We've probably all seen the easy mode discourse recently, especially around Sekiro and other From Software games. That discourse included debates about disability, difficulty, game design, elitism, and more.
I think it's fair to say that the subject is complicated and nuanced, and especially that dismissal of accessibility and how it influences the gameplay experience is a reductive and wrong way to look at games.
I want to preface this by saying that none of what is about to follow is an argument against accessibility options in games. A developer choosing to make an accessible game is never a decision to criticize. It might alter the game in ways, and I'm about to make the case that some of these ways might be to the detriment of what the game might be trying to convey, but that's still always a valid and worthwhile way to design a game. In short, I have nothing against Celeste's Assist Mode.
I am just trying to make the case that the opposite is also a potentially valid way to design a game. A game deliberately refusing to accommodate the needs and wants of the player can make for good storytelling. However, this is a difficult creative decision and precisely because it plays on the notions of accessibility, such a game needs to be approached with care. Therefore, I'm not making the argument that inaccessible games are beyond criticism- but I'm saying that the game needs to justify such a decision.
I actually don't feel this is fully conclusive -in the sense that perhaps universal accessibility is more important to have than experiences like these- but I think this side of the discussion is worth having from a game design perspective and a part of the discussion that mattered to me but seemed lost and ignored in the larger discussion.
P.S. In what follows, "inaccessible" stands for "inaccessible for some people with disabilities", but it can also be more generally understood as needing higher physical proficiency (reaction time etc.) to play.
---
Games are perhaps the first truly interactive medium of storytelling in human history. Stuff like choose-your-own-adventure books simulate(d) interactivity to a degree, but at the end of the day a book can't keep you from leafing through the pages and finding an ending you like to read. Interactivity in games goes a step beyond such freedom, which comes down to being the freedom to rearrange the order of what you're seeing, and not much more than that. (After all, you probably won't stop reading a CYOA book after your first run, the entire idea is trying different things and seeing how the outcome changes. Perhaps more to the point, there's almost nothing you can permanently (or to any degree, irreversibly) change in such a book. I think games differ.)
Games can keep things from you, or take things from you, and this gives games a whole new set of tools to convey stories in ways previously impossible. I think that a lot of discussion around interactive storytelling or stories that can "only be told in a game" come around to being a consequence of this idea: We want our choices in games, our agency, to carry weight, and that's only possible if there is something actually at stake.
Many acclaimed games and series directly exploit this idea for their gameplay mechanics: In modern Persona, how you choose to spend every day matters precisely because you can't feasibly do everything before the game ends. Yoko Taro's work also plays a lot with this idea in many ways, but the most illustrative of them are spoilers, so you'll have to take me at my word if you've not played his games. Some visual novels also dabble in this idea by, say, locking or hiding certain choices/branches until you reach certain points in the story. Puzzles and hidden collectibles are similar, although they're somewhat easier to replicate with an analog medium (say, a book).
There are also more complex ways in which games can influence your interaction with them: Games can modify not just which parts of the game you get to see, but also how you get to interact with the game. As you might imagine, this is where things like difficulty modes come in. One might say difficult games parallel, stylistically, literature that uses lofty language, but in games difficulty is more direct and profound than that; difficulty obstructs progress and unlike a difficult book, when it comes to a difficult game, the game decides when you can progress. This is just another example of the game keeping something (namely, the rest of/part of the game) from you, and it exerts incredible influence on many elements of a game (from progression mechanics, to combat design, to story). It's a new creative avenue to explore, and I'll come back to this later.
Easy and hard options in a game that offers both have relatively predictable effects: On an easy mode, it's easier (perhaps!) to focus on story, it is more accessible on account of demanding less skill from the player, quicker to beat for people who have less time to play a game. A harder mode (at least in a well-designed game), on the other hand, offers a deeper experience, where mastery of mechanics and skills the game demands of you (which often entails some level of physical proficiency- but not always, in Hexcells for example) can lead to a more intense and rewarding time with the game.
By and large, the vast majority of games benefit from both options. This is sometimes simply due to the fact that difficulty in gameplay doesn't factor into the story (e.g. in Final Fantasy X), and sometimes it's because of design flaws (like how SOMA's enemy encounters felt clunky and so the no-enemy mode offered a less frustrating and thus more engaging way to play the story, even though you lose a lot of horror elements from the enemies being gone). Frankly, it's also true that most games out there strive to be entertainment rather than a deeply introspective work of art, so for a lot of games, most individual components of the game are non-essential. Hence why rhythm and shoot 'em up games benefit so heavily from multiple difficulty options; difficulty plays into the designs of those games as something to overcome and not much more than that.
However, I don't believe this is the case for every game. Specifically, I believe that the first Dark Souls justifies its inaccessibility as a game, and very few other games do (if any). I wanted to keep this post as free of From Software comparisons as possible, but DS1 is the only game that I can think of which truly manages to justify its inaccessible nature, and the one game that I think would be fundamentally different for having (especially non-diegetic) easier difficulty options. (And to reiterate, since that makes the game more accessible, it's still not an overall bad change. Just different.)
Like with any other attribute in any other medium, the existence of difficulty options changes the context in which a game is portrayed: Conversely, so does the absence of difficulty options. A hard difficulty in a game with difficulty options is a choice- even if Hard mode is the "recommended way to play", ultimately the game gives you leeway to experience the game as you wish. (This is, to me, part of why Wolfenstein The New Order's difficulty options having patronizing names is nonsensical; by including them the game sends the opposite message. A bigger part is that they really don't need to treat people who might need/want easier difficulty options as children.) A game without difficulty options, on the other hand, is explicitly unwelcoming. The game is telling you, before you even start the game proper, that it is unwilling to accommodate your wishes and that you might have to struggle.
If you can drop down the difficulty, continuing to play through the game in its difficult state is something you subject yourself to. It carries no further significance than that. However, if the game itself is forcing you to play on a hard difficulty, then struggling within the game is part of the game's message. If this is not supported by anything else in the game, however, difficulty only becomes significant as a challenge. That, I believe, is why we get charges of elitism thrown around all the time (especially at anyone in the Souls community who's fine with the singular difficulty option): If you believe difficulty is only in there as a barrier for skill, it's easy to see people who don't want to lower that barrier as elitist.
However, difficulty can serve a bigger purpose than a skill barrier, and therefore a difficult game refusing to accommodate a player's wishes or needs (wrt. difficulty) can create a unique thematic experience.
This is hard to generally describe, so I'll describe how DS1 does it:
Dark Souls 1 beats you down from the get go. You're locked in an asylum and you're undead. The narration lies to you as you fly to Lordran, and the lie is revealed mere moments later when you talk to the Crestfallen Knight at the Firelink Shrine: It turns out you weren't some special 'chosen one' at all, and there are two bells of awakening, not one, like you were told. Perhaps most importantly, the world is infested by Hollows; if you give up your quest, you truly risk becoming one as well.
The last bit is crucial- it is the artery that connects the narrative/storytelling of Dark Souls to the physical difficulty the player is facing. The game is not difficult because you're an 'experienced player of action role playing games willing to engage deeply with the mechanics' or whatever- the game is difficult to play because within the game, you're in a difficult situation, all alone, and you are close to giving up on everything. You didn't choose to be here, but if you want to persist in your existence, you have to struggle.
Therein lies the genius- it is often we see that a story and a setting is designed around gameplay. Take any CoD game with a barely -if at all- coherent story because everyone's there for the shootybang (and arguably some are also there for rampant glorification of American imperialism but I digress). Dark Souls subverts this, and designs the experience around the world. How you are able to approach the game is dictated by your circumstances in the in-game world. The game takes away your ability to have an experience closely according to your wishes (or even needs), because in Lordran, the Chosen Undead has no power, and he/she is trapped.
Giving the player the agency to mold the experience into their liking gives them power. Hitting an obstacle because you're putting your own self through a challenge doesn't have the same impact or the same context as hitting an obstacle you cannot bypass (regardless of choice) but have to overcome.
(There's a temptation hee to draw a parallel to a horror game without a mode to get rid of monsters. While this parallel works to some extent -there, the difficulty isn't conveyed through mechanical mastery but rather actual fear of moving onward- it doesn't fully convey the experience, because you can remedy the tension/reach safety pretty much by closing the game and not opening it again. What's at stake in Dark Souls isn't something you can find in the real world like (relative) safety; it's simply getting to see the rest of the game. That provides another difference.)
Dark Souls uses its lore, themes and game mechanics to build a mindset of struggle. That's why bonfires are significant, that's why levels are designed around shortcuts, and that's why the game is not letting a high level of difficulty just be a choice. Dying again and again, losing progress, having to adapt to the game's unfriendliness- all of it plays into the idea that you're in a bad place and you don't want to be. It's like a meta kind of horror/tension, conveyed through gameplay mechanics, chiefly difficulty. (Conversely, if travel wasn't so time-consuming and risky, getting to Firelink wouldn't feel half as peaceful and reassuring to me.)
We've all heard enough about how Dark Souls' mechanics tie excellently into the difficulty of the combat system, I'm sure, so I'll leave it here.
By refusing the player the right to have a choice (and by all means, such choice should by and large be standard in the medium), Dark Souls creates subtle but strong constraints around the experience. It's designed to pull the rug from under you. The game keeps your rights from you, and that's why it's so effective at building the mindset and mood it wants you to have, in my eyes. Not giving up in spite of the unfairness of the game is part and parcel with the main story.
This is also why difficulty in Dark Souls is not about "a sense of pride and accomplishment", or anything of the sort. That element IS there, of course, but perhaps in direct opposition to most other difficult games, Dark Souls' difficulty is there for the frustration and fatigue it creates first, and for the elation overcoming it brings second.
--
That concludes my main argument, but there's some more stuff I want to address:
1. Cheats let you steamroll the game anyway, so why bother not having a completely easy mode in the game?
I think there's a difference between a game played with and without game-breaking cheats. That's not to go all "you cheated yourself" on you- if you want to blaze through Dark Souls, sure, do your thing! But expecting all developers to provide a dissected, sanitized version of all their creations just so that everyone who wants to have a gander at a piece of a carefully constructed whole is unreasonable, and in my eyes, a touch disrespectful. If Dark Souls 4 came out tomorrow with a debug mode or whatever, I wouldn't really bat an eye, but it's not something to criticize a game for not having. This is the one place where I'd invoke the "creative freedom" argument.
Including game-breaking modes is perfectly fine, but if they had to be included, we wouldn't have experiences like Dark Souls 1 where the lack of choice in direct selection of difficulty matters to the game.
2. Bloodborne, DS2/DS3, Sekiro
I don't think any of these games use their decision to be inaccessible to any comparable level of competence or significance as DS1. I'm partial to Bloodborne -difficult bosses serve the theme of the hunt and the terrifying nature of later creatures you find, and the whole horror angle- but with DS2, DS3 and Sekiro, I don't see anything that'd be thematically lost if they were the normal/hard mode of a game with difficulty options. So yeah, I do think Sekiro would be better off with an easy mode- the game does nothing else with the lack of difficulty choice. If anything, as the badass servant to a liege, it makes perfect sense that the Wolf would steamroll almost any boss in that game. Idols, XP/gold system etc. all carry very well to a more superficial treatment of difficulty (being there as a skill threshold) that loses nothing by being in a difficulty option.
These games don't do enough, generally speaking, to justify being inaccessible.
3. Still inaccessible.
I will reiterate what I said at the beginning: I don't have the full answers to this debate. But I wanted to refute one particular point that came up in the Sekiro discussions again and again, that adding difficulty options changes nothing about the game. This post is a counterargument to that statement: I argued that it CAN change things, in select circumstances, if the game is designed around being as unwelcoming as possible- and that not giving difficulty options can be a valid narrative device for a game.
If people think having such narratives is less important than ensuring that everyone can play Dark Souls 1 one way or another, I have no counter or repose to that. I don't see that as a position to stand against.
4. What about the fact that difficulty is subjective? Why not have such modes so that everyone can gear the game to be hard for themselves?
I'll admit that there's a weak point in my reasoning here. There's no way to simultaneously ensure that a game like Dark Souls can convey the essence of being trapped and helpless through the lack of difficulty options, while ensuring that everyone feels an appropriate level of difficulty the developers intended everyone to experience. Perhaps this is simply an area in which Dark Souls' usage of game mechanics falters somewhat, and someone will be able to take the same ideas (unwelcoming through options provided by the game, a game taking things away from you) and establish them in a different manner of difficulty than combat (or another gameplay mechanic requiring physical fidelity), so that being inclusive of all people with disabilities doesn't even have to be a debate at all (and can be a foregone conclusion).
If the game had widely advertised easy modes, a lot of people would deliberately not play the game on the intended difficulty, and so that aspect of the game (that it's something you're forced into) would be lost, especially because if a game does have difficulty levels, people who play on the easy/easier difficulties are no less valid members of the community and the 'difficulty' that would've been otherwise much more attached to the perception of the game is lost.
5. What about summoning and other ways (e.g. Drake Sword) to make Dark Souls easy? Doesn't that undermine your point about the game refusing to compromise on being easy?
I think part of what makes Dark Souls work is that it pushes you to find handholds and footholds to push yourself forward, precisely by being so unyielding in its rules. I think such diegetic means of regulating the difficulty (that is to say, adjusting difficulty by using things within the game world) of the game provide a good compromise between creating a mechanically hostile world and still ensuring people have means to get through the games. I especially love the idea that in an unwelcoming, hostile world and game, the only way to make the game significantly easy that is clearly communicated to the player is to ask for help.
Also, if that provided the measures everyone wanted to make the game actually easy, the controversy wouldn't exist in the first place, so clearly they're not enough of an easy mode.
---
Well, I think that's all I wanted to say.
I think it's fair to say that the subject is complicated and nuanced, and especially that dismissal of accessibility and how it influences the gameplay experience is a reductive and wrong way to look at games.
I want to preface this by saying that none of what is about to follow is an argument against accessibility options in games. A developer choosing to make an accessible game is never a decision to criticize. It might alter the game in ways, and I'm about to make the case that some of these ways might be to the detriment of what the game might be trying to convey, but that's still always a valid and worthwhile way to design a game. In short, I have nothing against Celeste's Assist Mode.
I am just trying to make the case that the opposite is also a potentially valid way to design a game. A game deliberately refusing to accommodate the needs and wants of the player can make for good storytelling. However, this is a difficult creative decision and precisely because it plays on the notions of accessibility, such a game needs to be approached with care. Therefore, I'm not making the argument that inaccessible games are beyond criticism- but I'm saying that the game needs to justify such a decision.
I actually don't feel this is fully conclusive -in the sense that perhaps universal accessibility is more important to have than experiences like these- but I think this side of the discussion is worth having from a game design perspective and a part of the discussion that mattered to me but seemed lost and ignored in the larger discussion.
P.S. In what follows, "inaccessible" stands for "inaccessible for some people with disabilities", but it can also be more generally understood as needing higher physical proficiency (reaction time etc.) to play.
---
Games are perhaps the first truly interactive medium of storytelling in human history. Stuff like choose-your-own-adventure books simulate(d) interactivity to a degree, but at the end of the day a book can't keep you from leafing through the pages and finding an ending you like to read. Interactivity in games goes a step beyond such freedom, which comes down to being the freedom to rearrange the order of what you're seeing, and not much more than that. (After all, you probably won't stop reading a CYOA book after your first run, the entire idea is trying different things and seeing how the outcome changes. Perhaps more to the point, there's almost nothing you can permanently (or to any degree, irreversibly) change in such a book. I think games differ.)
Games can keep things from you, or take things from you, and this gives games a whole new set of tools to convey stories in ways previously impossible. I think that a lot of discussion around interactive storytelling or stories that can "only be told in a game" come around to being a consequence of this idea: We want our choices in games, our agency, to carry weight, and that's only possible if there is something actually at stake.
Many acclaimed games and series directly exploit this idea for their gameplay mechanics: In modern Persona, how you choose to spend every day matters precisely because you can't feasibly do everything before the game ends. Yoko Taro's work also plays a lot with this idea in many ways, but the most illustrative of them are spoilers, so you'll have to take me at my word if you've not played his games. Some visual novels also dabble in this idea by, say, locking or hiding certain choices/branches until you reach certain points in the story. Puzzles and hidden collectibles are similar, although they're somewhat easier to replicate with an analog medium (say, a book).
There are also more complex ways in which games can influence your interaction with them: Games can modify not just which parts of the game you get to see, but also how you get to interact with the game. As you might imagine, this is where things like difficulty modes come in. One might say difficult games parallel, stylistically, literature that uses lofty language, but in games difficulty is more direct and profound than that; difficulty obstructs progress and unlike a difficult book, when it comes to a difficult game, the game decides when you can progress. This is just another example of the game keeping something (namely, the rest of/part of the game) from you, and it exerts incredible influence on many elements of a game (from progression mechanics, to combat design, to story). It's a new creative avenue to explore, and I'll come back to this later.
Easy and hard options in a game that offers both have relatively predictable effects: On an easy mode, it's easier (perhaps!) to focus on story, it is more accessible on account of demanding less skill from the player, quicker to beat for people who have less time to play a game. A harder mode (at least in a well-designed game), on the other hand, offers a deeper experience, where mastery of mechanics and skills the game demands of you (which often entails some level of physical proficiency- but not always, in Hexcells for example) can lead to a more intense and rewarding time with the game.
By and large, the vast majority of games benefit from both options. This is sometimes simply due to the fact that difficulty in gameplay doesn't factor into the story (e.g. in Final Fantasy X), and sometimes it's because of design flaws (like how SOMA's enemy encounters felt clunky and so the no-enemy mode offered a less frustrating and thus more engaging way to play the story, even though you lose a lot of horror elements from the enemies being gone). Frankly, it's also true that most games out there strive to be entertainment rather than a deeply introspective work of art, so for a lot of games, most individual components of the game are non-essential. Hence why rhythm and shoot 'em up games benefit so heavily from multiple difficulty options; difficulty plays into the designs of those games as something to overcome and not much more than that.
However, I don't believe this is the case for every game. Specifically, I believe that the first Dark Souls justifies its inaccessibility as a game, and very few other games do (if any). I wanted to keep this post as free of From Software comparisons as possible, but DS1 is the only game that I can think of which truly manages to justify its inaccessible nature, and the one game that I think would be fundamentally different for having (especially non-diegetic) easier difficulty options. (And to reiterate, since that makes the game more accessible, it's still not an overall bad change. Just different.)
Like with any other attribute in any other medium, the existence of difficulty options changes the context in which a game is portrayed: Conversely, so does the absence of difficulty options. A hard difficulty in a game with difficulty options is a choice- even if Hard mode is the "recommended way to play", ultimately the game gives you leeway to experience the game as you wish. (This is, to me, part of why Wolfenstein The New Order's difficulty options having patronizing names is nonsensical; by including them the game sends the opposite message. A bigger part is that they really don't need to treat people who might need/want easier difficulty options as children.) A game without difficulty options, on the other hand, is explicitly unwelcoming. The game is telling you, before you even start the game proper, that it is unwilling to accommodate your wishes and that you might have to struggle.
If you can drop down the difficulty, continuing to play through the game in its difficult state is something you subject yourself to. It carries no further significance than that. However, if the game itself is forcing you to play on a hard difficulty, then struggling within the game is part of the game's message. If this is not supported by anything else in the game, however, difficulty only becomes significant as a challenge. That, I believe, is why we get charges of elitism thrown around all the time (especially at anyone in the Souls community who's fine with the singular difficulty option): If you believe difficulty is only in there as a barrier for skill, it's easy to see people who don't want to lower that barrier as elitist.
However, difficulty can serve a bigger purpose than a skill barrier, and therefore a difficult game refusing to accommodate a player's wishes or needs (wrt. difficulty) can create a unique thematic experience.
This is hard to generally describe, so I'll describe how DS1 does it:
Dark Souls 1 beats you down from the get go. You're locked in an asylum and you're undead. The narration lies to you as you fly to Lordran, and the lie is revealed mere moments later when you talk to the Crestfallen Knight at the Firelink Shrine: It turns out you weren't some special 'chosen one' at all, and there are two bells of awakening, not one, like you were told. Perhaps most importantly, the world is infested by Hollows; if you give up your quest, you truly risk becoming one as well.
The last bit is crucial- it is the artery that connects the narrative/storytelling of Dark Souls to the physical difficulty the player is facing. The game is not difficult because you're an 'experienced player of action role playing games willing to engage deeply with the mechanics' or whatever- the game is difficult to play because within the game, you're in a difficult situation, all alone, and you are close to giving up on everything. You didn't choose to be here, but if you want to persist in your existence, you have to struggle.
Therein lies the genius- it is often we see that a story and a setting is designed around gameplay. Take any CoD game with a barely -if at all- coherent story because everyone's there for the shootybang (and arguably some are also there for rampant glorification of American imperialism but I digress). Dark Souls subverts this, and designs the experience around the world. How you are able to approach the game is dictated by your circumstances in the in-game world. The game takes away your ability to have an experience closely according to your wishes (or even needs), because in Lordran, the Chosen Undead has no power, and he/she is trapped.
Giving the player the agency to mold the experience into their liking gives them power. Hitting an obstacle because you're putting your own self through a challenge doesn't have the same impact or the same context as hitting an obstacle you cannot bypass (regardless of choice) but have to overcome.
(There's a temptation hee to draw a parallel to a horror game without a mode to get rid of monsters. While this parallel works to some extent -there, the difficulty isn't conveyed through mechanical mastery but rather actual fear of moving onward- it doesn't fully convey the experience, because you can remedy the tension/reach safety pretty much by closing the game and not opening it again. What's at stake in Dark Souls isn't something you can find in the real world like (relative) safety; it's simply getting to see the rest of the game. That provides another difference.)
Dark Souls uses its lore, themes and game mechanics to build a mindset of struggle. That's why bonfires are significant, that's why levels are designed around shortcuts, and that's why the game is not letting a high level of difficulty just be a choice. Dying again and again, losing progress, having to adapt to the game's unfriendliness- all of it plays into the idea that you're in a bad place and you don't want to be. It's like a meta kind of horror/tension, conveyed through gameplay mechanics, chiefly difficulty. (Conversely, if travel wasn't so time-consuming and risky, getting to Firelink wouldn't feel half as peaceful and reassuring to me.)
We've all heard enough about how Dark Souls' mechanics tie excellently into the difficulty of the combat system, I'm sure, so I'll leave it here.
By refusing the player the right to have a choice (and by all means, such choice should by and large be standard in the medium), Dark Souls creates subtle but strong constraints around the experience. It's designed to pull the rug from under you. The game keeps your rights from you, and that's why it's so effective at building the mindset and mood it wants you to have, in my eyes. Not giving up in spite of the unfairness of the game is part and parcel with the main story.
This is also why difficulty in Dark Souls is not about "a sense of pride and accomplishment", or anything of the sort. That element IS there, of course, but perhaps in direct opposition to most other difficult games, Dark Souls' difficulty is there for the frustration and fatigue it creates first, and for the elation overcoming it brings second.
--
That concludes my main argument, but there's some more stuff I want to address:
1. Cheats let you steamroll the game anyway, so why bother not having a completely easy mode in the game?
I think there's a difference between a game played with and without game-breaking cheats. That's not to go all "you cheated yourself" on you- if you want to blaze through Dark Souls, sure, do your thing! But expecting all developers to provide a dissected, sanitized version of all their creations just so that everyone who wants to have a gander at a piece of a carefully constructed whole is unreasonable, and in my eyes, a touch disrespectful. If Dark Souls 4 came out tomorrow with a debug mode or whatever, I wouldn't really bat an eye, but it's not something to criticize a game for not having. This is the one place where I'd invoke the "creative freedom" argument.
Including game-breaking modes is perfectly fine, but if they had to be included, we wouldn't have experiences like Dark Souls 1 where the lack of choice in direct selection of difficulty matters to the game.
2. Bloodborne, DS2/DS3, Sekiro
I don't think any of these games use their decision to be inaccessible to any comparable level of competence or significance as DS1. I'm partial to Bloodborne -difficult bosses serve the theme of the hunt and the terrifying nature of later creatures you find, and the whole horror angle- but with DS2, DS3 and Sekiro, I don't see anything that'd be thematically lost if they were the normal/hard mode of a game with difficulty options. So yeah, I do think Sekiro would be better off with an easy mode- the game does nothing else with the lack of difficulty choice. If anything, as the badass servant to a liege, it makes perfect sense that the Wolf would steamroll almost any boss in that game. Idols, XP/gold system etc. all carry very well to a more superficial treatment of difficulty (being there as a skill threshold) that loses nothing by being in a difficulty option.
These games don't do enough, generally speaking, to justify being inaccessible.
3. Still inaccessible.
I will reiterate what I said at the beginning: I don't have the full answers to this debate. But I wanted to refute one particular point that came up in the Sekiro discussions again and again, that adding difficulty options changes nothing about the game. This post is a counterargument to that statement: I argued that it CAN change things, in select circumstances, if the game is designed around being as unwelcoming as possible- and that not giving difficulty options can be a valid narrative device for a game.
If people think having such narratives is less important than ensuring that everyone can play Dark Souls 1 one way or another, I have no counter or repose to that. I don't see that as a position to stand against.
4. What about the fact that difficulty is subjective? Why not have such modes so that everyone can gear the game to be hard for themselves?
I'll admit that there's a weak point in my reasoning here. There's no way to simultaneously ensure that a game like Dark Souls can convey the essence of being trapped and helpless through the lack of difficulty options, while ensuring that everyone feels an appropriate level of difficulty the developers intended everyone to experience. Perhaps this is simply an area in which Dark Souls' usage of game mechanics falters somewhat, and someone will be able to take the same ideas (unwelcoming through options provided by the game, a game taking things away from you) and establish them in a different manner of difficulty than combat (or another gameplay mechanic requiring physical fidelity), so that being inclusive of all people with disabilities doesn't even have to be a debate at all (and can be a foregone conclusion).
If the game had widely advertised easy modes, a lot of people would deliberately not play the game on the intended difficulty, and so that aspect of the game (that it's something you're forced into) would be lost, especially because if a game does have difficulty levels, people who play on the easy/easier difficulties are no less valid members of the community and the 'difficulty' that would've been otherwise much more attached to the perception of the game is lost.
5. What about summoning and other ways (e.g. Drake Sword) to make Dark Souls easy? Doesn't that undermine your point about the game refusing to compromise on being easy?
I think part of what makes Dark Souls work is that it pushes you to find handholds and footholds to push yourself forward, precisely by being so unyielding in its rules. I think such diegetic means of regulating the difficulty (that is to say, adjusting difficulty by using things within the game world) of the game provide a good compromise between creating a mechanically hostile world and still ensuring people have means to get through the games. I especially love the idea that in an unwelcoming, hostile world and game, the only way to make the game significantly easy that is clearly communicated to the player is to ask for help.
Also, if that provided the measures everyone wanted to make the game actually easy, the controversy wouldn't exist in the first place, so clearly they're not enough of an easy mode.
---
Well, I think that's all I wanted to say.
