I’ll keep saying it: I already have a job. I want to play a game to unwind.
Implementing a wide gamut of difficulty settings is also an accessibility feature, and allows people with certain physical or mental challenges the opportunity to enjoy your game firsthand. Why would you want to deny your audience this opportunity?
I mean, presumably because it’d compromise their vision for the game or some such? Some games use gameplay as part of the storytelling, so nontrivial difficulty swttings would compromise the story being told (for example if the game wants you to experience a gruelling trek through a hostile area). Now that doesn’t mean a story mode or similar is bad, but there are reasons to consider for a game dev to consider such settings incompatible with their game. Also in a game with more complex mechanics difficulty would be more complicated than player and enemy stats, and a dev might simply consider implementing satisfactory difficulty settings not a good use of their time.
One of the big inspirations for Dark Souls was the manga Berserk. A man in an impossibly difficult position fighting against demi gods and the many monsters in that universe. You don’t see how a “normal” difficulty would destroy that vision?
I meant that the story/easy mode wouldn’t conform with their vision. To expand on my example, if your game is portraying a grueling trek through a swamp where enemies abound and rest is scarce, the struggle would be an inalienable part of the experience; removing the struggle would fundamentally alter the story being told through the game. It’s not about their vision being intact or not; it’s about not wanting to intentionally make an inferior version of their art.
Then they label the intended difficulty with “recommended” and say that will give the best experience and that if you choose a difficulty higher or lower you might impede the intention of it.
I really don’t see the problem with having options.
Like I love the Kingdom Hearts series and was able to play it and fall in love with them as a kid on normal and sometimes beginner difficulty. As an adult I play critical because it makes me engage with all of the mechanics of the game. But I would have unlikely got to the point of being able to play at that level if I couldn’t work my way up through Normal > Proud > Critical.
The same admiration you have to grinding on a single playthrough to overcome an intended challenge can still be obtained through multiple playthroughs of increasing difficulty.
Then they label the intended difficulty with “recommended” and say that will give the best experience and that if you choose a difficulty higher or lower you might impede the intention of it.
You’re missing the point, which is weird because I explicitly stated it. To repeat, an artist might not want to create an inferior version of their art, irrespective of the utility of doing so. Art is an egotistical affair.
I really don’t see the problem with having options.
Options can make sense in some games but not in others; a developer deciding not to include them has likely either figured they wouldn’t work with the game’s structure, wouldn’t be a good use of their time or both. Difficulty options are simply not a one size fits all solution, for the same reason it wouldn’t make sense to demand all painters make colorblind-friendly versions of their paintings.
You don’t have to play difficult games. Not everything has to cater to a wide audience. Most of today’s re-boots and sequals were from stories that catered to a niche audience only to lose its appeal by going too mainstream…
[CITATION NEEDED]
It seems pretty clear you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about from a game development standpoint. Difficulty is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay and you can’t just add multiple versions of that trivially. Even Bethesda’s classic “bump up the health” stuff isn’t a trivial thing to implement. Just come on with this.
Game design is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay. Difficulty just plays around with the variables that you already have made for said game design.
Do you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?
Sir you must be a very niche or inexperienced game developer because there is more than tuning variables to impact difficulty especially from genre to genre and game to game. Level design alone for platformer’s can introduce degrees of difficulties. Puzzle games’ difficulties revolve entirely around the puzzle design. You can’t adjust a variable and tune that. These are just two of countless examples.
Game design is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay.
Been a while since I’ve seen a good old fashioned tautology. Stop trying to be disingenuous, ‘difficulty’ (or if you prefer, ‘challenge’) is the #1 factor in game design. You either should know this, because it’s patently obvious, or you should just stop talking about this subject like you have any idea what you’re talking about.
Do you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?
Strawman me harder, zaddy!
No, they don’t redesign a game for every difficulty - that’s absurd. But it does have a huge impact on every aspect of gameplay, and like I said, it’s far far from trivial to alter the abstract concept which defines things like the core gameplay loop.
I see you have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you think it’s a simple as reducing a health bar? Because games that do difficulty scaling like that are not fun at all and I would consider that lazy.
How can you be niche without a “gatekeeping” to some degree? Again, not every game or piece of media need to cater to everybody.
I designed games myself. It is very easy. Just switch around some variables.
Every game does it like that, whether it is HP, damage, enemy spawns, probability to take a specific action, … it is all just playing around with variables.
It is neither lazy nor not fun.
Did you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?
It is you that has no idea what you’re talking about.
“All game design is just changing numbers” sure, and all programming is just manipulating two values over and over and over. But the difficult part isn’t changing the numbers, the difficult part is the mechanisms that define how those numbers interact with other numbers. “Magic Numbers” have a place in game design yes, but they are not by any stretch how those systems are defined. If your game was created like that, it cannot have been very good…
Difficulty is not simply one aspect of a game that can be adjusted with a slider. Difficulty is the confluence of many different gameplay aspects coming together. Sometimes, those systems allow for easy and discrete adjustment like with the old Doom games where settings can simply vary the enemies that spawn, the damage dealt, or the health and ammo from pickups.
The deliberate decisions and balance that make Dark Souls good also make it difficult, it’s not good simply because it is difficult. Take Blighttown for example, one of the most notoriously difficult areas of the game. It’s difficult because the architecture is hostile and confusing, and encounters place immense pressure on the player through application of Toxic and confined or deliberately open spaces that allow you to dodge yourself off a cliff. How do you make that “easier”? There really isn’t an abundance of enemy placement throughout most of the game, it’s very deliberate. Equipment attribute numbers are all low to maintain a tight balance and even things like parry windows are affected by the specific shield you have equipped. Adding in additional difficulty options is a retuning of the entire game, which also retunes the formula. Look, I’m sorry if it sounds snobby but there’s just no other way to say that if you start making substitutions to a dish at a restaurant it’s not the same dish!
This insistence that all games MUST be for all people is what leads to the bland homogeneity of modern game design. Dark Souls comes from the rich legacy of dungeon crawlers like King’s Field before it and those games are notoriously oppressive and difficult, it’s why people like myself love them. Everyone attributes poison swamps to Miyazaki but go back to Eternal Ring or Shadow Tower: Abyss in the early 00’s before his involvement and you’ll find mandatory poison damage areas there as well. It’s a staple of the genre. Heck, play Megami Tensei (no, not Shin Megami Tensei, MEGAMI TENSEI from the NES) and there’s a whole section of mandatory fire damage that you can’t negate until you’re already 4/5 of the way through it.
I also find the accessibility angle disingenuous and a little insulting even. All props to devs that add difficulty to their game as a means of accessibility when they are able to or want to, but it should not be necessary. This also diminishes real accessibility options like colorblind modes, reading assistance modes, keybinding modes, etc. I do not appreciate that.
Everyone thinks they’re a critic because they don’t like a game or certain things about a game and that it would be better if it catered to them, but difficulty is already highly subjective to begin with and insisting that devs find ways to foresee and cater to all possible permutations is untenable.
If you don’t like the game: fine. If you want to levy valid criticisms about the game in your opinion: fine. But this insistence that the developers are being foolish for creating a game to their vision and not yours is the actual thing cheapening it as art.
And insisting games can only be for “you” is just as - if not more problematic.
Again, no one has insisted this. The game is for those that enjoy it.
Running out of breath here.
Developer: I have made the game exactly as I intended.
The Intended Audience: Wow, this is for us, we love it exactly as intended!
You: I hate this game, I do not like it or the decisions you’ve made. You should change it for me so that I might like it.
???
Again, you all keep trying to paint us as the selfish ones as if we’re gatekeeping this game from you, but there’s nothing stopping you from picking up and engaging with the game exactly as it is, as we’ve all done, other than that you do not like it. The notion that ALL games MUST be for EVERYONE seems much more selfish and unhinged in my opinion.
Expecting every developer to cater to every possibility of everyone’s subjective opinion of what is good and bad difficulty is impossible.
Honestly don’t care. Because see the thing is, I get to enjoy these games while you gotta come online and whine about them. I wrote my post out of passion because I see something there worth valuing. You wrote your post to whine and tear something down you didn’t understand.
You’ll have to do a little more legwork to make that connect back to the idea it’s being used to support, which correct me if I’m mistaken is that every game needs to make all of its content easily received or it’s not valid art/less valuable/somehow problematic.
You don’t demand a guarantee that you’ll finish every book you’ll buy and you don’t hate every song you can’t dance to, why are games different? They’re different because you think of games as purely entertainment, and you don’t respect it as art. If you did, you would not be arguing that creators should conform to your personal preferences.
I’m not arguing that every game must cater to my casual needs. What I’m expanding upon the op is that art is art only in the eye of someone experiencing it. Artists like game devs are free to make the kind of games they want, but it is a balance between making the game attractive and marketable and making something only the most purist will like. Concessions are to be made for the game to be accessible, as you will have to sell it to make a profit. All the examples are from commercial games that need a consumer base to buy it.
Some will criticize Elden ring for being a bit more easy and approachable (than previous DS), because they are used to the elitist view that games must be difficult to play. But on the other hand, all gamers that had fun playing their own way are valid. Some will like having a hard time, some will like having an easier path to progress.
In the end, if you make art you want for others to see it. If your game doesn’t sell because only hardcore players can progress, it could be seen as a failure for your art to be spread. It’s also certainly a business failure as well.
So as I said, it’s a balance and there is no right or wrong way to do it. People can still discuss what their preferences are, be it hard games or story mode for easy gameplay.
I’m not 12 anymore so I don’t have time to learn, memorize and train for some of the newer games. I can appreciate games that include an easy path for me, allowing me to experience their art. Unlike eg. the Dark Souls universe where I’ll never truly experience it because it’s too hard for me.
Devs are then free to take this feedback into consideration for their next game.
art is art only in the eye of someone experiencing it
That flies in the face of one of my core values so I’m glad you underlined it for me. My view is ars gratia ars. That is an entire body of thought that stands against the idea that art needs to serve some purpose or agenda in order to be valid. Art is complete in itself no matter who gets to receive it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is some brand of authoritarian sooner or later. I’m ride or die with the bohemians on this one.
As for Elden Ring, I am fully onboard with their design choice with regard to difficulty. I enjoyed the time I spent with it, and the only reason I didn’t finish it is because I approached it while burnt out in other areas of my life. I finished all but one Dark Souls game, and I found them harder for sure. The creative vision with Elden Ring is a few steps toward the accessibility crowd, and you seem to notice how it’s still not enough. It never will be, and it’s folly to try. Once they’re running the show, you get to do a lot less.
Again, I am not talking about preferences, I am arguing that we should treat games as art and do art critique about it. We should not be treating games as mere commercial products that must amuse us at all costs, that is a long road that goes nowhere. Difficulty in games has a meaning, it is a design choice, and we can talk all day about what that choice meant - whether it served the creator’s aims - whether that difficulty achieved what it was trying to achieve - but if we are only here to bicker about whose preferences are more important, leave me out of it.
it is. but if the reason that you think something is poor is because you were not the target audience, you can come across as entitled and clueless. it is not like their games pretend to be easy games, it is clear from the start that that the challenge is part of the design
It’s like making music and experimenting with discordant harmonies and unusual rhythms. Art can be challenging, it can require engagement and time and study to fully experience. It can make people uncomfortable and it can appeal to only a small audience and still be good.
Is poor the word you’d use for art that fails to be amusing and charming? Because a lot of art is not trying to be amusing and charming.
Edit: I don’t care if people disagree, but at least have an answer. Not liking art because it wasn’t intended to be delightful and pleasing is not how to do art criticism.
Ah, I think there’s a bit of a disagreement here between what types of art are respectable and what types aren’t. For context, I subscribe to the definition of art that says “everything made with intent” is some form or other of art.
Suppose you go to a gallery. Would you consider handicap-hostile architecture, which is part of the exhibit itself, to be worth respecting as a art enthusiast? (Stairs required to be used in order to see a painting, specifically because the artist wants you tired from walking, not pushing a wheelchair, which they don’t like, when you look at it, for example.)
I could see it both ways, but I fall more on the side of accessibility. If an artist requires someone to use stairs to see their art, they are an asshole, regardless of how good their paintings actually are.
This is exactly the kind of conversation that I’d rather be having. Thank you! I’ll try to disagree at least interestingly.
I subscribe to the idea that art is the study of choice, and that’s fairly close to your definition of art, but the difference is that I’m not saying I can draw a circle around what is and isn’t art. Gun to my head, I’d probably define it as something like “anything done with aesthetic intent”, to exclude the act of intentionally kicking a puppy as performance art. We intend many things in life, many of which are also intentionally artless.
I think I see what you’re driving at with the bit about ramps. To hew to the heart of the matter as the metaphor applies to video games, I would still call that exhibit art - it would simply be limited in how successfully it achieved what it was attempting, which is a severe flaw. I would want to talk about how it could have better achieved its aims. The aim of such an art installation could have merit, if it was more intelligently done.
The reason I do not place the accessibility question from the metaphor on the same level as difficulty in video games is that completion of a game is, I would submit, something that the creator should only endeavour to guarantee if they believe completion of the game is part of the intended experience. I would caution against taking this as a maxim.
When media is highly interactive, as with games, it is a mistake to take it as an implicit assumption that that this media must be completable by a broad majority of participants. Booksellers do not make such guarantees, and books are far less interactive.
If we all raise our voices on behalf of accessibility proponents with the idea that games that are not as easily completed are of lesser value, or if we even become so strident that we say they are not even art, we are limiting the space of an art form that is still in its nascence. We are very permissive with other, older art forms (and they have all taken their lumps with highly prescriptive and proscriptive schools of thought, over the years). It would be like saying music with too many notes isn’t music, or that music isn’t good if I can’t personally dance to it. Those are preferences, not art critiques. We should be asking how the choices of a game developer serve or betray their creative aims. We won’t always get what we want out of every game, but at least we’ll have better conversations.
I like games that take a generous view of accessibility, and I respect that vision. Celeste is a masterpiece. I like games that take a stern view of difficulty also, when it serves their aesthetic vision in a meaningful way.
That last bit is easy to get wrong, and I respect people who struggle with the subject of difficulty in how it interacts with creative ideas, but I have less time for people who hate the music just because they can’t dance to it. That’s not always the point.
It’s like with any other art. Some of it is a simple pleasure, and some of it wants you to struggle. Some people read Gwenpool, some people read Cerebus.
This isn’t a very honest argument. If the only saving grace of the game was its difficulty, nobody would mind not being able to finish it.
Something is lost and gained with every substantive choice in game design. That’s what makes the choices interesting, and worth discussion.
Let’s play with that idea. Take one of my favourite games of all time, Morrowind. It’s hard to get through, maybe. Weird UI, weird bad combat. Those are flaws. But it also has a big fat 0 to 100 difficulty slider. Is that a flaw? I would argue no, because in that game the intended struggle is to engage with the world and the story on your own terms. The combat is all window dressing for the real struggle, which is with the story’s frustrating ambiguities.
In the case of Morrowind, some of the difficulty fails to serve the intended experience and some of it supports that vision wonderfully. It’s not a flawless game, but importantly I am discussing how the difficulty helped or hindered the creative vision. That is art criticism, and it’s a more interesting conversation than arguing over personal preferences.
A lot of hobbies like gardening, sports, chess require effort, why is it necessary for video games to be easy?
Forcing some challenge gets you to engage with more things rather than taking the easy way out. It’s like bungee jumping (I’d assume), sometimes a push is necessary to experience something new.
Some of my favourite moments were trying Fire Emblem Ironmans, which initially made me go “this is stupid, I’ll regret this, I should reload”, only to change to “this is peak”
If the main difficulty is intentional, then it’s not an artifical barrier, the easy mode is an artificial easener. How easy is easy enough? Some people can’t beat Clair Obscur on the story mode (presumably by not doing side content) In case of gardening, it’d be getting someone to garden for you, and just chilling with the results.
Let’s plays/walkthroughs exists, and only lock you out of interactivity. And interactivity doesn’t mean much if every option beats the game.
Case in point, if I see some post-game superboss with lore behind it, I just look up the thing online.
Options don’t stop you from having those moments in fact they make it more possible for you to find the difficulty for those moments. For you and everyone else.
I think it’s an age gap 9f when you started gaming. If you were a gamer back in the 80’s and early 90’s, you played because it was a challenge to overcome and that’s what you enjoyed.
You didn’t want to “play” a game. You wanted to “beat” a game. No one played Mike Tysons Punch Out for the story. It was a challenge that took many hours worth of attempts, trial and error, and skill to beat. You liked it and remembered it because it was hard.
Part of the reason they were hard back then was due to file size and lack of saving and such, so hard games took longer to be bored of and sold better, but those were the games that we got hooked on. The challenge. New gamers are hooked on the stories and the entertainment, which is all well and good. Just a different type of crack.
I started gaming in 1983. (with Pac-Man!) I played games then because I enjoyed the gameplay and only suffered through the difficulty of the NES era because was either that or you didn’t play at all. I prefer easier games now.
That said, I think the hardest thing I’ve done in the modern era is this level in Rayman Legends. I still can’t believe I actually had the patience to do it over and over until I beat it.
With difficulty options you will still get that, in fact you may get it better. Maybe for a specific game the difficulty needs to be lower or even higher for you to find that sweet spot.
If difficulty is just hit points, higher difficulties are not really enjoyable. Adjusting hit points, items, weapon damage, etc. together to achieve good flow on every difficulty is not an easy task.
They don’t have to go all out. Shitty easier/harder difficulties that just multiply or divide values in a basic manner is better than nothing at all.
Devs should absolutely just focus on the difficulty specific experience they planned but nothing is stopping them from doing the bare minimum. And if you have good coding practices, it’s easy as fuck to implement with the difficulty menu itself likely to be the hardest part to implement after the fact.
This just is not true for souls like games. The difficulty is a core part of the experience, and lowering it would literally compromise the artistic vision
Straight up answer which yes, will sound confrontational, but it is made in a blustery manner to drive home the point: People who want games tuned to what they need in terms of difficulty are the same kind that go to a Vietnamese restaurant and complain that spaghetti or chicken nuggies aren’t on the menu. “Why would you deprive a paying customer food they’re willing to pay for??”
That’s what it comes down to. The game wasn’t made for you to unwind. It was made with intentional choices made for other people to play and feel the experience of surmounting challenge.
If anything there is spicy then yes, definitely more difficult for some people to eat, and obviously they have spicy shit it’s a vietnamese restaurant. Restaurants don’t pay you to eat their food, but they also don’t take requests beyond relatively minor variations on their pre-selected menu. Quit expecting the world to revolve around you, put some effort into finding the developers that are doing what you want and patronize them instead of complaining about the existence of games that are not made for you.
And if you order something spicy then you get something spicy, yes, and if you complain that the restaurant serves things that are spicier than you enjoy you will be politely asked to leave. If you don’t like Dark Souls then don’t purchase and consume goddamned Dark Souls, simple as.
Why are you pushing to deprive people of challenging games where they know everyone playing it is playing on the same level field? Even if it’s single player, a lot of games are a social experience.
Your point seems to be like not making an easy mode is being evil, yet you denounce players that specifically want games like that. It boggles my mind, there’s plenty games with all the freaking sliders you want, let us have our games.
Why would you want to denounce your audience this opportunity?
Yeah, that exactly, people who dislike hard games are not the audience of hard games and it’s weird for you to take issue with that. Full disclosure, I tend to cheese the fuck out of hard games with the tools they give me, I like to find the way to make the game “easy as fuck” via tools in the game instead of a slider, it creates the illusion that I’m smart and I like that.
I enjoyed expedition 33 and cyberpunk but they are a different experience than dark souls, no rest for the wicked, path of exile, last epoch… Sorry for the long post.
How does someone beating a game on “story” mode reduce your enjoyment of beating it on “nightmare”? I don’t get it. We can have both in the same game; isn’t that just better?
(Assuming we’re talking about single player, obv.)
It’s basically just a digital age version of the wanna be thugs acting like they grew up in a broken home on the mean streets when in reality mommy and daddy still wipe their ass in a suburban home.
Even if the game is single player, some games are a social experience. You discuss in forums, with friends, about your experience, and when I want that kind of experience difficulty levels cheapen the social aspect of the single player game.
This is not new either, I remember talking to friends about how I beat the water temple in ocarina of time as a kid. Everyone who beta it had to go through beating it and it gave them something to talk about. It just wouldn’t be the same if there was an easy mode, it’s not the same shared experience.
I guess my answer is that no game is truly single player because humans are social creatures. And again, there are games catered to your interests so it’s not like either of us is suffering from a shortage of enjoyment.
It just wouldn’t be the same if there was an easy mode
What’s the difference between saying, “I beat that level” for a game with only one difficulty setting and saying, “I beat that level on hard mode” for a game with multiple difficulty settings?
Multiple difficulty settings never stopped people from talking or bragging about accomplishments in Doom.
It doesn’t feel the same. I enjoy knowing that when someone on the internet or on forums complains about X that my experience matches theirs without having to look for the difficulty they played on. It’s not really bragging rights, but knowing that everyone in the community is having the same shared experience, no need of tags or anything. It’s a social thing for me more than anything.
Then there’s the matter of Devs being able to fine tune things better if they don’t need to care about multiple patterns, progression levels, etc. I won’t get to those because while important, the point I wanted to make is that single difficulty games allows for a shared experience between players which facilitates more community. You can have it with different difficulties but that breeds elitism and fuck that, everyone on the same field and that’s it.
I mean it both ways btw, some games are easier and that’s how you are supposed to experience them, ex: Slimer Rancher
Every time there’s a multiple diff game I always search for the one devs “intended” originally because it’s the most fine-tuned and the expected experience (usually the one before the hardest diff), but I prefer not having to make that choice.
For some games, where hardship and strife is a genuine core element of the creative vision, a single level of difficulty doesn’t just create a striking apprehension of the genuineness of that hardship, it also allows the developer to tune that difficulty with great care, further pushing that choice to serve the intended experience.
The game is only “just better” with difficulty options if you have implicitly accepted the idea that you should be able to complete any game you buy. If you don’t feel that way about, say, books you purchase, please investigate that feeling.
For some games, where hardship and strife is a genuine core element of the creative vision, a single level of difficulty doesn’t just create a striking apprehension of the genuineness of that hardship, it also allows the developer to tune that difficulty with great care, further pushing that choice to serve the intended experience.
This is all a very flimsy excuse for annoying gate keeping.
Pretending that difficulty tuning has to suffer if there is more than one difficulty is absurdly nonsensical.
Of all the parts of a game that take significant effort, this is not one.
Studios literally already tune their games for a specific difficulty firstly usually, and tune up or down from there.
You are just imagining that magically one difficulty means higher quality difficulty.
The game is only “just better” with difficulty options if you have implicitly accepted the idea that you should be able to complete any game you buy. If you don’t feel that way about, say, books you purchase, please investigate that feeling.
This is such an absurd prick opinion that makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
Who in the fuck buys any media they don’t intend on being able to finish. What???
You think people are buying books they think they’ll want to stop reading half way? Movies they’ll want to walk out of?
How did you get so deluded you even thought you were making a cogent argument here.
We can have both in the same game; isn’t that just better?
This is the crux of the problem right here: it assumes that adding in difficulty adjustments is zero cost for the dev and can be done without affecting the overall game feel and I insist that that is a wildly incorrect assumption. This isn’t about other people playing the game on “easy mode” reducing my enjoyment of the game, it’s about adjusting the perfect balance and vision of the game reducing the enjoyment for everyone overall.
Difficulty can be, but is not always a discrete series of elements that can just be adjusted on sliders. Difficulty is a derivative attribute of other gameplay elements that give rise to it. Adjusting the difficulty as a derivative element can negatively flow backwards into poor adjustments to the game design if not done properly. Adjustments to the game design that allow for easier control and flow into the derivative attribute of difficulty may undermine the overall vision? Does that make sense?
Given an old school game like Ninja Gaiden on the NES it’s easy to think of how difficulty modes could be implemented by simply adjusting damage values, hit point values, life count, etc. But something like Dark Souls derives its difficulty from item balance, level architecture, encounter design, world puzzles. Rebalancing all of that for one or several difficulty modes is non-trivial! Furthermore, anyone who has played any of the Soulslikes can tell you that no playthrough is the same. One build may breeze through an area because they have specific strengths while other builds may struggle. How do you balance around all builds on multiple axes of gameplay elements?
A lot of people agree that Dark Souls is perfect (or near so) as it is and exactly the kind of thing we want while another group of people says, “I hate this thing and it’s not to my liking but by changing it I could maybe hate it a little less.” Think of it like the audio of a song being too loud and rather than properly adjust the overall range to preserve the entire tune you simply clip the highs and lows. It’s not a good song anymore … for anyone.
Gamers have a hard time properly articulating their critiques and I absolutely abhor the “git gud” mentality, but taken in the most positive light I can, I believe what most of them really mean isn’t just simply practice or skill up. It’s to learn to meet the game where it’s at. And if you still don’t like it, it’s not a game for you.
and I insist that that is a wildly incorrect assumption.
Based on nothing but your gatekeeping feelings.
Gamers have a hard time properly articulating their critiques and I absolutely abhor the “git gud” mentality,
No you don’t, thats literally just one of the excuses you use here for your gatekeeping.
. And if you still don’t like it, it’s not a game for you.
They are absolutely allowed to criticize a game that you believe isnt for them. They’re allowed to review it poorly if they’ve bought it, and they’re allowed to shit on it for not being to their liking just as you’re allowed to praise it.
Based on the detailed arguments of the entire post you just replied to without responding to any of those points.
No you don’t, thats literally just one of the excuses you use here for your gatekeeping.
This is not gatekeeping. It is explaining why I like the game as it is and implore others to experience and enjoy the game where it wants you to be.
They are absolutely allowed to criticize a game that you believe isnt for them.
For fuck’s sake, yes! Everyone is allowed to criticize but everyone in this thread is trying to “fix” the game and demand the developers do things to cater to them that they have directly stated they do not or have no intention of doing and somehow we’re the selfish ones here?!
Look, I can review a Barbie game, but I’m going to hate it because I’m am must in no way the intended audience. Should the developer cater to my sensibilities until it becomes a game I want to play? The intended audience of any specific Souslike game or other difficult game is a lot blurrier because it could be anyone from any demographic.
If you think the game is bad, say the game is BAD. Say YOU hate it! Don’t make arguments about how the game should be when other people love it the way it is. Sit with your opinion and recognize it for what it is. Your opinion.
Based on the detailed arguments of the entire post you just replied to without responding to any of those points.
They were not detailed arguments at all. You just “feel” like game difficulty has to be this magic thing that can’t possibly have settings without compromising your dream experience. You have no evidence for this. You just want it to be true to justify the gatekeeping.
This is not gatekeeping. It is explaining why I like the game as it is and implore others to experience and enjoy the game where it wants you to be.
Using fancy verbal diarrhea to say exactly the same thing is not convincing.
You are absolutely gatekeeping as you want games not to have options because you think people should play the game how you want to play games.
For fuck’s sake, yes! Everyone is allowed to criticize but everyone in this thread is trying to “fix” the game and demand the developers do things to cater to them that they have directly stated they do not or have no intention of doing and somehow we’re the selfish ones here?!
You absolutely are the selfish ones here. I mean look at that ridiculously bad faith summary of the comments here.
People are 100% reasonable and right to complain about games doing things they don’t like here, on a forum for discussing games.
They aren’t at all unreasonable for doing so. This specific excerpt from you is such nonsensical double speak, where you start by saying yes people can criticize, but finish by calling people selfish for not liking aspects you like.
Im sure youll try to weasel around that being what you’ve done, but thats what it is.
Look, I can review a Barbie game, but I’m going to hate it because I’m am must in no way the intended audience.
This is a bs weasel though, because many of the people are the intended audiences. These arent crazy mismatches, these are developers being stubborn and stuck up in bougie, high artsy, self important ways that a great deal of their playerbases don’t appreciate.
From what you’re suggesting, you basically think all the games you like should get about half the sales numbers they are getting because anyone who doesn’t like any noteworthy aspect of the game clearly just isnt the intended audience and shouldn’t have bought it.
Its a silly, childish black and white view solely there so you can continue to be angry at people for being critical about the aspects of a game you gatekeep around.
Don’t make arguments about how the game should be when other people love it the way it is.
Why? This is you pretending to be for open conversation but not at all being… This is the gatekeepy bullshit I am talking about.
Adding difficulty options does not cheapen the game, it widens its appeal and makes games far more fun for a larger amount of people without subtracting from the experience for others.
For instance, lets say you have a game that has painful backtracking that a large number of people complain about. Who does it harm to have a setting to skip the painful backtracking? Fucking nobody.
You can’t argue even for a second that this ruins the experience for those that say they do like the painful backtracking as this by no means would take away from their experiences, yet you would argue that people shouldn’t complain or ask that developers include that because you want to gatekeep experiences.
Sit with your opinion and recognize it for what it is. Your opinion.
This is a bullshit way of you insisting your (shitty) opinion is objective (where you think people shouldn’t complain about things you like) while pretending people stating their opinions are somehow doing exactly what you’re actually doing.
Oh dude … I don’t know how to tell you this but at this point you’re just wrong. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.
They were not detailed arguments at all. You just “feel” like game difficulty has to be this magic thing that can’t possibly have settings without compromising your dream experience.
I’ve broken it down several times in this topic already, but sure, let’s do it once more. Difficulty is a complex equation that is the result of various components like level architecture, encounter design, world puzzles, and complex stat curves across enemies, equipment, and player characters in addition to intricate boss fight routines with varied movesets. There’s no “slider” here. Everyone keeps mentioning these mythical sliders and THAT is the magical thinking here. That there is a simple way to adjust the game to Easy that adjusts all those other variables.
In addition to this if you were to implement sliders for each one of those features separately (neverminding how you’d do something like level architecture) what you end up takes both additional developer time and may not be as good. The fine tunings don’t fit together as nicely; it’s the difference between a model kit you buy and assembly yourself vs. one that comes premade form the manufacturer. There are different tolerances here and I think you need to get some dev perspective on this at this point.
People are 100% reasonable and right to complain about games doing things they don’t like here, on a forum for discussing games.
Here is criticism: “I do not like this game because I find it too difficult.”
Here is not criticism: “This is a bad game because the developer did not make more effort to cater to the wide range of entirely subjective opinions on what difficulty is.”
I hate to rely on arguments from popularity but when the dev of the game itself says “naw” and the game is so popular it literally spawns its own subgenre with millions of adoring fans and you’re trying to armchair unnecessary solutions to things people don’t think are problems, I ask again who is being selfish. This game ain’t for you, dawg.
From what you’re suggesting, you basically think all the games you like should get about half the sales numbers they are getting because anyone who doesn’t like any noteworthy aspect of the game clearly just isnt the intended audience and shouldn’t have bought it.
Miss me with that sales speak. Disgusting. We’re talking art here. Gross.
This is the gatekeepy bullshit I am talking about.
I think you need to look up what gatekeeping is. At this point looking at your other responses in this topic I think you’re kind of a troll? But I mean I don’t care, I have fun talking about and critiquing the finer points of games online and then actually playing them. I think I’m gonna go beat Dark Souls again while you mald.
FINAL EDIT: Cheat. Just cheat. We’ve already established elsewhere in this topic that I and many others DON’T actually care about the “sanctity” of the game, that’s a talking point people like you made up to throw around, mostly. Nobody cares. Get a cheat engine and double soul drops. Crank your stats. Enable one hit kills. Cheat. Don’t care, cheat.
Oh dude … I don’t know how to tell you this but at this point you’re just wrong. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.
What riveting, useful commentary.
I’ve broken it down several times in this topic already, but sure, let’s do it once more. Difficulty is a complex equation that is the result of various components like level architecture, encounter design, world puzzles, and complex stat curves across enemies, equipment, and player characters in addition to intricate boss fight routines with varied movesets. There’s no “slider” here. Everyone keeps mentioning these mythical sliders and THAT is the magical thinking here. That there is a simple way to adjust the game to Easy that adjusts all those other variables.
Just because you state something repeatedly doesn’t mean you’ve made a logical argument or a good point.
The easy rebuttal to this nonsense, is the question, for a game that is already made, where you are already happy, lets say they keep everything as it is right now, like they literally have the games they already have and add some difficulty options like less annoying backtracking. How does this “ruin” your experience?
There has yet to be a legitimate answer to this question.
The truth therefore, is that the only answer is gatekeeping, because you don’t want other people to be able to experience the game in a way they enjoy.
More than that, the idea that difficulty is just a series of sliders is something entirely constructed in your mind.
Atomfall for instance has things like live hints vs you figuring it out your self. Stamina, vs infinite running, etc etc. There is so much more that can be done with difficulty than your simplistic view that its about sliders.
Basically your whole point is nonsensical.
Here is criticism: “I do not like this game because I find it too difficult.” Here is not criticism: “This is a bad game because the developer did not make more effort to cater to the wide range of entirely subjective opinions on what difficulty is.”
Just because you make a hyperbolized version of opinions you disagree doesnt mean they arent criticism. Also, its 100% legitimate to criticize something for being too focused in certain areas.
You are here literally gatekeeping criticism. Is gatekeeping all you do?
I hate to rely on arguments from popularity but
Then don’t. This should be a sign to you that your point is weak.
and the game is so popular it literally
Just because something is successful does not mean every single element of it is what made it so, or is good.
I think you need to look up what gatekeeping is. At this point looking at your other responses in this topic I think you’re kind of a troll?
Least obvious attempt to troll possible by you here. When you don’t have an argument you just imply the other person must be trolling for not agreeing with your bad take.
But I mean I don’t care, I have fun talking about and critiquing the finer points of games online
Evidently not judging by this conversation.
Cheat. Just cheat.
Modding games is extra effort and not immediately available, especially for consoles. This isn’t a solution and you know that.
I’ll keep saying it: I already have a job. I want to play a game to unwind.
Implementing a wide gamut of difficulty settings is also an accessibility feature, and allows people with certain physical or mental challenges the opportunity to enjoy your game firsthand. Why would you want to deny your audience this opportunity?
I mean, presumably because it’d compromise their vision for the game or some such? Some games use gameplay as part of the storytelling, so nontrivial difficulty swttings would compromise the story being told (for example if the game wants you to experience a gruelling trek through a hostile area). Now that doesn’t mean a story mode or similar is bad, but there are reasons to consider for a game dev to consider such settings incompatible with their game. Also in a game with more complex mechanics difficulty would be more complicated than player and enemy stats, and a dev might simply consider implementing satisfactory difficulty settings not a good use of their time.
How can it compromise their vision if their vision is still intact with a “normal” difficulty?
One of the big inspirations for Dark Souls was the manga Berserk. A man in an impossibly difficult position fighting against demi gods and the many monsters in that universe. You don’t see how a “normal” difficulty would destroy that vision?
The current difficulty of the game would be the “normal” ya dingus.
Sure…
I meant that the story/easy mode wouldn’t conform with their vision. To expand on my example, if your game is portraying a grueling trek through a swamp where enemies abound and rest is scarce, the struggle would be an inalienable part of the experience; removing the struggle would fundamentally alter the story being told through the game. It’s not about their vision being intact or not; it’s about not wanting to intentionally make an inferior version of their art.
Then they label the intended difficulty with “recommended” and say that will give the best experience and that if you choose a difficulty higher or lower you might impede the intention of it.
I really don’t see the problem with having options.
Like I love the Kingdom Hearts series and was able to play it and fall in love with them as a kid on normal and sometimes beginner difficulty. As an adult I play critical because it makes me engage with all of the mechanics of the game. But I would have unlikely got to the point of being able to play at that level if I couldn’t work my way up through Normal > Proud > Critical.
The same admiration you have to grinding on a single playthrough to overcome an intended challenge can still be obtained through multiple playthroughs of increasing difficulty.
You’re missing the point, which is weird because I explicitly stated it. To repeat, an artist might not want to create an inferior version of their art, irrespective of the utility of doing so. Art is an egotistical affair.
Options can make sense in some games but not in others; a developer deciding not to include them has likely either figured they wouldn’t work with the game’s structure, wouldn’t be a good use of their time or both. Difficulty options are simply not a one size fits all solution, for the same reason it wouldn’t make sense to demand all painters make colorblind-friendly versions of their paintings.
Sounds like a skill issue.
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You don’t have to play difficult games. Not everything has to cater to a wide audience. Most of today’s re-boots and sequals were from stories that catered to a niche audience only to lose its appeal by going too mainstream…
Adding a difficulty slider is easy, doesn’t take much time, doesn’t change much about the experience, and allows more people to enjoy your media.
So leaving it out is lazy game development.
Niche audiences is fine, gatekeeping isn’t.
[CITATION NEEDED]
It seems pretty clear you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about from a game development standpoint. Difficulty is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay and you can’t just add multiple versions of that trivially. Even Bethesda’s classic “bump up the health” stuff isn’t a trivial thing to implement. Just come on with this.
Depends on how it’s implemented. Just give the player more/unlimited HP or armour would be easy.
“Game designers should include cheats” is a take
Yes
All of them did before, so why not?
No, they didn’t?
And should be the bare minimum of a game
My citation is myself as amateur game developer.
Game design is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay. Difficulty just plays around with the variables that you already have made for said game design.
Do you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?
It is balancing at most.
Sir you must be a very niche or inexperienced game developer because there is more than tuning variables to impact difficulty especially from genre to genre and game to game. Level design alone for platformer’s can introduce degrees of difficulties. Puzzle games’ difficulties revolve entirely around the puzzle design. You can’t adjust a variable and tune that. These are just two of countless examples.
Been a while since I’ve seen a good old fashioned tautology. Stop trying to be disingenuous, ‘difficulty’ (or if you prefer, ‘challenge’) is the #1 factor in game design. You either should know this, because it’s patently obvious, or you should just stop talking about this subject like you have any idea what you’re talking about.
Strawman me harder, zaddy!
No, they don’t redesign a game for every difficulty - that’s absurd. But it does have a huge impact on every aspect of gameplay, and like I said, it’s far far from trivial to alter the abstract concept which defines things like the core gameplay loop.
Yeah… Okay.
This way undermines the effort required for developers, and will drastically vary from game to game.
I see you have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you think it’s a simple as reducing a health bar? Because games that do difficulty scaling like that are not fun at all and I would consider that lazy.
How can you be niche without a “gatekeeping” to some degree? Again, not every game or piece of media need to cater to everybody.
I designed games myself. It is very easy. Just switch around some variables.
Every game does it like that, whether it is HP, damage, enemy spawns, probability to take a specific action, … it is all just playing around with variables.
It is neither lazy nor not fun.
Did you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?
It is you that has no idea what you’re talking about.
How do you do, fellow game designers.
“All game design is just changing numbers” sure, and all programming is just manipulating two values over and over and over. But the difficult part isn’t changing the numbers, the difficult part is the mechanisms that define how those numbers interact with other numbers. “Magic Numbers” have a place in game design yes, but they are not by any stretch how those systems are defined. If your game was created like that, it cannot have been very good…
I enjoyed difficult games a lot more back before I got a job.
Exactly. I’ll play Dark Souls if they pay me.
Difficulty is not simply one aspect of a game that can be adjusted with a slider. Difficulty is the confluence of many different gameplay aspects coming together. Sometimes, those systems allow for easy and discrete adjustment like with the old Doom games where settings can simply vary the enemies that spawn, the damage dealt, or the health and ammo from pickups.
The deliberate decisions and balance that make Dark Souls good also make it difficult, it’s not good simply because it is difficult. Take Blighttown for example, one of the most notoriously difficult areas of the game. It’s difficult because the architecture is hostile and confusing, and encounters place immense pressure on the player through application of Toxic and confined or deliberately open spaces that allow you to dodge yourself off a cliff. How do you make that “easier”? There really isn’t an abundance of enemy placement throughout most of the game, it’s very deliberate. Equipment attribute numbers are all low to maintain a tight balance and even things like parry windows are affected by the specific shield you have equipped. Adding in additional difficulty options is a retuning of the entire game, which also retunes the formula. Look, I’m sorry if it sounds snobby but there’s just no other way to say that if you start making substitutions to a dish at a restaurant it’s not the same dish!
This insistence that all games MUST be for all people is what leads to the bland homogeneity of modern game design. Dark Souls comes from the rich legacy of dungeon crawlers like King’s Field before it and those games are notoriously oppressive and difficult, it’s why people like myself love them. Everyone attributes poison swamps to Miyazaki but go back to Eternal Ring or Shadow Tower: Abyss in the early 00’s before his involvement and you’ll find mandatory poison damage areas there as well. It’s a staple of the genre. Heck, play Megami Tensei (no, not Shin Megami Tensei, MEGAMI TENSEI from the NES) and there’s a whole section of mandatory fire damage that you can’t negate until you’re already 4/5 of the way through it.
I also find the accessibility angle disingenuous and a little insulting even. All props to devs that add difficulty to their game as a means of accessibility when they are able to or want to, but it should not be necessary. This also diminishes real accessibility options like colorblind modes, reading assistance modes, keybinding modes, etc. I do not appreciate that.
Everyone thinks they’re a critic because they don’t like a game or certain things about a game and that it would be better if it catered to them, but difficulty is already highly subjective to begin with and insisting that devs find ways to foresee and cater to all possible permutations is untenable.
If you don’t like the game: fine. If you want to levy valid criticisms about the game in your opinion: fine. But this insistence that the developers are being foolish for creating a game to their vision and not yours is the actual thing cheapening it as art.
And insisting games can only be for “you” is just as - if not more problematic.
Again, no one has insisted this. The game is for those that enjoy it.
Running out of breath here.
Developer: I have made the game exactly as I intended. The Intended Audience: Wow, this is for us, we love it exactly as intended! You: I hate this game, I do not like it or the decisions you’ve made. You should change it for me so that I might like it.
???
Again, you all keep trying to paint us as the selfish ones as if we’re gatekeeping this game from you, but there’s nothing stopping you from picking up and engaging with the game exactly as it is, as we’ve all done, other than that you do not like it. The notion that ALL games MUST be for EVERYONE seems much more selfish and unhinged in my opinion.
Expecting every developer to cater to every possibility of everyone’s subjective opinion of what is good and bad difficulty is impossible.
Disagree
Honestly don’t care. Because see the thing is, I get to enjoy these games while you gotta come online and whine about them. I wrote my post out of passion because I see something there worth valuing. You wrote your post to whine and tear something down you didn’t understand.
Because it’s their philosophy and they can do what they want. If the game is too difficult, then don’t play. Some of us enjoy difficult games.
Exactly, games are art. I don’t go around telling artists not to make things I don’t enjoy. I just buy other art.
Art can’t be art without an observer.
If someone is unable to get to the art, then that “art” is useless to them and might as well not exist.
To them, even a derivative of this art is more worth more than no art at all.
I made a drawing yesterday, and I will not show anyone.
It’s not art? It doesn’t exist? Would you rather play peek-a-boo right now?
It’s art to you, not us as we haven’t seen it.
You’ll have to do a little more legwork to make that connect back to the idea it’s being used to support, which correct me if I’m mistaken is that every game needs to make all of its content easily received or it’s not valid art/less valuable/somehow problematic.
You don’t demand a guarantee that you’ll finish every book you’ll buy and you don’t hate every song you can’t dance to, why are games different? They’re different because you think of games as purely entertainment, and you don’t respect it as art. If you did, you would not be arguing that creators should conform to your personal preferences.
I’m not arguing that every game must cater to my casual needs. What I’m expanding upon the op is that art is art only in the eye of someone experiencing it. Artists like game devs are free to make the kind of games they want, but it is a balance between making the game attractive and marketable and making something only the most purist will like. Concessions are to be made for the game to be accessible, as you will have to sell it to make a profit. All the examples are from commercial games that need a consumer base to buy it.
Some will criticize Elden ring for being a bit more easy and approachable (than previous DS), because they are used to the elitist view that games must be difficult to play. But on the other hand, all gamers that had fun playing their own way are valid. Some will like having a hard time, some will like having an easier path to progress.
In the end, if you make art you want for others to see it. If your game doesn’t sell because only hardcore players can progress, it could be seen as a failure for your art to be spread. It’s also certainly a business failure as well.
So as I said, it’s a balance and there is no right or wrong way to do it. People can still discuss what their preferences are, be it hard games or story mode for easy gameplay.
I’m not 12 anymore so I don’t have time to learn, memorize and train for some of the newer games. I can appreciate games that include an easy path for me, allowing me to experience their art. Unlike eg. the Dark Souls universe where I’ll never truly experience it because it’s too hard for me.
Devs are then free to take this feedback into consideration for their next game.
That flies in the face of one of my core values so I’m glad you underlined it for me. My view is ars gratia ars. That is an entire body of thought that stands against the idea that art needs to serve some purpose or agenda in order to be valid. Art is complete in itself no matter who gets to receive it, and anyone who tells you otherwise is some brand of authoritarian sooner or later. I’m ride or die with the bohemians on this one.
As for Elden Ring, I am fully onboard with their design choice with regard to difficulty. I enjoyed the time I spent with it, and the only reason I didn’t finish it is because I approached it while burnt out in other areas of my life. I finished all but one Dark Souls game, and I found them harder for sure. The creative vision with Elden Ring is a few steps toward the accessibility crowd, and you seem to notice how it’s still not enough. It never will be, and it’s folly to try. Once they’re running the show, you get to do a lot less.
Again, I am not talking about preferences, I am arguing that we should treat games as art and do art critique about it. We should not be treating games as mere commercial products that must amuse us at all costs, that is a long road that goes nowhere. Difficulty in games has a meaning, it is a design choice, and we can talk all day about what that choice meant - whether it served the creator’s aims - whether that difficulty achieved what it was trying to achieve - but if we are only here to bicker about whose preferences are more important, leave me out of it.
Then it should be perfectly valid to criticize poor art.
it is. but if the reason that you think something is poor is because you were not the target audience, you can come across as entitled and clueless. it is not like their games pretend to be easy games, it is clear from the start that that the challenge is part of the design
It’s like placing a statue at the top of a flight of stairs.
It’s like making music and experimenting with discordant harmonies and unusual rhythms. Art can be challenging, it can require engagement and time and study to fully experience. It can make people uncomfortable and it can appeal to only a small audience and still be good.
No it isn’t
Is poor the word you’d use for art that fails to be amusing and charming? Because a lot of art is not trying to be amusing and charming.
Edit: I don’t care if people disagree, but at least have an answer. Not liking art because it wasn’t intended to be delightful and pleasing is not how to do art criticism.
Ah, I think there’s a bit of a disagreement here between what types of art are respectable and what types aren’t. For context, I subscribe to the definition of art that says “everything made with intent” is some form or other of art.
Suppose you go to a gallery. Would you consider handicap-hostile architecture, which is part of the exhibit itself, to be worth respecting as a art enthusiast? (Stairs required to be used in order to see a painting, specifically because the artist wants you tired from walking, not pushing a wheelchair, which they don’t like, when you look at it, for example.)
I could see it both ways, but I fall more on the side of accessibility. If an artist requires someone to use stairs to see their art, they are an asshole, regardless of how good their paintings actually are.
This is exactly the kind of conversation that I’d rather be having. Thank you! I’ll try to disagree at least interestingly.
I subscribe to the idea that art is the study of choice, and that’s fairly close to your definition of art, but the difference is that I’m not saying I can draw a circle around what is and isn’t art. Gun to my head, I’d probably define it as something like “anything done with aesthetic intent”, to exclude the act of intentionally kicking a puppy as performance art. We intend many things in life, many of which are also intentionally artless.
I think I see what you’re driving at with the bit about ramps. To hew to the heart of the matter as the metaphor applies to video games, I would still call that exhibit art - it would simply be limited in how successfully it achieved what it was attempting, which is a severe flaw. I would want to talk about how it could have better achieved its aims. The aim of such an art installation could have merit, if it was more intelligently done.
The reason I do not place the accessibility question from the metaphor on the same level as difficulty in video games is that completion of a game is, I would submit, something that the creator should only endeavour to guarantee if they believe completion of the game is part of the intended experience. I would caution against taking this as a maxim.
When media is highly interactive, as with games, it is a mistake to take it as an implicit assumption that that this media must be completable by a broad majority of participants. Booksellers do not make such guarantees, and books are far less interactive.
If we all raise our voices on behalf of accessibility proponents with the idea that games that are not as easily completed are of lesser value, or if we even become so strident that we say they are not even art, we are limiting the space of an art form that is still in its nascence. We are very permissive with other, older art forms (and they have all taken their lumps with highly prescriptive and proscriptive schools of thought, over the years). It would be like saying music with too many notes isn’t music, or that music isn’t good if I can’t personally dance to it. Those are preferences, not art critiques. We should be asking how the choices of a game developer serve or betray their creative aims. We won’t always get what we want out of every game, but at least we’ll have better conversations.
I like games that take a generous view of accessibility, and I respect that vision. Celeste is a masterpiece. I like games that take a stern view of difficulty also, when it serves their aesthetic vision in a meaningful way.
That last bit is easy to get wrong, and I respect people who struggle with the subject of difficulty in how it interacts with creative ideas, but I have less time for people who hate the music just because they can’t dance to it. That’s not always the point.
I wouldn’t say a difficult game is poor art, it just challenging and may be more than the user wanted.
This is part of why reviewing a game’s difficulty and it’s play options are critical.
I mostly play sandbox games because the online ones come with the constant strife and challenge which is the antithesis of what I want.
Will really enjoy a well thought out puzzle game however…
My introduction to that was Myst, way back in the early 90’s and my main love are games of that nature.
It’s like with any other art. Some of it is a simple pleasure, and some of it wants you to struggle. Some people read Gwenpool, some people read Cerebus.
Then crank up the difficulty setting. Why feel the need to exclude others?
You specifically should be excluded
You should go back to reddit
The place where you’re not allowed to upvote Luigi memes? Lol no thanks
Are you claiming the only saving grace of those games is the difficulty?
If not, then why not allow people to enjoy the other parts of the game?
Their philosophy sucks. They lose nothing by adding more options.
This isn’t a very honest argument. If the only saving grace of the game was its difficulty, nobody would mind not being able to finish it.
Something is lost and gained with every substantive choice in game design. That’s what makes the choices interesting, and worth discussion.
Let’s play with that idea. Take one of my favourite games of all time, Morrowind. It’s hard to get through, maybe. Weird UI, weird bad combat. Those are flaws. But it also has a big fat 0 to 100 difficulty slider. Is that a flaw? I would argue no, because in that game the intended struggle is to engage with the world and the story on your own terms. The combat is all window dressing for the real struggle, which is with the story’s frustrating ambiguities.
In the case of Morrowind, some of the difficulty fails to serve the intended experience and some of it supports that vision wonderfully. It’s not a flawless game, but importantly I am discussing how the difficulty helped or hindered the creative vision. That is art criticism, and it’s a more interesting conversation than arguing over personal preferences.
A lot of hobbies like gardening, sports, chess require effort, why is it necessary for video games to be easy?
Forcing some challenge gets you to engage with more things rather than taking the easy way out. It’s like bungee jumping (I’d assume), sometimes a push is necessary to experience something new.
Some of my favourite moments were trying Fire Emblem Ironmans, which initially made me go “this is stupid, I’ll regret this, I should reload”, only to change to “this is peak”
The problem is with artificially enforced barriers.
Nothing about the difficulty level of From Software games is artificially enforced. Like the exact opposite, really.
If the main difficulty is intentional, then it’s not an artifical barrier, the easy mode is an artificial easener. How easy is easy enough? Some people can’t beat Clair Obscur on the story mode (presumably by not doing side content) In case of gardening, it’d be getting someone to garden for you, and just chilling with the results.
Let’s plays/walkthroughs exists, and only lock you out of interactivity. And interactivity doesn’t mean much if every option beats the game.
Case in point, if I see some post-game superboss with lore behind it, I just look up the thing online.
My point is that it’s inherently artificial.
If you think that gameplay is just meaningless busywork in between cutscenes then sure.
But I am of the opinion that games are not movies just because they are on a screen. They are much closer to tactile or kinetic sculptures.
Gameplay isn’t meaningless busywork.
Tedious and boring gameplay, shrouded under the name “difficulty” is.
If you have to replay the same section over and over, that is the real meaningless busywork.
Options don’t stop you from having those moments in fact they make it more possible for you to find the difficulty for those moments. For you and everyone else.
I think it’s an age gap 9f when you started gaming. If you were a gamer back in the 80’s and early 90’s, you played because it was a challenge to overcome and that’s what you enjoyed.
You didn’t want to “play” a game. You wanted to “beat” a game. No one played Mike Tysons Punch Out for the story. It was a challenge that took many hours worth of attempts, trial and error, and skill to beat. You liked it and remembered it because it was hard.
Part of the reason they were hard back then was due to file size and lack of saving and such, so hard games took longer to be bored of and sold better, but those were the games that we got hooked on. The challenge. New gamers are hooked on the stories and the entertainment, which is all well and good. Just a different type of crack.
It’s also a holdover from arcades. Arcade games were difficult because they wanted people to spend another quarter.
I started gaming in 1983. (with Pac-Man!) I played games then because I enjoyed the gameplay and only suffered through the difficulty of the NES era because was either that or you didn’t play at all. I prefer easier games now.
That said, I think the hardest thing I’ve done in the modern era is this level in Rayman Legends. I still can’t believe I actually had the patience to do it over and over until I beat it.
Mastering a game and falling into a good flow is unwinding for me. Something easy doesn’t release any tension nor give me accomplishment-dopamine.
And not everything needs to be made for the widest possible audience.
With difficulty options you will still get that, in fact you may get it better. Maybe for a specific game the difficulty needs to be lower or even higher for you to find that sweet spot.
If difficulty is just hit points, higher difficulties are not really enjoyable. Adjusting hit points, items, weapon damage, etc. together to achieve good flow on every difficulty is not an easy task.
They don’t have to go all out. Shitty easier/harder difficulties that just multiply or divide values in a basic manner is better than nothing at all.
Devs should absolutely just focus on the difficulty specific experience they planned but nothing is stopping them from doing the bare minimum. And if you have good coding practices, it’s easy as fuck to implement with the difficulty menu itself likely to be the hardest part to implement after the fact.
This just is not true for souls like games. The difficulty is a core part of the experience, and lowering it would literally compromise the artistic vision
I don’t have the time to get into any sort of flow these days.
Yes, that is what higher difficulties are for. Why does that preclude lower difficulties?
Straight up answer which yes, will sound confrontational, but it is made in a blustery manner to drive home the point: People who want games tuned to what they need in terms of difficulty are the same kind that go to a Vietnamese restaurant and complain that spaghetti or chicken nuggies aren’t on the menu. “Why would you deprive a paying customer food they’re willing to pay for??”
That’s what it comes down to. The game wasn’t made for you to unwind. It was made with intentional choices made for other people to play and feel the experience of surmounting challenge.
Does the Vietnamese restaurant make the food more difficult to eat for certain customers?
Are the video game companies paying me to “play” their games?
“I’m allergic to wheat and they don’t carry gluten-free bread for the banh mi!”
Yeah bud, the world be like that sometimes. Eat somewhere else.
If anything there is spicy then yes, definitely more difficult for some people to eat, and obviously they have spicy shit it’s a vietnamese restaurant. Restaurants don’t pay you to eat their food, but they also don’t take requests beyond relatively minor variations on their pre-selected menu. Quit expecting the world to revolve around you, put some effort into finding the developers that are doing what you want and patronize them instead of complaining about the existence of games that are not made for you.
They will literally ask you how spicy you want it
And if you order something spicy then you get something spicy, yes, and if you complain that the restaurant serves things that are spicier than you enjoy you will be politely asked to leave. If you don’t like Dark Souls then don’t purchase and consume goddamned Dark Souls, simple as.
Why are you pushing to deprive people of challenging games where they know everyone playing it is playing on the same level field? Even if it’s single player, a lot of games are a social experience.
Your point seems to be like not making an easy mode is being evil, yet you denounce players that specifically want games like that. It boggles my mind, there’s plenty games with all the freaking sliders you want, let us have our games.
Yeah, that exactly, people who dislike hard games are not the audience of hard games and it’s weird for you to take issue with that. Full disclosure, I tend to cheese the fuck out of hard games with the tools they give me, I like to find the way to make the game “easy as fuck” via tools in the game instead of a slider, it creates the illusion that I’m smart and I like that.
I enjoyed expedition 33 and cyberpunk but they are a different experience than dark souls, no rest for the wicked, path of exile, last epoch… Sorry for the long post.
How does someone beating a game on “story” mode reduce your enjoyment of beating it on “nightmare”? I don’t get it. We can have both in the same game; isn’t that just better?
(Assuming we’re talking about single player, obv.)
Basically they have a super fragile ego.
They want to feel special.
It’s basically just a digital age version of the wanna be thugs acting like they grew up in a broken home on the mean streets when in reality mommy and daddy still wipe their ass in a suburban home.
Even if the game is single player, some games are a social experience. You discuss in forums, with friends, about your experience, and when I want that kind of experience difficulty levels cheapen the social aspect of the single player game.
This is not new either, I remember talking to friends about how I beat the water temple in ocarina of time as a kid. Everyone who beta it had to go through beating it and it gave them something to talk about. It just wouldn’t be the same if there was an easy mode, it’s not the same shared experience.
I guess my answer is that no game is truly single player because humans are social creatures. And again, there are games catered to your interests so it’s not like either of us is suffering from a shortage of enjoyment.
What’s the difference between saying, “I beat that level” for a game with only one difficulty setting and saying, “I beat that level on hard mode” for a game with multiple difficulty settings?
Multiple difficulty settings never stopped people from talking or bragging about accomplishments in Doom.
It doesn’t feel the same. I enjoy knowing that when someone on the internet or on forums complains about X that my experience matches theirs without having to look for the difficulty they played on. It’s not really bragging rights, but knowing that everyone in the community is having the same shared experience, no need of tags or anything. It’s a social thing for me more than anything.
Then there’s the matter of Devs being able to fine tune things better if they don’t need to care about multiple patterns, progression levels, etc. I won’t get to those because while important, the point I wanted to make is that single difficulty games allows for a shared experience between players which facilitates more community. You can have it with different difficulties but that breeds elitism and fuck that, everyone on the same field and that’s it.
I mean it both ways btw, some games are easier and that’s how you are supposed to experience them, ex: Slimer Rancher
Every time there’s a multiple diff game I always search for the one devs “intended” originally because it’s the most fine-tuned and the expected experience (usually the one before the hardest diff), but I prefer not having to make that choice.
For some games, where hardship and strife is a genuine core element of the creative vision, a single level of difficulty doesn’t just create a striking apprehension of the genuineness of that hardship, it also allows the developer to tune that difficulty with great care, further pushing that choice to serve the intended experience.
The game is only “just better” with difficulty options if you have implicitly accepted the idea that you should be able to complete any game you buy. If you don’t feel that way about, say, books you purchase, please investigate that feeling.
This is all a very flimsy excuse for annoying gate keeping.
Pretending that difficulty tuning has to suffer if there is more than one difficulty is absurdly nonsensical.
Of all the parts of a game that take significant effort, this is not one.
Studios literally already tune their games for a specific difficulty firstly usually, and tune up or down from there.
You are just imagining that magically one difficulty means higher quality difficulty.
This is such an absurd prick opinion that makes no fucking sense whatsoever.
Who in the fuck buys any media they don’t intend on being able to finish. What???
You think people are buying books they think they’ll want to stop reading half way? Movies they’ll want to walk out of?
How did you get so deluded you even thought you were making a cogent argument here.
Jesus Christ.
This is the crux of the problem right here: it assumes that adding in difficulty adjustments is zero cost for the dev and can be done without affecting the overall game feel and I insist that that is a wildly incorrect assumption. This isn’t about other people playing the game on “easy mode” reducing my enjoyment of the game, it’s about adjusting the perfect balance and vision of the game reducing the enjoyment for everyone overall.
Difficulty can be, but is not always a discrete series of elements that can just be adjusted on sliders. Difficulty is a derivative attribute of other gameplay elements that give rise to it. Adjusting the difficulty as a derivative element can negatively flow backwards into poor adjustments to the game design if not done properly. Adjustments to the game design that allow for easier control and flow into the derivative attribute of difficulty may undermine the overall vision? Does that make sense?
Given an old school game like Ninja Gaiden on the NES it’s easy to think of how difficulty modes could be implemented by simply adjusting damage values, hit point values, life count, etc. But something like Dark Souls derives its difficulty from item balance, level architecture, encounter design, world puzzles. Rebalancing all of that for one or several difficulty modes is non-trivial! Furthermore, anyone who has played any of the Soulslikes can tell you that no playthrough is the same. One build may breeze through an area because they have specific strengths while other builds may struggle. How do you balance around all builds on multiple axes of gameplay elements?
A lot of people agree that Dark Souls is perfect (or near so) as it is and exactly the kind of thing we want while another group of people says, “I hate this thing and it’s not to my liking but by changing it I could maybe hate it a little less.” Think of it like the audio of a song being too loud and rather than properly adjust the overall range to preserve the entire tune you simply clip the highs and lows. It’s not a good song anymore … for anyone.
Gamers have a hard time properly articulating their critiques and I absolutely abhor the “git gud” mentality, but taken in the most positive light I can, I believe what most of them really mean isn’t just simply practice or skill up. It’s to learn to meet the game where it’s at. And if you still don’t like it, it’s not a game for you.
Based on nothing but your gatekeeping feelings.
No you don’t, thats literally just one of the excuses you use here for your gatekeeping.
They are absolutely allowed to criticize a game that you believe isnt for them. They’re allowed to review it poorly if they’ve bought it, and they’re allowed to shit on it for not being to their liking just as you’re allowed to praise it.
Based on the detailed arguments of the entire post you just replied to without responding to any of those points.
This is not gatekeeping. It is explaining why I like the game as it is and implore others to experience and enjoy the game where it wants you to be.
For fuck’s sake, yes! Everyone is allowed to criticize but everyone in this thread is trying to “fix” the game and demand the developers do things to cater to them that they have directly stated they do not or have no intention of doing and somehow we’re the selfish ones here?!
Look, I can review a Barbie game, but I’m going to hate it because I’m am must in no way the intended audience. Should the developer cater to my sensibilities until it becomes a game I want to play? The intended audience of any specific Souslike game or other difficult game is a lot blurrier because it could be anyone from any demographic.
If you think the game is bad, say the game is BAD. Say YOU hate it! Don’t make arguments about how the game should be when other people love it the way it is. Sit with your opinion and recognize it for what it is. Your opinion.
They were not detailed arguments at all. You just “feel” like game difficulty has to be this magic thing that can’t possibly have settings without compromising your dream experience. You have no evidence for this. You just want it to be true to justify the gatekeeping.
Using fancy verbal diarrhea to say exactly the same thing is not convincing.
You are absolutely gatekeeping as you want games not to have options because you think people should play the game how you want to play games.
You absolutely are the selfish ones here. I mean look at that ridiculously bad faith summary of the comments here.
People are 100% reasonable and right to complain about games doing things they don’t like here, on a forum for discussing games.
They aren’t at all unreasonable for doing so. This specific excerpt from you is such nonsensical double speak, where you start by saying yes people can criticize, but finish by calling people selfish for not liking aspects you like.
Im sure youll try to weasel around that being what you’ve done, but thats what it is.
This is a bs weasel though, because many of the people are the intended audiences. These arent crazy mismatches, these are developers being stubborn and stuck up in bougie, high artsy, self important ways that a great deal of their playerbases don’t appreciate.
From what you’re suggesting, you basically think all the games you like should get about half the sales numbers they are getting because anyone who doesn’t like any noteworthy aspect of the game clearly just isnt the intended audience and shouldn’t have bought it.
Its a silly, childish black and white view solely there so you can continue to be angry at people for being critical about the aspects of a game you gatekeep around.
Why? This is you pretending to be for open conversation but not at all being… This is the gatekeepy bullshit I am talking about.
Adding difficulty options does not cheapen the game, it widens its appeal and makes games far more fun for a larger amount of people without subtracting from the experience for others.
For instance, lets say you have a game that has painful backtracking that a large number of people complain about. Who does it harm to have a setting to skip the painful backtracking? Fucking nobody.
You can’t argue even for a second that this ruins the experience for those that say they do like the painful backtracking as this by no means would take away from their experiences, yet you would argue that people shouldn’t complain or ask that developers include that because you want to gatekeep experiences.
This is a bullshit way of you insisting your (shitty) opinion is objective (where you think people shouldn’t complain about things you like) while pretending people stating their opinions are somehow doing exactly what you’re actually doing.
Insufferable.
Oh dude … I don’t know how to tell you this but at this point you’re just wrong. Sorry to be the one to break it to you.
I’ve broken it down several times in this topic already, but sure, let’s do it once more. Difficulty is a complex equation that is the result of various components like level architecture, encounter design, world puzzles, and complex stat curves across enemies, equipment, and player characters in addition to intricate boss fight routines with varied movesets. There’s no “slider” here. Everyone keeps mentioning these mythical sliders and THAT is the magical thinking here. That there is a simple way to adjust the game to Easy that adjusts all those other variables.
In addition to this if you were to implement sliders for each one of those features separately (neverminding how you’d do something like level architecture) what you end up takes both additional developer time and may not be as good. The fine tunings don’t fit together as nicely; it’s the difference between a model kit you buy and assembly yourself vs. one that comes premade form the manufacturer. There are different tolerances here and I think you need to get some dev perspective on this at this point.
Here is criticism: “I do not like this game because I find it too difficult.” Here is not criticism: “This is a bad game because the developer did not make more effort to cater to the wide range of entirely subjective opinions on what difficulty is.”
I hate to rely on arguments from popularity but when the dev of the game itself says “naw” and the game is so popular it literally spawns its own subgenre with millions of adoring fans and you’re trying to armchair unnecessary solutions to things people don’t think are problems, I ask again who is being selfish. This game ain’t for you, dawg.
Miss me with that sales speak. Disgusting. We’re talking art here. Gross.
I think you need to look up what gatekeeping is. At this point looking at your other responses in this topic I think you’re kind of a troll? But I mean I don’t care, I have fun talking about and critiquing the finer points of games online and then actually playing them. I think I’m gonna go beat Dark Souls again while you mald.
FINAL EDIT: Cheat. Just cheat. We’ve already established elsewhere in this topic that I and many others DON’T actually care about the “sanctity” of the game, that’s a talking point people like you made up to throw around, mostly. Nobody cares. Get a cheat engine and double soul drops. Crank your stats. Enable one hit kills. Cheat. Don’t care, cheat.
What riveting, useful commentary.
Just because you state something repeatedly doesn’t mean you’ve made a logical argument or a good point.
The easy rebuttal to this nonsense, is the question, for a game that is already made, where you are already happy, lets say they keep everything as it is right now, like they literally have the games they already have and add some difficulty options like less annoying backtracking. How does this “ruin” your experience?
There has yet to be a legitimate answer to this question.
The truth therefore, is that the only answer is gatekeeping, because you don’t want other people to be able to experience the game in a way they enjoy.
More than that, the idea that difficulty is just a series of sliders is something entirely constructed in your mind.
Atomfall for instance has things like live hints vs you figuring it out your self. Stamina, vs infinite running, etc etc. There is so much more that can be done with difficulty than your simplistic view that its about sliders.
Basically your whole point is nonsensical.
Just because you make a hyperbolized version of opinions you disagree doesnt mean they arent criticism. Also, its 100% legitimate to criticize something for being too focused in certain areas.
You are here literally gatekeeping criticism. Is gatekeeping all you do?
Then don’t. This should be a sign to you that your point is weak.
Just because something is successful does not mean every single element of it is what made it so, or is good.
Least obvious attempt to troll possible by you here. When you don’t have an argument you just imply the other person must be trolling for not agreeing with your bad take.
Evidently not judging by this conversation.
Modding games is extra effort and not immediately available, especially for consoles. This isn’t a solution and you know that.