The TGA's are prestigious now?
Yep. I love the game, but accessibility options are always good.
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Sekiro success, sales, and winning Game of the Year is a huge strike against the "difficulty equals bad" notion
- Thread starter CenturionNami
- Start date
Not being able to get far enough into the game to do much of anything.
Kept trying and after about three hours gave up and sold the game because I didn't want to waste anymore time on it.
This is pretty vague. What was it that you couldn't do? Was it the controls? Text too small? Colour blind issues? Or another accessibility problem?
Dude I get your trying to gotcha me but no the game was to hard or me to care anymore. I didn't even mention accessibility in my post, my arguments are for difficulty adjusters if anything.
I was in the exact same boat as Gold Arsene. I got through the point where you're meant to die and into the game proper, and then promptly spent the next 4-5 hours banging my head against it because I kept dying to the earliest mobs you have to either fight or avoid.
You're being awfully defensive. I was just trying to understand your issues with the game in a thread about game accessibility and not about the difficulty. So you're saying your posts have no relevance to this topic?
Check out the last Witness thread on here. Anecdotal, sure, but people tended to drop the game anyway.
Just because it's a logical fallacy doesn't make it any less true. ;)
Niche is a relative term, and in terms of 'prohibitive' difficulty settings and singular challenge, I would say it very much is. Most games offer multiple difficulty settings.
But that misses the point I was making. There are tons of games that aim to be accessible and appeal to as wide an audience as possible. There are relatively few that specialise, so to speak. Why is there a need to change those few?
Dude quit with this passive aggressive BS, people are also talking difficulty options or difficulty adjusters so I weighed in on my experiences with a FROM title.
I brought up that if I wanted to play a more casual version of Tetris I have that option, one that I don't have for Bloodborne despite my intrest in it.
So you can just stop with this condescending "so your post have no relevance to this topic" right now.
I dont know where you are going with that. Those accessabiliy options exist and are great. Also convienently shuffled with one's percieved right to beat any game they choose.
I mean I was genuinely asking what you had trouble with but got a typical it's hard bullshit vague response. I'll just assume it was the typical game not playing on your terms issue if you don't want real advice and you're not here for genuine discussion on the topic.
Why would I come here for advice? I gave up on FROM titles years ago and just came to give my experiences while discussing the topic at hand.
According to you that somehow means I'm not allowed to actually talk about it.
Discussing the topic at hand? Your posts amount to saying the game is too hard so fuck me over and over again.
Reading this thread really does remind me of Monster Hunter the more I think about it. Namely, there were more than a few people who didn't want Capcom to make the games more accessible and kept insisting that players needed to buckled down and learned the systems of the game and forced the game to hold your hand (yes, basically 'git god'). For the most part, I agreed with this since Monster Hunter is a game where you have to play it the wants it wants you to play, not your idea of it. And when you master the systems and take down a monster who have been kicking you in the teeth repeatedly for the better part of an hour, it feels really good. Especially when you take down a monster in multiplayer mode by yourself. At the same time, I thought Monster Hunter could get its point across without having such chucky and stiff controls, bosses that could hit you from across the map, better inventor management, and a better way to track the monster if you didn't want to make paintballs.
And Capcom eventually took some of this to heart and made Monster Hunter World. I mean, they didn't have to make a game like World since while Monster Hunter was somewhat niche in the west with it selling around 2-4 million copies, it was a huge hit Japan and rivaled Dragon Quest. The series could have kept going the way it was and still be successful. But Capcom took the task of making Monster Hunter more accessible while not losing the soul of what people love about Monster Hunter. While, World is far from perfect, they have largely succeeded and now World is Capcom's best selling game ever. They also have a strong base so they can make the needed the improvements to the game which can make the hardcore part of their base more happy.
And Capcom eventually took some of this to heart and made Monster Hunter World. I mean, they didn't have to make a game like World since while Monster Hunter was somewhat niche in the west with it selling around 2-4 million copies, it was a huge hit Japan and rivaled Dragon Quest. The series could have kept going the way it was and still be successful. But Capcom took the task of making Monster Hunter more accessible while not losing the soul of what people love about Monster Hunter. While, World is far from perfect, they have largely succeeded and now World is Capcom's best selling game ever. They also have a strong base so they can make the needed the improvements to the game which can make the hardcore part of their base more happy.
So you didn't actually read anything besides my anecdote about my time playing Bloodborne got it.
Dude, you weren't even trying to engage in any way that suggested a genuine interest to help. What's difficult to understand about the early game being too hard, not being able to adapt to it, and electing to give up?
I'm not even in the camp of "Give Bloodborne an easy mode," but GA's issues with the game are plain as day to me. The game is punishingly hard and a lot of people are apt to give up on it from its earliest points.
You're not saying much at all by saying it's hard. I was simply expecting the poster to expand on their points which they're finding difficult to do. Maybe you could shed light on what was so difficult? Stamina management? Overwhelming enemies? Lack of objective marker?
The game was too fucking hard to get a grasp on literally anything in the five hours I banged my head on it. I don't know why you expect someone to be more specific than that years after the fact when all they remember is getting hammered by the earliest enemies repeatedly.
You make one base difficulty with some assist mode options like slowing down the game, widening the parry window, or lowering boss HP. Again, Matt Thorson did this in a cave, with a box of scraps. I'm a developer and I know exactly how much work this would take, and it's trivial for a developer of From's size. If they'd like to add a little mark next to a player's save file that they used these options, I'm all for it.
Again, not saying they *have* to do this, but that it would not affect your experience, at all. People who enjoy challenge don't just say fuck it and put the bumpers up in the bowling lane. They don't lower the basketball rim. They don't go to assist mode in Celeste, and they wouldn't go to assist mode in Sekiro.
Reaction time is an easy-to-understand specific physical skill that might gate Sekiro progress, but the point is that not all people are capable of beating Sekiro in a "reasonable" amount of time due to fundamental differences in skill. Is Sekiro still fun if it takes 1,000 hours to do what you did in 30? Unless you're seriously arguing that everyone who's worse at video games is just lazy or something. And this isn't even touching people with actually recognized disabilities.
TGM3 literally has an easy mode, what are you talking about? Games are *welcome* to have incredibly high difficulty levels, as long as they have ways to enjoy them otherwise. You can get a ton of mileage out of TGM3 if you're not a god, plus, you know, it's Tetris. There are *highly* similar experiences elsewhere for Tetris players. There is no other way to enjoy the story, graphics, lore, sound, and combat of Sekiro if you suck at it.
Or are you saying that highly skilled players gain incredible satisfaction by beating TGM3 on the hardest difficulty, *even though most players can enjoy an easy mode*? How curious.
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Well it clearly left an impact on the both of you if you're still bothered about it to this day.
I kept dying. I can't really be any more elaborate then that seeing as it was like two or three years ago. Best I can say is that the enemies gave me trouble and I felt there was little I could do as I had no way to level up or such yet.
It just got to the point where I didn't want to play anymore. Simple as that.
Okay, few things here:
1) Multiple sliders altering difficulty are impossible to implement when it comes to wanting to play multiplayer in this game. Either everyone needs to be in their own servers because there would be complaints about skilled players invading easy difficulty players. This divides the community even further. For single player games, there already exists cheat engines and trainers. Feel free to use them, just don't bring them to multiplayer.
2) Stop patronizing disabled people because they DO NOT like being patronized. I work in customer service and sometimes when I am a cashier there is this 80+ year old woman who is one handed and is able to hand out cash and a bonus card from her wallet ON HER OWN faster than most younger people. I admire this woman how she handles the situation despite being severely disabled. She doesn't complain either and wants to be treated like everyone else. Likewise I see many mentally ill people who want to have normal discussions despite their conditions and they do not like having a special treatment.
3) People wanting cinematic modes and one hit kills? From Software games hardly have cinematics enough to warrant that as they are mostly gameplay-oriented games. You need to understand gameplay to appreciate story and lore too and why things happen in their worlds. One hit kills does not help this cause at all and actually makes it much less to appreciate the game world and its design. First time playing these games, you need to remember: every enemy, boss or trap encounter is basically a puzzle with several solutions; "How can I beat them without getting damaged too much?", "How can I do more damage to this beast?", "Is there way I can avoid this encounter?". Only difference to other games is that you need to think on your own that solution.
4) You don't have patience and time to play these games because they are difficult? A) Patience and frustration is easily fixed by changing your priorities when it comes to attitude to things in general. This, by the way applies to every hobby and why you do it in the first place. I highly recommend doing some mental training, because it is vital to every hobby. B) Time is easily fixed too. We all have families or full time jobs or other hobbies (or all of them), but still we like to play these games when we can. Sometimes we mix up easier games and then try again the harder games.
5) I'm 100 % for accessibility options that do not alter difficulty in any way. Included but limited to: Explaining how every stat works, subtitle size changing for those who cannot see well, more options in character creator and aids for those who can't hear well (such as giving a visual clue when this dangerously sounding enemy is nearby, like subtitling its roar or breath). From Software does not owe you any difficulty-related accessibility (and fully respect their spine to stand for that 100 %) and they shouldn't be criticized for that. Those who criticize need to watch in the mirror first and think if the problem is somewhere else instead. These games are already well balanced and it is not so simple as just changing few attributes here and there. You would need to fine-tune balance for every difficulty and that would take too much time testing when they could be focusing their resources for the actual game. Fine-tuning difficulty and quality testing for Celeste and From Software-games have two entirely different approachs because the concepts of games are not even nearly the same.
But in the end this is just "old man yelling to cloud"-rant and I won't be participating this further, because the thread is going nowhere anyway.
1) Multiple sliders altering difficulty are impossible to implement when it comes to wanting to play multiplayer in this game. Either everyone needs to be in their own servers because there would be complaints about skilled players invading easy difficulty players. This divides the community even further. For single player games, there already exists cheat engines and trainers. Feel free to use them, just don't bring them to multiplayer.
2) Stop patronizing disabled people because they DO NOT like being patronized. I work in customer service and sometimes when I am a cashier there is this 80+ year old woman who is one handed and is able to hand out cash and a bonus card from her wallet ON HER OWN faster than most younger people. I admire this woman how she handles the situation despite being severely disabled. She doesn't complain either and wants to be treated like everyone else. Likewise I see many mentally ill people who want to have normal discussions despite their conditions and they do not like having a special treatment.
3) People wanting cinematic modes and one hit kills? From Software games hardly have cinematics enough to warrant that as they are mostly gameplay-oriented games. You need to understand gameplay to appreciate story and lore too and why things happen in their worlds. One hit kills does not help this cause at all and actually makes it much less to appreciate the game world and its design. First time playing these games, you need to remember: every enemy, boss or trap encounter is basically a puzzle with several solutions; "How can I beat them without getting damaged too much?", "How can I do more damage to this beast?", "Is there way I can avoid this encounter?". Only difference to other games is that you need to think on your own that solution.
4) You don't have patience and time to play these games because they are difficult? A) Patience and frustration is easily fixed by changing your priorities when it comes to attitude to things in general. This, by the way applies to every hobby and why you do it in the first place. I highly recommend doing some mental training, because it is vital to every hobby. B) Time is easily fixed too. We all have families or full time jobs or other hobbies (or all of them), but still we like to play these games when we can. Sometimes we mix up easier games and then try again the harder games.
5) I'm 100 % for accessibility options that do not alter difficulty in any way. Included but limited to: Explaining how every stat works, subtitle size changing for those who cannot see well, more options in character creator and aids for those who can't hear well (such as giving a visual clue when this dangerously sounding enemy is nearby, like subtitling its roar or breath). From Software does not owe you any difficulty-related accessibility (and fully respect their spine to stand for that 100 %) and they shouldn't be criticized for that. Those who criticize need to watch in the mirror first and think if the problem is somewhere else instead. These games are already well balanced and it is not so simple as just changing few attributes here and there. You would need to fine-tune balance for every difficulty and that would take too much time testing when they could be focusing their resources for the actual game. Fine-tuning difficulty and quality testing for Celeste and From Software-games have two entirely different approachs because the concepts of games are not even nearly the same.
But in the end this is just "old man yelling to cloud"-rant and I won't be participating this further, because the thread is going nowhere anyway.
LOL, impossible. You don't need separate servers, you just match up people who haven't used assist mode options with people who haven't used assist mode options, and people who have with people who have. What a difficult thing to do.
Also it...doesn't have multiplayer, so.
Cool. She (or anyone like her) can choose the base difficulty mode of the game, just like everyone else, and get some fantastic enjoyment. For those who can't, or don't want to, there are options.
The rest of your post basically boils down to "git gud" so I'm not going to address it.
Era has a lot of armchair developers.
Also yeah, despite dying literally 1000+ times in Celeste, I haven't touched the assist mode yet. But I'm super glad it exists. Hats off to Matt and team.
I'm actually not arguing that games including easy modes would affect my experience. My argument is that it's fallacious to say that every game can have an easy mode and that there would be no resulting gameplay impacts. Sekiro becomes a much worse game if it's not challenging, and it's not the only one.
If you widen the parry window, you take away basically the only thing the game has going for it or you create a second difficulty that is still insufficiently easy to get a lot of players on board. It's not implementing the feature that takes work, it's implementing the feature in a way that doesn't lower the quality of the experience for those who use it that takes work. In the context of Sekiro, where the point is that the game makes you learn to pay attention to it, I'd argue that it's pretty damn difficult. Accordingly, I don't fault developers for being unwilling to make the undertaking because I think it's an acceptable way to allocate your resources to make your game do only the one thing well.
I'm arguing that it's fine to have games that some people can't beat. There's literally entire genres of games seemingly designed around the idea of punishing players for trying. It's intellectually lazy to characterize this as an accessibility problem (although many of these games probably do have issues that can be legitimately characterized as accessibility problems since we're still in a time where customized controls, GUI scaling and colorblind options are decidedly not standard) and because it's not an accessibility problem it's appropriate to look at whether difficulty options make sense in the context of each game.
TGM3's easy mode is very short (shouldn't take more than a few minutes) and, ironically, is quite difficult. I don't think including easy modes in the way that they have been implemented in TGM, in which you get to play a small fraction of the game and then end up doubly humiliated by the experience, is what anyone is advocating for in this thread, so the comparison is pretty disingenuous.
Sakura is whatever, but both Master and Shirase have execution barriers so large that if we're talking about players who can't physically beat Sekiro they're not going to be making too much headway in either mode. If your argument is that players who aren't good will enjoy playing the first 30 seconds of shirase for the rest of their lives, then I'm not seeing why we can't be content with people not making it all the way through Sekiro, especially since it's a pretty front-loaded game.
To be fair, MHW was really more the next big step. Over the last few titles there had been a number of QoL improvements, and MHW is more like the culmination of all that. It didn't quite happen over night, but MHW does seem like a bigger foot forward though.
These are the bare minimum of accessibility features that should be standardized across the entirety of the industry like it is in other mediums regarding the audio and visual spectrum. Games are also still different from other mediums that you also have to interact with them directly, and thus that needs to be taken into consideration regarding accessibility. Are you against the disabling of QTEs? Are you against assisted aiming? Are you against assisted steering? Are you against holding a button instead of tapping a button? Are you against camera assistance? Are you against parry time adjustments? Are you against increased stamina or infinite stamina?
There's a whole bunch more than what I have listed and are in all kinds of games. Many toggable, use a percentage system (0% 25%, 50%, 75%, 100%), or a slider.
Do those affect you in any way? No they do not. They do not diminish the games you play. They do not dimish the intended experience, because accessibility is about allowing people to experience the intended experience.
Oh I know. You can see a lot of the QOL changes in Monster Hunter 4 and Generations when you compare it to Tri and Ultimate. I mean, Ultimate had a big QOL change from Tri just by lowing the HP pool of monsters. Before Ultimate, fighting monsters in Tri solo was tedious since they took a million hits to kill and can actually time you out (keep in mind, the timer in was 50 minutes). My point was that World was Capcom's first real effect to streamline the games for more 'casual' users.
I AM AN ACTUAL DEVELOPER.
It is NOT HARD TO DO THIS.
All of these quotes could have been used to argue against Assist Mode in Celeste, which lets players tune things like the game speed or jump total (or, perhaps, parry window) to their preference. But it had those and it was fine. You can *just not use them*. If the "easy mode" isn't as "good" as the regular mode (according to you), WHO CARES, the people playing easy mode weren't able to play normal mode at all, so by default it's better for them. (Also, I still don't understand how lengthening the parry window "breaks" the game. It simply makes a mechanic more forgiving. No one has been able to explain this to me in detail.)
But certainly TGM3's easy mode is nothing for those crazy grandmasters, and the existence of an easier mode does not take away from the game's mystique or mythos. So if they offered an even easier option, it would still have all these mystique about it. The existence of any easier mode doesn't affect those at the top.
It lets you play the game's first 50 levels, and "sakura is whatever" is not a good counterargument. TGM3 still offers players of lesser skill some opportunities to enjoy the game, even if you think they aren't the "real experience". Could it use more? I would say yes. But it has *some*. Also, even if it didn't, players can get a *very* comparable experience (and easier!) in other Tetris games, where they could not in Sekiro.
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I know, I meant the person you quoted, and others who say its extremely hard to implement variable difficulty levels and accessibility sliders. Like doing that will somehow take away huge resources from other areas. Nice to get a perspective from an actual developer.
I believe Halfcoordinated once talked about before, that there are a number of accessibility features for games that can be found on the dev end from how games are generally made. The biggest issue regarding accessibility is making devs aware of them and implementing such features. There are a number of accessibility features that are easy to implement that are wide reaching and work in almost any kind of game or genre.
The game´s difficulty is still a mess no matter what. And I don´t want to hear how I don´t get it. I beat every boss in the game and knew who From was back during the PSX/PS2 days. Make your game´s more accessible From. That said. This isn´t the most frustrating game they developed just the most frustrating modern one.
I've never played Celeste so I'm not going to comment on whether I think the implementation of those features was good.
I think it's acceptable for a developer to care that the value of a game is diminished by the inclusion of difficulty modes that seem to undermine what makes the game good in the first place. I also think it's acceptable for a developer to not care, since as you've pointed out numerous times these features are very easy to avoid and they don't affect my experience at all (see: Bayonetta). My problem is not with games having multiple difficulties, it's the framing of the issue here as being exactly like games not including colorblindness features and saying that the developers are bad or wrong for not including multiple difficulties.
The problem with lengthening the parry window is that where it is right now was clearly tuned in such a way to get players gradually on board with what the game is trying to get you to do. The parry window is actually quite large, but the game makes you think it's small because it punishes certain behaviors harshly. This is a rather clever way of getting players to focus on getting their defense together, and then in the run-up to Genichiro the game gradually forces you to start to figure out how to work an offense into your plans.
If Sekiro's difficulty was really about the parry window, then the game wouldn't have been completed by nearly as many people as it was. Indeed, even on the last boss the game is pretty generous with the timing, and the challenge comes from the fact that you have to stay calm because Sekiro makes you commit to the action you picked. A great example of how this works is when you have to send back lightning. The timing window for this is massive and you can basically mash it out at any point before the attack lands (Mikiri works like this too). The difficulty comes from the fact that if you panic and don't jump you'll just get hit. But it's still not really about timing.
Perhaps there's something to be said about Sekiro being relatively opaque about trying to get you to do what it wants. A lot of the players I know who were stonewalled by the game had problems because they didn't realize that they, say, had to swing back at their opponents or they were going to lose no matter how well they parried. Also, the game is filled to the brim with worthless mechanics that I could see players getting sidetracked by and then wondering why the game is impossible. But I digress: My point is simply that the parry window size isn't an accident and they clearly put a lot of work into setting it at a point where players with a poor reaction time like me won't be completely shut out of the experience while still getting people to do the right stuff.
The bolded isn't really true. None of the best western players, for example, are particularly good at easy. It's really not a good example of a well-implemented "easy" mode; it is a very difficult mode with an inappropriate name that hides its difficulty a little better than master or shirase. I said "sakura is whatever" because sakura is clearly a minigame; its inclusion doesn't change the fact that the vast majority of the game is completely unplayable for most of the population. Also, its execution barriers are still pretty high so even if it were representative of the main game it's not really doing anything for your argument.
TGM3, by any objective measure, has no easy modes. The two modes that have more lenient clearing requirements are best characterized as minigames because they don't reflect the experience of playing the overall game (easy is about economy and making combos which don't play into the main modes at all and sakura is a puzzle game with completely different objectives/parameters).
Playing the first 50 levels of shirase means placing 50 pieces, clearing no lines and losing. This is akin to dying in the tutorial of Sekiro (or perhaps in the menu, all things considered).
Segregating players by what mode theyre using in soulsborne is intrinsically effecting the community, an argument thats been made ad nauseum. No one is preplexed that From could do it this way if they wanted, the issue souls players have brought up is it would dilute player pools in a game that already can sometimes struggle to find others to queue with. Whether or not you think thats acceptable is different then whether or not it effects other players (which is objectively does).
If it is true that parry timing window would not really make the game much easier to play, a blanket slowdown on game speed certainly would (another mechanic in Assist Mode). Or health decrease, or more iFrames, or whatever. It may not be the "tuned" or "ideal" way to play, but of course it isn't. From would of course develop the primary mode to be the de facto true experience. But *whatever* it is, the easy mode would allow others to have fun with it, even if it isn't as "well tuned".
I know you haven't played Celeste, but each screen is a precise platforming "puzzle" that you have to figure out how to clear using a single air dash. Granting the player more or even infinite airdashes straight up breaks the intended design of the screen, but it doesn't matter, people had fun with it. And it doesn't affect me at all.
It is, of course, still Tetris. There are other Tetris games.
But I maintain that the existence of easier (and it *is* easier) modes didn't harm the game. It could use more, sure. But I am *quite* confident that if the game offered a "Very Easy Mode", it would still be quite famous. If you disagree, we'll just have to come to terms with it. IIDX is an example of an *unbelievably* difficult rhythm game, famous in Japan for its absolutely insane nonsense. It has a wide variety of easy difficulties and it hasn't affected its popularity one bit.
Right, and as I said in the post that you responded to, I have no problem if developers want to do this. But I also have no problem if developers don't, and framing this as an accessibility issue is disingenuous, not to mention harmful to the cause.
I've never said the inclusion of easier difficulties harm the game. I've only said that it's not an accessibility issue if a developer decides they don't want to include an easy version of their game.
TGM3 is mostly just about master and shirase; easy and sakura are essentially different minigames. Master and shirase are also basically unplayable if you don't have excellent hand-eye coordination. If difficulties in games are about accessibility, how is this not an accessibility concern? Those who find the "main game" of Sekiro too hard can just wail on the training guy in the starting area.
IIDX (and rhythm games in general) require very little effort to implement multiple difficulties. Indeed, since we now have some sense of "best practices" for easier charts in rhythm games the process could probably be automated and few would be able to tell the difference.
It's still an "accessibility" issue, even if the traits in question (whether they be poor reaction time, poor spatial reasoning, inability to multitask, whatever) aren't traditional disabilities. The whole point of accessibility is to make the game playable *and fun* to as many people as possible.
You claimed TGM3's intrigue and fanbase would disappear overnight if the game had easier modes. I fundamentally disagree with that, as IIDX shows.
I agree that TGM3 would probably benefit from increased accessibility, as would Sekiro. But I am not *demanding* it. I am merely saying its inclusion would not harm the game.
Speaking as someone who has literally developed a popular rhythm game, I disagree. It is not very little effort. In fact, making four good step chart difficulties for each song in the game was a mind-numbing amount of work. It has to be done by hand, and you can't follow the music note-for-note, as that would be too difficult. Which notes do you leave in while still preserving a good difficulty while still making the player feel like they're going along with the music? Do you stick to melody, or do you work in other layers? When do you switch? And all the testing...whew.
This is a Sekiro thread, which doesn't even have online. If it had online, people would be able to summon and go through things easier, in a way acting as a (still insufficient but at least present) accessibility feature.
This going to happen again in about 2 months and again when elden ring come out.
I don't think it's an accessibility issue because I find it very difficult to define "accessibility issue" in a way that would include game difficulty. I define an accessibility issue (within the context of gaming) as an aspect of the game that interferes with the ability of a player who has the skills to do what the game is asking them to do but is prevented from doing so because of the game's failure to address their disability. I don't define "disability" so rigidly as to consider only what would legally constitute a disability (especially because that's not really a thing), but this isn't really a big concern of mine.
I'm going to use Quake as an example to illustrate the difference because I'm a huge Quake player and it works as both a positive and a negative example. Quake is a very tough game to play. You need a lot of raw mechanical skill to play against even average players and you need to combine that skill with good decisionmaking and the ability to keep track of a lot of information at once. The older Quake games gave you a lot of power over what the game looked like, such that players with problems differentiating color were not disadvantaged by this fact. You could make the enemies whatever color made them easy to see, or you could disable the wall textures if they created distracting visual noise. The newest Quake game doesn't let you do this, and that's an accessibility issue: We know from past Quake games that empowering people to change the colors of the players and walls didn't affect the core gameplay but it did make the game work better for people who had trouble distinguishing colors.
What is not an accessibility issue is the part where the game requires you to have good aim. Bringing aim assist into the mix would fundamentally alter the game. Yes, it would make it more "accessible" insofar as more people would be able to play it, but being challenged to aim properly is a big part of what makes Quake. Indeed, the weapons are balanced around how hard it is for humans to use them in certain circumstances, so to take that away would be to turn it into a different product.
I don't see how it is possible to conflate these two concerns under a single heading ("accessibility") without the term completely losing meaning.
No I didn't. I'm claiming that TGM3's difficulty is what makes it good, and I want to know what the people who think difficulty-as-gatekeeping is an accessibility concern will do about a game that is popular strictly because it is hard. I brought it up because you can somewhat credibly make the argument that Sekiro would still be a good game if it wasn't hard, whereas with TGM3 if it wasn't difficult it'd be a completely different (and much worse) game.
I don't think it's possible to make TGM3 the type of game that everyone can play without changing it in a very fundamental way. TGM3 is very carefully designed to be only barely possible by the best in the world. How do you preserve that aspect of its design while making it easier? It's a bit of an oxymoron.
I made a lot of stepmania charts back in the day. If I were a better programmer, I think I could automate the process of making (or at least starting) lower difficulty charts if I'd put in the work to make the hardest difficulty chart first. Most of the differences between a heavy and a standard chart come down to rhythmic resolution: If gallops are 16th notes on the heavy chart, they can probably become eighth notes in a standard chart, for example. You'd obviously have to manually intervene sometimes, but this is clearly a lot less work than making an easy version of a game premised on its difficulty engaging.
I just don't see how this game won GOTY. Dying constantly in a game isn't my idea of fun and found the game very unfair to play but that's just me.
No. Never.
The difficulty is the selling point, that's what makes it special and if you offer an easier path then people are less likely to persevere on the original intended difficulty and when that happens the reputation of a notoriously hard game is diminished.
Look at games like Halo or Metal Gear Solid 2, which can be just as hard on the right setting but those games don't have a reputation for being hard because everyone just defaults to normal. Those games are okay because they have other strengths to sell themselves on but these From Software games don't have similar opportunities. It's not going to sell itself on stealth or gun mechanics, it's all about the difficulty. You'll be gutting a fish if you offer easy difficulties.
The difficulty is the selling point, that's what makes it special and if you offer an easier path then people are less likely to persevere on the original intended difficulty and when that happens the reputation of a notoriously hard game is diminished.
Look at games like Halo or Metal Gear Solid 2, which can be just as hard on the right setting but those games don't have a reputation for being hard because everyone just defaults to normal. Those games are okay because they have other strengths to sell themselves on but these From Software games don't have similar opportunities. It's not going to sell itself on stealth or gun mechanics, it's all about the difficulty. You'll be gutting a fish if you offer easy difficulties.
I hope everyone has already copied their responses in this thread and ready to paste it in the new ones once that game comes out.
You are conflating multiplayer with Sekiro. Offering aim assist to players *would* affect your experience, even if you could turn it off; you would no longer do as well in matches relative to other players, because you're fighting against them.
The solution there *would* be to offer separate matchmaking (Overwatch does not allow PC players to play with console players), though I know that's a bit of extra work, of course.
In a single player game, offering an easier difficulty doesn't affect you. They live in a bubble completely removed from your own experience. The only thing you see different is "would you like to play with bumpers?", and you say no. The end.
I mean, you...you did, though. Quote: "TGM's intrigue (not to mention fanbase) would disappear overnight if the games were easier to beat." This is literally what you said. If you offered an easier mode to beat the game ("on easy", of course), you claimed the game wouldn't be what it is today.
If TGM3 offered an easier mode, the original would still be the exact same game, because the original game would still exist as it was originally designed. I can't fathom how people can't see this. *It's still there.* Nothing is changed. Go after that impossibly difficult triumph. Train till your fingers bleed. You think beating it on a "very easy", the mode *for the masses*, would just satisfy these people? Hell no. They live for the challenge. They're going after it. Just like IIDX. I'm not making the "true" game easier, I'm making the whole package *more accessible for others to enjoy*.
And again, there exist other Tetris games. TGM3 could have done much better, but in this particular case, I can see why no one complained.
Many games have attempted to automate this sort of process to let the players import their own music. *None* of them have resulted in good step patterns. While sufficiently advanced AI can do theoretically anything, I assure you there exists no automated process that could make good easier stepcharts without very significant intervention from people, and it would be exceptionally difficult to even begin to create one.
Not sure why this point is even relevant. The point is that IIDX, whether it was easy or hard to implement, *offered* easier difficulties and the game still has a legendary mythos of extreme difficulty.
Edit: Anyway I'm going to bed now. Nice discussing things with you!
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Same. Got to the first boss after a few hours and lost had to track back and spend time collecting item so I could stand a chance against him. Rise repeat. Realized I could be spending my precious time playing something I'm actually enjoying so i quit and never went back.
Don't have time to rinse/repeat the last hour of game over and over and over, if that's fun for some people, more power to them. I like moving forward to be faster.
No, I wasn't making a comparison to Sekiro. I was distinguishing between what I define as an accessibility concern and what I define as not an accessibility concern. I used a multiplayer game as an example, but the point works just as good for singleplayer games.
The rest of your post on this point is responding to points I didn't make. I have never once argued in this thread that easier difficulties in games I like are a problem for me, and I agree with you that these difficulties don't affect me so I have no reason to object to their inclusion. The argument I'm making in this thread is that framing the issue as being about accessibility (and consequently as there being something of a moral duty on the developers) is wrong.
There's an important difference between what I said and what you're saying I said.
TGM3 is a game about difficulty. If the main gameplay modes were significantly easier, it would be far less popular. It wouldn't undermine the game at all to add easier modes that are ultimately irrelevant, but then how are you addressing the accessibility concern? People still can't play the main game. You could add a hundred easier modes and 99.9% of the gameplay would still be concentrated in the hardest modes so you'd have achieved nothing in making the game more accessible. Indeed, the previous entry in the series kind of did this already; nobody plays the easier modes because the only reason to play TGM is for the difficulty.
I think you have this idea that offering an easy mode wouldn't be letting people play the "main game". I disagree. If you only purpose in playing is experiencing mind-numbing difficulty, sure, those people don't get to "experience it", but many people want to play Sekiro for the story, the world, the characters, the graphics, the audio, whatever. And they can absolutely experience what they want to, the things they were interested in, without mind-numbing difficulty.
Tetris is sort of a bad example in some sense, because there's not much beyond the mechanics of the game itself. But even then, plenty of people are happy playing normal levels of Tetris. They don't need to go wild to get some value. Their "main game" is just easier.
I also don't think that even if we're talking about traditional "accessibility" that developers have a moral obligation to make their stuff work for everyone. Traditional music games *cannot* be played by deaf people as intended; it's impossible. Almost no traditional games can be played by the blind. But it's always nice for people to try their best to include as many people as possible, and I will always applaud their efforts.
ahhhhh must sleep though
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I raised the example of TGM3 explicitly because an easy mode means not playing the main game. If you want to talk about game difficulty being about accessibility, then that's a problem for you because there's no way to make it accessible without changing it on a fundamental level. Unlike Sekiro, there's really nothing else to see here: You're there for the masochism. Again, the lack of popularity of the TGM modes that can be beaten by normal humans illustrates how fundamental the high difficulty level is to the experience.
I would argue that this is mostly true of Sekiro as well - there's not really anything to the gameplay if it's not hard - but I recognize that to at least some degree there are other reasons you might want to play the game.
I think developers have a moral obligation to minimize accessibility concerns where they can. This is broadly parallel to how accessibility concerns are often handled in the legal/human rights context: Accommodation doesn't mean putting yourself out of business, but it does mean acting when and where you can to remove unnecessary obstacles.
Because I think this obligation exists, I don't think it is appropriate to put game difficulty under this heading. It's all well and good to say that more games should have easy modes, but I don't think there exists any imperative for developers to do this and I understand why they don't a lot of the time.
It's a ill-defined obligation. To what extent do developers go out of their away, at risk of financial collapse, to include x% more people? Because that can't be defined, I don't think it can be termed an "obligation". A developer is not evil because financial realities caused them to not include a colorblind mode. If you can't define specifics, and you can't, you can't expect developers to hold up a completely ill-defined set of "obligations". They simply do the best they can under the circumstances, and I won't fault anyone for it. I just think developers should be pro-active in exploring these options and hopefully get as many of them in as they can.
I think it's better to think of TGM3 itself as a "hard mode" DLC to the existing game of Tetris, which might resolve our issues here. You're right in that you can't make a hard mode easier without making it...not a hard mode, its literal identity. But TGM3 is not the only way to play the base experience of Tetris, and the easier modes exist for everyone else to enjoy the actual gameplay of what makes Tetris, Tetris.
I think it's better to think of TGM3 itself as a "hard mode" DLC to the existing game of Tetris, which might resolve our issues here. You're right in that you can't make a hard mode easier without making it...not a hard mode, its literal identity. But TGM3 is not the only way to play the base experience of Tetris, and the easier modes exist for everyone else to enjoy the actual gameplay of what makes Tetris, Tetris.