I think looking at Monster Hunter is an interesting parallel. Monster Hunter is another action game that emphasises animation-priority and overcoming challenges. It had steep difficulty curves, which players were told to just put up with, or 'summon' some friends to make it easier. Hunters would spend a lot of time reading wikis and guides containing information that the game obscured. As the series progressed however, the devs added more tutorials, revealed more information about underlying mechanics, smoothed out the difficulty curve immensely, and even give players the option of permanent AI partners without any hassle or penalties. Pretty much all of these changes in the past decade were met with resistance and people pulling up their nose, saying that it would ruin the games, but this generally stops being an issue once the games come out. The latest game seems to go even further by baking a wiki in-game, streamlines the tracking and gathering immensely, and makes enemies able to aggro and hit each other, and the reaction is once again following this pattern. Lots of concern, but demos already squashed a bunch of those concerns, and the game's release is bound to continue the trend.
You can argue they are different genres of games, and thus incomparable, and that's true. What is comparable though is the fear that making games more friendly to the inexperienced and less talented will ruin everything.
This thread provided plenty of reasons. Don't come into the thread without reading it and then declare that "there's no no reason for __" please.
I have read the thread and similar threads on the old boards, and I'd still say that I still have not seen a compelling reason why there cannot be an easier mode. Arguments against it usually boil down to misguided notions that there's one universal skill level and Souls games ride the sweet spot where everyone can eventually overcome its challenges. This is evidently not true, as your level of experience with action games in general and your natural dexterity will greatly alter how you interact with a game, but also because the subject of an easy mode for these games keep coming up. If you happen to exist in the sweet spot these games target, that's nice for you, but you being unaffected is not really an argument against something not being an issue for others. I'd even say the From games' lack of options create a similar issue for players who think the game is too easy, several of which can be found within this very thread. For them the feature of a harder mode is there, but they are subjected to a sub-standard experience first because the harder difficulties are arbitrarily gated off until you've beaten the game. I'd even say they are robbed of their true intended experience at their difficulty sweet spot, because almost everything will have been spoiled by the time they reach this harder difficulty. If it was just the lack of easy mode, I'd say the developer was being exclusionary, which is their prerogative, but given that the harder difficulties are integrated oddly too, the developer is probably just short-sighted.
Regardless of where From came from, I think exclusion and denial are the main factors that echo that loudest in these types of threads. There's some other types of unhelpful comments like 'start over entirely and pick another class, which may or may not address your issue', 'you're not reading enough wikis and strategy guides, watching youtube videos, and participating in megathreads', 'the e z mode is idling for ages in the hope someone comes to help you, and not to make your life harder', 'don't be lazy', or the ever classic 'it's not hard to me'. I kind of wish video games were big enough to warrant proper studies, because I'm curious to see which demographics are proportionately affected the most by this 'not every game should be playable to everyone' mentality in response to difficulty.
However, were they to create a cheat mode (infinite health/stamina) and make it paid DLC or something I'd totally buy it just for screwing around. Even if it was locked to post-game.
Cheats are far from the most elegant or best solution around the "too hard" issue, but they are undoubtedly the easiest method. Pretty much every action game out there has cheats baked in already for debug purposes. It would take a negligible amount of effort to make those suitable for consumers. I'm not sure how I'd feel about adding a paywall to them though.
