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Against the extermination of hard games
In this post, I argue against the extermination of hard video games, that is games that are hard to beat, even on the easiest difficulty setting. Those who wish to exterminate these games usually do so by broadly advocating for the implementation of easy modes. I deal with two main arguments, the "narrow liberal" argument and the argument from accessibility. The narrow liberal argument simply asserts that the inclusion of an easy mode does not harm those who wish to play on a harder setting. I refute this by showcasing advantages of unique difficulty settings. The argument from accessibility states that accessibility concerns should trump concerns regarding the enjoyability of the game. I show why this doesn't make sense. Lastly, I take a broader perspective and end up with the metapolitical implications of applying a "narrow" or "broad" liberal worldview.
Whenever FromSoftware releases a new game, a deluge of articles pour down demanding for an easy mode to be implemented. While, ostensibly, these articles are about FromSoft games, most of their arguments apply to any game. Furthermore, in none of these articles is it argued to implement easy modes only in certain types of games. Therefore, in this article, I will argue against the notion that every game should have an easy mode. Of course, I am not the first to do so. Youtuber Ratatoskr has, in my opinion, the best arguments against implementing easy modes in every game and I will draw in part from his work. However, I believe that his videos still don’t sufficiently express just how utterly wrong, egoistic, and exclusionary those are, who aim to exterminate hard games by arguing in favor of easy modes in all games. With “hard games” I mean games that are difficult to finish even for a seasoned player on the easiest available difficulty. In particular, I focus on the subset of games that have a unique and hard level of difficulty.
All articles arguing in favor of easy modes base their thesis on one central argument, which I dub the “narrow liberal argument”.
The narrow liberal argument
Implementing an easy mode does not hurt those who still wish to play at a harder difficulty level because the harder difficulty levels are still available. Nobody is taking anything away from you when implementing an easy mode and there are absolutely no downsides to it.
If this argument was true, the discussion would be essentially over. Unfortunately, it is completely wrong and disrespectful.
Why is it wrong? Even a single, small benefit of a unique difficulty setting is enough to prove the narrow liberal argument wrong. Here are some benefits that a unique difficulty setting provides, and that an easy mode would undermine:
It provides a sense of meaning to your struggles. When beating a challenge in a game like Sekiro, the reward is that you are able to progress through the game. Overcoming the difficulty has meaning because if you didn’t overcome the challenge, you could not have moved on. Conversely, if there was an easy mode, beating the challenge on “normal” only means that you did not have to lower the difficulty in order to overcome the challenge. It, thus, lowers the meaningfulness of your victory.
It provides a sense of unity and comradery. In Dark Souls you can literally see other peoples’ struggles against the exact same challenges that you face. This engenders a feeling of comradery against a common foe, which would be weakened if you couldn’t be sure that they aren’t facing a lesser challenge.
It provides a sense of identity for the game. It is no coincidence that discussions about difficulty always pop up around the release of FromSoft games. The unique difficulty setting has helped to create the identity of FromSoft games as “hard games”. Think of other “hard games”. How many of them have an easy mode? Having a strong identity, in turn, makes it easier for people to understand whether a game caters to their tastes. Everyone knows what to expect from the next FromSoft game. In some cases, the difficulty is the entire point of the game. For example, I wanna be the guy, QWOP, and getting over it are specifically designed to frustrate the player.
It provides a sense of pride when beating the game. The fact that some people cannot beat the game but you can, is a potential source of pride. If you enable everyone to beat the game, it is gone.
It saves on development time spent on balancing the game, which can be used on other areas. If the developers care about properly balancing all difficulty levels, this time save can be significant. If they don’t, which seems to be the usual case, the idea of implementing multiple difficulties is flawed in the first place. In the usual case of “easy/normal/hard”, normal is easy but hard means bullet sponge enemies and difficulty spikes. In some cases, it even ruins the game economy. I started out playing “ELEX” on ultra difficulty as an archer but had to quickly realize that killing enemies wasn’t worth it because I simply couldn’t afford the arrows to kill their bloated health totals. Thus, the difficulty setting didn’t provide a challenge for skilled players, it turned the game into a broken, unbalanced mess. There is no way this would have happened, had the developers balanced the difficulty around skilled players from the start.
It allows developers to generate their intended atmosphere more accurately. Some parts of games are meant to be hard to create an oppressive atmosphere. Others are meant to be easy to create a cathartic feeling in players. If there are multiple difficulty levels, a player may increase the level when the game is “too easy” and decrease it when it is “too hard”, thus undermining the developers intended atmosphere.
It provides commitment to a challenge. Hard games are oftentimes not that enjoyable to play in the moment but they provide more satisfaction when you finally beat them:
image in article
However, humans are impatient creatures who are prone to depriving themselves of long-term satisfaction for short-term enjoyment, e.g. by lowering the difficulty below what it needs to be. If you only have one difficulty setting available in the first place, this is impossible.
It provides peace of mind. In the beginning of a game with difficulty settings, you need to choose a setting without really knowing which one will be best for you. Maybe “hard” is good, maybe enemies are just bullet sponges. Don’t ask me what to pick, I’m here to play the game, not to design it! During the game, you are always faced with the choice of lowering or increasing the difficulty. With a unique difficulty setting, you don’t have to think in the back of your head that you could always lower the difficulty when struggling against a difficult boss. You simply have to…
…git gud. git gud means that there are some challenges that don’t scale to your level and that can’t be side-stepped. It represents the struggle of man to overcome his own limitations against all odds. Failing to git gud means to fail the archetypical struggle of humanity. It doesn’t matter that it’s unfair, it doesn’t matter that others are more privileged than you are. This is your challenge and you need to conquer it. However, if there is an easy mode, you no longer have to git gud. No longer gitting gud means that we lose a part of humanity itself. If you do not instinctively get what I am alluding to, you lack an essential aspect of humanity, sorry. Games are one of the last areas where git gud still applies in the West (another is love) and it does so with relatively low stakes. In the words of one our time’s foremost philosophers Fetusberry ‘Ass Bastard’ Crunch...
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Meta: can we please disallow H1 and H2 tags in posts? Or at least make them smaller in css? Having the ability to write all caps or bold is one thing, but on my device these headlines are really screaming at me.
You can customize css in your account settings: https://www.themotte.org/settings/css
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I couldn't disagree more, as someone who thinks From Soft's games are some of the best in the industry - Bloodborne and Sekiro are probably easily number 1 and 2 as the best games of the last 2 decades IMHO, though I'm about halfway through Elden Ring, and I'm pretty sure by the time I'm done, that will steal number 2 from Sekiro and possibly number 1 as well. The unique difficulty setting just doesn't add anything to these experiences, and they would be strictly better with an easy mode (Sekiro and Elden Ring both arguably have different difficulty modes, via the Demon Bell in the former and Fia's blessing in the latter both increasing the difficulty, so adding an easy mode wouldn't be much of a leap). I don't find your arguments compelling:
There is no intrinsic meaning in moving on in a game. The meaning is only in what the player puts in it, because it's a game, rather than something of actual consequence. A player is free to place meaning in beating the game in Normal mode instead of dropping the difficulty to Easy, and if the player chooses to place less meaning in that compared to beating the only difficulty mode available without hacking the game, then that's a free choice by the player, not something imposed on them by the game.
This is also something that's entirely by choice on the player. Furthermore, in games like, say, Devil May Cry which does have difficulty modes, you see no shortage of comradery between players who bond over beating the game in the hardest difficulty. Souls games themselves all have pseudo-difficulty modes other than the ones referenced above, through New Game+, which scales the difficulty through damage numbers bit by bit each iteration. There's already a stratification within these communities where people bond over specifically beating the various challenges at the highest New Game+ when the scaling caps out (e.g. Sekiro caps out at NG+7, i.e. after 8 playthroughs, the rest of the playthroughs have identical difficulty).
This is one of the stronger arguments here, but it also has to be weighed against the experience of the player. I'm sure FromSoft gets marketing benefits out of their games having this unique-difficulty reputation, but I don't care about benefits to FromSoft, I care about the benefits to me, the player.
This is, again, a free choice that the player makes about comparing oneself to others. And, again, there's plenty of pride in communities for games that do have different difficulties, where the hardest difficulty is the one that brings the most pride. Again, this is even the case for From Soft's games, where some people don't consider you to have truly beaten the game unless you beat it in the highest NG+.
This is also an arguably strong point, but frankly, Easy Mode is basically trivial to tack onto after the game is developed. Just scale the numbers by an order of magnitude or more. There's no need to make Easy Mode balanced in a fun way, because it still serves the purpose of accessibility. As well as offering experienced/good players a silly and light-hearted way to experience the game.
What the developers intended isn't really important; the player has no responsibility to make sure that the devs that they handed money over to sees their artistic vision realized. The player is there to be entertained in exchange for their hard-earned money, and if that involves experiencing the game in a way that doesn't fit the intended atmosphere, then they ought to experience it that way.
This is the one that I disagree with the most. I've yet to play a hard game that I've liked which was not enjoyable to play in the moment. Again, I'm playing Elden Ring right now, and the boss that beat me the most was Margit the Fell Omen, (the first boss of the game for most people, I think), which took me 24 tries. I enjoyed each and every one of the 23 failed attempts that led up to the victorious 24th. Because the game's combat mechanics, the boss's movesets and AI, and the stakes of the fight that were built up from the game's lore all made the experience of tackling this challenge fun. There's no shortage of games that are even more difficult than From Soft's games, but also not fun. We just call those bad games that aren't worth playing.
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I think the reason the "but u should git gud" thing tends to fall flat is because it's kind of missing the point a bit, or perhaps trying to answer the wrong question.
What is the point of difficulty? A lot of people forget that difficulty should be in service of fun, not simply an end in itself; otherwise game developers would just implement everything James Rolfe [rightfully] mocks and break sales records because of it.
But the point remains that I need to still continue to be motivated, to still think it's worth mastery of the game's systems. And if the game cannot do that, if I can't actually derive joy from playing it because it's too far up its own ass with "well just get better" (with not even a hint as to how, no incremental progress or that progress is too slow, or something one-shots you/you die to bullshit you can't forsee and it takes 5 minutes to get back to the place you can try again), then the game is not fit for purpose and thus not fit to play. It has failed the player as a servant fails its master- "flow state" is shorthand for/a simplification of this.
(It's probably worth noting most of the people making the "even though the game isn't fun -> worth mastering, git gud" argument are men, and most of the people arguing "I shouldn't have to do any work to win" are women. Both are missing the point that the game should set out and be designed to serve its player but at the same time resist being an unsatisfying pushover of an experience.)
And in the 30-40 year history of video game development, all sorts of things have been done to thread that needle, and the games that fail generally do so because their core mechanics work against any of those solutions. And they've had varying amounts of success, including but not limited to:
And those approaches are combined when and as appropriate. But it is very obvious when a game is designed with the difficulty in service of the fun, and when it is not, and when it is not it is just as unsatisfying and awful as it is when Bethesda or Ubisoft implements the brain-dead bullet-sponge difficulty, or when your default difficulty fails to be meaningfully challenging.
If you're talking about hentai games, some of those do have difficulty adjustments or at least aren't ball-bustingly hard--indeed, for some, you'd probably have to go out of your way to lose on purpose to see said scenes.
Hentai games do this most often for obvious reasons, but the fact that it does that (and all the other things that happen as you start to lose) suggests [to the player] that the difficulty has a slightly more casual relationship with the player even if the rest of the game is quite difficult, so the game designer gets a bit more leeway if the balance isn't otherwise struck just right.
Come to think of it, lots of different games do bad ends this way, and a slightly wider variety of them change substantially based on certain choices you make- for instance, playing the earlier Fallout games with 1 INT makes a lot of the dialogue in the game vastly different. Sure, you don't have to play it that way, and playing it that way makes it more difficult in certain ways (but less in others, at least you can max out STR), but the novelty is going to be worth at least another playthrough.
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I can somewhat agree on one case where catering to a lower-skill strata really does take away from the experience of the higher-skill strata.
There are games where everyone, by definition, has to have the same content - the multiplayer games such as Dota 2. Same map, same heroes, same numbers. A complaint that the devs casualized some high-skill-floor hero like Invoker would be perfectly valid here, since the sweaters can't enjoy him afterwards.
Even then, provisions have been made such as Turbo Mode, which makes a match go faster through sped up progression and thus (arguably) less strategically deep.
In singleplayer games, the impulse to exclude the casuls from the game entirely is vastly misplaced, its logical conclusion would be that game completion recordings can't be uploaded to Youtube so that the gamer lords can truly feel like an exclusive elite. I don't buy the justification that "adding difficulty modes takes away from development time that could be used better". It's not that hard. It would take more development time to tweak the only difficulty level just so, in order to maximize sales and player satisfaction (and companies will want to do that because they want money, not a sense of pride and accomplishment).
I do not recall any examples of a non-videogame activity where participants specifically take pride that this activity is hard and impenetrable for casuals even at the lowest stakes where it still counts as the same activity. Sports, crafts, art, puzzles - they all have their little leagues, amateurs and easy modes. Still there is no small amount of pride and renown that is won by engaging into them at the highest level successfully.
Can you provide any examples to the contrary?
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Difficulty levels enable vastly greater challenge.
Any idiot can beat civ 4 on Settler. Noble isn't too hard. Monarch is quite difficult. Emperor requires advanced tactics and strong execution turn-by turn. Immortal and Deity are really hard, Deity in particular is astonishingly hard. You need hundreds if not thousands of hours of experience and really strong game knowledge to win. Apparently 37% of players beat Elden Ring, 15% beat Dark Souls 1, 30% beat Sekiro. I'd be surprised if 1% of civ4 players beat deity. I've played it for 15 years and I can only beat Immortal, sometimes. Only 3% of Civ 5 players have won on Deity and that's far, far easier since there's a reliable meta-build for it plus some cheese you can do in game setup to hamper the AI.
No game designer would release a game that was locked to a truly hard setting, the 'hard' games you play are pretty easy to finish and the statistics show it. People want to be able to finish games with a reasonable investment of effort. Difficulty levels allow for a real challenge worthy of real elitism.
Sounds like a skill issue, you picked an uncompetitive build. That's real difficulty: the huge proliferation of strategies that used to be competitive narrow down to a few workable methods. Higher difficulties on civ 4 don't make the AI smarter, they just get huge bonuses to production and science. You have to overcome the cheating machines, turn them against eachother and outgrow them.
This makes me want to take up the challenge to demonstrate that I am that idiot who can't 🤣
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'Git gud' can be dismissive of new players' struggles with a game which has been running for a long time and has over time become tilted more towards keeping the experienced players interested by ramping up difficulty. Viva La Dirt League did the one take on it that does make it less of a sneer at noobs and more actual advice, which ties in with what you're saying there about challenges.
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If Alice only plays fire emblem on the most difficult mode available in classic style (permadeath) and Bob place on easy casual mode, who cares that Bob cruises to an easy playthrough on the first try? More people got to experience the journey and the cost of developing puzzles that challenge Alice get amortized to far more sales copies. Plus maybe Bob will try the more difficult challenge on a later playthrough and wouldn't have touched a git gud title.
The problem comes in the design phase of the game. The developers aim the game at “Bob”s in the customer base and then later add difficulty, usually by tweaking the HP, or maybe the hit boxes. Or they might lower the number of recharging drops. What they don’t do is create a hard game for Alice alongside an easy game for Bob. Alice no longer has a game designed ground up to be challenging in a thoughtful way. She gets the easy version gameplay - one that might well not really require strategic decisions or foresight or grinding. She just has to mash the attack button more often than Bob.
I'll admit that's a trend, especially in the AAA open world design space, but I don't see why things have to be that way. There are plenty of other games where they're still designed for Alice, then Bob is thrown a bone by cranking his modifiers up and his enemy's modifiers down until he can faceroll it.
If you still need the Bobs to think the game is designed for them since they're your biggest market segment, just do what Bungie did for Halo 3: design your game around the "Heroic" mode, then rename your "Easy" mode to "Normal" so the Bobs don't feel insulted.
For a slightly more recent example, that's how the Owlcat Pathfinder games work as well. "Core" / "Challenging" utilizes the actual rules for the system, while "Normal" gives the player a variety of cheats to smooth out the experience.
I don't feel insulted by "here's the baby hand-holding easy mode for you pathetic chumps what can't play properly" mode at all, since I am a pathetic chump what can't play properly 😀 I'm doing this for fun, not "I am so marvellous!" feelings, though I admit when I finally gave in, consulted a build guide for PoE, and managed to at last get past some of the later Act bosses, it was a great relief. Though even there, it wasn't "Yes, I killed the big boss, I'm so great!", it was "At last I can move on with the rest of the story".
Some people do want to have high kill rates, some people just want the story. I see no reason why there can't be separate modes to accommodate these. (Gosh, I'm really being all irenic and peace'n'love about this, unusual for me!)
More credit to you for it, but often the target audience for these games is teenaged boys who tend to be less comfortable choosing anything easier than Normal (speaking from my personal experience of having once been one). If shifting around how things are named allows devs to target a higher skilled audience with their design while still making money, I'm all for it.
Yeah, teenagers are sensitive around things like that, so if calling the easier mode "Normal" lets them preserve their amour-propre, I won't sneer at them (maybe smile tolerantly). I don't even mind if they invent a super-easy "granny mode" for the likes of me, so the kids can feel "well at least I'm not playing on that level".
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Hard disagree. I think the Souls games and Elden Ring are all pretty mediocre. They're fine at some baseline quality, but they're only remarkable because of the arbitrary high difficulty that breeds elitist protectionism that this post is a good example of. Sekiro is the only title I'd unconditionally qualify as "great". Never played Bloodborne.
Basically any game can be made much more difficult through challenge runs or speedruns, and they'd confer just as much intrinsic pride for beating them as a Fromsoft title would at equivalent difficulty. But those challenges would lose the extrinsic motivator of one being able to pretentiously lord their gaming superiority over others, since e.g. saying "I completed [game] in the any% hitless category in under 14 minutes" is a lot less legible to people who don't play it themselves. Conversely, plenty of people know about the reputation of the Souls series.
Even if you personally enjoy that extrinsic motivator, it's undeniable that it creates other problems. Discussions of the game become worse in a lot of ways, with plenty of obnoxious policing on how you're "supposed" to play the game (e.g. "you didn't really beat Elden Ring if you used Ash Summons" or "you didn't really beat DS if you used ranged/magic"). Then there's the people who are so overprotective of difficulty that they'd say any change that would make the game better but also slightly easier is automatically bad. Think the game craps the bed when fighting 2+ enemies? Git gud. Do you think enemies attacking through walls when the player can't should be fixed? Git gud. Think the terrible grab hitboxes should be adjusted to more closely match the enemy model? Git gud. Fromsoft games are the only series I've seen people unironically defend framerate drops as something that shouldn't be fixed since they "add to the difficulty and atmosphere of blighttown".
Apart from the peripheral issues, the core of the game itself is degrading as From runs along the difficulty treadmill, trying to make ever more difficult enemies that are almost certainly made as hard as they are to preserve the series' reputation for difficulty as opposed to any compelling gameplay reasons. The later bosses in Elden Ring are a good example of this, and are something that Joseph Anderson has gone into at length here.
As for the easy mode discussion itself, I propose a hypothetical to you. Say the challenge runners and speedrunners took control of the development of the series and decided to massively increase the difficulty so it appealed to them personally, but you were now excluded. Your first instinct would probably be to retort with "I'd just get better, adapt to the challenge, and enjoy the game even more!" But let's say this wasn't an option. Say you were either hard-limited on your skill such that you couldn't progress, or that the amount of time it would take you would be so high as to be unreasonable. You'd now effectively be locked out of a series you had greatly enjoyed up until this point. An optional easy mode could fix this and allow you to enjoy the games, but oh wait the speedrunners have decided they don't want to do this. They give some half-hearted excuse answers about "developer vision" as to why they say they don't want it, but you know that at least a big part of the reason is because if they implemented an easy mode, then they couldn't be quite as smug when they say they've beaten the game on discussion forums.
I don't understand this perspective at all. That is, I don't see how the high difficulty in these games is arbitrary. I haven't played a single Souls game, but I've spent probably 500+ hours collectively on Bloodborne and Sekiro, and I'm about 50 hours into Elden Ring right now. Bloodborne is my favorite, though Elden Ring is challenging its place at the top while being by far the easiest of the 3, while Sekiro is a close 3rd despite also being by far the hardest of the 3. And in all of these, the difficulty, or perhaps more precisely the challenge, is one of the core elements that make them fun. And it's not that there's some extrinsic motivation in bragging about accomplishing things other people haven't; out of those 3, Elden Ring is likely the most popular and most well-loved, but, again, it's also by far the easiest and most accessible (Bloodborne being a PS4/PS5 exclusive plays a factor here though, admittedly).
It's generally how quickly and mercilessly they punish you that people consider them of high difficulty. To be honest, the main thing that makes these games tougher than the typical game of the same genre is the scaling on enemy damage; in most games, even bosses can hit you 10+ times before you die, whereas in these games, most regular mobs can kill you in 2 or 3 hits. But this is only one piece of the combat design in these games that make them so fun; the counter to this is that, often enough, the player can kill the enemies very quickly just by playing well. Sekiro exemplifies this perfectly with how every miniboss in the game that has 2 lives can have 1 of those lives taken out immediately before the fight begins, essentially halving their HP.
And furthermore, because enemies are so punishing, it forces the devs to design them to be fair. I consistently marvel at how well designed the enemies are in these games in terms of their attack patterns and animations which clearly convey to the player exactly what they need to do in order to avoid damage and to counterattack safely; the tough part is actually executing them consistently while under pressure from a very intimidating-looking enemy (furthermore, the execution is often not particularly difficult due to the slow pacing of these games; the timing precision and reflexes required for even Sekiro are basically nothing in comparison to something like a Devil May Cry). I've watched players with little experience in Souls games take down tricky bosses like the Guardian Ape in Sekiro - a sort of "twist" boss which took me over a dozen tries on my 1st go-around - on their 1st try, merely because they were smarter than me about analyzing their moves and experimenting safely with counters.
I'm also of the opinion that these games would be strictly better if they had easy modes. Beyond the challenge of the games, I'd say the From Soft games I've played are top of the industry in terms of level design for exploration and lore/world building. These are things that any player who doesn't care about the combat could enjoy and appreciate.
For your first two paragraphs, I agree challenge can be fun, but I strongly disagree that the challenge I would face would be diminished if other players could opt for an easy mode. That's the crux of the debate here. From your last paragraph I feel like we probably agree on this point. An easy mode would allow more people to experience the games if the difficulty would have otherwise precluded them, and it would smash the elitist snobbery surrounding the games to a good degree.
Definitely not. I've already responded to your other comment on how these games aren't fair in general. A better lens the "fair" would be "predictable and preventable" that Joseph Anderson has detailed in his video essays on the series. Games like Sekiro nail that concept, while the later bosses of Elden Ring fail horribly. Again, watch the JA critique I linked above for examples of how they do so. Elden Ring is proof that in at least some instances, FromSoft values the elitist snobbery over good game design.
Yes, we agree that these games would be better with an Easy Mode - even moreso, my opinion is that all games would be strictly better with a Dev Mode where any and all cheats that developers use for debugging/testing their games can be toggled on and off at will, including the ability to hop into any place in the game at any time, and this should be unlocked from the very start. These are games, not exams; let me have my fun.
My point, though, is that, at least with Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring, the high difficulty isn't arbitrary. The difficulty directly impacts the visceral thrill of playing and mastering these games. It's akin to the thrill of a boxing or MMA match, where no matter how well your favored fighter is doing, a single momentary error can mean getting KO'd. No matter how much you've mastered a boss and no matter how close you are to winning, knowing that you can lose it all from being careless for just a second makes the encounters much more fun and exciting. That the games tend to give you a ton of healing items but requires you to leave yourself vulnerable to use them plays into this high-volatility philosophy, since dying is often not about losing more HP than you have available to you (i.e. including healing items) but rather about making a bunch of mistakes in a row. This also means near-misses can happen fairly often, where you go down to 5% HP but then manage to find a healing opportunity to give you more slack for the rest of the fight, which you hopefully go on to win. There's something to be said about winning the World Series on a sweep, but there's greater thrill in winning in game 7 through a come-back walkoff.
I feel like we basically agree with each other.
You've mentioned "arbitrary" in both your comments so I assume you're reading into that word more than what I meant by it. I've never been opposed to players finding high difficulty enjoyable, I was opposed to them wanting to force that on others who may not want that if they'd also like to play the game, perhaps for other reasons like its lore or aesthetic.
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I've never played the Souls games, so I'll take your word for it that they're not good. But if so, why are they occupy such a large cultural space? Obviously, because they are difficult - that extra challenge is clearly adding something that other actions RPGs just lack. I think it's that - there's a pleasure in overcoming an unfair challenge. And I think a lot of it is the unfairness. Other video games are difficult, but they play by Marquess of Queensbury rules - no sucker punches or surprises.
I wouldn't say they're bad games per se, but they're certainly overrated on their own merits barring Sekiro.
Nonsense, they occupy a large cultural space because they're needlessly exclusionary, which appeals to a lot of elitists. Difficulty isn't hard to find, just try any challenge runs or speedruns for games you already enjoy. But there's a reason why speedrunning is incredibly niche while the Souls games aren't. People like to watch speedrunners but not to actually do it themselves, while the Souls games sell millions of copies, and it's mainly because of the elitist snobbery the Souls games have wrapped themselves in.
I think this take and your favorite Soulslike being Sekiro are entirely at odds, which is what I don't get.
Souls, and to the greatest extent Elden Ring, allow you to use the game's systems, content and options to make the game as difficult or as easy as you want. Even in Demon's Souls, you could essentially powermax your character through repetitive soul farming until you trivialized a lot of the content, serving as a sort of soft difficulty modification depending on how the player wanted to play. There are options in the game that can make the majority of bosses a joke, and the oneshot magic spell is a meme in the Elden Ring community.
Sekiro is not like that. You either have reflexes or you don't. If you don't parry, you're dead. People who don't have the reflexes to accurately do so are never going to be able to complete Sekiro by design.
One of the sillier parts of debating the possible inclusion of an easy mode is this exact line of reasoning. "The devs must not include an easy mode as that would ruin the game... except oh wait they already did! It's [any playstyle I think is too easy]!" My response would be to question why easy playstyles are fine, but an easy mode is perceived as such a sacrilege?
The effect of levelling is overstated. It has its biggest impact at the lowest levels, but even there it doesn't make much of a difference beyond giving maybe 1 or 2 more hits of leeway before you're flattened into a pancake. Weapon upgrades follow a similar path of the lower levels everyone will get being pretty impactful, but there's quite diminishing returns after that. The oneshot magic spell (I'm assuming you're talking about the big beam thing?) is good for Twitter clips and YT clickbait but is way too inconsistent to rely on in any capacity for a first playthrough.
You're not wrong about the general point though. There are definitely things you can do to trivialize the game. Using magic in DS1 feels like you're the only character in the game with a gun, and Ash Spirits trivialize every boss in ER (although in a really boring way, the Joseph Anderson critique I linked above goes into that more).
You don't have to play Sekiro using parries. I did hit-and-run tactics for most of my first playthrough, which is low risk and low reward. It's definitely not the best way to play the game and had I not grinded the bosses after beating the game I probably never would have noticed how well-designed most of them are, but it's certainly possible to do. Heck, new players probably gravitate towards it if they've played other Souls games before.
Also, I don't really understand how that is connected to the overall point. Sekiro is the tighter game overall, but it would still be fine if it had an easy mode.
I disagree so strongly with you and your point is so alien to me that I don't think it's possible we can have any realistic dialogue.
To quote a discussion further up the thread: what is the purpose of the game? Why is it a game? What comprises a game? What is the purpose of gameplay? To me, a game must have win state and lose state. Otherwise, it's not a video game. Otherwise you would have to expand the definition of 'gameplay' to include the act of turning a page in a book or hitting play on a media player for a movie. Winning has meaning because losing matters.
Have you ever interacted with a child and handed them something for free? Expecting them to value it at all is a joke. Make them earn something, something nontrivial, and they will treat it like a treasured heirloom.
The dialogue between the game designer and the player is the point of the game. You seem to be under the impression that the reason games are designed to be hard is to weed out players. I don't think any game designer thinks like this, especially as they are subject to financial incentives that explicitly want the game to find the widest possible audience.
The purpose of a game is to be fun. Difficulty is a big part of that. Something too hard is frustrating, while something too easy is boring. Skill differences between players are wide, which is why the vast majority of games include difficulty options.
For most games this is true, but FromSoft has found a niche where alienating less skilled players is worthwhile for them to prop up the series' reputation for difficulty, which appeals to smug elitists. "Developer vision" arguments are vacuous nonsense that essentially boil down to "you can't criticize any design choices, ever".
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Even if you never valued at all any gifts you have got at birthday or some other occasion, it does not mean that it is universal.
ironically, heirlooms are quite universally in this category
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Clearly, that exclusionary element is not needless - it serves a purpose or satisfies some desire. I think that desire is the desire for competition, just channelled into a single player game. I also think it's wrong to write off that very natural drive as snobbery.
There's a big difference between the drive for completing a tough challenge, and being pretentious for having done so. I get that the smug superiority people get is part of the reward for doing the challenge, but it's best not to make that the central premise. For FromSoft titles it very much is.
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I haven't played a Souls game, but having played Bloodborne, Sekiro, and probably half of Elden Ring, I believe this is actually the opposite. The challenges in these games tend to be very fair, even the sucker punches and surprises are ones that could have been prepared for. Which is to say, when you're in a boxing ring facing against an opponent, there's no such thing as a sucker punch, just poor attentiveness. These games have their share of surprise encounters, but every one of them could have been anticipated just by looking around a corner before stepping in - it's just that looking around each and every corner in a large, complex game world with tons of enemies is tough to do and can be quite stressful.
And it's that sense of fairness that makes these games so well-regarded in contrast to the generic difficult action game. They're not perfect and so exceptions do exist, but by and large, they telegraph to the player very well exactly how to react to any challenge to overcome it; they just demand great attentiveness and consistent execution while under pressure. The reputation for difficulty tends to come from how few mistakes a player is allowed to make before their character dies (most regular enemies can kill you in 2-3 hits most of the time). The fact that healing locks your character into a vulnerable animation and thus needs to be strategically used based on one's knowledge of the enemy's behavior also plays into this.
Categorically not true. Enemies can attack through walls while you can't. Enemies can attack through each other while you almost never get allies in the first place (at least prior to ER). Grab hitboxes are notoriously terrible. DS2 has a large emphasis on groups of enemies which is the literal definition of unfair.
Then there's traps like the infamous dragon bridge in DS1 that is just terrible game design. Absolutely no indication that the bridge is a trap other than scorch marks (like somehow fire in the past means a dragon is about to attack you in the present). It also comes right after a difficult boss and could easily make people think they're supposed to go somewhere else when you're actually supposed to dodge around the dragon.
I have to admit, that bit makes me laugh. That's the kind of sneaky "well eff them but right, technically in hindsight they did give me a clue" move that would have me both screaming in anger and laughing at the sheer brass neck of the devs. Though I'm never going to even attempt Dark Souls, so I imagine the level of frustration already engendered makes it hard to see the humour, from the outside.
It's more frustrating because many in the community refuse to accept that it's bad. The dragon bridge is a frequent flashpoint on the game, and the scorch marks are one of the goofy defenses that DS stans frequently offer in retort. It's dumb because it's such a massive leap in logic. You can put on the heaviest armor in the game and essentially bodyslam a thin bridge that's just two thin planks, but they won't break because the game generally does not expect you to make big leaps of logic when reading the environment.
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First of all, when people say "fair" in the context of single player games where it's player vs AI, that doesn't mean having the exact same mechanics available to the player and AI or having the exact same number of enemies as the player (i.e. 1 on 1). The point of fairness in these games isn't to put each entity on equal footing, but rather to have the player experience a challenge where failure is the result of their own mistakes. DMC games are generally regarded as very fair, and the vast majority of the non-boss gameplay is centered around defeating large groups of enemies. All 3 From Soft games I've played have their moments of unfairness, but all have tended to be far better at fairness than most similar games of similar genres.
Second, it's simply not true that you can't attack through walls. I've cheesed enemies in Bloodborne and Elden Ring by attacking them through walls. Your weapon swings sometimes bounce off the wall in both games, but not always.
I actually was going to agree that grab hitboxes are notoriously terrible, but the only ones that really stick out to me are Genichiro's running grab and the Guardian Ape's leaping grab. For most grabs, I'd say it's the tracking that's complete BS, such as with Emma's. I can't speak to the latter half bosses in Elden Ring (I've just gotten to the royal city, having defeated Godrick, Rennala, and Radahn as the main big bosses), but I can't recall a single grab that struck me as being off compared to their character model. Godrick's grab was really frustrating to me, as was the Fallingstar Beast's (rather well-telegraphed) one, but both matched their character models quite well, especially for Godrick where I could just step back a foot and punish the grab by slashing his arm.
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I find it odd that you have a very similar ranking of the FromSoft titles with Sekiro on top, yet you still disagree with my point. In my view, Sekiro is the best title in part because it is so tight. There is a limited amount you can do in terms of grinding to defeat the bosses. So you just have to... uh... git gud. In contrast, in Elden Ring you can basically make the game as easy or as hard as you want by using ashes or meta builds. This makes the game more accessible in the same way that a dedicated easy mode would have made it more accessible. At the same time, it creates the risk of having overtuned bosses like Malenia. You couldn't have a Malenia type boss in Sekiro because almost nobody would beat it. So it is exactly the tightness, that a bounded difficulty level brings, that may have made Sekiro the better game.
Full agreement on the second paragraph. Comparison with others is part of the enjoyment for some people.
Sure, the flanderization of Dark Souls is bad. Sure, some people have dumb opinions and justify it with git gud. I wouldn't blame it on the lack of easy mode though.
I am generally against taking an established franchise to a completely new direction that alienates many of it's old fans, whether that be adding an easy mode or making it insanely hard. Therefore, I would reject it on these grounds. A better example would be creating a new franchise that is so hard that I can't beat it. I am perfectly fine with this shrug
I personally liked Sekiro because it doubled down on what the Souls games did well while removing most of the crap. One of my biggest pet peeves, the instadeath pits, were removed. This is something that had bugged me since the janky platforming of DS1, but people always defended that garbage with the nonsense elitist difficulty argument. Unfortunately the pits returned in ER, and are actually a pretty big issue in that game despite its dedicated jump button. Sekiro compensated with higher base boss difficulty, but those bosses also felt a lot tighter at the higher levels of play as well. I can pretty consistently do Genichiro, Owl Father, and Inner Isshin damageless, and doing them gives a great sense of mastery. I never got the same feeling with Malenia. ER bosses feel like I'm cheesing an algorithm rather than dueling, and Malenia in particular never felt good even after a bit of practice.
It definitely doesn't help, as it helps to entrench the series as unwelcoming to players who can't adapt to the arbitrary difficulty. That's the elitism people are defending.
"It shouldn't have an easy mode because it didn't have one before" is a goofy argument. Further, I feel like you just ignored the point of my hypothetical, i.e. the arbitrary exclusion, rather than addressing it.
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I do understand that, but I think what the established fans forget is that when the game first came out, they were new players and it wasn't developed to the point it is now after several years. Now new players are coming in at the level of the established players, not the level at which the game was first brought out, and that's a lot of the disjunction between "this is too damn hard" "well just git gud, noob".
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If you're deriving pride from beating the game on normal then how does the fact that everybody can beat the game on story mode take away from that?
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I agree that the game itself is better when it enforces stakes. Now I’m much more and RPG gal, and what frustrated me quite often with sandbox rpgs is that because the game was designed around a “anyone can be anything and even switch mid game “ ethos a lots of skills became basically useless. Being good at speaking and charisma was a waste of time because basically, there’s no place you could use it where it wouldn’t be easier to simply kill your way to victory. Even within places where you’d expect it, the game would let you win a quest that’s supposed to be about magic or stealth even if your skills in that area were somewhere around pathetic when you’re supposedly a master of those skills.
I think a lot of this is simply a fear that the first failure someone has in a game is when he’s going to quit and go do something else. Worse, it might hurt the chances that person will buy the next game in the series.
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Meta: I dislike giant bold text. Is there a setting to disable this, custom CSS or something? Super not a frontend person...
This CSS should work:
h1,h2,h3,h4,h5,h6{font-size:inherit;}Literally less legible than assembly. Thanks.
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Sometimes I worry about what effect that has on kids. What does it do to someone, who has invested hundreds of hours into perfecting their skills at a video game, just so they can brag about beating it? And it's not even a multiplayer game, they're just memorizing patterns against a fixed bot. And then they go and play other games, making video games their main hobby and only source of pride, because they're bad at all things in the real world, because they're not practicing anything real... I don't know. I'm not saying these games should be illegal or anything, but I think people need to be more aware of how addictive they are. Most of us wouldn't casually sign up to watch a 300 hour long movie, or the same 3-hour movie 100 times, but we download these video games without a second thought.
300 hours is nothing... Get on my level, I have 3,000+ hours in just Dota.
Oh, ive also wasted tons of time on videogames. Most of it before steam thiugh, so i dont know the exact value. It is shocking to see that hiur count go uo though.
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...Improves their hand-eye coordination and reaction times? Gives them a healthy sense of competitiveness?
But its not actually competitive. Theyre not doing esports, theyre just following some how-to guide and following its directions, or screwing around until they find somethat works against pre-programmed monsters. I think there is value in competition, but i dont see the value in these solitary time-sinks.
I mean, that's how I got into software engineering (doubly so if we consider windows 98 to be one of the monsters).
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This doesn't seem that different from rock climbing or archery or even footraces. These are all intrinsically solitary activities of man vs a static environment, but by doing them together, people can build communities, and by comparing performances, people can compete. I do think there's something about overcoming video game challenges that is intrinsically... not worthless, but perhaps worth quite a lot less than other endeavors, but I see that more as a video game thing.
I agree that part of the problem is them being videogames. Its the combination i think?
This combination applies just as well to "reading a book" as it does to playing Dark Souls, and you're making a lot of assumptions when you say "difficult enough to tire out your brain, but not difficult to be a really serious challenge".
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You could make the same argument for football and chess. Games are a good way to practice useful skills, which is why they exist and are encouraged or tolerated, and the failure modes are well known: if your entire life starts to revolve around this inconsequential thing or if you contract behavioral addiction, it's time to stop.
I've never really been convinced by the idea that video games are more addictive than other types of games. People do spend hours upon hours playing various other things or marathoning TV shows and movies.
What you seem to be missing is that interactive media inherently contains more possible interaction. It's less boring because it contains more experiences. A completionist playthrough of Elden Ring isn't equivalent to watching the same dark fantasy movie on a loop, it's comparable to watching a complete anthology of a bunch of different fantasy movies.
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I can't speak for everyone, and I can't speak for all games. But I played a lot of video games as a kid. You learn a lot more than just how to press buttons in a pattern.
It taught me how not to get ruffled by failure, a skill that came in quite handy during my amateur martial arts career at tournaments. To say nothing of less intense situations like debugging frustrating code, or dealing with a cut in woodworking going wonky.
It taught me to be methodical, as a lot of success in difficult games comes from thinking about the problem you are stuck at, and working backwards. If you constantly die in a certain corner, don't get stuck in that corner. If you can only beat a boss with a certain item, make sure you've collected that item going in. And once again, this methodical approach to problem solving has paid dividends in my professional life, and my hobbies.
This last one, I donno. I want to say intense gaming sessions taught me to focus. But there is a fine line between compulsion and focus. I wouldn't say anyone is "focused" at the slot machine for 3 hours. But I'm willing to bet the kid who beat tetris was focuses as fuck.
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This is, to be blunt, a character flaw and not a good argument against difficulty settings. If your sense of pride in your own accomplishments depends on others not being able to do it, that reflects pretty poorly on you.
I find your other arguments flawed as well (though I don't want to go point by point because I find that kind of obnoxious). I think that the "it doesn't affect you" argument for lower difficulty settings is correct, and that your arguments don't really counter it.
Nonsensical. Are you proud of breathing? No, because everyone can do it. Are you proud of knowing how to swim? No, because it's extremely common to be able to swim. Do you feel more pride over gaining a PhD, or gaining a bronze swimming certificate? Why?
I'll tell you why: The value of something is directly proportionate to how rare it is and how much effort it takes to produce. This is as true for achievements as it is for physical goods.
The near future is going to be strange, computers and robotics will be superior to humans in every endeavor. Will you still take pride in beating other humans? People that play chess do, even though a computer can win easily at this point. Will you be proud of a PhD when an AI has made your PhD worthless as a possible contributor? How about when a human can be augmented to do anything at the best "human augment" level?
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This has nothing to do with how many other people can do it. It's reasonable for, for instance, someone with some physical disability to be as proud at completing a comparatively short run as someone else is at finishing an ultra-marathon, if equal effort was demanded of them. If swimming suddenly and totally fell out of fashion as a thing to learn recreationally, such that fewer people could swim at all than had a PhD, that would not then imply that if I went off and learnt to swim to a bronze certificate standard it would be an achievement to be proud of.
Why wouldn't it? If the cachet of a PhD is that it is something relatively few people can do, then being able to swim to certificate standard when that is rarer than having a PhD is something relatively few people can do, and so is something to be proud of.
If everyone gets a PhD with their box of cornflakes, is that an achievement to be proud of?
The cachet of a PhD might be that, but that doesn't mean that's why one ought to be proud of it. It's only correlated. You should be proud of it because it's hard, and not many people can do it because it is hard. But you shouldn't be proud of it because not many people do it, that's getting the chain of causation the wrong way round. Hence;
No, but not because everyone has one, but because you didn't have to do anything to get it. Which again are correlated - everyone has one because it comes with their cornflakes - but not the same thing.
Here's a perhaps clearer example. If I decided to learn to a very basic level some conversational phrases in an ultra-obscure language for a couple of hours, that would already get me to a level of knowledge rarer in the the general population than having a PhD. But that obviously doesn't mean that I should be prouder of the former than the latter, if for instance I had both.
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This is the wrong comparison. You can feel pride in getting a doctorate degree, but does that mean nobody should be able to get a master's or bachelor's degree?
Saying “there should only be hard mode” is akin to saying “nobody should be allowed to get a bachelor's degree, so I can take pride in my doctorate degree” which is obviously (hopefully) nonsense. The fact that people can get bachelor's degrees doesn't invalidate your doctorate degree at all. Everyone understands that getting a doctorate degree is a bigger accomplishment than getting a master's or bachelor's degree. Why deny others the opportunity to get a lesser degree?
No, it's saying "we should not lower the difficulty of getting a doctorate to the level of graduating high school so that everyone can feel the accomplishment of getting a doctorate"
I'm not. They can go play other, easier, lesser games just fine.
No one is getting "the doctorate" (the hard mode completion) by "graduating high school" (completing easy mode). Besides, of course, blatant game state editing (cheats/hacks/mods).
It might as well be a whole other game.
There are no devalue fields being emanated by easy mode players that can somehow affect your experience of beating hard mode against your will.
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In fact, I am. Not being great at it makes me even prouder, because I can still do it despite being not that great. I never had any ambitions of being a Channel swimmer or Olympic medalist, but stick me in a swimming pool or the ocean, and I won't drown. Go me! Not everybody can swim even that much.
The fact that people like Michael Phelps exist and make me look like a rock doesn't matter one bit to me, and if Michael Phelps derived his sense of self-worth from "I'm way better than FarNear", I'd actually be kinda sorry for him. I'm so far below his level, him complaining that I was allowed in the same pool as he swims in would be less "I am a champion" and more "I am a dickwad up my own arse about how Great I am".
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No, it's because it isn't challenging for me. Whether other people can do it doesn't factor in.
I am in fact mildly proud of knowing how to swim, because it was challenging for me to learn. Less proud because I haven't swam in years and so I've lost the skill somewhat, but I still have reason to be proud of the effort I made.
It's not at all true for achievements.
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Can you give me an example of something that you are proud of, that everyone else can also do? The only stuff I can think of would be a depressed person managing to get out of bed in the morning and cleaning their trash or something. But what about everyone else?
Cooking. It's not hard to do, almost everyone can cook to some extent. But when I cook a dish that is challenging (for me), I'm proud of it no matter how easy it would be for most people.
I don't think most people can cook that well. Everyone can put a frozen pizza in the oven or cook Ramen. But you wouldn't be proud of that. Are you sure that your sense of pride is completely independent of your environment? I would guess that you would feel somewhat less proud if everyone else was a 3* chief. Then, being proud of what would be considered a moderately complex dish today would be equivalent to being proud of cooking Ramen.
Dude, I can manage to burn frozen pizza by getting distracted and forgetting how long I've had it in the oven. Not burning it is legit a source of pride for me. I think you're operating off a different level of how you value achievement; a lot of people just do things for fun, and easy mode on games is one of those fun things. After all, it's just a bloody video game, it's not like curing cancer or brain surgery.
There are games I'd never be able to play, because I'm not good enough, have not been playing for long enough and don't know the etiquette, as it were, and have nowhere near the hand-eye co-ordination needed (particularly as I'm getting older and the first traces of arthritis in the joints are appearing). That's fine, I'm never going to try playing those games anyway. But mass-market games? Why not an easy mode for those who just want to have fun, or who won't be able to get to complete the game without help? What are you losing? You still beat it on Ultra Hardcore Suicide Massacre Mode, you achieved that, you are the champion.
I'm one of those people who like story mode because I'm playing the game to find out the lore and explore the world and wander around (maybe I like plucking all those flowers for the herb garden for the villager side-quest) rather than the grind of following a guide to get the maximum build to power through the maps with the most slaughter. I'm not interested in the body count I rack up! So you enjoy yourself running through like a blazing meteor of death, I'll be pootering around chasing rabbits, and we can both have fun with the game.
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Yes, of course I'm sure. The pride is in the challenge I overcame, not because it makes me better than anyone else.
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Pride doesn't, or at least needn't, depend on your position relative to other people. English is a widely spoken language that doesn't require any special intelligence to learn. I learned it effortlessly as a child. But someone who becomes fluent in English as an adult put in a lot of work and has something to be proud of. To someone who is learning to ski, getting down a black diamond run for the first time without falling is a major accomplishment worthy of pride. Someone who skis regularly might do ten black diamond runs in a day and think nothing of it.
Becoming fluent in another language as an adult is an achievement that not everyone can do though. On the other hand, nobody is proud of learning their mother language because it's expected. It seems to me that this supports my argument. I am not arguing that pride comes solely from comparison with others, just that if basically everyone can do something, it's hard to be proud of doing that thing.
But you can do that thing well, or badly, which I think is part of the point you want to make. Learning to read and speak fluently your native language is an achievement, even if you can get by perfectly well with a level that is ordinary speech.
What your position comes across as is demanding that everyone should speak at the level of a university degree in literature, or else they're just loser time-wasters, and moreover they are devaluing your achievement in attaining fluency. But if everyone can play and win in hard mode, then what is the achievement to be proud of there? You need the lower-level players to contrast yourself with, otherwise "I won on hard mode" becomes the same "so what, are you also boasting about being able to cook a frozen pizza?".
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My point is that it's based on one's own situation, not others. You gave an example in your post of a depressed person doing basic tasks. Another example might be someone who had a stroke learning how to move their right index finger, something almost everyone can do. It is worthy of pride because it's an accomplishment for that person. By contrast, doing something that almost no one can do may not be worthy of pride. If Usain Bolt runs a race faster than 99% of the population could, he still may be quite disappointed with his time and feel no pride at all.
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This is a ridiculous stance.Being better than other people in some way is the whole basis of our social hierarchy and much of the motivation for striving at anything.Edit: On reflection, this brings to mind Michael Malice's razor "Are some people better than others?" Someone right wing says yes; someone left wing gives a speech. I'd characterize the left wing stance here as counter-signaling. "I'm so far above everyone else that I don't need to participate in this competition to prove my worth." It's cool to personally bow out of a competition, but destroying the competition so others can't get value from it is very rude. You could say the same thing about leftists' policy preferences regarding taxation, housing, and immigration. In all of those areas the leftist policies make it harder to prove one is better than others by having wealth/living in an expensive area/being a citizen of a powerful nation.
Yes, some people are better than others because of natural talents or gifts. But boasting about being good at video games? Yeah, OP could beat me because I have the hand-eye co-ordination of a turtle. Well done you, this is like Usain Bolt getting in a race with me and bragging that he beat an old, fat, out-of-shape, arthritic Irishwoman. At that point, people tend to think you're not so great after all.
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No it isn't. A person of good character strives to excel because excellence is its own reward, not because they can beat others.
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Not only is it not a flaw, it's a virtue! The fundamental axiom of all value is that it is destroyed by abundance. Ensuring that this knowledge is able to take root and flower in every mind that provides suitable soil for it is of vital importance.
No one, despite the great amount of effort exerted, ever got so much as a footnote in a history book for being born, having children, feeling great love or anger or jealousy, spinning out an entire hidden inner universe with the utmost uniqueness and specificity, being ground into ashes by implacable anxiety, or dying - experiences that are if not common to all lives then at least common to a great many of them. We do, however, give great honors to star NFL quarterbacks, and rightly so. Not many people can throw a ball like that.
Are the achievements of NFL quarterbacks diminished by the existence of beer league sports?
No, but they might be if you forced the NFL to sponsor beer league sports and give a bunch of time/resources to them.
At the very least, the prestige of the term "NFL player" would drop significantly. To bring this back to the original point, the prestige of being a player who beat *insert game* is significantly lower with games that have easy modes. You can be part of the group that beat *insert game* on hard mode, but human beings aren't great at modifiers, and I could see it dropping total prestige.
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We aren't talking about economic value here. We're talking about the virtue of overcoming challenges, which is not limited, and in no way requires an external reference.
I know.
Then I think your argument isn't very good because virtue is not lessened by lack of scarcity. Almost nobody murders people, but that doesn't mean it's not valuable to refrain from killing. And if someone really struggled with anger issues such that it was a real struggle for them to not get violent with people, I would say they should be proud at their success even though most people find it easy.
Hey, is it me who gets to be the C.S. Lewis quote poster today? I can't believe it.
This popped into my head from Mere Christianity:
Lewis is talking about God's judgment, but you can really substitute your moral framework here; he's talking about external actions vs internal choices, which is a cross-cultural theme. And I do think there's a tremendous difference between the two.
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I'm not convinced by OP's arguments either, mainly because as others have pointed out it's trivial for the community to define a bar that earns respect regardless of what settings the game allows. But this is going too far. It's reasonable and inevitable to seek a more objective lens on an achievement that feels substantial to you by comparing it to what others can do / have done. It's easy to say "measure yourself by yourself - if you sink 200 hours into beating easy mode because your thumbs just won't cooperate like a normal person's then you can be just as proud of that". But the failure mode there is that we are liable to deceive ourselves and let ourselves off the hook too easily if our only standard is subjective difficulty.
That, too, is a character flaw. It's honestly not that hard to set reasonable standards for yourself which are genuinely challenging to you. If someone is lacking in character such that they aren't willing to do that, then there's nothing you, I, or anyone can do to help them.
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Not sure about that. Unbounded arrogance is a flaw, but people recognizing their own strong points is something that shouldn't vilify people if they find a way not to be obnoxious about it. I feel like these efforts are trying to enforce a Harrison Bergeron-esque experience for video games. If someone's a chess grandmaster, I expect him to feel some pride about it, otherwise it's just kind of sad.
I think there are at least two different mindsets here: one is the person who is competitive and wants to measure themselves against others. For them, having peers is important, because how else will they judge their own performance and ability save by striving against the best? Thus, including an easy mode is, for them, the equivalent of letting slobs who can barely waddle traverse ten steps of ground, then say they 'completed' and 'won' the same way as if they were running against Usain Bolt in the 100m.
The second mindset is doing it for fun, and not caring about anyone else's result. That view is okay, us slobs will waddle our ten steps over here, you get to race Usain over there, what's the big deal? I'm not stepping on your toes, you're not stepping on mine. I'm not competing with you, I'm not competing with anyone, I don't care if I rank first or ten thousandth on some leaderboard of game scores.
I'm not going to say either mindset is superior to the other, though as a waddling slob of course I'm more sympathetic to the second view.
I have still not seen a satisfactory answer to "so how do the slobs stop you from competing against your peers, anyway?". Right now, slobs can actually waddle ten meters and say they won. Why does that not "ruin" running for Usains but ezmodo ruins games?
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While some of the games given as examples, like Dark Souls and Dwarf Fortress, are memed as being hard, they're really not that hard.
I played Dark Souls after dealing with the far harder Monster Hunter games (the newer games have eased the difficulty curve but get even harder towards the end) before, so it never really felt all that difficult. Nioh also scales up the hurt to far higher levels than Dark Souls, but also gives you the tools necessary to do those fights if you get gud, which is where Elden Ring's last few bosses fall apart. Most Fromsoft Soulsborne games tend to have several mechanics that allow you to trivialize most of the content even if the standard guy swinging big stick will struggle. Usually something involving magic, blocking or parrying.
Dwarf Fortress is not hard. It's just convoluted. You can stick 7 dwarfs in a hole with a tiny patch to grow food and they'll live in happy mediocrity forever. Any difficulty comes from the player trying to do a 'stupid dwarf trick' or RNG sometimes sending an indestructible syndrome-spreader your way.
Stephen's Sausage Roll is by far the hardest puzzle game I played. Nothing else warrants mention in that genre.
And to highlight something in a genre that interests me, the Codemasters F1 games are both the most "mainstream" sim racing titles, but also by far the hardest. Sure, you could whack on all the assists and drop the difficulty to 0 and cruise your way to victory, but the baseline car without assists is one of the the most difficult cars to drive in all of sim racing. So difficult, in fact, that actual F1 drivers criticized it as being unreasonably difficult to drive and unrealistically prone to spinning out of corners. The AI is also extremely aggressive relative to most older racing games. Driving the same car in any other series, even more "hardcore" simulators, is a far more relaxed experience. I believe the 2023 version of the game improved, however this. Similarly, their contemporary "Dirt Rally" games are so much harder than the old "Colin McRae" titles that they might as well be a separate genre. Sim Racing has long had a bit of a problem with a hard=realistic perception, and generally improved simulation has lead to easier driving, not harder.
Dark Souls is like a 6 or 7 on the hardness scale out of 10. It's sometimes challenging but doesn't scale up too far once you've figured out whatever particular gimmicks are useful in the exact title. Monster Hunter and Nioh are more like an 8 because they do in fact keep scaling up in difficulty. Dwarf fortress is maybe a 3 or 4 once you've gotten around the controls because, aside from deliberately challenging yourself, the core gameplay is easier than most city/colony builders. I'll give Stephen's Sausage Roll and the racing games I mentioned 9, because they hit hard and never stop hitting. And the hardest mainstream games tend to be rhythm games on their highest difficulties for the sheer level of mechanical execution they expect. You cannot fire up Through the Fire and Flames on expert and clear it without at least 100 hours of prior practice in either Guitar Hero or in very similar games.
Old games are rarely hard. Contemporary gaming is harder at a baseline for at least some of these reasons:
Whenever I have played an older game that I thought at the time was difficult, I soon learned it was not. I was just younger. To give an example of something I recently replayed, Pikmin's 30 day time limit sounds like a challenge, and my memory of the game was that it was a serious threat. When I replayed it, I beat the game in 11 days, and the time limit was totally irrelevant. Roller Coaster Tycoon is another old game I recently played, and is utterly trivialized by using high ride prices (often 10x the default) and advertising, something the game doesn't clearly explain the impact of but once you know about them it's GG. There are exceptions, like Battletoads and Ghosts 'n' Goblins still being difficult, but these were the exception then just as very hard games remain the exception now.
Some games I remember as at least reasonably difficult (>=6/10): Ninja Gaiden series, Castlevania series, Mega Man series, early Zelda titles, early Mario titles, Mickey Mania, Gothic I-II(NotR), Mafia, System Shock 2. These are all proper games without an insane amount of artificial difficulty. It feels like most modern games on "normal" are like 3/10 at most. I think you are missing one important reason for why games are less difficult today: The market is much broader, implying that the average skill level is much lower.
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Have you ever finished Battletoads? Or Ninja Gaiden NES?
(Of course you did say "rarely", but those are very well known games.)
Battletoads (which I mentioned) and Ninja Gaiden are the exceptions that prove the rule. And still, if you were to task someone with completing Battletoads and completing Guitar Hero III, I know which one I'm betting on being finished first.
Assuming you're not asking for expert difficulty, I'll happily take the other side of that bet. Even if you are, I'll still probably take it - Through the Fire and the Flames is not a required song to beat the game. I think you're underselling the difficulty of older games, and I'm somebody who has cleared TtFatF on expert (barely - Rock Band 3 has much tighter timing and sells the song as DLC I can't do it there, so I'm not a god or anything). Battletoads is mean. Turbo Tunnel is called out as impossible even though it really doesn't take more than 10 minutes of practice if that (the final stretch literally just alternates up and down rapidly), but it gets so much worse later.
I'm highly confident that the average difficulty of reaching the end credits without modifying difficulty settings of a popular game from the 90s was higher than the same in the 2010s, though I can't find any studies saying so.
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That's true for you, and people like you. IE, male gamers with good reaction speeds and visual logic skills. It might not be true for journalists, especially the sort of woman who writes gaming journalism feminism articles.
I was watching a livestreamer recently, and she was trying to beat one of the old mario games. And just was dying, over and over again, on what seemed to be pretty simple stages. She didn't seem to learn or improve, she just kept making the same mistakes and only progressed by random luck. So at first I was tempted to feel smug. But then I thought, she's doing something I could never do- she's got a big crowd of people watching her, she's somehow connecting with them, and convincing them to give her money. That's a much more powerful skill than making mario jump onto platforms! But people really are different.
Yes, and a game that's an 8 or 9 on the scale is still even harder than dark souls for journalists too. There's no point cramming most of gaming into the top 3 points on 10 point scale just because the average Journalist is performing at a 3/10 level.
Also, for what it's worth, my visual reaction speeds aren't particularly great. I am terrible at fighting games and fast-paced shooters. Sim Racing is something I'm good at because reaction speeds matter a lot less than you'd expect, precision and repetition is more important, and we get the advantage of force feedback.
I have previously heard a variety streamer describe why they sometimes seem like inattentive amateurs on stream even if they're good at their go-to games. Their mental capacity is focused more on audience interaction than getting to grips with a new game.
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It's still a 6 or a 7, she's just unable to beat anything that's higher than a 2.
Set the goals in advance, otherwise they're meaningless. She may be winning at the game of fame and fortune, she still sucks at Mario.
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I think the hardest aspect of Dark Souls is "figuring out what to do to make it easy". Rarely is the wise thing to do to mash your head against a wall, at least until you start getting near the end. Early on, there are almost always alternate avenues you can explore that make things a lot easier. I think you could chalk this up to "challenge" as well, knowing where and how to seek out better opportunities. But it also introduces an element of luck. Someone who gets it in their head that they've figured the game out while missing key details about kindling and stats and weapon upgrades will have a really rough time.
In that particular case, this is only another argument against difficulty-setting. The tools are there, you just have to know when to go do other stuff. Sucks if you miss an ember though.
Sekiro, on the other hand, almost never offers these kinds of pathways or any opportunities for confusion, and really is quite challenging no matter what you do.
This seems to be my time to keep recommending Viva La Dirt League videos on the topic 😁
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Well, this challenges a lot of my preconceptions. I'm kind of 50/50 on it. Like, if I take Doom for instance, the original on standard difficulty, with modern ASWD and mouselook controls, is trivially easy. When I was a kid, playing with the default controls that practically had you moving like a tank, I think holding the alt key to strafe, it was borderline impossible. I exclusively played with cheats I found it so punishing at 10 years old.
With the original Warcraft, most of the difficulty IMHO came from the primitive controls. Warcraft II improved on them enough that I didn't find it too severe a challenge with respect to that at least. Starting with Starcraft, despite the group size being limited to 12 units, it's fine IMHO. On recent playthroughs, I did notice that the campaign in Warcraft II seems like more of a challenge, and I found myself actually running out of resources, and not really getting 2nd or 3rd tries if an assault failed. Starcraft by comparison had a campaign that was relatively easier, with more plentiful resources and a less aggressive AI, that seemed willing to let you recover from mistakes until you got it.
But I don't think you can directly compare multiplayer games. How "hard" a competitive game is will always be contingent on the players involved. Likewise, I'm not sure I consider the sort of "difficulty" that hinges on whether you have access to a wiki or not actual difficulty. Looking up what OP strategy works on a boss isn't that much different from the sorts of moon logic puzzles that eventually killed point and click adventure games, and which most gamers rejected as being artificial "difficulty". It's not difficulty, it's just bad design.
That said, there are hard games from back then which still hold up. I find NES and SNES era Mario games just as difficult as I always did. Lately I've been stretching outside of my gaming comfort zone and throwing a credit into the original arcade Gradius from time to time. It felt like a big achievement when I was able to semi-reliably get to level 3.
TV Tropes becomes helpful here.
Old games were full of this stuff.
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NES and SNES era Mario games had something most of their contemporaries lacked. They actually controlled well and had good visual clarity, setting the standards for pretty much all later platformers with the degree of momentum and mid-air control offered. This lets the gameplay itself be the challenge, instead of wresting with controls.
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The problem is, you are dealing with, I believe, clinical narcissist. Twitter addicted, attention seeking game journos/activists. It's a raw, bleeding, narcissistic wound that there is anything that "cool kids" like which they can't participate in. That there might be any experience other people enjoy which is inaccessible to them. Begging them to leave something alone, lest they ruin it, simply means nothing to them. If they don't get to join the club, the club shouldn't be allowed to exist, and damn all the people who derive enjoyment or community from the shared experience of overcoming a challenge. There is literally nobody, no organic groundswell what so ever, clamoring for "accessible" FromSoft games.
I'm simply amazed that conversations like this even occur. If a game is too hard, I just don't play it. I don't need every game to be for me. Probably the majority of popular games I don't play. I attempted to play Demon's Soul once upon a time, and got my poop pushed in so hard a few bosses in I gave up. Never tried another FromSoft game, I don't care. There are literally tens of thousands of games out there. Play any one of those and get over yourself.
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I think your perspective is skewed. Why the focus on fixed difficulty? Rather than looking at how some people want to make games easier, you should look at the ways a lot of games allow you to scale difficulty higher.
Recently Balatro came out, and it's pretty fun, and the first win isn't that hard, but to win on the higher difficulties isn't that easy. There's plenty of other games with the same mechanic. Slay the Spire is probably the best example, it has 20 ascension levels, and the highest level is basically impossible to winstreak on. There's tons of other roguelites with similar mechanics. AI Wars is an RTS that has tons of difficulties where again, the highest one is basically designed for you to lose on.
Gunfire Reborn & Roboquest are FPS roguelites and they both have scaling difficulty. You mentioned Ubisoft games too. Tom Clancy Wildlands also has a scaling difficulty setting.
All in all, there's tons of games that are out now that have scaling difficulty, either built in or through mods. Is all of that just meaningless because it's not fixed?
It seems like the bulk of the post is just focused on gaming journalists who barely games in the first place.
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The very thing that makes videogames stand out from other mediums is the difficulty. The dialogue between designer and player; as a player you are challenging an opponent who has made all of their moves in advance and is daring you to find a way through them.
Removing difficulty, or even removing fail states altogether, completely undermines what makes videogames a unique medium in the first place. The difficulty IS the point; if you just want to experience the story, watch a Let's Play or go watch a movie. Walking Simulators don't deserve the title of game for the fact that they have no gameplay; at least no more than watching a DVD while periodically pausing it, flinging the remote across the room and retrieving it before continuing does.
Difficulty is a way of telling a story in and of itself; we know Malenia is hard as nails because she's fucking hard as nails. Radahn dropping on you from outer space hits home as a gameplay mechanic in a way that simply showing it in a cutscene wouldn't. It's the difference between "wow, that was cool" and "holy FUCK that would've oneshot me if it hit, wouldn't it?"
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The random mention of "goyslop" makes what would otherwise be a reasonable article to reference elsewhere impossible to use in "polite company". Why did you find it necessary?
To begin with, why would the Jewish/non-Jewish dimension even be relevant here? There may have been some case the JQ-posters could have made in the case of TV where I believe the term was originally coined, but Genshin Impact may be the biggest extreme spoonfeeding quest marker open world game out there at the moment, and it almost certainly has a higher fraction of Jewish players than Jewish developers.
Can we please have a moratorium on word policing? Especially if it's literally all you have to say? There is nothing more obnoxious, low effort, and uncharitable that picking a single word out of a 10,000 word essay and harping on it for a lazy paragraph.
No. It's entirely appropriate to tell people that dropping random slurs into an otherwise okay post is derailing and serves no purpose except to let everyone know who you want to boo, however irrelevant.
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There are other forums without this rule.
This is a silly rule, and you should feel silly for citing it. I've over the years seen members melt down and rage quit over topics they wanted completely censored being allowed here. Like HBD. By even allowing anyone to mention HBD, they felt like they were not being included in the discussion. So all that rule really boils down to is the caprice of whoever receives it in the mod queue.
There's a distinction between censoring manner (what the rule is referencing) and censoring topics (what people flamed out about).
I mean the issue is over-policing of a rule about the manner in which something is written as a gotcha. If the post had included a statement that even implied that Jews or Judaism were even part of the discussion, then I would see the point. None of that appears in the post. It’s not even about who controls the games. So the point of bringing up “goyslop” as a word — in what amounts to a substack length post — not only derails the conversation with an isolated need for rigor, but reads a bit like an accusation of dog whistling. If you think he’s trying to be back door antisemitic, fair enough, say so plainly and have at least some evidence beyond a fairly common slang term for “bland and boring”.
No. People are noticing it because it's not common. Using it is a sideswipe attack on Jews. And there's no backdoor or dogwhistle; it's blatant.
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Ironically, that would make the choice of words less bizarre.
What is isolated about this demand? For that matter, what does it have to do with rigor?
Is the claim that 4bpp was... Dog whistling about dog whistles? I think he spoke pretty plainly. It's really only common in forums where antisemitism (ironic or otherwise) is common.
Maybe rigor is the wrong word. But I think it’s a case where people are simply taking a word in a post of several thousand words, and assuming with no context that even implies antisemitism that 4bpp was clearly trying to imply that Jews were somehow involved in making games easier and thus more bland, boring and so on. And this without anything else that points in that direction.
And the thing I observe about most dog whistles is that they’re rarely one off events. I’ve never known anyone who could keep a clean profile online and only have one incident. I wouldn’t say it’s never ever happened, but it’s extremely rare for someone to sincerely hold an opinion and never say so in the open.
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But you fuck one goat...
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Low-quality, unhealthy food, seen in antisemitic circles as being promoted by Jews for consumption by gentiles for malicious purposes .
Yes one word can ruin a comment, however long. Try it out! You can literally ruin any normal discourse with a single turn of phrase.
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Given the views that are sometimes expressed here, I don’t think you should be sharing any links to this forum at all with “polite company”.
And if you just want to share the essay without showing where it came from you can just edit that word out.
The word was in the longer substack post linked at the bottom.
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Mostly because I find the word very funny. But you are right, I shortened it to just "slop".
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Achievement is always zero-sum. We only respect and feel the power of things that other people cannot or will not do. The magnitude of an achievement is directly proportional to the number of people who have failed.
What the people whining for easy mode are trying to do is co-opt the social cachet of the skill required to beat a hard game at a lower investment in time/ability.
I don't agree with this psychoanalysis. Cuphead has an easy mode, Devil May Cry games have an easy mode, Touhou games have an easy mode. In none of those games' communities does anyone boast of completing the game on easy mode. If there's any chase for social cachet, you're essentially calling those people very delusional because there is no cachet in beating ezmodo. Instead, the normal mode or higher (depending on how sweaty normal mode is) becomes the socially accepted "real completion".
Some people just want to experience [some fraction of] the game's mechanics and beat the final boss and not watch it on Youtube. There isn't any more social aspect in that than idly swiping gems in a 3 in a row game on the train.
Is it not better to have a clear win condition, so you don't even need to have the argument about what counts as winning?
Yes, I realize that some people consider using ashes in Elden Ring as cheating. Clarity is a matter of degree. I have, for example, never heard anyone complaining about beating Sekiro in any semi-normal way as cheating. Btw. the Cuphead easy mode doesn't count because it doesn't let you advance in the game. That's why I put it into the list of "hard games".
You don't have to have the argument. I haven't noticed any argument, certainly. There is a clear win condition, and different strata of Touhou players value different tiers of victory differently. I observe that the majority consider normal 1cc and upwards to be "real".
(There are usually different endings in Touhou games and the ones granted for easy mode or multiple continues are the "bad endings", but it's just a few lines of text.)
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Possibly true, but even dumber if it is.
What's dumb? Wanting to enjoy a game's mechanics without being forced to compete in big sweaty boy league?
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I can confirm this is definitely the case for Touhou. Not just normal, but also only 1 credit clears of the game are considered "real completion". I have done 1cc on some of the games but only on easy.
And I never once heard from anyone in the Touhou community that "it would feel more rewarding to complete normal/hard/lunatic 1cc if lower difficulty modes/continues weren't available".
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