Memes

Okay, but only if we compromise and you give me “balls in belt sander” level difficulty in casual games too. None of this skyrim “just double the enemy HP and damage” crap either, I want to be fighting for my fucking life trying to avoid tom nook’s bankruptcy beam.

It would be a lot to ask the devs to include a variable for the basic functions 😁

I think the irony is, there's a huge overlap between gamers who don't have a lot of time to game because of work and the gamers who have money because they work.

A market for those who want to enjoy games in an easier way that doesn't require practice 😏

That's a paradox. Games are in the unique position to make hardship part of the experience.

If you take out the hardship you wouldn't experience the art in the intended way anyway.

I think you’re leaving money on the table

For some people that is ok

intentionally limiting who can experience the art you’re trying to share with the world

Almost every musician, painter, or sculptor ever has done that. It is ok.

You don’t HAVE to include more than the basic colorblind option

I think most devs could include stuff like colorblind options or rebindable control schemes and such, and I definitely think they should

better products for it

Difficulty is not the same as colorblind mode. Colorblind mode is the same as creating closed captions for movies, difficulty is the same as changing the movie to fit another audience. Difficulty is part of the game.

it COULD be a better game if they did

It would be a different game, that they are not trying to make.

It's not a bad game because they don't have features to make it more accessible to me, but it COULD be a better game if they did.

They already have this feature. With the exception of Sekiro, you can summon a partner to help you defeat any challenge as long as you're outside the tutorial area.

That, or you can just find enemies you're comfortable with defeating repeatedly and use them to level up until the game is easy enough for you. Or you can look up good weapons and where to find them. Or items that may help in certain situations, or weaknesses the boss/enemy you're struggling against has...

I highly doubt that making an easier difficulty will net a higher cash flow. Maybe short term but the souls games sell as they do because they are known for their difficulty. If you take that away they lose their marketing gimmick.

Actually, even easier cuz I judt had to copy the link and paste it in my app and it auto formatted so I really didnt need to do anything

Okay, but the same applies to easy games, and nobody tears people asking for more challenge a new arsehole for some reason.

I still wouldn't advocate for being the second wojack though. The presumption that hard games are not made for the other person can also make you blind to genuine flaws in these harder games that prevent people from liking to play those games, because sometimes the frustration isn't worth it. Harder games have a far higher bar for being fair and feeling good to play, because frustration can genuinely kill people's desire to go through that effort even if they have the mentality required to play harder games. And sometimes you are circumstantially lucky and reach the bar for you to get hooked, but someone else gets turned off by unfair or rough edges in the game's design. Those flaws should still be resolved to allow more people to enjoy the game.

As far as my personal opinion on whether games such as any of the Soulsbourne titles should be made easier, I'm appreciative of the fact that they don't have difficulty sliders in much any regard. If I beat Dark Souls 3, there isn't a question about if I beat it on the easiest mode, anyone who's gone through the entire experience knows what I also went through. While I agree that most of the FromSoft games are sorely lacking in accessibility options (even more so their older titles), Difficulty is only one of many accessibility options. I would rather they add other accessibility options so that players who struggle with the games as is can have an easier time getting the intended experience than reduce the intended experience down to allow for the lowest common denominator.

As an aside, many of the Soulsbourne games already have something in the way of "easier modes" via alternate weapons, different combat systems, and different play styles. Playing almost any of them primarily using ranged combat reduces the difficulty in most every encounter in the game outside of boss battles. Boss battles often have their own gimmick that you can exploit to make them easier to fight. Often the level design, nearby items (and descriptions), or enemy positions are used as clues to make finding these exploits easier.

As an example, the Taurus Demon in DS1 can be killed fairly easily by baiting him to where the skeleton archers are above the fight, then using a plunging attack on him several times in a row. The intended experience is that you would go into the arena, you may run directly towards the other side, spawn the Taurus demon once you run about halfway through the arena, and notice you're being shot at from behind. You'll likely die, but in the next fight against him you can try to take out the archers via your own ranged weapons, but doing so shows a cleverly hidden ladder that leads up to the archers. The ladder isn't visible when entering the arena but the moment you turn around to look at the archers you can clearly see it next to the doorway you entered from. You can go up the ladder and easily dispatch the archers. I don't remember if every following fight you have to run halfway through the arena to spawn him again or if you have to run halfway through only the first time, but regardless an observant player will notice after taking down the archers that the drop back down the ladder will look very similar to the plunging attack the game teaches you in the tutorial boss fight. If you make the connection and perform that attack on the Taurus Demon it'll take out about 30% of his health depending on your class and weapon. Scramble around his legs (now that you're on the same floor as him) back towards the ladder, climb up, and repeat a few more times for an easy victory. Alternatively you can wait up where the archers were for a few seconds and the Taurus Demon will jump up and fight you there. You now have an alternate wider arena better suited to strafing around him instead of the narrow bridge he spawns in on.

Other games would do things like give a prompt to lower the difficulty, reduce the health of enemies in the background after repeated failures, or give you optional power ups after X defeats. All of these reinforce the mentality that "what you're doing is right, but you're lacking the skill to do it" when often in Soulsbourne games that's a harmful mentality to have as it'll lead you to keep repeating a tactic or playstyle that's demonstrably not working. In my opinion, that's the core of what fans of harder games like myself want to keep experiencing and why so many are against "easier modes" because it subverts the intended experience we enjoy: recognizing what's going wrong, correcting it to make things go right, and overcoming great challenges.

You're presenting the two options as similar when I'm not entirely sure they are. You've explored making an easy game harder and a hard game easier, but let's look at the other two results from your presented options: making an easy game easier and a hard game harder.

Making a hard game harder is often met with praise because the people who beat or otherwise enjoy the hard game already want and expect a challenge out of the game, so giving them more of that is almost what they expect already.

Making an easy game easier can be met with praise as much as it can be subject to criticism. The Pokemon series has long been critiqued for continually making every next installment easier and easier for the last several generations.

Obviously in your example of making a hard game easier there are people in favor of it but also people against it. The fact that we're having a discussion about this controversy is proof enough that many people want it, but dedicated fans are often against it.

And just like in your example, I don't think I've ever seen someone against allowing an easy game to have harder modes as long as it doesn't negatively impact those playing the easier modes.

The trend I'm seeing amongst these 4 outcomes is usually that allowing the option for a harder mode than the game already allows is often agreed upon by the wider gaming community, but asking for easier modes is often controversial. The trend I'm also seeing is that this remains true regardless of if the game was considered easy or hard in the first place.

Your original post seems to imply that players and fans for hard games are being obstinate and resistant to allowing the same concessions that players and fans for easy games do, when you could use the other two results I brought up to make players for easy games seem just as obstinate. "Us players of hard games are allowing for harder games to be made, why do you fans of easy games seem to be having such a controversy over if easy games should be made easier?" or something to that effect.

In my opinion, the controversy isn't whether hard games should be made easier, it's whether games that fans enjoy should be made easier.

Well, it was sadly not the original Tetris by Alexey Pajitnov for the IBM PC, but the NES version was indeed beat recently.