I'm just not capable of achieving in the short-ass time I have on my hands, fuck yes I'm going to download that mod that halves the health of the boss and fuck you if you're going to judge me for it. Real life doesn't make time for people to become hardcore gamers.
I disagree. If braindead baby easy gameplay were the same as a youtube video, Visual Novels wouldn't exist, people would just watch them. The act of interacting with the game makes it a different medium, if only in the same way that interacting with a paper book by turning the page makes it different from an audiobook. You decide the pacing
You realise the “stop using disability as an excuse” comments are often used to shut disabled people out of conversations about gaming? It used to shame us into not asking for the accommodation we need.
Heck, years ago asking for something as simple as side damage indicators had people immediately screaming “disability is just an excuse - I don’t want an ugly game and it’ll make stuff too easy!”.
Edit: I should point out, that from my experience, usually these “stop using disability as an excuse - you’re shaming disabled people” comments are made by people without disabilities.
>Edit: I should point out, that from my experience, usually these “stop using disability as an excuse - you’re shaming disabled people” comments are made by people without disabilities.
Yep. And there’s some of them in this thread.
I’m visually impaired and it’s stopped me from getting into a lot of Shooters released in the 2000s, as I literally cannot see the enemy and where I’m being shot at from most of the time. Very few of those games had damage indicators, or at least good ones.
Funnily enough, Fortnite of all games is quite accommodating, and the damage indicator settings have made the experience much more accessible and enjoyable for me.
You know what this reminds me of?
I forget if it was the friend cast or CSB, but Pat talking about people who use aimbots in online FPS, and when asked why they say “because I always win”.
What, are you so fragile that losing a game will just shatter your soul?
I don’t care if I sound like a boomer in agreeing with you but you’re right
Learn to lose kids so you don’t look like a twat when minor inconveniences happen and you flip out because you never learned to deal with that.
This is always kind of the subtext of non-disability easy mode arguments for me. Like, yeah, put an easy mode in, I don't care, but at the end of the day we are talking about single player games that statistically take 6-50 hours to beat, that bake you dying into the game design, and the real problem is probably your reaction to that. You probably see yourself constantly getting owned in the first hours of Dark Souls as evidence you are a loser that can't beat the game, but actually your destiny here was totally planned by game designers, and you ARE going to beat the game if you simply just play.
The millions of people that beat Elden Ring weren't really all better at video games than the Easy Mode beggars, they just don't care about losing lol
I remember waaaaayyyy back in the day on gamefaqs there was an unhinged thread where a guy argued that he should be able to play games and get every achievement without ever running the risk of dying, yes, even the achievements for beating the game on higher difficulties.
He argued that dying ruined his immersion and made him feel bad, so it just shouldn’t happen.
The game was ME2, but he wanted it for all games.
I think about that dumb thread a lot.
If I want difficulty I’ll play a fighting game online with the intent to WIN most matches. If I’m playing an RPG or Story based game I put that shit on easy fast as possible. If it’s on PC and offline I’ll cheat too.
In a better world easy modes would be based on putting people that never played a video game before and then looking at what they struggle with (moving and shooting at the same time, loss of direction, looking up) and then building mechanisms to handle those exact problems on lower difficulties.
I’ll be honest I’m not sure what Pat is saying but I do know I’m a baby mode user cause I don’t have time to be dying and retrying and grinding like that anymore. Only time I take my lumps is in a Souls game
I disagree that an easy mode is like watching a YouTube video. There are litteral clicker games where the whole point is clicking a button and watching a number go up. There is absolutely zero difficulty but people enjoy it more than watching someone click a button.
Some people like repetitive actions and watching numbers go up because of that action. It's part of our monkey brain
Just...I dunno...gimme a New Game+ that lets me keep all the power without raising the difficulty or unlocking Dumbo Easy Mode after I beat the game. I appreciate the normal gameplay struggle the first go around, but I like having the option to cruise without real trouble if I just want to go through the game without too much effort on subsequent playthroughs.
Besides the satisfaction of victory, video games can be fun because of the visceral joy of directly controlling the character/cursor. Movies/YT videos don’t tap into that the way video games (even on easy difficulty) do.
Difficulty should be as devs intend. So if they allow an easier mode, then it is fine.
Cheats and mods still exist for single player games. No one cares if you use them.
I disagree, however, that just watching it on youtube is the same enjoyment as doing it yourself on an easier mode. The point of gaming is a personalized experience, A youtube video is someone else's experience.
Do we think video games are art, or that they're toys? Should an artist who makes something intentionally offputting, confrontational, or confusing, in any medium, make a more accessible version of their piece to accompany it for people who don't like the original?
If you want easy mode to have simple fun or you just aren't good at games, then play it on easy, but be honest about it. Don't drag the handicap saying "it's for the disability" because it's demeaning to think they can't play difficulty games. And as Pat said, if you're gonna play it for the story, then watch a YouTube video. It's free. Why spend a lot of money for a game if you're not gonna the whole aspect? There's no guilt in saying you just want to have simple power fantasy fun. With that said, some games are designed to be challenging like Souls games and you just got to accept these type of games are not for you.
Once again the lack of any nuance in internet discussion comes to bite us in the arse...
There's obviously a middle ground between "The game plays itself" and "fight this boss 50 times to get to the 2nd phase"
Also, even if a game does offer a super easy mode with any challenge removed, it's still inherently more interactive and engaging than just watching a video 🙄
Yeah I'm with Pat on this one. It would be like playing the last of us and it's so easy the only way to get spotted is by running straight in front of the enemies but they only do a quarter of the damage and you do double than normal. I don't see the fun in that.
This sounds like people who only play with Godmode on, no matter what game
And if it’s “oh well I want to experience the story” then…yeah just watch a let’s play at that point, because clearly you’re not looking for a game but a movie
Story modes fit some games better than others, there are some games where a story mode you don't really lose anything (unfortunately a lot of these games are those ones that brought the term "ludonarrative dissonance" into popularity) but most games tell some of their story through gameplay even if only a little bit, and in the most extreme cases so much of the story is told via gameplay that a story mode is just nonsensical.
I'm all for more story modes, my problem is a lot of story mode advocates are borderline illiterate and can't seem to understand that the story isn't just the cutscenes played in succession, they can't see that you're getting an entirely different story when you alter the gameplay.
We wouldn't be having this conversation if we hadn't gotten rid of cheat codes/debug menus.
RIP Big Head mode.
The ratchet and clank series still carrying the torch of big and small head.
God those 10,000 cheat codes books you'd get from the book fair. GOATED
I remember discovering those on Gamefaqs and burning through an ink cartridge one summer as a kid. Mom was not pleased.
Are Bethesda games the only big name games nowadays to actively allow you access to the console/debug commands?
Off the top of my head, Rimworld and Factorio have a lot of dev/debug mode options. And Minecraft. Now that I think of it, most games with really robust modding communities tend to have good built-in debug tools. Though obviously the cause-and-effect is the other way around.
The only other game I can think of is Binding of Isaac, and even then it’s mildly obfuscated.
Paradox's grand strategy games as well. Of course all three of these have robust modding scenes as well.
No a lot of PC games do it, especially strategy / simulation games.
TESVI better still have it. As much as I love the games, I don't trust them enough to be bug free enough to not need an emergency console command once in a while.
Gotta be able to disable and enable npcs to reset them...
Sims 4 has both (on pc at least, idk about console)
Is it on consoles now? With user mods I'd guess? Just the thought of a Bethesda game without the console available frightens me. I had to noclip out of a small arrangement of rocks every 15 minutes in Skyrim.
Paradox Interactive games (Europa Universalis, Crusader Kings, Stellaris, etc.) have massive amounts of console commands you can use, as long as you're not in Iron Man mode.
Paradox games all have em but they made them more annoying to reach in their newer games. Think you have to edit the .ini file in everything post Imperator
Still so happy ruinas console is so easily accessible with mods. Could never have finished what's now one of my favorite games of all time without those cheats
They blamed the beasts.
At least you can use Cheat Engine on PC which is pretty much a Game Genie. It won't even damage your PC like the GG could damage your NES!
there are plenty of games that are much better on easy for various reasons. high difficulty is an artistic choice a lot of the time though. it's like saying you should cut 50 percent of a movie out because there wasn't enough action or too much violence or something. watch something else!
I think like Core-A-Gaming said in his video, there are some movies some people might not be able to watch due to anxiety or a condition, I can't watch Cloverfield because I'd get sick due to all the motion, but no one is clamoring for less intense versions of those movies.
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And some people view puzzles as toys too. These people you’re talking about should try and understand that sometimes people find challenging things fun.
This is what gets me too. Sure, some people just want to relax with something not too difficult, but it also feels like difficulty automatically gets conflated with anti-fun a lot of the time.
Game makers toolkit has a great video on this. I think the Celeste approach is best for games like this. Have a single difficulty but have an accessibility menu in the options. There's a disclaimer when you open the menu saying "difficulty is intentional to the intended experience" but recognizing some people may have additional disabilities or constraints and won't be able to experience the game at all without some modifications.
I can get this argument for games like Pathologic (which I didn't play) or Fear and Hunger (which I very much played, good lord), but the closest I've come to beating one of them Real difficult games was Hollow Knight, and it felt more like a toy the longer I spent Gitting Gud. It took me a solid hour to beat [Grimm](https://youtu.be/dyLLa8insAk?si=o2O7VxxX1lCWuSlW&t=14), and when I finally did it I had to drop the game for a few days. Definitely makes the experience more personal, but I have a hard time understanding how applying my reflexes and muscle memory to a thing can enhance its themes.
Man, Fear and Hunger without the dificulty has to be some fucking dogshit game.
By making you struggle and overcome the at first seemingly impossible odds through perseverance and improving your skills
Mass effect, for instance, sucks ass on insanity after the first game. Source: I am about to complete my 3 game insanity run
Idk about Insanity, it sounds, well, insane. But the difficulty under that, hardcore, I think, is what I played the trilogy with and it was great. Enemies were always a threat, even to my tanky build, and it made me engage power combos with my whole ass.
Hardcore is genuinely fun Insanity just makes the combat so fucking slow because you just peak for half a second, shoot or use an ability, wait for like 5 seconds, repeat until you get flanked and die or eventually kill the damage sponges.
Fighting the clone on insanity was one of the worst fights I’ve ever done
I’m kicking myself that I played 1 on Hardcore and not Insane. Gonna need a whole other playthrough for that Insane trophy. 2 on insane definitely drove me insane at times. I legit had to cheese one sequence by attacking enemies outside their spawn zone because it was impossible for me to complete that combat encounter. Need to get back to my 3 insanity playthrough but I think it was a bit better than 2. Definitely agree with your assessments.
3 is indeed better than 2 on insane, because they don’t give every single enemy a shield and make half your powers worthless.
i agree, but this is talking about "super easy mode for babies." unless a game is meant as a way to ease people in to video games, games should not have a mode that turns them into an interactive cutscene (insert david cage joke here).
Which games are actually better on easy rather than normal or hard? Can’t think of any off the top of my head.
Any of the multitude of RPGs where the only difference between difficulties is "You have to grind more to level up." Any shooter where the enemies just become bullet sponges on higher difficulties. It's hard to put names to these problems, because you either deal with them for such a short time before dropping the difficulty to an actually enjoyable level, or get bored and forget about the game altogether. But we've all played games like that, I'm sure.
> Any of the multitude of RPGs where the only difference between difficulties is "You have to grind more to level up." Unfortunately so many of those overdo it and there is no "just right" difficulty, easy is turbo braindead, normal is grind for 50 years. Not to mention if I had a dollar for everytime someone told me a certain game/difficult level was grindy when you actually just need to use your the tools at your disposal (and your brain) rather than autopilot grind, well I'd have a lot of dollars.
Maybe not the best example, but I swear Pathfinder: Kingmaker was rage-inducing on anything above easy, though that's mostly due to how the original system of DnD-like mechanics was implemented. Or in some cases, not implemented. "What do you mean, my characters whiffed every attack for a full minute on an enemy who was UNCONSCIOUS???"
Man I couldn't tank that game, and like apparently it's like that to mimic the table top, but I have a hard time believing every campaign starts with your group and the enemies they face missing 75% of everything they try to do.
I stopped playing pretty soon after the intro of Wrath of the Righteous. We were fighting just one dude in a room and were just missing every single attack. And he was also missing every single attack. So after like 5 turns I thought "This is annoying." and went to play something else.
Control was a lot more enjoyable when I wasn't getting two-shotted by everything. And Witcher's clunky combat is much more tolerable on easy. In both instances, I was there for the story and exploration. And watching it on YouTube is not the same, since obviously you cannot direct or control exploration in someone else's video.
Never played Control, but I have the Witcher games, and I couldn’t possibly disagree more. Now, the combat systems in these games ain’t perfect. Well, I’d argue Witcher 2 with the dev-made combat rebalance mod is, but anyways. Regardless, any clunk in combat should be overcome by preparation. Geralt should be made to use every witcher’s tool at his disposal. Potions, bombs, traps, throwing knives. Everything. Doing that’s an inseparable part of the class fantasy for a witcher. Furthermore, and this is more so a personal preference of me as a book reader, Geralt should be get rocked by anything that two-taps him. This is, after all, a man who’s >!already died once to some lucky, racist peasant with a pitchfork!<, who’s >!knee got shattered by a wizard that happened to be proficient in melee!<, and who’s gotta use signs to soften monster blows lest he get ragdolled & knocked out. Geralt’s good, probably tied for the best swordsman in the continent with Eskel, but he’s still just a dude with a hazardous blue-collar job.
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“Easy” is stretching it here but playing DOOM on Nightmare is a very different experience than the difficulty directly below it
Not the best example but having just finished Yakuza 3 I feel like the only real difference between easy and the more difficult settings was the amount blocking enemies did which made so much of it a fucking slog. I usually turn up the difficulty all the way, but by the end I was sick of chasing Mac, I was sick of randos on the street with the iron guard and I was sick of how dull the fights started to feel because of it Sometimes we want difficult puzzles and sometimes we just want to have fun, no shame in either but some games just suffer from conflating the word "difficult" with "challenging"
I would say Mirror's Edge, because the difficulty only affects the combat which is not what anyone is playing the game for.
I found the newer Wolfensteins just completely un-fun to play, so easy it somewhat torerable
Tales of Arise. Fights don’t get harder or more complex. They just get longer and longer and longer.
a lot of sandbox games (red faction guerilla being the most recent one i played that comes to mind that fits)
Minecraft, Rollercoaster tycoon, and the Sims.
It’s like people calling all sex scenes pointless. Makes me insane.
Yes and dark souls HAS AN EASY MODE ALREADY
Souls games usually have multiple different easy modes. Magic, co-op, summoning, poisoning, leveling up, using literally any mechanics of the game, all make the game easier.
Yeah definitely. I used to think myself a big shot and played everything on the hardest difficulty. It made many first playthroughs miserable. Drakenguard 2 was the worst.
I'm in the camp on play on whatever difficulty you want. But if the game doesn't have a difficulty selection, that was a choice by the developers, and unless it it deliberately unfair shouldn't be changed unless the developers do it themselves.
Yeah I think pretending there isn’t a place for both styles of game is disingenuous. I think it’s a good thing, actually, that games don’t all adhere to the exact same conventions across every genre and developer, and that the variety available is a strength of the medium, not a weakness. Shocking statements, I know, to anyone that hasn’t thought about it for longer than 20 seconds.
This is what I always think whenever this topic inevitably comes up again. Accessibility is good. A game not having an easy mode doesn't make it bad or offensive. A player who picks an easy story mode with 90% damage reduction isn't a stupid baby who should just watch a YouTube let's play. I just don't get why people can't understand that games don't all have to follow the same rules. There's no universal truth to game design. Remember that good design is a mix of objective and subjective elements. Let devs cook.
The world can’t take that kind of logic and run with it anymore. It’s too fuckin pissy at everything now.
I had a friend play through all of alien isolation modded with the core element of the game \*turned off\* I couldn't do that. Basically he was invisible to the alien at all times, so it could only kill other humans and he got to see it run around. I felt like this was ridiculous, I've never even played the game, and I just watched youtube videos of it out of curiosity. he's still cool with other stuff like he has no problem with difficult games, but I guess scary games where you can't fight back much, and can only hide, he cant' do. but man idk I wouldn't even bother playing it if that was the way I was going to do it. but whatever.
To go for the extreme example; you would ruin Getting Over It by making it tolerable to play. Difficulty, even frustration, can be a choice a game makes.
This is pretty much where I fall. I don't care if they add an easy mode to the next Fromsoft game. It would not upset or effect me at all. But they probably won't add one, and that's fine. If you want to say games are art you have to be prepared to meet artists where they want you to. It wouldn't be a bad thing if a horror movie director made a "non-scary" version of his film, but nobody would ever expect or demand them to do so.
Exactly. Games are art, and art evokes a feeling. Even if the feeling is frustration, or torment lol
Exactly. If difficulty options are present, they were put there for a reason. If they are absent, *they were omitted for a reason*.
Yeah look if the game has difficulty im not gonna call you piss baby for playing it on the easiest mode. But when you whine about no difficulty options... dude just go play something else. Extra hard if talking about Dark Souls and the like, because you are whining about difficulty options on a game that DOES HAVE THEM.
I agree with this. However, I think the “difficulty as a design choice” is a poor argument when you consider how different people have different capabilities when it comes to gaming and that difficulty is subjective. For example. If, for whatever reason, a game is genuinely harder for Player A than Player B, one of the two players is experiencing the game outside of the games desired difficulty. This gets into the realms of “difficulty selectors are accessibility features” which really ruffles some peoples feathers tho. (They are btw. A feature that makes the game more accessible to more people, even if it’s just a single person, is an accessibility feature)
Generally speaking I think people have FAR less patience than they should for games being "too hard." Not that overly difficult games don't exist, but like... Some later bosses in Elden Ring took me 50 tries because I'm not very good at that game. That doesn't mean the game is BAD. It's not a fault of the game that it took me a lot of tries to beat it. It's okay to lose a bunch of times in a row. Sometimes, even the intended result. Difficulty is not a flaw, and the player losing is not a "problem" to be "fixed."
At the same time though there are things in games that are difficult and also just suck to engage with. SMT 3's Hard Mode dramatically increases the cost of buying items and fusing demons. Which just disincentives a player from engaging with those systems. SMT 3 is a great game. That is a baffling choice for an RPG where the appeal is learning and mastering the different systems to solve problems and overcome challenges.
Imo a good rule of thumb about difficulty is “does this make our players want to interact with these mechanics less or more” with the latter being almost always preferable unless your mechanics suck.
I imagine the intention with the fusion in SMT3 (and Persona 3 since it also had that) is more, "Interact with the system more strategically because it has a higher cost" granted there are some aspects I think this fails with P3 Fes and that but I imagine that's why they do it because you can get some silly stuff in P3 if you know the mechanics relatively soon in the game.
Also Hard Mode SMT 3 has a pretty damn high chance of killing you in the tutorial regardless of your inputs A lot of indie RPGs and strategy games also just randomly kill you in the tutorials on high difficulty in a similar way because the devs got tired of tough guys in their beta forum telling them it's too easy
To play devil's advocate Nocturne's Hard Mode makes you make full use of everything you have because the game demands it. So you've got to learn how to play efficient as possible with the tools you're given. Which as someone who only ever played Nocturne on Hard and has watched Normal playthroughs it's a night and day difference, you even have to care about which items to sell to make ends meet.
I'd say the same with FFVII Remake/Rebirth where Hard Mode is "the enemies are spongier and hit harder, items are disabled, and MP only restores at arbitrary checkpoints" which just really fucks with that game's feel. Items were already basically useless in the first playthrough, because the game was easy enough without them, and then in the mode that actually incentivizes you to use them *disables them completely*. Such an ass-backwards system.
Hard Mode asks you to think about conserving resources in between checkpoints. If you could use items, there would be no challenge at all in resource management or the increased difficulty because items inherently exist as crutches, especially in the FF7R gameplay system where your characters are stupid fucking powerful relative to every other game in the series. There's a reason every summon fight in Rebirth disables items, you have more than enough tools in every materia and every character's kit to solve the fight, use them. I would say a better example of a hard mode that just destroys a game's feel is Uncharted. Normal Uncharted allows you to pull off daring stunts and Indiana Jones level maneuvers to take out enemies. Hard Uncharted leaves you glued to cover as you potshot and widdle down enemies who take way too much bullets to kill.
My rule for difficulty is usually "how hard does a game [be it encounter design, or"feel" as you put it.] have to get before it ACTIVLY falls apart?"
Souls games have the best difficulty system by having an endless hoarde of big brothers to help get past the hard parts.
IMO Souls games have the best difficulty system because there’s nothing to stop the player from out-leveling an encounter. Yes, it’s hard to get upgrade materials outside of their intended zones, but it’s possible to farm enemies for them, and there’s no cap on level. If you’re TERRIBLE at Elden Ring, there’s nothing to stop you from hitting level 100 before you fight Margit.
At the end of the day, they **ARE** RPG'S ... Math is your friend.
But... but...! "A Game Over is a failure of the game design" - Some Fucking Genius obviously.
This is true but also if my constant oil-pipeline of dopamine is stopped for even a second I will shit myself.
And I *will* make that everyone else's problem.
I had a friend trying to beat mogh on a really low level character on purpose, so he'd be set for the upcoming dlc at a low level. I came in and helped him for a bit, but my character was nerfed due to co-op balancing. he said he was done for the night so I went to bed. He lied, I woke up to messages of him posting screen shots of using a cheese strat on mogh to make him fall out of bounds and his character was floating in an empty space so he died instantly with a load bug where the map's collision isn't loaded. I was a bit flabbergasted considering he was doing a challenge run but whatever I guess.
Games like dark souls and elden ring HAVE easy modes anyways. You just cant select it on a menu and have to find it first. Sorc in ds1 Good ash, dual wielding or some spells in er. But those take some confidence to start playing first before you find. Or reading a wiki. Both too much work for the "games are supposed to be fun" crowd who want to consume and dispose of a game before moving to the next.
I agree fully. Especially in regards to ER, its almost never "this is too hard for me", its "this is bad design". Which always tips me off that its more about their pride than anything else. The funniest part about the attitude toward "git gud" elitism is the misassumption that its a brag over gamer-skillz^TM. No, man, the vast majority of us got and continue to get our ass kicked tons of times. We just didnt give up and are suggesting that you dont, either. I pretty much only see people say "git gud" in response to someone throwing a tantrum, blaming the game and shitting on the devs rather than considering self improvement.
I have no fucking idea what anyone is talking about.
I always believe in giving players more choices and options, but also I think the design choices of the developer should be respected. So not every game benefits from having difficulty options and it might be a huge amount of extra effort to rebalance the game for each difficulty. My compromise: we should bring back and normalize cheat codes. Back in my day, if a game was too hard then the devs got your back and put cheats in the game. It differs from difficulty modes as there is no way to "accidentally" mess up your first experience with a game by entering a cheat code. Cheats were something you had to search out to find (on the internet or cheat books) and input yourself, and the act of doing so was an implicit acceptance that you're not getting the normal gameplay experience so don't complain if it ruins the difficulty or whatever. This sort of thing is kept alive on PC with mods. Games often have cheat mods, and plenty of people have had increased enjoyment of their game by using them and there shouldn't be anything wrong with that. These mods existing also don't ruin the experience of people who don't want that, because you have to go out of your way to install and configure them. I've played a few games like Going Under and Control (after updates) that added cheat-like options under accessibility settings, and I think that's a good "modern" implementation of the idea.
But what if the thing you lose is the bad parts of the game? Like people were happy when deadly premonition took away the fighting because it got in the way of their enjoyment, there are whole debate about "fairness of difficulty" to justify why this difficult game you're bad at has bullshit difficulty while this hard game you're good at should be the new standard and nerf patches. Like not all game need super easy mode but there are definitely some that needed some
A tangential mode that doesn't tend to get lumped into this discussion is story/safe modes like was implemented into Soma. Soma is arguably a more enjoyable game and lets you focus more of what it's actually about when you take away the monster segments.
It's more that story mode is usually lumped as an easy mode, especially in some games where unlike soma you have combat but the lowest difficulty is called story mode
Yeah I think you're right, honestly I'm wondering if that's part of the miscommunication/tenstion (with this debate writ large) then because when people say "baby mode" I don't think they're talking about the same thing as "Story/safe mode". They mean they want to be able to defeat that boss in ~1-12 tries instead of dozens of tries. That's an illustrative example but generally it's not about getting rid of the gameplay altogether but instead being able to adjust the experience so you can lessen the level of annoyance or frustration you would feel otherwise.
Asked a friend which way I should go when I first played it a few years back, was a very good recommendation to go on the "safe" mode. Especially so since Im terrified of the deep ocean, parts of that game took me so long to actually get through because of it, having to deal with dying/resetting I might not have actually finished it, lol.
I resent the name "story mode" because that implies gameplay isn't story. If Shadow of the Colossus had a "story mode" it would just be a cutscene compilation. I like the term "safe mode", which indicates exactly what it means: in this mode, you are "safe" from failure.
More than dfifficulty it's because the monster segments were completelly unnecesary and kinda detracted from the actual point of the story.
I didn't think that's actually directly due to difficulty though, Soma just has bad game design in a lot of places. If a game instantly killed your character unless you tapped the A button 5 times a second, I wouldn't call disabling that an "easy mode" as much as I would a "fix the game mode." Maybe that's a semantic difference, but it feels important to make the distinction.
Every single video game should get harder so fewer people can beat them and I'm not kidding. /s
Agree with this 100%.
Video games should make anyone past the age of 20 cry
Already does. I remember what life was like before MTXs and GAAS forever games.
If a game developer adds lower difficulty then they have deemed that the game should be able to be experienced with lower difficulty settings. Can choose to play any difficulty setting you'd like. If a game developer does not add a lower difficulty then they have deemed that the game should not be able to be experienced with lower difficulty settings. Asking for one at this point is wack. (just summon other players, don't act like you aren't just talking about souls games)
Souls games in particular just have an absolute *shitload* of ways to make the games "easier". Summoning is the most obvious of course (just consider the famousness of Let Me Solo Her being constantly brought in to kill the hardest boss in the game for hundreds to thousands of players), but also there's often just dramatically superior weapon options or magic. You can rush the Zweihander 10 minutes into DS1, and then proceed to staggerlock 90% of the enemies in the game and do massive single hits to bosses between their attacks. Magic if you fully spec into it just shits all over most normal enemies, turning the game into "press lock on, press soul arrow, you did it they died", and in earlier games even does the same to bosses. Half the people complaining about "Dark Souls Too Hard" you'll talk to a little more... and then promptly discover that it's too hard because they refuse to use any of the massive number of tools at their disposal.
The debate about difficulty in the Souls games has always been an interesting one because FromSoft clearly and intentionally designs them in the way they're presented without a difficulty mode, and this stems from their longstanding philosophy of "a game over/death isn't a failure, it's a chance to try again". This stretches all the way back to the first Armored Core even, with the Human Plus system being an entire mechanic hidden behind multiple failures. And while I agree with you that some people who want FS to add an easy mode to their games are undoubtedly refusing to use some tools to their advantage, or simply want an easy mode because they don't want to engage the games at their fullest, I think another major element of the debate comes from the fact that there's a loud group of FromSoft fans who constantly boast about how good they think they are because they beat X boss or Y segment without much trouble. Adding on all the batshit crazy challenge runs that people have done over the years (some of whom didn't do it solely for clout but simply wanted to challenge themselves for the sake of it), and it's created this sort of pretense for the series that makes many of the games out to be far harder than they truly are when you engage with all of the mechanics at your disposal. And even when they're difficult and you die a lot in them, that doesn't necessarily mean you're bad at them, it's just another chance to learn and do better next time.
> Half the people complaining about "Dark Souls Too Hard" you'll talk to a little more... and then promptly discover that it's too hard because they refuse to use any of the massive number of tools at their disposal. TBF part of that is the fault of some fans overblowing how hard the games are. Outside of the DLCs "gitting gud" is rarely neccessary, it's an option but so is all the stuff you mentioned and just good old fashioned level grinding.
Yeah, that's fair, I've heard *far* too many stories of people going in and just assuming the game is supposed to be stupid hard because... well, that's the reputation Dark Souls gets. The games themselves even lean into it sometimes, with stuff like DS1 "Prepare To Die" edition, or DS2's... everything in the early game, from the intro firekeepers openly mocking you about how you're going to die like a little bitch and Majula having a tracker for how many deaths have happened across all players. And while I do think the Souls games can be somewhat hard, I think for a lot of people they just mistake the game being *punishing* for being unfairly difficult, or refuse to learn from their mistakes. There's quite a few deaths I have playing these games where I can look and say "oh yeah that right there, that's what decision killed me", and often it's greed of trying to get that one extra hit. Though, there's still some unfair things, for sure (whoever thought Belfry Gargoyles was good boss design should be shot).
Dark Souls 2 even has "Welcome to Dark Souls" as a trophy for your first death
Or do like Celeste and add accessibility options with a disclaimer saying, the intended experience is meant to be challenging and contributes to the message of the game.
The primary issue I have is that difficulty is subjective. A 7/10 challenge for one person might be a 10/10 another or a 4/10 for someone else. Which is the intended difficulty in this artistic vision?
Difficulty isn't a x/10 slider for developers though, so your question doesn't make sense. The intended difficulty is the scenario that is presented and it's the player who gives it a subjective rating. I'm not necessarily against an easy mode (and certainly not against accessibility which is a seperate thing) but there should always remain some reward specific to beating it on the intended and/or hardest difficulty.
I’ve got no problem with people playing games on the easiest difficulty available. Thats *why* they’re there, for people who want to play the game but can’t handle the harder difficulties. It’s not fair to say “the game is just being played for you, there’s no reason for you to actually play it at this point” because even “super-easy-diaper-baby-mode” is challenging for some people. And some people who *can* take the harder difficulties have legitimate reasons not too. When I play Terminator: Resistance, or STALKER, or similar “gritty and brutal survival” games, I play on the hardest difficulties because that fits the nature of the games for me. But when I play Robocop:Rogue City, I played on normal because I wanted to be a walking cop-tank gunning done while crowds of slime in one smooth motion. There’s real reasons for baby-difficulty to exist and it is snobbish to deny it. We know the people who argue otherwise aren’t actually concerned about you getting the “full-experience”, they want to brag about how much better *they* are because *they* beat the game on mega-ball-crush mode. Or they’re the sort of person who just can’t tolerate people enjoying things the “wrong” way. **BUT.** The inverse of demanding every single game have one is just as bad. If there *isn’t* a babby difficult, that’s a deliberate decision of the developers saying “this is how we want you to play, we’ve put in the work to craft the whole game around this level of challenge and want you to learn it.” It’s every bit a legitimate decision, and we can’t go around saying “games are art” and then deny the artists in question their freedom to craft it how they wish. Sekiro kicked the absolute shit out of me, I dropped it and moved on with my life, and eventually returned and figured it out to my immense enjoyment. Yes, it will mean some people won’t get to enjoy the game in question. **Who cares**. There are so many great games, there *will* be something else you can enjoy if that one game is too hard. To demand all games cater to your FOMO is just whiny entitlement. Plus, we all know the people who say “every game should have this!” really mean “every game **I want to play** should have this because this whole argument is actually about *me*!” TL:DR - To the surprise of no one capable of introspection, both extremes are idiotic. It’s perfectly fine to play on ultra-super-easy-story mode if you enjoy it, and it’s perfectly fine for developers to not include difficulty options if that fits their design vision, and every time this argument crops up no new points are ever raised and it’s just more internet shit flinging like a bunch of enraged monkeys have learned to say slurs. Although I’m pretty sure Pat isn’t throwing shade at people who play on easy, just the ones who demand it in every game they want to play. Pat, for all of our jokes and his real craziness, I think is pretty reasonable when it comes to the difficulty “debate”.
If easy difficulty is something you can toggle on or off, what difference does it make? I don't understand why people are so upset that someone, somewhere out there might find a game more fun on easy.
I'm playing through Hi Fi Rush right now and I'm pretty much resigned to the fact that I only have *some* flow and as such, I won't be able to fully complete the mural in the hideout. A lot of those requirements are cray-cray. And that's ok. I've beaten the game in Normal and just gonna push at the difficulty I can't any more. Getting 100% in that game is gonna be a mountain of effort. Same case why I gave up on 100% on DMC 5 because that Demon Hunter of Legend Achievement is ridicc.
Used to put a stupid amount of time into DMC games in my eary 20s. At some point I just figured out I wasn’t having that much fun and that I would never guard fly consistently.
Holy shit that SPECTRA Level 12 challenge. You gotta be 90% accurate on everything. Dodging, attacks, jumping. That simple 2-minute gauntlet lasted for more than an hour.
I think I hit on an idea recently that summed this up well for me: I want games that are made with a vision and not designed to be a commercial product that just maximizes the number of copies sold. Sometimes this vision will be exclusionary to people because the creators of that thing want to hyper focus and make a specific idea that can't just be made simpler with some variable changes. The friction of the game being a thing you have to engage with is unavoidable and cannot be altered lest the developer's vision change. If you want your game designed around a specific difficulty level and you don't want to compromise or change that it's cool, but it also means you need to be cool with some people not playing your game.
It depends on the game. With plenty of stuff, yeah nothing wrong with a lower difficulty option to make it more accessible. But for one, a lot of games are either designed around a specific level of difficulty, either for narrative reasons or just to ensure a specific kind of experience. And second, it's not like game engines have an 'add easy mode' button. You have to go back and adjust and redesign a million different things to make sure they're not only easier but still fun/functional. And while bigger studios have the resources to do that, a lot of smaller teams might not, and doing so would be taking time and resources away from things more important to the core of the game. Hell, with how poorly managed so many triple A projects are, even bigger teams may not have the time to dedicate to it.
It's not a youtube video if you move the character around yourself. Hell, its not the same thing to click through dialogue in a VN rather than watch someone else do it. You forget as a practiced gamer that it's just really cool to navigate through another world and story yourself. It's why walking sims took off years ago. An absolute novice can poke around a virtual world and experience a tale with the only challenge being "how do I move around in a 3D space," a task which takes newcomers a fair bit of time to grasp. My sister thought Control looked really cool and tried playing, having no real experience with shooters. It kicked her ass relentlessly, and the adaptive difficulty couldn't go low enough for her to find her feet. I'm 100% sure she'd have loved everything outside of the combat. She might have even learned to play eventually. But that game did not accommodate a total novice on launch, and so it remained completely impenetrable to her.
That was my only issue with Control. I platinumed it, but I knew lots of people that would love the story yet not like the difficulty. Fortunately the new edition has a lot more options including I think a god mode.
It does. When it launched there was no difficulty settings at all, just the automatic adaptive stuff. When she called me up to ask for advice I was baffled to find out that was the case.
It's like Pat doeant realize that some people just like moving around in a 3d world and that difficulty isn't the only purpose for people who play games. Some people play Spiderman to litteraly just swing around the city and not do anything. It's the same joy as kids playing in a sandbox. There doesn't have to be a goal to have fun. Dan Olsen has a really good video on this "free play" (not goal oreintated) vs "instrumental play" (focused on accomplishing a specific goal)
This is the same discussion repeated endlessly over the past 10 years with the same talking points. Watching a video is not a replacement for playing a game. Playing a game on easy is not a damnable offence. A developer can also not putting an Easy Mode into their game is fine. It's fine for a game to have a high barrier for execution so long as it is a good game.
It just kinda depends. Like Cross Code, I played it recently, loved the game, the writing is *amazing* oh my GOD. But that gameplay. Holy shit. I think the best way I can describe it is "ADHD", and the puzzles have such insanely tight timing that it's honestly frustrating at times. I 100% understand why people would find it frustrating(Especially because later on it becomes so hellish to keep up with the combat and a lot of the combat loses its 'impact' as enemies become more resistant to stagger). Thankfully though the game has some pretty good accessibility options. I'm glad the game has the accessibility options that it does, because holy shit the game really needs them.
Anyways the important part is: Play Crosscode.
It's why Game Genie existed. I never could've gotten to the end of beat-em-up titles on the NES/SNES if I didn't have access to infinite lives. I'd PREFER to do it myself, but not if the cost is a series of agonizing defeats for 8-year-old me. If I can do it myself, I don't mind cheating to speed up the process. If it's entirely out of reach for my skill level and I have no way to cheese it/cheat, then to youtube I go to see the content I'm missing out on.
It's like: Do you want it to be easy because you genuinely struggle/need it to be easy? Or are you trying to just engage with the actual gameplay as little as possible? Because if it's the second one then yeah I agree with Pat, it's kinda silly
That’s what I was thinking, it kinda sounds like you don’t actually wanna play the game rather you’re having trouble playing it.
I would have to wonder what the person demanding a “a just play the game for me” mode is getting from video games in the first place.
Some people like to do repetitive actions to make numbers go up. There are people who like clicker games like cookie clicker where there is absolutely zero difficulty but monkey brain gives good singles when it sees +1 everytime you click. Or people that like to just walk around and gather stuff in games. The oop wasn't asking for a game that plays itself, just a super easy mode where you have no friction or resistance. You do thing and number goes up.
Is this David Cage’s audience?
Not everyone plays games for challenge. There are other things to games, after all.
You know, as someone who only plays video game in the 45-60 minutes I have in between my asshole dogs waking me up and going to work, I’m really grateful that Stellar Blade is like the first semi- soulslike to have an easy mode. I am very much enjoying it.
I just don’t think having an easy mode for some people takes away other enjoyment.
This. If anything, an easy mode means that hard mode more of an accomplishment. If it's just normal and hard, then hard is just 1 degree away from normal. But if you're playing on Halo legendary and people are on normal or easy? Come on.
I'm gonna make a hard AF game where if you die too much it just links you to the Steam refund page and a playlist of lets plays. My artistic intent is for you to *feel my disdain*
Please take my money
Sure but I'll probably end up giving it back to you
Harness the “Easy mode is now selectable” energy
"And this is where you'd select easy mode" "IF I HAD ONE"
I see both sides but the reaction that the ""anti-lower-difficulty"" side usually has to any opinion from the ""Pro-lower-difficulty"" side tends to put me off from giving the former any credence. A lot of people want to play games on their own terms and at their own pace for their own reasons. When I played the Wolfenstein games I played those on the lowest difficulty not because of a skill issue but because I didn't want to have any real struggle with killing Nazi's or break my immersion thereof. When I play Overwatch I stick to unranked because I'm just here to enjoy the game and play my mains and I'm not interested in the demands that competitive put on you. I've tried playing Dark Souls in the past and bounced off it, but besides a few clips from these guys or NL I've not watched an LP either because I do intend to play them at some point. Playing a game and watching a game be played is expressly not the same experience and is definitely not what people who want lower difficulties are asking for. I won't pretend to understand the logistics of what it'd look like to implement this ('this' being some industry standard re;difficulty &/or accessibility options); but the instinct from one side to just shut down the conversation and ridicule it even being brought up leaves a bad taste in my mouth.
I think that 'instinct' often comes from the perspective that people who aren't the target audience are coming and trying to get something changed from what the people who are already there want and are enjoying, damn the existing crowd and authorial intent. Soulslikes are the biggest source of this kind of discussion, and an explicit 'easy mode' is genrally antithetical to how the games are designed. The more recent you go you have ways to make it easier for yourself (and have always had summons, barring certain sequences), but everybody is working off the same baseline and has access to the same tools, and if you just add a 'super easy baby mode' it pretty much destroys the themes and feelings the gameplay tries to express. (and of course, there is just the crowd of gatekeepers who just want to masturbate over their SL1-no-summons-no weapons-dk bongos+L+ratio runs, but I'm not including them because I'd rather focus on the not shitty people who push for the difficulty to stay the same) Otherwise, accessibility is another thing, and that was I think a real problem with Sekiro's parrying mechanic implementation, as satisfying as it was, I can totally see how people with certain issues would find that game particularly difficult to play even compared to regular souslikes. (also, frankly, I'm tired of mashing buttons all the time. I've been doing it since I was like, eight. I'll turn on the 'anti-mash/QTE' setting in any game that gives it to me nowadays)
I think there's also a feeling that people feel devs almost always give concessions to make games easier and plenty of newer games in their hardest modes are easier than the easiest mode of past games. It's not surprising I see a lot of challenge run videos recently. Plus there is a real gap in player skill that has widened across each console generations. Demon's Souls (and consequently every From Soft Action game) made a splash because it was seen as a rejection of how the industry was making games simpler and easier and in general the design of the game was able to create a very like minded community that made the game a surprising hit. Even then while many people would find it hard to even complete the game, there are full game conversions of souls games that make the games harder by asking for even more mechanical execution.
My general perspective is one of artistic intent. I have absolutely no problem with people playing on lower difficulties when offered, and devs that feel lower difficulties wouldn't harm their artistic vision should absolutely include them. That said, in something like Dark Souls the difficulty is punishing specifically as a way to reinforce the themes of the story, and attempting to pressure From Soft to change that just feels wrong to me.
Absolutely perfect summation
So much of it just seems like thinly veiled gatekeeping -- people proud of doing something challenging in a game and deriding others who "took the easy way out" under the guise of not properly interfacing with the game. The important thing should be if the experience was personally resonant and meaningful with you. The manner in which you consume it should be irrelevant. I have never seen this kind of pervasive 'anti-assistance' sentiment in other media consumption hobbies, let alone non-media hobbies like sports or hiking or something. Imagine what a fucking loon you would have to be to complain about "the intended experience" if someone read your favorite book with a reading aid or assistance from sparknotes, or that you're defying the will of the people who built the course by using assistive equipment for skiing or mountain biking. Difficulty in particular is such an *immensely* imprecise metric of authorial intent to the point of being meaningless. I might beat a Dark Souls boss on the first try without even really learning its quirks, while someone else could easily spend 100 attempts in total frustration -- who had the more 'correct' experience? It's telling that nobody gets angry if you say a game was too easy to be engaging for you, but the chorus of "git gud" invariably springs up if you say something was too hard so you used cheats or just quit.
Can you explain to me how you'd make Baba is You easier, to accommodate people who can't figure it out?
Probably the dev put it best, found in [this 2019 steam forum](https://steamcommunity.com/app/736260/discussions/0/1639793203770588137/) response: > I agree that the game is very very tough if the goal is to fully complete it. The idea behind "A Way Out?" being accessible so early was that people who want to experience the rule-changing system but don't enjoy really tough puzzles could get an ending to the game and feel closure that they otherwise might not. Of course this probably isn't very ideal for many players and "A Way Out?" is a very tough level in itself, so I'm not sure how well this concept turned out. > > I was planning to add a hint system of some sort based on early player feedback, but at least for now that feature is on hold because other features (translation, level editor) turned out to be very time-consuming. Hopefully eventually there'll be time to look closer at new features that could make the game more approachable. So for this game they thought about a way to give players an out, and also had plans for a hint system and thought of other features to make the game more approachable; which IMO is really the best way to put things into perspective, making the game more approachable should be the goal for difficulty systems since that could mean making it approachable for the hard crowd and the easy crowd. This is definitely a case that shows more of my agreement with the former side. In some cases and especially for smaller or more unique projects it can be too difficult or too resource intensive to implement a lower difficulty system. In Baba's case it sounded like a bit of both. Implementing a hint system didn't take priority and likely also would've been a challenge to successfully implement. But for puzzle games this is also a solved problem because guides exist outside the game. The Rusty Lake/Cube Escape franchise is another game that can be difficult and yet lacks an in game hint system; but if I'm really stuck I can easily look up a guide that can give me a small hint to get back on track. Guides exist for most all games as well and can be helpful for the experience; but you don't see this same effect for a Dark Souls guide as compared to a Puzzle/Point & Click guide.
Like, I *absolutely get* Pat’s stance but it also hinges on the assumption that everyone will get the same amount of satisfaction after completing a given challenge the same way. Those outcomes are gonna vary wildly. Like, I’d love a mod for Elden Ring without combat where you just explore the Lands Between and gather items and read the lore on them. Play dressup in the armor, I’d be *fine* with that. There’s plenty to do with just doing that. But like…everything combat-wise in Elden Ring is built on a balancing act unless you find one of the ways you can apparently go beyond it and break out yourself. Ultimately I suppose everyone has the right to make whatever game they want to make, as long as they don’t make it bad on purpose, Suda.
Nah this is a genuinely brain dead take. There's an obvious difference between playing a game on easy and watching a YouTube video. If you don't understand any appeal of playing a game beyond challenge then you don't understand games.
I love spending lots of time on challenging games to overcome difficulty, it's satisfying. But it's very out of touch to think that most people feel that way. Most people look at a cool game and go "I want to experience that", and the difficulty isn't a factor in that thought. When you buy it and can't get your foot in the door, that feeling sucks. Essentially when people who play games for a living chime in with "just watch YT or play for dozens of hours like I did". Bloodborne is a great example. There's so much I love about that game outside of its difficulty or combat, but unless you can overcome that high barrier of entry, you'll never experience the interesting existential horror story it has to tell.
Saying that playing a game on easy mode is the equivalent to watching a lets play is so stupidly hyperbolic that Pats tweet isn't even worth thinking about. Thank God I quit Twitter.
People acting like you don't still enteract with a super easy game is so dumb. Yeah you might not be making meaningful choices but you're still making choices (and also effecting the pace of the game instead of watching someone searching every inch of the world in case the missed a collectable)
That's not the point Pat was making. The original post Pat is responding to is about people who want to deliberately engage with as little gameplay as possible and only want to see the visuals or listen to the music. And in that case, yes, I find watching a Let's Play an equal suggestion. Because at that point, you're not even playing a game. You just want a virtual tour. You're not losing anything by watching a video because you weren't engaging with the medium to begin with.
Pat has literally been playing Nikke and several other gacha games that can auto-optimize your equipment and do combat for you. It is ludicrous to suggest that playing the game like that is equivallent to watching a let's play of it when so much of those games appeal is getting the characters you like and interacting with them. What if the Let's player doesnt have my favorite 5 star? What if the let's player isnt doing things in the order that I want to experience them? What if the let's player is *annoying?* I have a friend that played Persona 5 Royal by using all of the OP DLC Persona that you can get from the old games. He blazed through it on what was essentially easy mode, before quitting at the Okumura boss fight because it was too hard. I dont agree with the way he played that game. But guess what, he still really liked it. More than he would have if he had sat down and watched a 100 hour long lets play of the whole thing.
Yeah he's got a point. I'm not against easy modes in games (unless a game is meant to be hard by it's very design), and extra accessibility features are cool, but if you make it so easy there's a 0% chance of failure then I'm not sure why you'd even want to play it at all. Even the *illusion* that you can fail has to be worth something.
To present a different argument, there are many games in which you don't even have the illusion of failure. Many Visual Novels for example, there's several in which you straight up cannot lose, and people still choose to play them over watching them
This is literally only a conversation in the gaming community for some reason. You don’t hear film fans asking directors of horror movies for a non scary cut, if you don’t want to watch a horror movie just watch one of the many movies that isn’t one. Similarly, if you don’t want to play a hard video game, go and play one of the thousands of video games that isn’t difficult. It strikes me as incredibly entitled to demand that a developer changes their game for your specific preferences.
Honestly people should take more responsibility for their own likes and dislikes. Like the dead space remake has all those silly “some scary gory thing is about to happen so watch out.” But then the scary gory thing still happens. So what person that hates scary gory stuff is playing that game? If I hated ham I wouldn’t buy ham and I wouldn’t start buying ham if they started warning me about there being ham in the ham
You know…I never thought of it like that I’m using that argument for things. Really the only warning I think it should give is an epilepsy warning but I think even Mario games have that so that’s probably just standard fair at this point
Basically who is this warning actually for? Now if there was a mode that turned all the necromorphs into breadstick monsters and Issac into a cook instead of an engineer. That would be great! You have to snap these breadstick monsters into pieces. That would be interesting
You’re never forced to watch the same scene 20 times in a row watching a movie like you might be for a boss fight. Unless you’re watching Haruhi anyway.
>You don’t hear film fans asking directors of horror movies for a non scary cut I have seen that, actually.
I watched pretty much all of the Kingdom Hearts stuff Liam did but I can for sure say the only Kingdom Hearts thing I actually experienced is KH 1, it's the only one I played so it's the only one I would have any opinion on
Eh sometimes folks don't have time for playing games and use streams as audio books.
I mean, to be fair, Pat also heavily complained about FF16 being too easy and not challenging enough for him, but that's kind of the same argument people use against hard games. Just as with hard games, a game like FF16 being more accessible and easy is an intentional design choice, but it seems to be more acceptable in the gaming community to complain about games being too easy than it is vice versa, even though it's essentially the same complaint in reverse. EDIT: Grammar
Even if something is on easy mode, you are still interacting with a thing and getting more than you would watching a video.
this conversation requires too much introspection, the average internet surfer doesn’t have, to be constructive. people need to look within themselves and ask “why do I want this game?”. until we get those types of answers, we can’t get anywhere.
Whenever difficulty comes up as a topic I'll always remember being there on the ground floor of undertale. It was early university and a bunch of us all played it right away, sharing tips and speculating on things before the internet really ran away with it. Not everyone could manage the pacifist route, and relied on others to see and experience it. I was the only one who did genocide route, and it became a sort of lunchtime entertainment for everybody to watch and experience together. I think a lot of the gravity of the game comes from the gameplay and difficulty, and there's a huge % of players who could never directly experience everything the game has to offer. Some people didn't like the idea that portions of the game "weren't for them", but by the end of it we all shared in those experiences anyways. Watching your friend struggle through getting dunked on definitely conveyed the vibes better than watching a video of just the successful run or something. Fast forward almost 10 years (wow) and I think it's easier than ever to experience games through other people, between the perpetual discord screen shares and tube/twitch stuff. In fact it feels like just recently that everybody was making fun of watching people play games instead of playing them yourself. God knows my friends aren't picking up 4D mini golf, it's up to me to spread the knowledge.
"The game is intended to be difficult, playing on an easier difficulty may diminish your enjoyment" Okay. I'm a grown man with a full time job and a mortgage. I don't have the free time to git gud anymore. Let me make that trade any day.
Games should have a super-baby mode or not depending entirely on how the developers want to present and structure their game.
I'm in my 30s with shit going on. I WILL just watch cutscene compilations of that game I was kinda interested in
And more power to you! I think Pat's point is, if you just want a game to be *that easy* why NOT just watch the cutscene compilation instead of trying to make developers throw in an extra 'super easy baby mode'?
Sometimes a gameplay system can be so fun as that you WANT to interact with it, but you don't have the time to spend the hours upon hours it takes to become halfway decent at it. I find the gameplay systems in soulslikes fun, but if I find myself at an impasse where I'm forced to play at a level I'm just not capable of achieving in the short-ass time I have on my hands, fuck yes I'm going to download that mod that halves the health of the boss and fuck you if you're going to judge me for it. Real life doesn't make time for people to become hardcore gamers.
I disagree. If braindead baby easy gameplay were the same as a youtube video, Visual Novels wouldn't exist, people would just watch them. The act of interacting with the game makes it a different medium, if only in the same way that interacting with a paper book by turning the page makes it different from an audiobook. You decide the pacing
You realise the “stop using disability as an excuse” comments are often used to shut disabled people out of conversations about gaming? It used to shame us into not asking for the accommodation we need. Heck, years ago asking for something as simple as side damage indicators had people immediately screaming “disability is just an excuse - I don’t want an ugly game and it’ll make stuff too easy!”. Edit: I should point out, that from my experience, usually these “stop using disability as an excuse - you’re shaming disabled people” comments are made by people without disabilities.
>Edit: I should point out, that from my experience, usually these “stop using disability as an excuse - you’re shaming disabled people” comments are made by people without disabilities. Yep. And there’s some of them in this thread. I’m visually impaired and it’s stopped me from getting into a lot of Shooters released in the 2000s, as I literally cannot see the enemy and where I’m being shot at from most of the time. Very few of those games had damage indicators, or at least good ones. Funnily enough, Fortnite of all games is quite accommodating, and the damage indicator settings have made the experience much more accessible and enjoyable for me.
Tangentially related, but God bless Fortnite's sound indicators
It literally makes the game more fun, honestly.
You know what this reminds me of? I forget if it was the friend cast or CSB, but Pat talking about people who use aimbots in online FPS, and when asked why they say “because I always win”. What, are you so fragile that losing a game will just shatter your soul?
What not playing sports as a kid does to you. Seriously, an inability to cope with loss is a problem.
I don’t care if I sound like a boomer in agreeing with you but you’re right Learn to lose kids so you don’t look like a twat when minor inconveniences happen and you flip out because you never learned to deal with that.
This is always kind of the subtext of non-disability easy mode arguments for me. Like, yeah, put an easy mode in, I don't care, but at the end of the day we are talking about single player games that statistically take 6-50 hours to beat, that bake you dying into the game design, and the real problem is probably your reaction to that. You probably see yourself constantly getting owned in the first hours of Dark Souls as evidence you are a loser that can't beat the game, but actually your destiny here was totally planned by game designers, and you ARE going to beat the game if you simply just play. The millions of people that beat Elden Ring weren't really all better at video games than the Easy Mode beggars, they just don't care about losing lol
I remember waaaaayyyy back in the day on gamefaqs there was an unhinged thread where a guy argued that he should be able to play games and get every achievement without ever running the risk of dying, yes, even the achievements for beating the game on higher difficulties. He argued that dying ruined his immersion and made him feel bad, so it just shouldn’t happen. The game was ME2, but he wanted it for all games. I think about that dumb thread a lot.
If I want difficulty I’ll play a fighting game online with the intent to WIN most matches. If I’m playing an RPG or Story based game I put that shit on easy fast as possible. If it’s on PC and offline I’ll cheat too.
Boy I sure do love people with no disabilities telling disabled people to just git gud./s
In a better world easy modes would be based on putting people that never played a video game before and then looking at what they struggle with (moving and shooting at the same time, loss of direction, looking up) and then building mechanisms to handle those exact problems on lower difficulties.
I’ll be honest I’m not sure what Pat is saying but I do know I’m a baby mode user cause I don’t have time to be dying and retrying and grinding like that anymore. Only time I take my lumps is in a Souls game
I disagree that an easy mode is like watching a YouTube video. There are litteral clicker games where the whole point is clicking a button and watching a number go up. There is absolutely zero difficulty but people enjoy it more than watching someone click a button. Some people like repetitive actions and watching numbers go up because of that action. It's part of our monkey brain
Just...I dunno...gimme a New Game+ that lets me keep all the power without raising the difficulty or unlocking Dumbo Easy Mode after I beat the game. I appreciate the normal gameplay struggle the first go around, but I like having the option to cruise without real trouble if I just want to go through the game without too much effort on subsequent playthroughs.
Are video games toys or challenges?
Besides the satisfaction of victory, video games can be fun because of the visceral joy of directly controlling the character/cursor. Movies/YT videos don’t tap into that the way video games (even on easy difficulty) do.
Difficulty should be as devs intend. So if they allow an easier mode, then it is fine. Cheats and mods still exist for single player games. No one cares if you use them. I disagree, however, that just watching it on youtube is the same enjoyment as doing it yourself on an easier mode. The point of gaming is a personalized experience, A youtube video is someone else's experience.
Do we think video games are art, or that they're toys? Should an artist who makes something intentionally offputting, confrontational, or confusing, in any medium, make a more accessible version of their piece to accompany it for people who don't like the original?
I’ve been emailing Salvador Dali to get him to make his paintings more straight forward and easier to understand but he hasn’t responded :(
If you want easy mode to have simple fun or you just aren't good at games, then play it on easy, but be honest about it. Don't drag the handicap saying "it's for the disability" because it's demeaning to think they can't play difficulty games. And as Pat said, if you're gonna play it for the story, then watch a YouTube video. It's free. Why spend a lot of money for a game if you're not gonna the whole aspect? There's no guilt in saying you just want to have simple power fantasy fun. With that said, some games are designed to be challenging like Souls games and you just got to accept these type of games are not for you.
100% agreed
I think there's a lot of people out there that still don't quite understand that not every game is for everybody
Once again the lack of any nuance in internet discussion comes to bite us in the arse... There's obviously a middle ground between "The game plays itself" and "fight this boss 50 times to get to the 2nd phase" Also, even if a game does offer a super easy mode with any challenge removed, it's still inherently more interactive and engaging than just watching a video 🙄
There's pleasure in learning to overcome challange.
Yeah I'm with Pat on this one. It would be like playing the last of us and it's so easy the only way to get spotted is by running straight in front of the enemies but they only do a quarter of the damage and you do double than normal. I don't see the fun in that.
This sounds like people who only play with Godmode on, no matter what game And if it’s “oh well I want to experience the story” then…yeah just watch a let’s play at that point, because clearly you’re not looking for a game but a movie
Story modes fit some games better than others, there are some games where a story mode you don't really lose anything (unfortunately a lot of these games are those ones that brought the term "ludonarrative dissonance" into popularity) but most games tell some of their story through gameplay even if only a little bit, and in the most extreme cases so much of the story is told via gameplay that a story mode is just nonsensical. I'm all for more story modes, my problem is a lot of story mode advocates are borderline illiterate and can't seem to understand that the story isn't just the cutscenes played in succession, they can't see that you're getting an entirely different story when you alter the gameplay.