this post was submitted on 23 Nov 2024
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All difficult games should have an easy mode for accessibility.
Signed, a Dark Souls enjoyer.
I recently noticed the accessibility settings in Brotato, which are a great example of this. In addition to the normal difficulty setting, in accessibility they give you access to sliders for enemy health/damage/speed and some toggles for other visual and difficulty features.
The only option I use is being able to restart a wave after a death rather than losing the whole run, and it’s kept me occasionally playing the game and enjoying what the devs have created.
I see where you're coming from, but when a game's message is that meaning and purpose is born through hard work and struggling against impossible odds then that message is kinda undercut by a button that turns the struggle off, even if it's there for a good reason.
I would say that the number of games where that message is core and is reliably reinforced through the gameplay is small.
Getting Over It, for example, would not need an 'easy mode', but the vast majority of games should be accessible to as wide an audience as possible - not by compromising the devs' vision, but by simply allowing players the tools to handle the game at their own pace.
Granted, but I'd argue that dark souls and Elden ring, the typical subjects of this debate, are exactly that. There's no way to add an easy mode without compromising the dev's vision. And based on fromsoft's reticence to add an easy mode, I think they agree.
Sucks for console users. On PC there are trainers.
It's one of the reasons I got my grandparents to transition from consoles to PC. I knew how to fiddle with PC games to make things easier on them.
Still, oftentimes I would end up sending an email of thanks to a dev of some sort, usually along the lines of "I know this isn't your target audience, but thank you so much for putting in native controller support/UI scaling/story mode/etc in, being able to get this working for my grandparents is a big joy in their lives."
The most unexpected sentence I expect I'll run into today.
My grandparents were the ones who taught me how to play games! It skipped a generation - my mother was never a gamer, but she remembers them always having the latest consoles when she was growing up in the 70s and 80s. I grew up on my grandparents' laps, watching them pass the PS1 controller back and forth on a dozen different genres. Shooters and horror for my grandfather, puzzles and platformers for my grandmother, and RPGs for both.
My grandparents were poor, so they were always trading in their games down at Gamestop, and then kicking themselves when they had a hankering for it again. And god, having an original copy of Final Fantasy Tactics too scratched to play, and then finding out the only place you could get it in the mid-2000s was on Ebay for 100$? When I learned how emulators and less than legal rom acquisition worked, they were delighted to suddenly have every game they ever traded away back in their hands.
But another problem was that they just couldn't keep up with modern console gaming. The 360 was the last console they got, and most games were just... not friendly enough for them, especially since their reflexes were in decline (not that grandpa's were ever great, as he himself would have been first to admit; he was a perpetual cheater with DOOM and Duke Nukem). Being able to transfer them over to PC gaming entirely, and difficulty adjustments as an increasingly standard feature of RPGs in the early 2010s, went a long way towards letting them play modern games again.
My grandfather passed away earlier this year. It's been weird without him on call every weekend. Miss him terribly.
That's really awesome. I'm very sorry your grandfather is gone, but at least you have all of those great memories! My dad was a film historian, so I think I feel the same way about classic movies like it sounds like you do about games and how they're so much a part of not just me, but my family history. Similarly, there are so many times where I see a movie I hadn't seen before but he would have or just learned a fact about a movie he wouldn't have known and would have loved to have heard that I think about how great it would be to talk to him about it and miss him. He's been gone since 2016 but I still think about him a lot. The hurt gets less but it never goes away.
Yep, I've been trying my best to also say thank you to devs that go out of their way when they don't have to. (And also to musicians since I mainly listen to metal and 99.9% of those guys don't get the recognition they deserve)
Honestly... I disagree. What is accessibility? Every souls game has been beaten with dance pads, rock band drum kits and guitars. They're also frequently beaten by people with serious disabilities using specialized controllers. Input speed is not an issue here, Souls has always been about carefully choosing your moves to manage the end lag and stamina cost of your actions. It's about making the right move, not about moving quickly or pressing a lot of buttons at once.
IMHO, accessibility is frequently cited as an excuse for lower difficulties here, when in reality the difficulty isn't a serious part of the barrier for disabled players. It could use better accessibility options, like configurable colourblind modes, audio indicators, more configurable text size, some kind of clear colour indicators on attacks for low vision, but difficulty? No.
There are also lots of good reasons not to add explicit difficulty options, which is y'know, why From Soft haven't done it yet.
Accessibility isn't just a case of 'accessible to the handicapped', man.
That's a fair argument then, but... this is literally what accessibility means, whether or not you can "access" the thing.
If someone isn't willing to invest the time or frustration into Souls, then fair enough, but that's a matter of priorities/convenience, not a matter of accessibility.
Also, frankly, the difficulty of Souls for regular people is insanely overblown. Stuff like "Prepare to Die" is just a marketing gimmick, and the games have become substantially easier and more flexible over time. Like in Elden Ring, where you can leave bosses for later, and can frequently just bypass them entirely, experiment with an insane variety of builds, use effective ways to grind ridiculous amounts of souls, and just generally become ridiculously powerful. They've done essentially everything but creating an explicit "easy mode" to make the game playable for as many people as possible. If you want an easy mode, basically every souls game has builds or guides that function as that easy mode.
Difficulty counts as an access barrier. You always have to consider that there are people who, for whatever reason, have a skill capacity that is lower than required for the game in question. And for those people the game will be inaccessible.
Time is also an accessibility factor. If a person with a disability or lower skill has to grind and extend the playtime for 3-4x what a normal player would have, that’s not inaccessible but it’s less accessible comparatively. Especially if that kills the fun.
That being said obviously these things can be tweaked within reason and the problem can’t be solved for every player unfortunately. And they don’t need to be. Some games can just be too hard for some players.
The ultimate point for me just seems to be that the community needs to be listened to. You shouldn’t ever be in the positions as a dev where you are telling disabled or low skill gamers to get good or no dice. If a large portion of people are saying “I’d love to enjoy the art you’ve made, but I can’t. My disability/inability is stopping me” then I’d change my approach.
I think there is a balance that can be struck, grinding is one of the balances and you’re right there are ways to make those games easier that way. But the other people are also right, the games need to be hard sometimes. I just want people to stop being dismissive of people who want to enjoy the same entertainment and art but can’t just because of difficulty.
I wanna play a game with story interspersed with fun action combat... not keen on dying a million tonnes until I learn the timings for each enemy in order to be able to defeat them and get the next bit of story. Soulslike games aren't accessible to me.
I mean, Souls is accessible to you, it sounds like it just isn't for you. There are tons of games that I wish were made in a way that I'd enjoy more, features I've disliked, etc. But in almost all of those cases, someone loves those features the way they are, as is.
Like, for example, I don't love JRPG combat. I would love to play and enjoy Persona 5, but eh, I'm just not interested in investing in those systems to play that game. But that game is beloved, as is. I would never go petition Atlus to make Persona 6 into a Soulslike so that I "could" play it.
And that's great, there are a ridiculous amount of great games coming out every year, far more than I or basically anyone but full-time streamers have the time to play. So just... go play what you like?
Trying to make games that are "for" everyone is how we end up with soulless bland titles like Ubisoft keeps pumping out. Good games have to take risks, and make interesting decisions that alienate some and engage others.
I enjoy souls games and I'm okay with their difficulty but I honestly don't get how the possibility of an easy mode upsets so many people. It doesn't require much development time, if any, to scale down enemies.
This isn't like implementing something that doesn't exist or that fundamentally changes the gameplay. Scaling already exists.
It has literally 0 impact on your experience and would allow others to enjoy the game as much as you do.
Scaling sounds like it'd work, but in actuality, these games are designed with tough mechanics that you really have to learn before they make things more difficult. Take Sekiro for example. The endgame bosses will absolutely bully you if you don't know what you're doing. I'm not sure even 10x damage and health would help you get past the final boss.
While playing through the game, I got stopped in my tracks several times, stuck on a boss for hours while I learned how to parry, manage my stamina, deal with perilous attacks, etc. If I had been given a massive power boost, it would've only delayed my being forced to learn. And then, later, a much tougher boss would've stopped me in my tracks anyway, and I would be so behind on learning that it might turn into an impossible wall. Suddenly your "easy mode" has a much rougher difficulty spike than normal.
And the games are full of things that aren't made easier by just... scaling. Like managing deathblight, areas like Lake of Rot, stuff like the awkward parkour and areas where you have to play around not falling off. That stuff would have to be reworked to accommodate a player who hasn't learned proper positioning, or blocks, or just.. the general tools of mastering the gameplay.
Slapping a basic scale on the game is a poorly thought out approach that would do more harm than good. To do "easy" right, you'd want a proper balanced game, with reworked timings and boss movesets, and frankly, I don't think it's worth the effort and extra development time and cost.
Two things here.
A) Adding an easy mode actually would make the game worse for me. When I'm stuck on a hard boss, grinding attempts for hours, that isn't immediately fun. It builds to a worthwhile payoff, which is why I live these games. But when you're in it, an easy mode makes you feel like an idiot, wasting your own time suffering when you could walk right past at any moment. Except that lowering the difficulty to bypass something feels terrible, and also, puts you in the position I described above. It robs you of the satisfaction of conquering it and replaces that with guilt and feeling like you couldn't do it.
B) Someone cruising through on Easy wouldn't "enjoy the game as much as I do". Engaging with, and mastering these mechanics is a huge part of what makes these games enjoyable. Skipping that side of the game, jumping past the difficulty robs you of the satisfaction of beating it.
Also, I think many people would enjoy the experience Souls offers, if they're willing to give it a shot. One of my best friends used to play every game on easy, "why struggle when I could move on and see more of the game?". He got into Dark Souls 1, and had a hell of a time with it. But because there wasn't an easy mode, he persevered, and found he loved the stiff challenge and the payoff of beating a boss that really challenged him, and in finding mastery in the mechanics. He's now a diehard, who's done SL1 runs of many of the games, and usually starts new games on Hard these days. In a world where DS1 offered an easy mode, he never would've tried the designers intended experience, and Souls would've been just another decent action adventure.
Souls is offering a rare experience, with tons of alternatives that do offer an easier time. Why not let it shine and highlight what it does better than anyone else?
Exactly!!!!
Not every game is made for you!
Don’t like the gameplay or the challenge, you are welcome to switch to something else.
Why do people expect everything to cater to their preferences?
In addition to the other comment, you can easily choose to make the game easy. The developers just ask that you pay attention. You can go explore and increase your level and improve your equipment to trivialize almost everything. If you choose the right gear, most bosses are very easy. You just want the victory handed to you, which is fine but that's not the game they made. It's totally OK to not like the game, but don't pretend that's the same thing as accessibility. You're perfectly capable of completing the games. You just don't want to. That's cool. Go play any modern AAA that coddles you.
For mechanically difficult games, definitely agree. Celeste is an example I usually bring up - it's a platformer that can get pretty tough at times, especially in the after-story optional levels. But it also has one of the most flexible and useful accessibility modes I've ever seen. It allows you to adjust basically every aspect of the game a player might struggle with (game speed, additional jumps, timed mechanics, you name it). And the game itself is very good as well.
It also has a different sort of difficulty. It's all in bite size chunks, and you can try again immediately. It never feels punishing in the way Souls games do.
I agree. It's a good think FromSoft doesn't make difficult games. They make challenging games. Their games can be trivialize by meeting it on its own terms. If you pay attention to what things are weak to, it's often pretty easy. Also, you always have the option to level up and improve your situation. Outside of secondary content, everything is easy, but it wants to challenge you to see if you're paying attention. The issue is this is abnormal for modern games, so it's seen by some as being hard. Modern gamers expect to have their hands held, which I don't think developers should always oblige if it weakens the intended experience.