Easy mode in Souls games - an argument against

@relic: One of the things that you'll see in one of the first Twitter threads about this is that there is some pushback against referring to this sort of thing as "easy mode." Spohn and others argue that it's a reductive term that doesn't really apply here; while difficulty modes can help make games more accessible, what is ideal is a number of independent accessibility options (to use one example that I've personally used in two recent games, changing the way certain QTEs work by changing the type of input used).

Wow this thread really made the forums come back alive. It's like 2016 in here!

I think there's a misconception about the people who don't want an easy mode in souls games.

It's a selfless decision, not a selfish one. The option of playing these games on easy would take something away from YOU, not me. I really believe that

Okay but that's not selfless that's you assuming you know what's best for other people. If you were concerned about someone else's experience the way I think you want to imply here then instead of all this you would just....listen to what they say they want.

It's the same insofar as there are "difficulty levels" associated with other mediums as well, and for the sake of consistency we should consider whether the appeal for accommodations is justifiable there as well, and if not, determine what makes video games different, if we want to treat them differently.

We technically do have easy modes for some of that stuff; I know there are works that have been rewritten to be less obtuse, and that's even not considering heavy edits in compilations or what-have-you, or just the straight-up Cliff-notes sort of stuff.

But then we come upon a real sticking point here, which is which is why it should be incumbent upon creators to be accommodating with difficulty at all, and the answer, as with other mediums, is that it isn't.

If difficulty is an aspect of a game the same way complicated prose is an aspect of some particular book, then we should say it's a part of the expressed creative identity of the work.

Or games are toys or whatever. I swear I've had this conversation years ago.

@theht: Except again, I think it is a more nuanced question of accessibility

One of my favorite authors is Harry Connolly. That man writes some AMAZING "other" style urban (and traditional) fantasy. He has also been pretty open about why Twenty Palaces failed. Minor spoilers follow

In the second (third?) book there was an infamous chapter that was all one sentence. And it was a very long chapter. Harry's editors all hated the idea of that and apparently it is one of the most disliked portions of the series according to feedback from readers. I personally liked it for the same reasons it existed (it makes you feel almost breathless as the horror unfolds), but it was so unapproachable that it was one of the bigger nails in the coffin of that series. And, truth be told, it did nothing to build on the atmosphere and "style" of the series.

Was it truly that vital to the series that it needed to be there? At the time Harry thought "yes", but in retrospect he agrees he should have listened to his editors and rewritten that heavily.

But a similar moment that the editors pushed back pretty hard on was one of the first scenes in the series. A child spontaneously bursts into flames and dies. Its family immediately forgets said child existed. The protagonist, Ray, vomits. His boss, Annalise, is stoic. It is horrifying and jarring. And it perfectly introduces the characters and the stakes and explains what kind of world they live in and what kind of war they are fighting against rogue magic. In a single scene you discover that the hard ex-con covered in tattoos still has a soft heart. And the tiny lady in a fireman's coat is one cold hearted bitch. And neither of them are heroes: They are damage control. The best they can hope for is to minimize casualties. And you also learn that if the depiction of innocents, and children, dying is a deal breaker then you should shut the book right now.

Sometimes you need something truly inaccessible to get the point across. And sometimes you don't. Books and movies tend to have very talented teams of editors who are good at identifying when you need to go hard with it and when you don't. Sometimes they're wrong, but the good production houses tend to have editors who are right more often than not.

Or, to put it in the context of "easy mode": Books and movies and the like tend to start in "easy mode" with few exceptions. That doesn't mean your'e reading bubble gum young adult fiction. It just means that your super hard boiled noir story might have had people yell at the writer enough that the dick pimple popping scene was removed.

And that doesn't mean that you can't have a truly dark and impenetrable movie. But if the production house is doing their job they made sure that it "earns" that.

@gundato: Hm, but I don't see how any of that runs against what I said. Can creators change their minds about their creative decisions in retrospect? Yes, certainly. Should editors exist. Absolutely.

But is Connolly agreeing in retrospect what cements the long-sentence-chapter being a mistake? Would the situation be different if Connolly didn't agree in retrospect? That is, would we still be speaking as though the chapter is in fact not vital to the identity of the book if the author insisted that it was?

That would seem to suggest that what determines what is and isn't vital to a work is the creator, and taking these two cases and applying them to easy modes in games would suggest that in some cases having an easy mode is better whether the author can see it or not (such as with the long-sentence-chapter), and in others that not having it is a fine choice regardless of what "editors"--whatever that would mean in the case of video games (fellow developers? critics? general audiences?)--would say on the matter (such as with the kid exploding scene).

So we're not really that much closer in determining whether the Souls games and Sekiro not having an easy mode is an example of the former or the latter.

But there's a tangential question here of editing pre- and post-release that's interesting, as I would intuitively say that the former is merely a part of the creative process, while that the latter is a deviation from the work that fails to overwrite the "original", even when the creator is the driving force of post-release changes (e.g. Star Wars, Mass Effect). It's neither here nor there when it comes to easy mode, but I had to point it out.

There are objective aspects to a game's difficulty. Certain things you have to do if you want to make any reasonable progress, and these things inevitably become more important as difficulty increases. To take another game as an example: In the Division 2, it's possible to show up in a tier 1 world with tier 5 gear. Fights turn into a joke. I beat a stronghold by standing in the middle of a room blowing dudes up with my pistol. The cover mechanics, the skills, and which weapon I used straight-up didn't matter, because the enemies DPS was trivial next to mine. When the world caught up to my gear level, I started having to take cover, the mods I put on my guns and the guns that I used mattered, and I had to occasionally bust out a skill to stay alive in a fight. In other words, most of the games mechanics started to matter in a way that they couldn't on "easy mode".

Certain players have disabilities that make it difficult for them to play Sekiro as created. I think that this is a good argument for games being more modable and for those mods to be more accessible, but not a good case for mandatory easy modes in games development.

At some point this forum is just going to be filled with circular discussions about difficulty in games and the Epic store, at the rate we're going.

I don't really have anything new to add here. I would just say that some things like "mandate" or "forced" need to leave the conversation, because just writing a think piece of offering an opinion that difficulty options should exist if it's possible to do so isn't making any developer do anything. And, of course, I still fully believe that if you have such a poor grip on what you want out of a difficulty game that you can't keep yourself from bumping it down to a lower difficulty at the first moment of struggle, I would still argue that you might want to re-evaluate what you ACTUALLY want out of the game to begin with, and whether your lack of self control is a good reason to exclude others.

Also, @frostyryan, I doubt your post was intended to be framed in this manner, as you seem like a good duder, but I'm getting just some real gross "gamer" bullshit from it. Like, it's just a hair away from that tweet that went somewhat viral about cheating in games or whatever and a person only hurting themselves. It's the kind of take that simultaneously makes me groan and want to do a jerk off motion at the same time.

I will toss this out there as a disabled gamer (I'm on the Autism spectrum, have pretty bad hand/eye coordination and memory issues so I constantly have to look at the controller when there are button prompts), I really want to play Sekiro but know full well I can not play From Software games.

I lack the reaction speed and hand/eye coordination and my ability to process incoming information is often delayed deeply affect to play those games well, and I am someone with a love of weird lore and crazy game stories. I would love an easier mode as the bosses in those games (and a lot of other games I might mention) are just too much.

I respect the artist/developer's vision for their game, but I just find the argument for games only being hard a means of cutting out a great portion of your intended audience. Is the intention just that the game is super-hard, or is the story/lore what is intended to be experienced.

Sehiro is about a ninja with an awesome prosthetic hand - I am all about that, until I remember playing Dark Souls was like smashing my head against the second environment and getting no further than that. The game mechanics were simply beyond what I could follow or accomplish.

I understand the artistic intention, I am just less enthused at being cut out of something that I find of interest, but will never have the ability to play enjoyably at it's current difficulty.

I've been back and forth in my own mind as to whether I would be against an easy mode in Sekiro. What I do have a problem with is cutting out content in a game if you happen to choose easy mode, much like the makers of Cuphead did with their game. Did they ever change that?

@bmccann42: If you can play on the PC, there's a mod that lets you slow down the game world while keeping your character speed the same. That might help.

https://www.nexusmods.com/sekiro/mods/13?tab=files

I actually wonder how games as a teaching tool rubs up against a learning disability. It's a very rigid process so I wonder if people with those disabilities can conjure up methods to keep that knowledge in there.

@sombre: Couldn't agree more.

Nothing more to add to this discussion.

I'd rather play and fail at games that are designed by artists, than easily beat games normalized by accountants.

If games like Sekiro and the Souls series are games defined by their level of challenge and we accept that each player defines what is challenging differently, wouldn't it make sense to have the game meet each player at their desired level of difficulty?

The problem there is that we all have different skill levels, tendencies, etc. You cannot meet every player on their terms.

@shindig: But.. you can provide a variety of options to attempt this rather than just saying It Is What It Is.

@sweep: would you wear uncomfortable one size shoes by artists rather than have individual sizes dictated by “accountants” ? Difficulty options don’t inhibit artistic expression it just gives more people more options to experience the art.

What if Picasso considered his colourblind admirers?

@shindig: What if we lived in a world where at the press of a button you could swap between either one.

Or what if we just stopped bringing up other mediums entirely because it's not helpful to anything.

@shindig: Then surely his most famous work would have simply been in black and white and grey. Can't imagine that happening.

Serious answer, though. We're talking about art in different mediums, and we live in an era in which things like adding filters or different colors to depictions of art is extremely easy and, in some cases, is actually a feature.

We're people who spend time on a video game forum, presumably because we all value the art of video games and what games can do that other mediums can't do. Why limit our medium to the expectations and technology of artists in a different medium from the 1930s? It's absurd. Surely we can do better than that.

No, because like you said, Sekiro and the Souls series are games defined (in part, I should add) by their level of challenge (i.e. the games' level of difficulty, which is technically a fixed aspect of them (or at least the things about the games that make them seem challenging are fixed (systems, combat speed, animations, enemy behaviour, that sort of nuts and bolts stuff), while the perception of "being challenging" may vary from the standpoint of each player)).

That each player defines what is challenging differently has no bearing on the level of challenge that is defined in the game itself (as per that nuts and bolts stuff).

It depends on how they view their intended audience (by way of what they want the intended experience of playing the game to be), and to that end I don't see why it would be mutually exclusive that a game be super hard and have story/lore that's intended to be experienced.

Perhaps if you're someone who only cares about the gameplay being hard, then you'll skip or ignore cutscenes, and if you're someone who cares about the story/lore, you'll bang your head against the gameplay or just read/watch the story stuff in some other way. But the way you enjoy a game (and whether that approach is facilitated well in any particular game) is not necessarily on the developer.

We can say that a game with more gameplay options is good insofar as penetrability is a positive quality, but it's unclear whether a game being impenetrable with regards to gameplay is actually a bad thing. I suspect that's why some people are very passionate about defending a game being unforgiving, because for some of them, an intrinsically high level of difficulty in a game is not in-and-of-itself bad, while others might be passionate about the opposite, because, perhaps, games for some of them are about an experience of play to be shared/felt by as many people as possible.

Both seem like genuinely fine ways of looking at games, but not to the exclusion of the other. We might say games are about an experience of play to be shared/felt by as many people as possible, but it's okay for the scope of that to be more narrow for some games and broader for others, and also say that it's okay for a game's intrinsic level of difficulty to be unforgiving, but that it's okay for some games to instead be more forgiving.

So often these discussions come down to broadening out one perspective in order to tacitly engulf the other, where the sensible approach stepping back seems to be to have a medium that is itself broad enough to able to cater to either, while also valuing the connection between creator(s) and their artistic decisions.

And that isn't to say game developers are cut off from their audiences in their ivory tower to be left alone to create, because the reality of the world is that they aren't. They're audiences too, and their playing games influences their creating games, but that creative vision is still theirs (insofar as we're considering genuine works of art).

@humanity: That metaphor implies there's only one pair of shoes available and that they should be made to fit everyone, which is obviously not true. There are other games out there which are accessible and are easier and instead of an designer who deliberately made a game with a high barrier of entry because they wanted their players to feel a sense of accomplishment (direct quote from Miyazaki: “a feeling of accomplishment that may be relatively rare among other games”) having to tone their shit down just so more people can see what the later stages of the game look like, I'd rather people respected the original vision and came to terms with the fact that not everything is fair and not everything is for you.

The argument, put forward by Jeff and everyone else in this thread, is that you only gain something by adding an easier mode, but that's not true either. Something is gained, but something is also lost. As Simon Parkin wrote for The Guardian;

I think it's completely reasonable for an artist to say "if you're not going to experience my art the way it's designed to be experienced then I don't want you to experience it at all" - because art is fundamentally fascist and personal and an audience is not entitled to it. Sometimes art is supposed to be exclusive and inflame and isolate - some of the greatest works of the 20th centrury did exactly that (impressionism, cubism, abstraction, anyone?) and they dictated the way art and fashion and society evolved for the next 100 years and continue to do so. And I also completely understand if people disagree, and i'm completely on board with any designer who doesn't do that and is happy to open up their game to as many people as possible. But that's for the artist to decide, not the consumer, and in the case of Sekiro, Miyazaki has expressed repeatedly the point of view that carries the implicit suggestion that not every game need cater to every person.

I guess ultimately I don't know if the artist or their vision is worthy of much respect if there's this inherent gate keeping built into it.

I mean obviously there shouldn't be any method of forcing them to change what they want to make but respect is an entirely different matter.

So I finally played through Subnautica last week. Subnautica is a game about exploring an underwater world. Subnautica has no map. The entire point of the game is that it has no map. Combined with low visibility, a day/night cycle and complex caverns it is very very easy to get completely lost in Subnautica. Subnautica has no difficulty options and is generally praised as being a great game.

Not really trying to make a point, just an observation I had playing through that game while having this whole conversation in the back of my mind. If anything I'd like to point out how easy it is to miss the absurdity of this whole conversation by solely focusing on a single game. It's easy to get emotional about a single product, but when you apply the same standards across a multitude of examples a lot of it starts to fall apart. After seeing this thing rage on for way way too long at this point I've found myself in a position where I think neither side is making sense.

One final thought for the people talking about allowing as many people as possible to enjoy a game. No Zelda game has ever had difficulty options (as far as I know). You might think to yourself "but those games are easy". Isn't it much worse that those games, which are designed to be super inclusive, exclude the people who are unable to overcome their challenges ? I visited my nephews not too long ago, and even with their parents help (who are fairly inexperienced with videogames) they were completely stuck at the beginning of Lego Marvel. With my help they had the time of their life, but they still can't figure it out on their own. Why get all riled up over a game that's clearly designed and marketed as being challenging for not including difficulty levels ?

(I realize it seems like I'm only picking on one side, but I feel like I don't need to re-tread the points regarding how BS the artistic integrity argument is.)

I agree with Ares here i think. Most games out there are trying to appeal to as many people as possible, yet don't sufficently build their games to let everyone have a good time with it. Especially the multiplayer games that AAA studios create nowadays to get as many people in the door. What's up with the loss of MMR in battle royale games? A ton of people will never get a win that way. Where are the serverlists & private lobbies in the games that have millions of active players and therefore can fragment the userbase slightly in the name of accessibility without the queue times ballooning? Wouldn't it be great if the ablegamers discord could just host gamenights without Twitch streamers winning in all their games? Where are the mods that let us change hud , fontsize & colors to deal with our personal shortcomings? Let us remap buttons freely. Why doesn't Baba Is You have a hint-system? Why is there no rewind option in platformers for those that desire it after a missed jump? Why do singleplayer shooters not have a godmode toggle option?

If your game is shooting for mass-appeal already, why don't you put the systems in place to make your game accessible to as many people as possible? That's why i think it's strange that the accesibility argument always gets brought up around fromsoftware games, games that are explicitly about the challenge in an age where 90% of the games are not. Why not focus on the games that are halfway on the accessible path already (at least in regards to their objective) and would love to get more people in the door already? Wouldn't that be much more productive than to tell a series that has become super popular by not adhering to the trends of the AAA industry to step away from their design philosophy?

@sweep: The artistic intent argument comes up a lot in this thread and it's one that I partially agree with. First and foremost, I don't think something is essentially lost through the process of choice. If they released a dumbed down version of Proust as you cite, it would not erase the original. If anything people might buy it, understand it on a simpler level and decide to try the original with this new background and understanding. Similarly a Souls game with an easier difficulty would let a lot of people get their toes wet and potentially lead them to try play the game "as it was intended". Either way, there is no loss of culture because those who wanted the original experience still have it readily available for them, and those that were never going to try now have an avenue opened up to them.

Then again I do think there is an argument to be made against a strict artistic intent approach. Games unlike other static forms of art like painting, music or cinema, are commercial products that the end consumer interacts with. There is a back and forth here. In my opinion it is a lot harder to use the defense for video games because you do actually play them which is not the case for most other art mediums. A movie or a song is for you or it isn't - you simply turn it off or you don't. A game is dependent on the consumer experiencing it through interaction. You can't experience Uncharted simply by standing in place when the game starts. It's like if a painting was only revealed to you in tiny sections upon fully comprehending the one before it. Games aren't static pieces of art merely there to be passively consumed, which is why I think despite all the creative freedom a developer does have to account for this, and better yet they have an option to do so. The great thing about video games is that unlike Proust or the Mona Lisa, the developer actually has the ability to account for different levels of interaction. So it's strange to me that within this medium there exists this extremely unique ability to have your art become accessible on many levels, but you would rebel against it. It just seems like a waste.

At the end of the day though I do agree that each artist can do whatever they want. I simply thought your statement was incredibly "harsh" I guess is the best way to put it. A game with gradation to it isn't automatically designed by accountants, it shouldn't be that black and white.

@humanity: But why are games unlike movies or songs (which either click with you or don't) simply because there's an interactive aspect to them? Why is that the interactive aspect is not ultimately judged along that same standard of either being for you or not (noting that we're beyond the realm of critical analysis here and talking about the broad question of accessibility; this isn't to disqualify any criticisms of gameplay (or indeed any other part of a game), only to push back on the matter of having the "option" and duty to account for different "levels of interaction" (gameplay tastes?))?

Because we do in our everyday lives talk about games (from a gameplay perspective) as being in line with our tastes or not, whether that's just based on the feel of a certain game, its systems, or even whole genres altogether.

And the way we say those things is often distinct from the way we talk about gameplay in a game being competent, or well developed. For instance, someone might say the combat flow of Bloodborne isn't for them, without insisting that it's poorly constructed.

So the point here is that we do treat the interactive aspect of games (at least sometimes) like we do movies or songs, as either being for us or not.

@ares42: That's an interesting point about Subnautica. Reminds me of several dungeon crawling games that allow the player the option of having a map auto-generate as they explore, or having no map for those players who want to get out graph paper and draw their own. The key here is that having an option to have the game track the map doesn't take away from any other player who wants to draw their own map.

In the case of Subnautica, there are also mods that allow players to add a map to the game. But I don't think the discourse around that game is quite the same as it is here.

At the end of the day, I'm just happy that there are mods that allow people to play these games the way they want to. More art being more accessible to more people is good.

@humanity: I believe that From are trying to convey the harshness of the world they built and how hard it's for the playable characters to go against the odds and overcome their challenges. A lot of games tried to convey the same messaging but i got to say that the difficulty amplify it big time!

In my opinion, i don't see From games and Nioh are difficult like Cuphead for example because unlike Cuphead their games don't require that you become too good with the timings as long as you're willing to approach the game through the different ways they offer.

If you are too good with the timings you can blast through them with first loot you equip ?

You know what's strange though, is that although we're in this day and age, yet no current gen console have a Game Genie or Shark equivalent.

@giant_gamer: Well that last point isn't so strange. Everyone either realized that they could sell some of the features those old tools provided or realized that they really don't want external applications being able to inject code into their closed system.

@humanity: Yeah, that's fair. I think it's a harsh opinion too, but just because it's harsh doesn't mean it's wrong.

If they released a dumbed down version of Proust as you cite, it would not erase the original. If anything people might buy it, understand it on a simpler level and decide to try the original with this new background and understanding.

This is true. Simplifying Proust would not erase the original and yeah, it might open up the original to more people. But it also might not. I think the difference is that I don't see it as making the original more accessible, I say it as creating a completely new bastardized version of the original, and the idea that people might only experience that lesser version makes me really uncomfortable.

We'll never know if Proust himself gave a fuck, though :P

@sweep: It's a pretty weird argument to cite Proust specifically in this case. Proust's work already HAS been made more accessible by being translated into languages other than French. Since translation and localization can never be perfect (because some phrases or words don't translate perfectly either due to language or culture), if you've read Proust in any language other than the original, you have experienced it in a different, more accessible way.

What gets to me is that I would guarantee that anyone being super serious about The Art in this way has broken that countless times in games before this but now it's suddenly a very important concern.

Or in this very game, 'We cannot have an easier difficulty it's disrespectful to the vision, now excuse me I have to hang on a ledge and slice this mans ankles for 40 straight minutes because the fights too hard'

@efesell: Sometimes I'll run a Giant Bomb stream in the background while I'm playing a game. I like the banter that the crew has, so it's fun to listen to them get spicy in, say, PUBG. But watching the looting is boring! So I'll just alt-tab back to the video when it sounds like something interesting is happening.

I hope they don't get mad that I'm not respecting their vision.

@theht: I think the main difference is that you only find out if a game is for you or isn't through interaction whereas a movie or a song will unfold before you without any input. The input itself can determine a lot about the game whereas a song has only one vector of approach. You can pause a song, but the moment you hit play it will just keep moving forward while games do not. The difficulty curve of a game is nuanced and can be adjusted to allow a broader window of interpretation without necessarily changing the core conceit. Playing a song twice as fast or a movie in black and white would drastically alter the original vision of the artist. Having to hit the Corrupted Monk 15 times to kill him as opposed to 30 is not a dramatic change to the game as a whole, you still have to dodge and evade and show a certain amount of skill in the combat system to survive the encounter, but those 15 hits can mean a world of difference from one player to the next. And that world of difference between challenging and "I'm not playing this anymore" comes directly from the consumer interacting with the product.

Play games however you want. As long as it's not cheating against other players then I don't see why it matters at all how anyone plays a game or how they prefer playing a game. How this is even a debate just baffles me.

I think there are good points on both sides of this discussion. I do find it interesting that those arguing for easier/accessibility modes tend to be talking about games in terms of a product whereas those arguing against are talking about them more as art/experiences.

I tend to side with those saying that developers should be free to design games how they wish, including their approach to difficulty. I don't think the Souls/From games would get the attention/popularity they do without their approach to difficulty, and I think games like that should exist. Looking at the series from the outside, I've always been impressed with the world-building of the Souls games. Despite that, I spent about 20 minutes playing the first Dark Souls and realized it was not for me. And I was okay with that! There is plenty out there that I do like playing. It strikes me that for those in similar positions there are plenty of alternatives to playing the game and still being able to experience the story/world, whether that be watching a "let's play"-esque video or finding accessibility mods. They won't give you the same experience as playing the game as intended, but then again, neither would an easy/accessible mode, would it?

Well, cheesing/exploiting has nothing to do with respecting someone's creative decisions by not rendering unacceptable something like tough boss fights. You can respect a developers capacity to express their artistic vision without actually adhering to that vision when you're exploring the range of interactivity that they've made possible when playing the game, just like you can respect that capacity without actually liking or even playing the game.

If a dev doesn't like me hanging back and shooting arrows at every other boss in Demon's Souls, well it ain't my fault that it's a viable option.

Whether those sorts of opportunities should be patched out is an interesting question though. But again, one that's neither here nor there.

Is that the case though? The moment I saw Bloodborne I knew it was for me. Doom Eternal (before even playing Doom 2016 I should say), the Uncharted games, Spider-Man, Cuphead, Botanicula. These are all games I saw and knew would be for me, and turns out I was right. Even though I wasn't directly interacting with them, I could imagine what the experience would be like just by looking at the gameplay.

Maybe watching a game being played without actually playing it would be analogous to reading a review for a movie without having seen it. But can't you read a review of a movie and determine if it's for you?

In any case, it's true though that you could be wrong at that point either way, but you'd be wrong after experiencing the work first hand (whether by watching the movie or actually playing the game), which in both cases is asking of some kind of interaction before you can get to that realization.

I mean, here's the thing: if one of the core aspects of your game is having a narrow range of difficulty, should we still take that to be an aspect that could be adjusted?

The thinking that "this thing about the game doesn't matter that much, so let's change it some so more people can play," does not seem very far removed from the thinking that "the violence and nudity in Game of Thrones isn't that important, so let's change it so more people can experience the story." Why should we accept that these things aren't important? On whose understanding of what Souls games or Game of Thrones should be should we accept that?

Because you're right that we could change the Corrupted Monk to die in 16 hits and it might not seem a huge deal to us, but we could probably also change the volume of an audio track of a song by a hair and it also might not be a huge deal to us. That doesn't mean it should be up to us though. We can play a game and listen to a song as levy complaints along those same lines, and the creator can consider them, but if they're like "naw we good," then what?

Well, then it seems they keep making what they want, and we go find the things that we do like. What else should happen?

I'd guess that the creative intent for Sekiro isn't a 183ms parry window and an enemy having 1092 hp instead of 800, but for combat to feel tense and satisfying and the world to be dangerous.

That's all relative to the player. Everything in a game is.

So I propose that the ONLY way to communicate your vision is to have more difficulty options and From are betraying their vision for the trashy git gud narrative marketing push :)

Also play in the original language, no subs... AND DON'T YOU DARE TOUCH THAT OPTIONS MENU. EVER.

@theht: I'm sorry none of that makes any damn sense to me. How can anyone put forth the argument that overcoming this specific challenge is so vitally important to the work that you can't change it but also claim that it's totally fine to exploit something unintended to subvert that in game?

It's absurd.

My ability to cheese/exploit a game says nothing to respecting that there is an intended experience of the game that isn't up to me. It's like if I decide to use cheat codes or exploits, that isn't me saying "oh, this is how the game should be," it's me literally cheating/exploiting the game. If you wanna say that's immoral, I guess that's one route to go, and I'd be open to hearing the argument, but trying to suggest that respecting a creators capacity to control how their work manifests leads to some kind of duty/responsibility on the part of the user to actually adhere to that intended experience, as far as I can tell, doesn't follow.

Once the game is out there, it's out there, and if I decide to run around naked in Anor Londo and just fuckin chiiiiiill, then fuck it, that's how I'm gonna play the game. But that's a choice that I'm making with the options that the developer has presented to me. Just like sitting back and shooting the Armoured Spider with arrows is a choice that I'm making with the options that the developer has presented to me. If they didn't want me to be able to do that, then they fucked up (hence why we call them exploits?).

I think this is reason, too.

Because Nintendo got rid of the cartridge slot while Sony fixed the feature that the GameShark exploited on PSone. Because of that the last GameShark was a DVD on PS2 but it didn't work so i returned it.

Some hackers managed to inject cheat codes into consoles using a USB port but console makers would quickly release a firmware update to "fix the issue".

There is fun to be had with these tools, like speed running a game like a pro without the effort :D

I don't think gatekeeping is a valid excuse because there are people with no self-control. I dropped down two difficulties in Wargroove recently. I'm having a much better time. That's the point of videogames. Developers are oftentimes and understandibly experts at playing the genre they're developing a game in; I'm not. So what they might think is fine might not be an acceptable proposition for someone with a backlog in the hundreds (which is a lot of us, thanks to digital sales).

Oh look: That's what Jim's talking about this week. And as usual he says it better than I could; https://youtu.be/nIWivb-8C1w

@sweep said:

@humanity: That metaphor implies there's only one pair of shoes available and that they should be made to fit everyone, which is obviously not true. There are other games out there which are accessible and are easier and instead of an designer who deliberately made a game with a high barrier of entry because they wanted their players to feel a sense of accomplishment (direct quote from Miyazaki: “a feeling of accomplishment that may be relatively rare among other games”) having to tone their shit down just so more people can see what the later stages of the game look like, I'd rather people respected the original vision and came to terms with the fact that not everything is fair and not everything is for you.

The argument, put forward by Jeff and everyone else in this thread, is that you only gain something by adding an easier mode, but that's not true either. Something is gained, but something is also lost. As Simon Parkin wrote for The Guardian;

I think it's completely reasonable for an artist to say "if you're not going to experience my art the way it's designed to be experienced then I don't want you to experience it at all" - because art is fundamentally fascist and personal and an audience is not entitled to it. Sometimes art is supposed to be exclusive and inflame and isolate - some of the greatest works of the 20th centrury did exactly that (impressionism, cubism, abstraction, anyone?) and they dictated the way art and fashion and society evolved for the next 100 years and continue to do so. And I also completely understand if people disagree, and i'm completely on board with any designer who doesn't do that and is happy to open up their game to as many people as possible. But that's for the artist to decide, not the consumer, and in the case of Sekiro, Miyazaki has expressed repeatedly the point of view that carries the implicit suggestion that not every game need cater to every person.

I want to dissect this because I think it's interesting and you do put up some great logical arguments here that I'm going to (hopefully kindly) disagree with...

Does the Cliffnotes version of Julius Caesar ruin the main experience? Think about it, granted it wasn't the artist who wrote the Cliffnote's version, but for those who aren't well versed in 16th century dialect is it really that big of a loss. Did they ruin Julius Caesar for themselves?

Here's the thing about 'experiences' they're completely subjective. If I chose to mod or cheat Sekiro and the director came bursting into my home and exclaim 'YOU PLAYED ME GAME WRONG!', I'd reply 'you made the game wrong'. The problem is who's right in this situation? I find when you try and argue that something is lost when an 'easier' option is added in you go into territory that's really murky. You can dismiss the audience all you want, but if they're subjected to fascism, they have a right to fight back against it. The artist loses control when they show or sell their work to someone and it's really hard for me to see otherwise.

I do agree it's the artist's decision to not include an easy mode, but if I chose to cheat and make it easier for myself and you say 'well it's not supposed to be fair!' You become a penguin...

@shivermetimbers: I can be a penguin if I want!

The problem when you start labelling games "wrong" is where do you draw up those lines? What might be wrong for you may be right for someone else, and vice versa. This thread, the fact that so many people are vehemently against an easier experience, is testament to that. And sure, if people have a problem with it then they are welcome to, y'know, vote with their dollars?

Also let's not get it twisted, just because I threw in the word "fascism" doesn't mean you need to knee-jerk fight-them-on-the-beaches suggest that we need to throw down. The ideology when applied to art is that you reject external ideas in a way which is fascist; essentially that you're not designing by committee, that you stick to your principles, that it's a solo vision and when other people make suggestions you tell them to fuck off. Even if that means making something which doesn't look nice, or that other people don't enjoy; there's still value in that, both culturally and socially. The problem, as we're seeing here, is when it rubs up against the commercial aspect of games, because like a lot of modern art; it might encompass some truly fascinating ideas but you wouldn't want it in your home. However I'd argue that as there's clearly a large market of people who do like their games to have a single, soul-crushing difficulty, it's up to the designer to decide if he wants to cater to one, the other, or both, and shouldn't be punished or strong-armed into making one decision over the other. I think Miyazaki would feel like you're ruining the intended sense of accomplishment if, upon reaching a difficult enemy, you were able to simply flick the game down to an easier difficulty - that you had undermined the whole point of the game at a fundamental level - and I respect that decision and creative choice.

I don't know how anyone here arguing for mandatory easier difficulties survives in online multiplayer games, incidentally.

@sweep: After nearly two weeks and 150 comments in this thread, you should realize by now that no one is talking about "mandatory easier difficulties," and to continue framing the conversation that way means that you either haven't been paying attention to what people are saying, or you're being willfully obtuse and arguing against points that no one is making.

The difference between these arguments for single-player games and multiplayer games should be self-evident: in a single-player game, someone else's experience has absolutely no bearing on your experience.

At the most basic level of authorial intent, games are designed to be played. Yet here we are, on a website where we watch other people play games.

I don't understand the problem people have with an easy mode. If it is not the default setting, people would have to go out of their way to play it like that, it is an offline game and people's experience will not be affected by how others choose to play it, I see no drawback to having an option for people that want to engage it differently.

@sweep: I suspect that many of said people aren't concerned with online multiplayer if they're having a discussion about better options in a Single Player game. I know that if I'm playing a game on easy because I don't feel like I'm very good at it I don't subject myself to an arena filled with people who probably are.

That seems...obvious?