Relic

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.

Using fat stacks of cash to buy a pseudo-monopoly in an attempt to choke out other storefronts is an ugly, anti-competitive practice. The fact that the Epic store is garbage makes this worse. People have already listed ways that Epic's business practices are making things worse for consumers on the other stores, but if this strategy is successful then people could eventually be left with no place to turn to when Epic starts to exploit its customer base. This is also assuming that a company with deep ties to the Communist Party of China doesn't do what other companies with such ties do and spy on their customers with an eye for stealing trade secrets. Or using those computers to launch cyber attacks, which is the other thing that the China is infamous for.

@bladeofcreation: Thank you for the recommendation. I'll look into that. This is kind of reinforcing my point about what an accessibility mode would look like vs an easy mode though.

@bladeofcreation: I'm familiar with a broad spectrum of physical and mental disabilities. When I said "the pause button is a huge accessibility feature" I meant that it allowed people time for tremors and pain to subside, in addition to allowing people to deal with day to day life. Try as I might, I cannot think of how sliding the diffculty down would create an accessible game for somebody with severe intermittent pain, muscle spasms, or paralysis. Such people typically have functioning brains, which allow them to tackle and respond to normal challenges. They're PHYSICALLY disabled, which means that they have difficulty placing inputs in the manner or speed that a normal person would. You could make something which spaces attacks out in such a way that they could respond without pausing, but the result would be an easy mode of "dead air", rather than what the Rories and Jeff Bs of the world were actually looking for. A better solution for those people is the cheat engine method that Jeff G mentioned. You'd think that the people calling this an accessibility issue would be able to articulate HOW an easy mode would make these games accessible to the impaired, but I haven't seen that. I've seen a lot of able-bodied people saying that somebody somewhere might be helped by this, but nothing to indicate that any of the journalists opining on this topic have done even basic research on this subject.

@ralphmoustaccio: My guess is that the server connection is the culprit in those games. There's still some need to sync world state even if you're currently in the "offline" portion of the online mode. The actual offline mode should have had a pause option, as there's no reason to talk to the servers there, but I'm starting to think that actual engineers are in short supply in the game industry, and that's the kind of thing that takes an engineer.

@ralphmoustaccio: Button remapping, color blind modes, and subtitles are things I have no problem supporting and no problem holding developer's feet over the fire for not including them. The pause button feature is an often overlooked accessibility issue that Sekiro has, and I'm glad for it.

I'm glad that we agree that the people asking for easy modes should not buy or play this game.

@ralphmoustaccio: I didn't "struggle" with anything in those games. The only time I took more than 10 tries to beat a boss is on Amygdala. Beat Gascoine in 3. The point is that the experience of the game is tied to its gameplay. If somebody wants to "experience" these games and can't beat them, they can watch a walkthrough like everybody else, saving themselves time and money, instead of demanding that a developer devote time and resources to accommodate them. Being unable to experience something does not give a person a right to other people's time and money. And that's assuming that the "accessibility" argument was honest, instead of a thoroughly disgusting attempt to use the disadvantaged as cover for whining. The two people who asked for easy modes on these games are the perfectly-abled Rorie and Jeff B, with healthy Jeff G defending them. The two people I know of with physical disabilities on the site, Ben and Jason, love these games, and Ben has defended their difficulty.

The gameplay of the Souls-alike games is indelibly tied to their atmosphere and tone. The normal enemies are capable of killing an unwary player, and so anybody playing these games has to pay attention to moment-to-moment behavior if they want to progress. This creates a baseline of tension throughout the levels which is used to create a sense of release at the end of difficult encounters and sets the tone of the game. The Dark Souls series is about fighting the world's inevitable descent into darkness. The enemies are placed and designed in such a way as to create a constant grind creating the feeling of slogging through each area. The occasional ambush keeps the player on their toes, and ensures that that feeling never goes away. This is most obvious in the various bogs of the game, which often slow the player's physical progress to a crawl, introduce a drip-feed of weak enemies with the occasional hard case, and reinforce the idea that the world is rotting in a manner both spiritual and physical, only being held up by the desperate efforts of an elite few. Without the deadly ambushes and the occasional death t a chump, the world loses its tension, and with easier enemies, the elite few turn into a joke. They pose no meaningful threat to the player, and thus do not come off as "elite" at all.

These games also use their bosses to tutorialize the combat style that the designers wish for their players to adopt. This is most evident in Bloodeborne, where the game's themes (the hunters becoming the monsters they hunt, unknowingly delving into knowledge best left buried, etc) are coupled with an incentivized combat style that can be best referred to as "controlled aggression". The Cleric Beast (on the bridge) introduces the player to positioning, and weak points. You need to stay near enough to the beast to hit it when it has an opening, which means that you have to stay close enough to be vulnerable to its attacks. Gascoine introduces the idea of being aggressive by default. If you try to run, he starts shooting you. If you get up close, you have to dodge or interrupt his attack strings, but he's vulnerable to your own combos because his moves are punishable. If you use the music box, you get a short window in which to attack, but overuse causes him to switch to his most aggressive form early, and the box stops working, so you can't get through him without learning the lesson he teaches. The Blood-Starved Beast is a good example of a boss that's considered annoyingly difficult, but that boss is an example of one that should have been given a redesign for the regular difficulty, not a case for the easy mode. It's intended to introduce you to the idea that attack openings are also item and healing openings, and the player has to learn that to win, but the thing that makes it difficult is that it lunges across the room in a way that the camera can't handle. It's difficulty stems from something that would be a problem on any difficulty. All of this culminates in the Vicar Amelia fight, where the player has to combine the lessons they learned from the previous bosses. Hammering on her weak point gives you openings for visceral attacks. Staying aggressive keeps her from healing. Learning her attacks gives you the time to use items and healing without having to back up so far that you can't hammer her. Making this easy removes the ability of these bosses to teach the player the skills they need. If you learn the skills they teach, they become pretty easy. If you don't, you have to hammer away at them until you get lucky or learn.

A player who took advantage of an easy mode would not have a "shared experience" with me. They will have gone through these games missing a meaningful component of the atmosphere. They won't know the levels as well as I do because they didn't have to pay close attention when going through them. In the case of Bloodborne, they would lose the need for a playstyle that invites comparisons to the monsters being hunted. In the Souls games, they would lose the desire to be cautious. In Sekiro, they would lose the need to be clever with the environment to bypass or defeat enemies. Such a person might see the narrative through, but the narrative of these games is obscure and rife with wiki delving and guesswork even if you 100% them. They might see the things that I see, but with the threat an menace stripped out. They might beat the bosses I beat, but without the feeling of savage triumph I felt. And they might be able to go through an earlier area and rip through beginning enemies like I can, but without the satisfaction of having outgrown their challenge. The easy mode player could always beat them. I had to work at it.