I backtracked the discussion and I'm not quite sure how else to reply to you. Does your saying:
It means that "From wants the game this way because of X" is just that. A reason. An explanation. It doesn't mean it's a good reason or explanation. It's a completely neutral term on its own. You'd have to go much more in depth to explain why something that specific way is a good reason as opposed to doing it another way.
It's especially bad argument when something like Celeste accessibility mode exists - you don't see anyone arguing the normal run of Celeste isn't perfectly balanced, but they allow options like reduced speed and extra dashes that deliberately aren't designed around "balance" for those who need it. Noones asking the entire game to be balanced around an accessibily or easy mode.
OK, I'm getting it now. Allow me to ask, then: why would From shift their strategy in game difficulty if they have been successful by sticking to this formula?
What I'm getting at is if you want to get into hypotheticals and what-ifs, especially when it comes to how developers are allocating their resources (which is always what these arguments boil down to), then you would have to hypothetically compare the same game from the same developer with different approaches to difficulty. Not two different games from two different developers.
But there's also other games with multiple difficulty options that are tuned well. And there's other games with single difficulty options that aren't tuned well.
What exactly is the risk? Let's say they added an option to one shot a boss when you turned the option on. What risk is being run there? Or to be more exact what risk is being run that is inherently riskier than every other design decision that any other video game has ever made? It definitely wouldn't be a programming risk as something like that is already in the game's debug mode anyway unless you genuinely think every time the playstest the game they go through every single enemy encounter.
Oh for crying out loud....
The risk that they'd be messing with a successful formula?
It's also a faulty argument because the game wouldn't lose anything by having more options but it doesn't gain anything by not having accessibility options.
I don't agree it's not a huge risk
I mean Pokémon did offer difficulty options once, fucked it up so everyone complained and then never bothered again
Gamers want their games hard and only hard. And by gamers I mean thinly veiled gatekeepers.
So is adding a jump button and adding a voiced main character. Sekiro is filled with things that are different from the usual formula. Your logic doesn't hold because the game Sekiro as it is would not exist unless these things were done so either
Yeah, no. Really don't agree with that. This kind of reductive and oversimplified calibrating can completely break a game's intended design philosophy.
None of those affect the difficulty of the game, which is the whole point of this discussion. If there's one thing that's remained constant about From's games, it's been the difficulty. That is a constant of a much grander, complex scale than talking or jumping.
So what if you tell the player that this option will break the game's intended design philosophy, like Celeste? Like the next sentence you left out of your quote?
So then it's not a matter of breaking formula because as I just showed it does lots of things to break formula.
Well, I've discussed this at length in other topics, but sure I guess. This example is inspired by a discussion I had with BossAttack with regards to the last boss of Jedi Fallen Order. He said the combat did not feel satisfying because, since the damage dealt by some attacks was too low, he could just brute force the fight (e.g. heal up after taking damage) without having to learn how to evade/counter the boss's attack pattern.
I mean, you could, I guess? I just don't see why devs should feel pressured to include that. It's fine if the Celeste devs decided to include the equivalent of a "cheat code" in their game, but no dev should feel like it's an obligation, is what I'm saying.
Yeah. I would never ask the developers to alter their vision. Just give me some way to be able to play even though I suck.
Totally agree. Remembering back to when it released feeling like I was part of a support group for all of us suffering through the tough spots. We are not alone. Lol
isn't that literally asking the developers to alter their vision.
I mean you've answered your own hypothesis. For the people who play the games for difficulty reasons then they can ignore that stuff. For the people who play these games for other reasons then they would have those options available. These games have an incredibly wide arrangement of different fans who play these games for different reasons. Dark Souls 1, 2 and 3 have sold MILLIONS on the PC and all of those versions have had trainers almost immediately after the games came out that could be easily downloaded. Even Sekiro has one and it has still sold a huge amount on the PC. So while I'm sure the crowd that only buys these and enjoys these games because you can't alter the difficulty DOES exist the numbers show that they are either not as big a majority as you would think or that these people's enjoyment of the game isn't actually that effected by the existence of these options.
That's another reason we need games without difficulty options
But that's the thing; they don't always do that, and when they don't, they might ruin it for themselves. Removing the option forces them to play the game on its own terms and many players appreciate that.
This ignores the fact that Demon's Souls, and later Dark Souls (which originated on consoles and definitely without cheat engines, initially), were considered appealing precisely because of how uncompromising they were. Had Demon's/Dark Souls included easy mode to start with, it's very likely they would not have had the impact that they did.
Yeah, that's a great point. There are no easy answers, all I can really say is that even if you do add difficulty settings, no game will never be fully accessible to everyone, so it's up to the devs to decide what kind of audience they want (a small niche one, a wider one but with some restrictions, a very wide one, etc.) and what kind of dev effort they want to put to achieve this.
I'd personally be ok if they made a "cinematic mode" that made you invincible and let you 1 shot every monster/boss. That way people who cant play the game for whatever reason can still experience all the other great things about FROM game.
There's YouTube. Can't believe this discussion is going again lol
Way late on this one but also players can just *look up puzzle solutions*. You can look up Sekiro strats, but ultimately, you're gated by skill.
Most people aren't saying that; it's a strawman argument.
Sekiro is not niche. Not even close.
