Gaming

I think Kojima gets it. For a lot of players, esp. on the more cinematic games, the story is the main driver and the action is how it progresses. The games I’ve played that were ordeals are often the ones I’ve given up on. It’s the ones you can start on story mode with, enjoy the narrative and then re-play at the harder levels that I’ve stuck with.

God: .... I'll make a game ... random spawns ... one life ... no instructions .. no directions ... open world ... play as you want

The director should have reasons for the difficulty of the game. Celeste is a Perfect example. It's hard but it lets you learn and allows you to try again easily even if what you are doing is hard. Hard games that punish you and make you walk for 20-30 mins just so you can learn a few new moves the boss does can be incredibly frustrating. Many people who play these games eventually look at videos online to help after multiple tries because just "getting there" is extremely time consuming. A lot of games have normalized looking things up and that is disappointing as someone who would rather figure it out on my own. But wasting 30 mins to be killed in 2-3 hits from multiple stage bosses is not enjoyable IMHO.

And then there's Yoko Taro, who instead opts for the emotional difficulty in his games

Pathologic 2 Devs

My true desire was for this town to never have a direction or goal marker, not even once. It's intellectually offensive. Who do you have to be thrust a map marker under a free person's nose, saying "Here is your goal. You're too lazy and stupid to figure it out on your own, and I am not without mercy towards lesser minds, so I'll do the work for you. Go there. Go and don't forget to thank me for choosing your goal for you. Love, The Powers That Be.

Oh you died? Here's a debuff. Oh you thought you could save scum to get around the debuff? Ha! That debuff is on all your saves.

Why? We're Russian devs. Life is brutual and hard and so should this game.

I wasn’t expecting this post to bring out this kind of animosity in people. Jesus fuckin’ christ.

Video games are not a public service, there is no such thing as a 100% universally enjoyed video game for a reason. It’s ok that there are different types of video games, folks, be them too hard or too easy for your tastes, it’s kind of stupid to throw these kinds of stones about it.

I mean, is every book supposed to be palatable to everyone? Are we all supposed to feel the exact same way about every piece of art? This is like being mad that Guardians of The Galaxy involved sci-fi and super heroes and wasn’t a WWII documentary because that’s what you’d have preferred to watch.

Does anyone remember the devs of Diablo 3 saying that the internal team found the game difficulty is too high and then they doubled it.

And then there is Expedition 33 which added the story mode so that Jennifer English could play it.

I don't think I've played a game with fairer difficulty options than Halo: CE. On the lowest difficulty, even your grandma with arthritis can beat it, and on the hardest it's an actual challenge without making enemies infallibly accurate bullet sponges. But if you can't do it that way, do it Michael Zaki's way.

I like to relax when I play. My days of stressing out over games ended when I had stress in real life.

I had read some posts on Usenet back then with some players saying UV wasn't as tough as they hoped it would be. (...) I thought "Oh really? Ok then. You're all dead." (...) It wasn't meant to be fair, or even finishable. I can't even get past E1M3 in nightmare. Any level with backtracking would be almost impossible.

- John Romero

Yoshi P (FFXIV): "Yeah, the game was a huge cultural hit that grew more successful with each expansion, so I thought to myself.. now that we've brought in millions upon millions of players, why not nerf all of the overworld content into absurdity to bring in maybe forty or fifty noobs? So I did. And then I changed all of the classes again once everyone had reached max level. Nobody liked that. So I thought.. why not do it again?"

Zenimax (ESO): "So I just kind of made up whatever and then dialed the difficulty down to about a tenth of what it used to be. Now overworld content is on par with swinging an aluminum bat through a pile of packing peanuts. Also, the Second Era was filled with superhero sky ninjas with lava wings who rode around Tamriel upon lightning horses and mechanical spiders. Deal with it."

It may be a difficult debate between accessibility, experience and artistic vision. Though considering how many games are made every year, I think we can have difficult games with no easy mode. People who don't enjoy them or can't play them can simply play the thousands of other games.

Don't get me wrong. I'm all for accessibility. During my time in the video game industry, I personally paid great attention to options for colorblind people. Unfortunately, pretty much everything else was outside my scope. But it doesn't make any sense to potentially ruin the entire work just so 3 more people on the planet will play it.

If a game is frustrating to play, but I enjoy the story - I watch a playthrough. If a game contains elements that I don't like - it's probably not a game for me, so I move on to other games. If I had some disability that made it very hard or impossible to play some games - okay, fair enough, that would genuinely suck. But again, I'd move on to other games.

Of course, it's possible to add detailed difficulty settings, so that everyone can customize their experience. Mostly a great solution, if the team has the time and resources to implement it well, which isn't always the case. However, it may still interfere with the artistic vision of the developers.

Some movies can cause epileptic seizures due to some of their scenes. Should the authors throw their vision and ideas out the window, because some people cannot safely watch the movie? I'd say no, because that would kind of ruin the whole point of artistic expression. I think we need to be able to depict and express all kinds and forms of art, even if some groups will be unable to experience them.

Maybe some time in the future we'll be able to solve all of this easily and reliably (e.g., some kind of neuralink for people with various conditions). But as of right now, it seems to me that this is practically a non-issue. The impact is incredibly limited, while proposed solutions are either costly, unrealistic or straight up counterintuitive.

Just allow users to mod the game to whatever difficulty they want and don't be dicks about it.

Devs get to stick to their original vision and gamers get to have whatever difficulty they actually want to make things fun for them.

I'm all for easy difficulty options in games, but I'm never, ever going to use them. I just can't motivate myself to play if I'm not accomplishing something.

All game devs should be forced to play their own games all the way through.

And what are the games they talk about?

Some poor bastard actually buys a Kojima game to watch the cut scenes.