Developer's/creator's choice: a gatekeeping excuse to keep easy modes out of games.

[C J P]

I love From but they desperately need to improve their accessibility options - for arachnophobes (of which I am one, I really struggle with Rom the Vacuous Spider), people with more visible disabilities, and everyone inbetween. 100%.

I'm also not opposed to an easy mode, if that's what people want; they included one in Jedi Fallen Order (which borrows a lot of mechanics from Souls games) and it was still great and the challenge was still there for those who wanted it.

I do worry that people sometimes give up on these games too easily and thus sort of misses their essential appeal. I am not good at Soulsbornes AT ALL, my reflexes are shit and a lot of the time I'm throwing myself at a brick wall, but I muddle through because it's about pattern recognition and persistence and creating a build that works as much as "getting gud". I spent four days trying to bring down Sword Saint Isshin and when I finally did it felt amazing.

If an easy mode can preserve that feeling, and the elation you get when you've beaten a boss that's taken you several ties and strenuously tested everything you've learned, then why not? If you're one-shotting everything, though, that's kind of cheating the player. Some sort of slider based solution is probably best.

(I still haven't beat the nameless king. But I will. One day.)

 

[Zeal543]

An overwhelming majority of games are too easy, i don't see the problem with a few being too hard.

 

[Budi]

In the context of difficulty specifically, I think the problem comes with the fact that a mode included in a game implicitly comes with a developer endorsement, so if the easy/hard modes aren't tested and balanced thoroughly it could end up frustrating or boring players in unintentional ways, which in turn makes a more uneven (and thus worse) product. Things like mods and cheat codes don't set up the same expectations for individual players.


I think the tricky next question this brings up is "Are Promenade and Furi modes even the same game?"

Click to shrink...

I edited in pictures from Celeste earlier to my first post, I think they did pretty good job explaining the assist mode. I'll share it again just in case people missed it.

Spoiler

Game devs are often rather creative and clever people. I'm sure they find ways fitting for their game, to have adjustable difficulty and also to explain them to their players. Also it seems that Celeste developers weren't really concerned with people "breaking" the game. If that is what it takes for someone being able to play it. Invincibility seems like something that's inherently unbalanced.

 

[Weeaboom]

I feel like framing the discussion around "able bodied" people ignores a wide variety of non-physical disabilities and subsequent accommodations. If we take arachnaphobia for example, getting triggered could prevent someone playing a game just as much as physical issues with controls, reaction time, etc. And it's certainly great that there are devs that are starting to take this into account as well as a wide variety of mods for popular games to remove them. However, we don't see same outcry to classify such a game as Ableist in a broad, binary sense as we do for difficulty. I think it's partially because the idea of plot and content is well established as being in the purview of "artistic vision" in other mediums.


This is hands down the best post I've seen on this topic, well written.

Click to shrink...

I'm inclined to agree with this. Well done.

 

[-Tetsuo-]

how do I admit defeat if I can't even play the game.

Click to shrink...

He obviously isn't talking about that. There are ways to address a disabled persons ability to play something without changing the game. Altering the control method or sensory feedback instead of altering the games difficulty or design. You are trying to coopt one argument into another. This is about people wanting easy modes in games that don't have them, most of the time. That is where the "all games aren't for all people" comes in. I would probably play more JRPGs if they were more like CRPGs, but they aren't. So, I don't. I am not out here making threads about how JRPGs need to have dialogue trees and be isometric or whatever else.

One of my friends tried to play Crusader Kings 3 recently and he stopped after a few hours because it was too much for him. He didn't think they should remove mechanics, change features or lower the difficulty. He just quit and went to play something else. And this is a game, mind you, with LOTS of options regarding difficulty. This goes across all forms of gaming. I have some friends who won't play certain board games I have because they are too complicated and others who won't play because they are too simple. Once again, no one is asking to change the game, they just ask to play something else.

 

[Desi]

What the devs say for Furi is similar to what was said about Cuphead before it was released. It's a love-letter to old pattern-based side scrollers that were so hard to you had to try again and again to conqueror it. Their easy option exists and is similar but doesn't allow you to fight the final boss as the ingame lord requires you to get the souls of the defeated enemies which is only obtained on normal matches(you select this during the encounter)

This line of thinking is based on the idea that that all of those things are accessibile to the person, and therefor they can provide their own choice on whether its right for them.

But once again:

How can you decide if a game is right for you if you don't have the ability to even access it in the first place, and that's the entire point.

Click to shrink...

You seem to now be arguing for something different than this thread was originally about; which was easy modes. You are still able to play a game as long as you have the money and equipment needed. I can load up Total War Warhammer 2 and still get crushed regardless if the difficulty was an option at all. The ability to access the product is there.

 

[Deleted member 18944]

You seem to now be arguing for something different than this thread was originally about; which was easy modes. You are still able to play a game as long as you have the money and equipment needed. I can load up Total War Warhammer 2 and still get crushed regardless if the difficulty was an option at all. The ability to access the product is there.

Click to shrink...

It's literally mentioned in the op.

Hello, ERA, after a few threads about easy or accessibility modes/features in games, I realized people ALWAYS use the creator's/developer's excuse for games keeping those features out,

Click to shrink...

 

[Spacejaws]

I know its not really the same thing, but something that does irritate me is if I pick a hard difficulty, die a few times, then after every death the game starts asking me if I want to swap to Easy Mode.

Happened in Ghost of Tsushima, playing on hard and started a duel with low health. Annoyingly when the Easy Mode message popped up it would take longer to load.
I repeated it about 20 times until I beat the fight and loved it, felt like a real challenge, but after a few deaths the Easy Mlde prompt was there everytime.

Like respect my choice, I'm trying to give myself a challenge.
I must admit as a kid I would do the easy mode change if I got stuck and man did I feel bad about it. These days I love a game to have some challege, to get stuck on a boss for a night and really enjoy getting past them. Games without challenge kinda just make me drift to another game in my backlog. My brothers the opposite, he never wants to sit still or get stuck and wants to make a beeline for the end.

 

[Acquiesc3]

Or maybe you know.. some people actually do care about developer vision. Just maybe.

 

[gravitationsfeld]

It's toxic, gatekeeping and ableism. There are people who will not be able to beat your vision of a hard game because of mental or physical disabilities.

Games don't lose anything from adding an easy mode besides that some people can't feel superior or something.

Last of Us Part II is the gold standard how to do this right.

 

[KillLaCam]

We are not on a monolith, I am disabled and yes it affects games, I can't finish Sekiro specifically because of it, I don't support easy modes in everything as an accesibility mode. I want tweaks that allow me to interact in a way I can play the same content as everyone else, an easy mode does not give me that experience.

Click to shrink...

Best post.

 

[Budi]

Or maybe you know.. some people actually do care about developer vision. Just maybe.

Click to shrink...

So with Souls games, since that is where people mainly take an issue with suggestions/wishes of adjustable difficulty. "Ever since Demon's Souls, I've really been pursuing making games that give players a sense of accomplishment by overcoming tremendous odds." This vision can be fulfilled with adjustable difficulty, because as you also know, every person is different. While technically, if people don't achieve the sense of accomplishment because it's impossible for them with the current settings, the vision doesn't get fulfilled. It's a big ask from an artist, for everyone to experience their art in an exact same way. We see different interpretations of Souls games all the time. "They're not even that difficult" to "I couldn't even finish the first boss".

 

[Desi]

I love From but they desperately need to improve their accessibility options - for arachnophobes (of which I am one, I really struggle with Rom the Vacuous Spider), people with more visible disabilities, and everyone inbetween. 100%.

Click to shrink...

Phobias are tough. I have pretty bad Automatonophobia and very aggressive Subautomatonophobia. That I can freeze up if I notice or pay attention to a statue or breakdown when a picture appears on my screen. Still asking for the removal all statues as a feature is a strong pull especially when an enemy type is there to sell "horror".

It's literally mentioned in the op.

Click to shrink...

ah, I took it as a casual mention but the thread was more in line with

I have more reasons I can use to breakdown why developer's vision is a gatekeeping excuse, not a legitimate reason, for keeping easy modes out of certain games, but those are the main three reason I can think about now.

Click to shrink...

Though I believe the OP agrees that your pivot for accessibility as a whole is welcome too.

 

[Dogui]

Does it matter if a fellow era user that didn't develop the game use it as an "excuse"? It's all on the developer to make an easy mode or not.

I don't understand the logic of criticizing players of the game that has no part in the development, regardless of their opinions.

From Software doesn't put easy mode in the Souls games because the devs doesn't feel like the games were designed for it, "git gud" players aren't pointing a gun at Miyazaki or anything.

Excuse or not, this argument makes sense and if there's gatekeeping, the game designers are creating it, not the players. Which means, using the "creator's vision" is not even false in this case.

 

[Doc Kelso]

I want to direct a question aimed solely at the people that are not able-bodied, and I don't mean this in a harsh way:

Would simply increasing damage done/decreasing damage make a game more accessible to people that are unable to play the game due to a disability, writ large? I see this is as the general ask and it just doesn't compute for me.

I'm colorblind and colorblind options are normally horrifically bad; To the degree that they either don't exist or they just slap a filter over the entire game. It doesn't help and oftentimes just makes a game unplayable because the developer figured, "Eh, fuck it," and did the bare minimum.

It seems to me that the best case is to let players tweak a lot of the systems that make a game; iframes, button inputs. The meat of a game. Is this true?

 

[CupOfDoom]

Why do devs need to add easy modes themselves if the community can easily mod to it?

Click to shrink...

A few reasons. One, modding isn't available on all platforms. Two, modding a game can often times be extremely difficult. With developers almost never providing the resources to make modding easy, games like Skyrim are the exception, and in many cases putting in barriers to make modding harder with things like drm. Three, you are asking people to donate their time to do something that should just be standard in developing games.

There are also people who like the game specifically because they know there's no easy mode. Has nothing to do with other people, that's just part of the appeal for them. You being catered to is no more important than them being catered to and since most games have easy modes the actually inclusive thing to do would be to let games exist that cater to both types of people.

Click to shrink...

I legitimately prefer games without difficulty options because even though I don't pick the easy option knowing that difficulty can be switched off makes me lose interest in actually getting better at the game. I understand accessibility is more important than me enjoying a game though, so sure, put those modes in.

Click to shrink...

Out of all the arguments that people have try to make about why games shouldn't have a easy mode, this one makes the least sense. Like, how does the fact that someone played the game on easy take away from you playing on ultra-nightmare-permadeath mode, or whatever. Playing DOOM on nightmare is no less of an accomplishment just because I played through the game on easy. I'm not trying to call either of you out, or start a fight, I'm just genuinely curious as to why.

I think the real value in the lack of easy-mode isn't that the game is hard for everyone, it's that it's the same. From games aren't hard just to punish players; the difficulty is part of the world setting, and the oppressing sense of inevitable death is borne out through that. The fact that every player has this same singular experience is part of what gives it the sense of community, because we're all talking about the same trials and tribulations. Efforts to make the game easier have to come through clever circumventions of difficulty within the game itself, not in an option menu.


I'm fine with easy mode mods or maybe an optional DLC that adds easy mode or accessibility options that modify gameplay mechanics. If you had to go through a little extra effort to open up easy mode, it would mean the vast majority would all be playing on normal, so the sense of a unified experience could be protected.

Click to shrink...

A couple of things. One, difficulty is subjective. What is difficult for you isn't the same as what is hard for someone else. Two, From games are plenty oppressive enough in all the enviorments, and monsters, and lore. You don't need to die 35 times to the Asylum Demon to get the sense that all is not well in the Undead Asylum. And three, From games are not a singular experience. The Dark Souls games can played in wildly different ways from player to player. Summoning, playing as a magic user, having help from a friend, playing with a two-handed sword and no armor, can all change how the game is experienced. And all of that is built into the games by From themselves. So, I don't think that adding difficulty options will change as much as you think it will.

 

[Aureon]

Required reading: https://accessible.games/accessible-player-experiences/

It's an incredible resource, albeit made by players and not by designers, on what accessibility really means. There's a ton of patterns, from the base ones you'd expect, to more intricate ones
"Just make me more do more damage and enemies less" doesn't really figure anywhere, because it fucks with the design and doesn't really help players with disabilities much.

"Game developers are against easy modes because they don't care about the disabled" is a strawman, one offensive to both game developers and disabled people.

Taking less damage, doing more damage, increase perfect parry window, increase invulnerability window when rolling / dodging, increase time between two ennemies attack ? That's not difficult to do.

Click to shrink...

Can we stop with the incredible armchair game dev here?
This is an absurd post.
Creating and balancing a game is an IMMENSE effort, especially one centered about mastery and not story, and not caring at all about challenge is how we end up with the gen6 soups and why Souls had the incredible impact it had

A game about mastery is guiding a player towards challenges he thought impossible and showing them that they can make it.
It is, narratively and instinctively, one of the most effective driving forces in keeping a player engaged: It can be hard to do that if the player can just wind difficulty down.

 

[Acquiesc3]

So with Souls games, since that is where people mainly take an issue with suggestions/wishes of adjustable difficulty. "Ever since Demon's Souls, I've really been pursuing making games that give players a sense of accomplishment by overcoming tremendous odds." This vision can be fulfilled with adjustable difficulty, because as you also know, every person is different. While technically, if people don't achieve the sense of accomplishment because it's impossible for them with the current settings, the vision doesn't get fulfilled.

Click to shrink...

"Tremendous odds" and how that is interpreted is and should be up to the developer.

For example, enemies damaging 5% of your health bar per hit versus 20% is a massive difference. I certainly would not criticize any developer if their intent is to have the player overcome "tremendous odds"

 

[Thera]

Can we stop with the incredible armchair game dev here?
This is an absurd post.
Creating and balancing a game is an IMMENSE effort, especially one centered about mastery and not story, and not caring at all about challenge is how we end up with the gen6 soups and why Souls had the incredible impact it had

Click to shrink...

The point is to make the game easier, not having "perfect" balance.

 

[Thera]

It's an incredible resource, albeit made by players and not by designers, on what accessibility really means. There's a ton of patterns, from the base ones you'd expect, to more intricate ones
"Just make me more do more damage and enemies less" doesn't really figure anywhere, because it fucks with the design and doesn't really help players with disabilities much.

"Game developers are against easy modes because they don't care about the disabled" is a strawman, one offensive to both game developers and disabled people.

Click to shrink...

This is an absurd post too...
Easy mode and accessibility aren't the same thing, at all...

 

[Aureon]

The point is to make the game easier, not having "perfect" balance.

Click to shrink...

No.
The point of accessibility is to make the game fun, enjoyable, and engaging for a wider range of people.

What you refer as "Perfect" balance is nowhere near as such, it's just what the developers could do with the time and resources they had

 

[Doc Kelso]

Required reading: https://accessible.games/accessible-player-experiences/

It's an incredible resource, albeit made by players and not by designers, on what accessibility really means. There's a ton of patterns, from the base ones you'd expect, to more intricate ones
"Just make me more do more damage and enemies less" doesn't really figure anywhere, because it fucks with the design and doesn't really help players with disabilities much.

"Game developers are against easy modes because they don't care about the disabled" is a strawman, one offensive to both game developers and disabled people.



Can we stop with the incredible armchair game dev here?
This is an absurd post.
Creating and balancing a game is an IMMENSE effort, especially one centered about mastery and not story, and not caring at all about challenge is how we end up with the gen6 soups and why Souls had the incredible impact it had

A game about mastery is guiding a player towards challenges he thought impossible and showing them that they can make it.
It is, narratively and instinctively, one of the most effective driving forces in keeping a player engaged: It can be hard to do that if the player can just wind difficulty down.

Click to shrink...

Thanks for this link. It answers a lot of the questions I've had about difficulty with regards to accessibility. It seems to me--based off of this link--that the accessibility discussion should be less about "difficulty" and more about letting people actually interface with your game. They can be similar but it feels like the two are often conflated in a way that muddies the actual discussion and turns it into sheer moralizing.

The point is to make the game easier, not having "perfect" balance.

Click to shrink...

Difficulty is intrinsically tied to balance and design. At some point we start talking about God Mode being an accessibility option--is that a discussion worth having? I don't know.

 

[Budi]

Required reading: https://accessible.games/accessible-player-experiences/

Click to shrink...

It's indeed a great resource.

Once a player has access, they need to be able to play the game itself through interacting with what we call in general terms the game world, whether this is stacking falling blocks or exploring a distant mountain range. But games are challenging and for some players, those challenges are overwhelming even after they have the perfect access settings. The enemy is too fast or the puzzle is too hard, or the content is too intense. If there is no way to manage the challenge, then players will have to stop playing your game even after all the work you put in ensuring they had access. Players need to be able to adapt the game in a variety of ways to make it so challenges within the game are not unreasonably hard or impossible to overcome. Providing for this diversity in levels of challenge is the second layer of the APX Triangle

Click to shrink...

And here's another excellent site. http://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/offer-a-wide-choice-of-difficulty-levels/

Offering a simple choice of difficulty is a fairly blunt but still good first step in accessibility, allowing some flexibility in the main challenge involved, such as level of AI, speed of enemies or difficulty of puzzles. This can be taken further by offering more detailed options for individual elements of game difficulty.


Allow as wide a choice as possible, at both ends of the scale, and avoid giving demeaning names for lower levels or or mocking players who use them. Bear in mind that difficulty is about allowing people with different levels of ability the same level of experience, even the easiest setting you can possibly implement will present a significant challenge for some.

Click to shrink...

Also I'll throw in an article from Steven Spohn, COO of AbleGamers https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/sekiro-shadows-die-twice-accessiblity-equal-mode/

Argument #6: Accessibility is not difficulty levels

One of the most common arguments is that difficulty levels are not considered accessibility.
Truth is most accessibility can be added easily.

In short, yes. Yes, they are. Difficulty levels have been included in accessibility for as long as advocates have been imploring game studios to include these options. In fact, Includification, which was released by AbleGamers nearly a decade ago, included difficulty levels as one of the top advised options because it helps those with both physical and cognitive disabilities.

Click to shrink...

He references the same site you shared btw.

 

[mugurumakensei]

It seems to me that the best case is to let players tweak a lot of the systems that make a game; iframes, button inputs. The meat of a game. Is this true?

Click to shrink...

ideally, you should be able to tweak I-frames, boss pattern complexity, inputs, Player Character speed and Enemy speed (within reason), puzzle complexity, colorgrading, contrast, filters, audio, and subtitles within a game.

 

[Doc Kelso]

ideally, you should be able to tweak I-frames, boss pattern complexity, inputs, Player Character speed and Enemy speed (within reason), puzzle complexity, colorgrading, contrast, filters, audio, and subtitles within a game.

Click to shrink...

That sounds like a way for the game to completely and utterly fall apart, along with being impossible to test. The fact that game engines outright die when they're running above something like specified framerate leaves me convinced that options that in-depth are an impossible ask.

 

[Kinthey]

An overwhelming majority of games are too easy, i don't see the problem with a few being too hard.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, honestly it's weird that easy modes are so focused on when it's really rare that a game doesn't offer one. There are so many other accessibility features that are constantly ignored in major releases (like how often do people need to beg for a patch to increase the text size?). That there's occasionally a Soulslike game that doesn't offer an easy mode seems kind of trivial, especially when there's at least some game design reasoning behind it, opposed to not including things like colorblind mode, remappable controls etc.

 

[Thera]

No.
The point of accessibility is to make the game fun, enjoyable, and engaging for a wider range of people.

What you refer as "Perfect" balance is nowhere near as such, it's just what the developers could do with the time and resources they had

Click to shrink...

I was talking about easy mode, you are talking about accessibility option.
Once again, not the same thing.

 

[-Tetsuo-]

The point is to make the game easier, not having "perfect" balance.

Click to shrink...

Well clearly Fromsoft and other studios were focused more on the balance aspect and let the easier fall to the wayside.

 

[Swift_Gamer]

I graduated in 3D animation and Digital design for Video Games at University, it's one of the things we learn.

Click to shrink...

Yeah, sure. Maybe you should give bluepoint some tips then.

 

[justiceiro]

Three, you are asking people to donate their time to do something that should just be standard in developing games.

Click to shrink...

Says who?

 

[Deleted member 13101]

It is pretty much guaranteed that I don't have the same experience playing a game as a differently-abled person, whether they have more or less ability than me. It is also proven after decades of me gaming, that I don't have the same experience playing a game on "regular mode" (whatever that is) that I do on "easy mode". (And yes, it takes design and hard work to make effective and distinct difficulty modes happen, this is not in dispute).

However, there are aspects I may enjoy more on easy mode than regular mode too. Plenty of GIF-makers and streamers seem to do so as well. You may have been swayed to play a game based on seeing a game in action on "easy mode", and not realize it.

So not having one of the modes in a game only means less overall enjoyment for me. And maybe the developer didn't intend for my skill level to experience ANY enjoyment on easy mode or regular mode or even hard mode, on account of it being "too easy" for my ability level and all. Oops, I just wrecked the developer's intent by having a good time. Well, shit.

Now on to something more serious:

You know (and I remember this because I was alive years before this became a law in the US) but at one point it was considered entitlement for people to demand that buildings with entry/exit doors higher than ground level have some sort of entrance/exit ramp that was far easier to navigate than stairs, and could accommodate wheeled mobility.

I know, "easy mode" for entering buildings that were designed creatively (or perhaps not so creatively) by people. Not all buildings though, right? But the law was necessary so that people would not have this barrier from engaging with and participate in community life like able-bodied people could.

Community life.

Is gaming not an example of community life? Do people not depend on this kind of community for well-being, health, and perhaps even life-and-death? I can think of several examples off the top of my head, just from Era alone, where this has been very much the case.

Here people are being told to watch other people participate in community life, from their less-able situation, and accept this. This is just one of the implications of making statements like "just accept that some things are too hard for you", even if that wasn't what you meant. This is what people see and hear when these statements are made, because some of these barriers have yet to be lifted. Even barriers that cannot be seen, like the absence of ramps or elevators in a building, or the absence of modifiers or easier modes in games.

PS: for someone who is trying to have even just ONE of the experiences I can have playing a game? Asking for ONE out of, say, 1-2 billion experiences that a game may possibly result in? This is the furthest thing from entitlement.

 

[RedDevil]

Has anyone ever addressed that a seemingly large part of what's driving this kind of difficulty discourse is explicitly tied to a certain level of FOMO?

Like it's usually spikes up a lot when a popular game that is explicitly know for being "difficult" is released and everyone is hyped about it.

Feel like we didn't even see a fraction of this discourse when Nioh 2 released.

Click to shrink...

Pretty much, yeah.

 

[Swift_Gamer]

I find it weird how since demon's souls can turn off motion blur that means it's logically OK for them to upend what they wanted demon's souls or dark souls to be: a grueling slog where you will die repeatedly and a lot of more occasionally players will quit due to the difficulty. Just because a small change is made doesn't mean we should be wanting the identity of the game itself to be changed.

Click to shrink...

How can you say motion blur is not part of the game's identity? Do you have source on that?

 

[mugurumakensei]

That sounds like a way for the game to completely and utterly fall apart, along with being impossible to test. The fact that game engines outright die when they're running above something like specified framerate leaves me convinced that options that in-depth are an impossible ask.

Click to shrink...

Not really aside from the visual ones (and even those PC gamers often do have the option), those options are often baked into lower and higher difficulty options. Not all higher difficulties are bullet/attack sponge hell and more enemies. The better ones do the things asked though often not toggleable on an individual basis, but devs could if they wanted to or had to.

 

[Swift_Gamer]

There is something like dev´s/creators choice and it doesn´t have something to do with gatekeeping.

besides that why is the OP obsessed with having easy modes in every game? the "easy mode is a blessing, every game should have it" thread had a lot of the same arguments that this thread will produce.

reminder:

Easy/Assist mode is a blessing. Every game should have it.

So you're playing the game, it's challenging enough, you die a bit, you make some mistakes and it's ok, that's how games are. And then you get at the boss. You fight the boss, 3, 4, 5, 20, 30 times. You get frustrated, you finally win after 40 tries. Do you feel good about you? Well, I don't...

www.resetera.com

once again: let people have their 5% of hard games, 95% of all games releasing nowadays are too easy anyways because they want to cater to as many people as possible(which is fine but just let people have a few hard games on the market.)

not everything has to be for everyone, it is the same like asking a Death Metal band to maybe have some pop songs on their album because their other songs are too rough.

maybe just accept that some things are too hard for you and other games are too easy for other people, simple as that.

Click to shrink...

Nah, I'd rather call people out on their hypocritical views. It's a legitimate way to expose gatekeeping and change things for the better.

 

[Soundscream]

I mean, the average Halo player is probably not that great at shooters either, by nature of it being a huge mainstream game. That's why Normal is what it is. But if a developer says "*THIS* is the way to play our game," it means most people are going to play on that difficulty, even though they shouldn't.

And I would personally argue someone is far more likely to bounce off of a game if its too difficult rather than too easy. CoD campaigns are easy on Normal too and I don't see people complain about this, they just play on Hardened.

Click to shrink...

If they truly love Halo it's assumed that they would replay the campaign. In doing so eventually turn up the difficulty and see how it affects the combat encounters in a positive way. Because honestly playing Halo on normal is someway it becomes boring.

 

[SapientWolf]

It's gatekeeping. You don't care about that when you change filter that came enabled by default. You don't care about that when you mod games. It's gatekeeping.

Click to shrink...

People can mod a book too, if it's difficult to read. Doesn't mean that being difficult to read is gatekeeping. That's just how the book was written.

 

[Aureon]

It's indeed a great resource.

And here's another excellent site. http://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/offer-a-wide-choice-of-difficulty-levels/

Also I'll throw in an article from Steven Spohn, COO of AbleGamers https://www.digitaltrends.com/gaming/sekiro-shadows-die-twice-accessiblity-equal-mode/

He references the same site you shared btw.

Click to shrink...

Difficulty, as noted, is an immense and tunable spectrum, as i wrote
Of course twitch check bypass lowers difficulty. However, it's hard to do properly while keeping game feel intact and in terms of resources invested

The points i made aren't that difficulty isn't a legitimate accessibility option - heck, i said it is in like three different posts:
It's that it's rarely the lowest hanging fruit, and in a world of very limited resources, that matters
And that difficulty tuning is more about allowing the specialty needs player normal gameflow than tweaking stats.

 

[Timu]

1. People mod games - the same people that champion developer's creation are eager to mod games. So if developer's vision was really that important, nobody would mod games because it disrupts the game intended way of playing

2. People disable filters like filme grain, motion blur and Chromatic aberration that are enabled by default and used in promo for the games - it's pretty clear that people working on the visual part of the game want you to play with these filters on and a lot of people dislike them and turn them off, hence, throwing developer's vision in the trash can. Again, same people championing creator's vision.

Click to shrink...

1. When it comes to modding games, that's usually entirely optional and in some cases not only helps and fixes games but some games just can't run properly on modern PCs without mods. The 1st 3 3D GTA games(GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas) not only need mods to make them playable due to how badly they are ported without them but the devs also removed graphical features from the console versions when porting them to PC. The fact that people had to mod the graphical features back into the PC versions of the games goes to show how it is when they get ported. GTA San Andreas was capped at 25 FPS on PC for some odd reason and a mod had to remove that.

Games like Red Faction 1 I read needs a mod to even run properly on modern PCs. Mods can also extend the life of a game as well and make things that weren't even possible happen. I am all for the developer's vision and will play games as intended, but sometimes mods can fix things that the devs didn't fix to provide a better experience for the user and adds more creativity to a game too. Some mods can make games even easier(or harder) which would be helpful in various cases thus more accessibility. Best of all, mods usually make games more fun and unique to play.

2. This is more of a personal and optional thing. Film grain and chromatic aberration can even ruin the looks of some games and I usually have them off. Chromatic aberration is so overdone most of the time that I don't want it on, rarely do I accept it. To me it should be more of an effect in certain cases rather than plastering the entire screen with it. Remember bloom in gens 6 and 7 and how people wanted to turn it down or off because it was overdone in many cases? Yeah it's like that. Turning off motion blur can even improve the performance on PC games and I value framerate over graphics so I usually have that off.

This is kind of comparable to graphics settings for PC games(and some console games). The intended graphics settings are probably usually max settings but I normally go for high and medium to boost the framerate more plus I still don't care about graphics as much as framerate. Looks are subjective and while there are people who would have the default look with film grain and chromatic aberration on, others like me usually have them off to fit what they want out of a game to look the best it can in their eyes. Not everyone is going to like the same settings as well and good thing we have options for that.

 

[pleaseinsertdisctwo]

The Souls community, and by extension the director, is beyond obnoxious. I'd love to play Sekiro but apparently you have to love spending hours dying over and over again.

 

[Swift_Gamer]

Does it matter if a fellow era user that didn't develop the game use it as an "excuse"? It's all on the developer to make an easy mode or not.

I don't understand the logic of criticizing players of the game that has no part in the development, regardless of their opinions.

From Software doesn't put easy mode in the Souls games because the devs doesn't feel like the games were designed for it, "git gud" players aren't pointing a gun at Miyazaki or anything.

Excuse or not, this argument makes sense and if there's gatekeeping, the game designers are creating it, not the players. Which means, using the "creator's vision" is not even false in this case.

Click to shrink...

Yes it does. Because it's an excuse thrown to clearly silence people that are annoyed the game doesn't have an easy mode. So, yeah, until people admit they're actually gatekeeping and want to feel good about beating a game some people can't, they should be called out.
Using creator's vision is not a good excuse when people don't really care about it like proven over and over.

 

[Swift_Gamer]

1. When it comes to modding games, that's usually entirely optional and in some cases not only helps and fixes games but some games just can't run properly on modern PCs without mods. The 1st 3 3D GTA games(GTA 3, Vice City and San Andreas) not only need mods to make them playable due to how badly they are ported without them but the devs also removed graphical features from the console versions when porting them to PC. The fact that people had to mod the graphical features back into the PC versions of the games goes to show how it is when they get ported. GTA San Andreas was capped at 25 FPS on PC for some odd reason and a mod had to remove that.

Games like Red Faction 1 I read needs a mod to even run properly on modern PCs. Mods can also extend the life of a game as well and make things that weren't even possible happen. I am all for the developer's vision and will play games as intended, but sometimes mods can fix things that the devs didn't fix to provide a better experience for the user and adds more creativity to a game too. Some mods can make games even easier(or harder) which would be helpful in various cases thus more accessibility. Best of all, mods usually make games more fun and unique to play.

2. This is more of a personal and optional thing. Film grain and chromatic aberration can even ruin the looks of some games and I usually have them off. Chromatic aberration is so overdone most of the time that I don't want it on, rarely do I accept it. To me it should be more of an effect in certain cases rather than plastering the entire screen with it. Remember bloom in gens 6 and 7 and how people wanted to turn it down or off because it was overdone in many cases? Yeah it's like that. Turning off motion blur can even improve the performance on PC games and I value framerate over graphics so I usually have that off.

This is kind of comparable to graphics settings for PC games(and some console games). The intended graphics settings are probably usually max settings but I normally go for high and medium to boost the framerate more plus I still don't care about graphics as much as framerate. Looks are subjective and while there are people who would have the default look with film grain and chromatic aberration on, others like me usually have them off to fit what they want out of a game to look the best it can in their eyes. Not everyone is going to like the same settings as well and good thing we have options for that.

Click to shrink...

Chosing to play on easy mode is also optional. I played Celeste on hard cause I wanted to.

 

[Timu]

Chosing to play on easy mode is also optional. I played Celeste on hard cause I wanted to.

Click to shrink...

Yes, and that is fine. If the option for easy is there then you can choose it. Same with normal and hard.

 

[RadzPrower]

The Souls community, and by extension the director, is beyond obnoxious. I'd love to play Sekiro but apparently you have to love spending hours dying over and over again.

Click to shrink...

Apparently, you wouldn't love to play Sekiro after all as that is the game.

 

[Dogui]

Yes it does. Because it's an excuse thrown to clearly silence people that are annoyed the game doesn't have an easy mode. So, yeah, until people admit they're actually gatekeeping and want to feel good about beating a game some people can't, they should be called out.
Using creator's vision is not a good excuse when people don't really care about it like proven over and over.

Click to shrink...

You can say people agree with the gatekeeping. They aren't actually gatekeeping it if they doesn't take part in the game's development.

 

[Acquiesc3]

"Gatekeeping" is such an annoying term to use here. Technically 99.9% of all media is gating disabled players. It's borderline disingenuous to use in this context.

 

[Morrigan]

it takes 30 seconds to add basic difficulty modes and i don't wanna hear that BS about how it makes game balance harder. literally just do a toggle that makes me take less damage and deal more. design around "hard" as the default, that's totally fine, but this is a basic accessibility option that in no way diminishes your enjoyment of the game

Click to shrink...

This is very ignorant of how game design and game development works. Saying "it takes 30 seconds" is frankly insulting. As a dev I hate when others tell me how much time I need to work on something, you know?

- First, if it were that simple to add such an easy mode, you'd see this a lot more. Notice how devs don't actually often use this suggestion, though, for all sorts of reasons which I'll get into later.
- Second, a "take less/deal more damage" is not a modifier that may even apply to your game. Lots of puzzle, platformers, etc. don't even have a concept of "damage", let alone in numbers.
- Third, this approach ignores how even games with damage numbers in it, can be difficult in other ways. The most notoriously difficult encounters in Dark Souls, for example, don't involve damage, but falls (Anor Londo archers, Bed of Chaos boss fight). The most notoriously daunting area of Demon's Souls is because of its lack of visibility and how easy it is to get lost in it (Valley of Defilement, 5-2 swamp level). Some boss fights are simply puzzles that you need to figure out, and having all the damage boosts/invincibility modes in the world wouldn't help you, such as the Soul Reaver boss fights like Melchiah or Zephon.
- Fourth, game balance is a factor. "Take less/deal more" damage is vague advice that doesn't solve much. How much less/more? This isn't trivial to answer. Half/double? Third/triple? 25%? etc. And what if the game is still too hard for some players? What if, for some players, it's now way too easy and the game becomes boring, but the regular mode is much too hard? You now have a badly designed game that leaves tons of players unsatisfied.
- Which leads me to the final point: fine-tuning a difficulty setting is not a trivial task. Even many high-budget, AAA games fail to do it well. In fact, merely bumping/lowering damage values is often criticized as being a very poor way to tweak difficulty settings, because it can turn enemies into meaningless fodder (making the game boring) or alternatively, damage sponges (making the game tedious). Even the simple act of tweaking numbers requires re-testing the entire game to make sure the game is still balanced. Because devs who do want to offer an easier mode, don't want to offer a bad easy mode.

To summarize: there's no inherently easy way to build easy modes, and there isn't a one-size-fits-all solution becomes challenges come in multiple forms. It's up to the devs to decide how much time and resources they want to spend in how far they want to go, whether it's damage tweaks, parry windows, altering the animations, removing fall damage/deaths, puzzle solution prompts, including map/map marker toggles or not, etc. The more of those you add, and the larger the scale of those options, the more dev work and testing you need to do.

Required reading: https://accessible.games/accessible-player-experiences/

It's an incredible resource, albeit made by players and not by designers, on what accessibility really means. There's a ton of patterns, from the base ones you'd expect, to more intricate ones
"Just make me more do more damage and enemies less" doesn't really figure anywhere, because it fucks with the design and doesn't really help players with disabilities much.

"Game developers are against easy modes because they don't care about the disabled" is a strawman, one offensive to both game developers and disabled people.



Can we stop with the incredible armchair game dev here?
This is an absurd post.
Creating and balancing a game is an IMMENSE effort, especially one centered about mastery and not story, and not caring at all about challenge is how we end up with the gen6 soups and why Souls had the incredible impact it had

A game about mastery is guiding a player towards challenges he thought impossible and showing them that they can make it.
It is, narratively and instinctively, one of the most effective driving forces in keeping a player engaged: It can be hard to do that if the player can just wind difficulty down.

Click to shrink...

Great post!

(And yes, it takes design and hard work to make effective and distinct difficulty modes happen, this is not in dispute).

Click to shrink...

People have, in fact, repeatedly tried to dispute this in the thread. Unfortunately.

 

[Dolce]

I'd say the biggest barrier to accessibility in games comes from the massive amount of effort, limited amount of time and massive crunch that goes into game development. Something has to be cut, and generally that ends up being any focus on accessibility.

With that said, the goal of accessibility is important, but it will never be 100%. Game design just doesn't work for everyone at times. And the more complicated a game gets, the more intricate those aspects become.

 

[pleaseinsertdisctwo]

Apparently, you wouldn't love to play Sekiro after all as that is the game.

Click to shrink...

I see this from the Souls community all the time and this is honestly sad.

That's why you guys love the game?

Dying over and over?

Nothing else matters? The exploration, the setting, the level design, the visuals, the music, the lore, the story (for Sekiro), the atmosphere, the feel of the combat, etc... none of that matters? It's just the masochism of the design that matters? I have to laugh.

 

[PAFenix]

You can say people agree with the gatekeeping. They aren't actually gatekeeping it if they doesn't take part in the game's development.

Click to shrink...

When my daughter entered kindergarten she wore a Pokemon shirt. A boy approached her and said "Pokemon is for boys." That boy had nothing to do with the development of Pokemon and was gatekeeping.