Natalie

i think you come off fine but that might be because your thoughts line up pretty much exactly with mine. i also do not have the answer you seek

i have been straight up called ableist by a notable indie dev for making essentially the same points here, ahaha.

honestly it sounds fine to me; games are defined by experiences, not by content, and any alternative modes of playing the game need to be aware of and acknowledge this. It is on people to explain why "seeing all of the content" is the goal of a game to explain why old-fashioned difficulty selections exist the way they do, since, honestly, it isn't and it shouldn't be. that's not what playing games are really about.

I think an issue is that a game is not only seen as an experience, it also must exist as a product and therefore most if not all of its contents needs to be visible for everyone to consume. Especially if people paid 70 usd for it.

The thing I like about accessibility options, if the literacy of the people using those options immediately goes up. Your asking people to become game designers who either already have experience "Game designing" for themselves, or well.. they're starting with you. Most people won't pick an easy mode even if they'd benefit from it, let alone accessibility/assist stuff. Also most of it isn't even difficulty related anyways a lot of the time.

That said, I agree so much on Dark Souls. People will be like "It's not actually that hard so what's the point!" and it's like THAT IS THE POINT the game is ABOUT "if you try you can do it" and the kinda overhyped mystique of the game hs just enough real teeth.

Menu based difficulty cuts that down for everyone else and mile some people might go "Well that's an illusion! It doesn't actually matter" like... more than half of game design is artful illusion??

The hard thing with Souls games is people who are in the target zone of "You can beat this game, just try" would use stuff like accessibility options cause they got stuck. I feel like there are ways around.

I feel like if you were to have a true, modal "Easy/Accessibility mode" it would have to be so separate and different and such a drastic step down that most people wouldn't consider it unless they need it. Almost like nethack wizard mode -- not in terms of power lol that'd be a development nightmare -- but in terms of feeling of separation from the "intended" experience. Like you gotta be honest and be like "hey this isn't the game we designed, but maybe you can still find fun and value with parts of it"

i think transparent and manipulable rank systems can sometimes sidestep this problem nicely, since (given a scoring incentive) the objective of the game is now to raise the challenge as high as you're capable of—but you can still See All The Content if you're in it for the tourist experience, however worthwhile we decide that experience actually is. obvs not the right solution for every game tho, or even most games

the anxiety i experience when i run up against an unexpected challenge and have to ask "is this testing a skill that i care about cultivating, would i feel more fulfilled on a lower difficulty" makes me want to throw all explicit difficulty selection into a fire, but I have also basically never taken that option even in situations where it's possible I should have. is it condescending or overly prescriptive to label an easy mode "choose this only if you are completely convinced you need it to enjoy yourself, this makes the game materially worse and less interesting"? because this is sometimes what i feel like i need to stop stressing about tuning a game for myself as i play it.

on the other side, if your experience is based around the idea of guiding the player to the limits of their performance—and the expectation that those limits are mutable, that you can eventually do the things being demanded of you even if you can't do them right now, and that you need more than surface-level familiarity with the challenge to even begin building those skills—that might be exclusionary by its nature. it being exclusionary might actually be half the reason it's so compelling to those who opt in. that one is weird.

There's no perfect answer for this but my personal favorite is always some kind of dynamic difficulty. Imagine a version of Celeste where the assist options weren't checkboxes on a menu but features that automatically turn on or off based on player performance. Garegga is IMO the difficulty design gold standard for this exact reason, the fact that it adjusts itself so smoothly based on your actions not only solves the problem of forcing players to become game designers, but also exponentially increases the game's depth and possibility space since strategies can vary wildly based on how you manipulate the difficulty.

I put Silent Hill 3 on the highest puzzle difficulty and had to reset in the bookstore because I am dumb. I feel like letting the player change difficulty once the game has started can make the initial contextless difficulty selection less of a problem, but it's still a problem and for a lot of games this doesn't have a nice implementation.

Personally, I do like assist modes. But I don't know if they are really under the umbrella of difficulty. The framing is these are for accessibility with a big warning that this is against the developers vision (so don't blame us if it sucks). They also work better for twitchy action games than, say, a programming game.

I agree with the Celeste examples but for game speed or damage things are fairly easy to understand. Although a lot of options are just cheats. I miss cheats and Infinite Air Dashes and God Mode are fun to mess around with, but this is a different game. I’ve added assist modes like this, and would defend having them, but I'm not happy with the presentation (it felt better than adding another menu).

Dynamic difficulty and rank can be interesting for normal players who are unaware but it's polarising when players know about it - even if they don't know how it works. I remember after a sequence of errors in RE4 I thought "great, I bet the game thinks I suck now!" God Hand has a fun system for this, but I can't imagine it would fit well in a souls universe!

I also think of Uncharted when discussing difficulty. Whose base experience would seem to be you squashbucking around, jumping from ledges punching goons and taking their guns, that turns into a tedious simon says sequence at harder difficulties.

Game difficulty is relative, rises over time, and has orchestrated peaks and troughs. It's messy! But I think it is important to have a vision for the base experience and decide how precious you are about it.

I think the problem is yeah games don't have a responsibility to provide a different game for those that just don't like what the game is trying to do.

But they do have a responsibility to provide the experience they're trying to provide for people of different levels of physical health etc. And to provide the same challenge, and feeling of accomplishment to someone that is physically healthy versus someone with chronic pain, the experience might have to be pretty different.

So to someone that isn't experiencing the chronic pain it may look like they are making a game that takes away all the things that make the game enjoyable to them, but in reality they are actually supplying those things to someone else.

I don't think there's really a one size fits all solution to it because there are so many different considerations for so many different people. So provide as many options as possible because a disabled gamer may not be a game designer but they're gonna be pretty familiar with what they specifically need from a solution. And if you don't wanna fuck with em you can always just not touch em.

I agree with so much of this, and I agree with the argument of "dark souls really is not a complete game without the difficulty", and that adding invinciblilty to the menu is an invitation for players to potentially ruin that part of the game for themselves, in the same way "only combat" would ruin Undertale.

That said, at least in my own experience adding a plethora of variable difficulty/assist options to my games: I think it's worth trying to trust players here.

Games like Dark Souls already expect players to have a TON of game literacy: controlling the camera with the right stick, reading telegraphs, navigating arcane menus, understanding iframes. Players at that level know what "invincibility" means, and know how triple damage will trivialize challenge. And if they're there for the challenge, they're most likely going to resist touching the assist mode at all.

But I've also seen so many players tweak various assist options to just give them a slight edge - not enough to make the experience boring, but just enough so that they don't get so bored and frustrated that they quit entirely. In the same way that we want to trust players to explore a game without overtutorializing, I think this is an area we can trust players in, too. This might just be my experience - maybe others have seen the opposite.

I have to say that while I definitely agree with your thoughts on the target experience of the game being something they don't need to make concessions regarding, I don't entirely agree that games have an /obligation/ to cater to anyone other than a specific subset. I think that games merely /can/ be made to cater to a wider audience. Now obviously, anyone can make a game that only they can play, and if you want other people around you to interact with it, you need to consider what allows those who desire to play your game to play it. But I think that at the very baseline there's nothing inherently "wrong" with making a game that's only aimed at a very specific audience and background and skill level, etc.

Part of the reason I ponder this is that I think the only real way to figure out what people actually want out of your game is either to make stuff you personally desired/liked in other games, or to actually have testers play it and tell you what they didn't like. I like hard difficulties that meaningfully change entity behavior instead of being numerical, for instance, so I made my game with difficulty levels that majorly change those aspects. But ultimately, I can only really change things in ways that appeal to my personal tastes - it's so hard to design difficulty modes for a theoretical player I don't know. It's much easier to simply listen to a friend or family member who /shows interest/ in my game and make additions based on that.

I think a big weird aspect of this goes back to the fact that talking about games overall and talking about big corporate games hits an awkward barrier - the accursed barrier of "games as something that needs to sell". Companies and marketers are to trying to hit a reliable audience, and preferably as large a one as possible. So their goal is to make something as many people as possible will want to experience. There's quite a lot of FOMO online because of this, people will see all their friends get into the new popular game and feel bad it's not a game style they like. In cases like this I feel a little like sometimes people are treating the popularity of a game they don't want to play or can't play as a personal attack, and I'm not sure that's really the best impetus for game design. At the very least I feel like being surrounded by all those thinkpieces as a small developer can be extremely soul-grinding because it encourages agonizing over making games that can be played by a theoretical infinitely malleable person, and feeling like your game is pointless unless it's accessible to "everyone". Even though you are probably a single person, maybe working with a small set of friends, on a game that is likely not going to have a giant audience.

I think that ultimately, one should try to design for oneself and those one knows will actually play the game first, rather than trying to imitate corporate strategies. Corporations have legions of testers and a massive amount of combined past knowledge regarding what works. Individuals just don't have that reach. If you're designing as a small company, for instance, trying to release a paid game and to make money - I think you should try and get DIRECT information from people who might be interested in your game regarding what additions you should build in. But if you're a small generalist creator who does this on the side while working a day job, I think you have to focus on what it is you like about the game and what those you know will play it want from it.

These thoughts are all mostly informed by the fact that I'm rather autistic and in general the autistic experience is realizing that I really, really, really like certain things most people never will. I can either design things I don't like that some theoretical "normal" person does, or I can design things I personally like accepting that it's gonna be an acquired taste for most people. It's just an unfortunate element of having to live with a weird brain. At the end of the day, though, I can always go back and add new options to a game if enough new people want it - so I think that focusing on making the game functional first in a way I like is way more important, if that makes sense. Anyway, sorry for the rant!

i think it would be interesting if a game tested you first, and then scaled stuff to your abilities. like test your reflexes, your ability to watch for a coming attack etc. then adjust the frame data of enemies or the clarity of coming attacks and stuff like that.

This chimes with a lot of my thoughts as a very recent Soulsbornianism convert . It feels like replacing one form of accessibility issue (you must be this skilled to pass) with another (you must be this knowledgeable about shit like parry windows to pass).

Its also interesting to think on how I've used "difficulty sliders" as hammers to deal with non-accessibility nail-likes. Like everyone else in their 30s I don't have as much time for games as I used to so when I get the itch for a particular Dead Cells level I crank down those sliders to cut through a boss or two until I reach it. This cuts against the run based design of the game but... idgaf. I have played it before and now I want to dip in and enjoy my favourite bits, like an old TV show.

a mode in, say, undertale that gets rid of all the characters and simply has you play the combat minigame for about 8 hours

err, but undertale does — famously! — have a mode that's about getting rid of all the characters and doing significantly harder combat. it is sans undertale, and everything leading up to him.

but in contrast with bloodbornes, you have to the put extra internet bookworm effort into finding the hard part. it's not like all those character interactions function as a skill gate. a player may not like them, but that doesn't functionally block them from progressing.

fwiw: i played (most of) bloodborne, and i was told all the cool tricks, and it was at a time when i had literally nothing else to do so i didn't mind pouring entire days into 1 boss. but the bosses were the worst part and they definitely sap any interest i have in returning to it. i don't know how everyone else's brain works but after N attempts on the same boss, especially where it has multiple phases and/or i die in two hits, i don't feel like experimenting — i start to tune out and play increasingly conservatively because it is literally mind numbing.

clearing a hurdle like that doesn't feel satisfying. it doesn't feel like i climbed a mountain. it's relief, like i got a pebble out of my shoe. it feels like, finally, i can get back to the good part

i don't know that this means bloodbornes need difficulty settings or whatever. but it does make me think about how i've never seen anyone who struggled with a bloodborne argue that it doesn't need difficulty settings

I thought Hades had a really elegant pair of solutions to the problem of difficulty levels:

First, "God Mode", in which every time you die you get increased globally-applicable damage resistance, up to a maximum of 80%. This isn't perfect, because it doesn't decay, so you're pretty much guaranteed to end up maxing it out. But it does have the effect of ramping the difficulty down quickly if you're really struggling to complete runs, or if you just want to focus on the RPG story aspects.

Second, the "Pact of Punishment", which allows you to fine-tune different aspects of difficulty. You can make enemies hit harder, or have more health, or move faster, or a combination of those. You can make the end-of-level bosses much tougher. You can make damage harder to heal (in a game where it's already hard to heal), or impossible to heal. Crucially, you don't unlock the Pact of Punishment until you've got enough experience with the game to make it all the way out at least once; this means that when you start ramping up the difficulty, you have some idea of what you're letting yourself in for. And you can even combine the Pact with God Mode. The result is a game where increasing difficulty levels feels like a natural extension of the game's puzzle. It definitely doesn't feel as though the devs have built a kiddie pool out of "easy mode".

For the really hard-core gamers, there's Hell Mode, which has to be enabled when you create a fresh save file. This disables God Mode and forces you to take a bare minimum of 5 extra points of difficulty from the very beginning. It's not really a third solution to the problem of difficulty levels, it just applies the second solution in a particularly stringent way. The problem it actually addresses is gamers who whine about dumbing down the game―they can go to Hell Mode, get a brutally difficult experience, and feel virtuous about it.

saw this before i was able to post, but i also never saw an email telling me i was able to post, so i just randomly discovered a few days ago that i was able to now. so first of all, sorry for responding to this so long after the fact. i think i broadly agree with a lot of what you're saying, and obviously difficulty options or just making the game easy enough for people to finish it is something that makes commercial sense overall. i mean, i even set nier automata to easy and just mashed through it to see the story, though that wasn't because i thought i couldn't beat it otherwise, i just decided early on that i did not like the mechanics, particularly the enemy design, so i support it from that viewpoint of "getting the experience you want". and the other comment about people going "i paid for the game so i should get to see all of it" is an argument i've seen when this topic has come up before in circles i'm in. but like, people who think like that already won, as the saying goes. many games now tell you where all the quests are and how much of the game you've finished and give you chapter select so you can do stuff you passed over the first time and

i dunno, it's the kind of thing that makes me feel like mainstream games are pulling from movies and tv in more than a storytelling sense, but kind of a broad consumer one: people try to see all of it and then they talk about it with their friends for a while and wait for the next one. and that's a bit frustrating to me for sure. it's funny because i'm the kind of person who plays a lot of the stuff that makes people go "wow, that game's really hard, i could never play that!", but i'm not playing it because i think i'm good at it, hahaha. and i wish i was better at conveying that idea to people of like, sometimes you should free yourself from the idea you have to be good at something and just do it. i mean, that's what making art or doing something competitive is like too. i think one of the biggest things i've learned in recent years is how much people who get good at stuff still are frustrated by what they still can't do, and never reach the point where they really feel satisfied.

i kind of suspect i have it worse than most in a way, because honestly if i get near the end of doing something really hard i start to get bored and then finishing is more of a relief than an actual joy. in fighting games i absolutely hate losing all the time in the long term, but if i beat somebody a lot i don't feel anywhere near as happy in return. so the ketsui example kind of hits home for me because at this point i have my doubts that i'll ever get that feeling of pure joy at having overcome something with a lot of effort. in fact, ketsui was a game that, even coming off of other cave games, and having 1cc'd some of them, i played for like 40 hours and realized it was incredibly hard, especially to be consistent at. and at that moment i felt myself decide that the only way i could actually play the game was to free myself from feeling like i had to beat it, knowing that would be a road where i'd spend a long, long time really frustrated and a little time going "well, thank god that's over". and maybe this makes me less likely to actually do it, but i've spent a lot of time playing games that made me feel old or mad or stupid and if this is the price of getting myself to enjoy a cool and tough game then i think i'm willing to take that for now.

A big issue I have trying to approach Souls games is that the character options that I have the most aesthetic draw to are apparently all picking hard mode? The options that seem cool and fun to me are the ones that make it hardest for me to progress. I’m sure its all surmountable but it’s made me bounce off a few times regardless of how interested in the games i am.

and then there's me. my Elden Ring philosophy is that the game is BS, it's a practical jokester, it's going to get the better of you sometimes, so why shouldn't you take every chance to get the better of it? I avoid spoilers, I don't want to know what's coming, but I'll take advantage of every glitch, if I can clip into a boss arena by climbing a wall with my horse and grab the loot for free, that's only fair, the game's done worse to me lol

unfortunately even with this philosophy I haven't been able to find the time to get very far

I guess my thing about Soulsborne difficulty is that I want to have the same experience everyone else describes when they talk about these games. I'd love to go into that goblin nerd mode and work to incrementally overcome challenges and all that. But my experience of whichever Dark Souls it was that I played was that I got killed by dogs over and over for hours, never had any idea where I was supposed to be going or what I was supposed to be doing, never make any progress at all, and eventually gave up. I'm pretty sure I never got to the point where the easy modes you described were available to me--I can't respec for a tough boss if I never get to a boss.

I don't think games have an obligation to do anything in particular. But I have a real problem with claims that players who want an easy mode just want to subvert the "intended experience." I guess maybe the experience I had is the one Fromsoft wants players to have, but that experience was very very bad! I desperately wanted an easy mode that would have made it possible for me to get to the point where I could engage in the interesting choices described here, and have the experience that I think Fromsoft wants players to have.

I would love to have the feeling of reaching the summit after a long, hard climb, but instead I have the feeling of falling down in the mud over and over until I give up. It might make me a fake gamer or whatever, but I would rather reach the summit with help than never reach it at all.

I definitely think assist mode sliders to affect stuff like "parry window" or "damage reduction" are something players can learn without TOO much difficulty. They don't seem any more complex than the hyperspecific skill trees which are in nearly every game nowadays. We're already asking players to learn what those numbers and mechanics mean, just in a slightly different context.

I do love the diagetic ways that Elden Ring allows you to modulate the difficulty, but the fact that these mechanics are often strangely hidden or understated means that some players may never even realize they're there - they sometimes requires a different kind of player savvy to use them... but when it works, it feels so much more natural, and it rules. I would love to see that "make-your-own-difficulty" explored more! I think it's a tool that is already very cool and has a lot more potential, too.

I have some thoughts based on the many years I've been playing games, and I think I can boil them down to two points:

1. There are entire game genres which I find unplayable, with a few rare exceptions, but I don't think adding options to make them easier or adding cheats is necessarily the answer, and unfortunately probably the answer is completely different game design (e.g. more Tyrian, less every other bullet hell game).
2. What I find most enjoyable is when the baseline difficulty is playable but then you can turn on a challenge mode, or raise the difficulty in a way that makes it a greater challenge, or when the game is flexible enough that you can play a self-imposed challenge. I use the examples for each of these of GITCL, Max Payne 2, and (the original) Deus Ex.

First I want to note that I have never extensively played any Souls or Soulslike games, because I bounced off of the first Dark Souls or Demon Souls or whatever hard and never tried another Fromsoft game (and don't particularly want to). So I have nothing to say about Soulslike games, and my comments are all going to be about other things. (No, I don't remember which one it was.)

The problem I have is this: there are entire genres of games that I have found unplayable or nearly so, with few exceptions. I so wanted to play through Enter the Gungeon, but no matter how many times I played, I did not get any better at avoiding enemy shots when there were a lot on the screen, and I did not get any better at timing my dodges - I consistently mistimed them and got hit. I could sometimes beat one of the possible first bosses, if I got a weapon I could use against them effectively, but the others wiped the floor with me, and every time I did get to the second level, the regular enemies killed me almost immediately. I've found pretty much every bullet hell game I've tried impenetrable for the same reasons - there's too much stuff to process at once, and I repeatedly mistime my attempts to avoid the projectiles. The only one I've actually found playable, and felt like I could get better at, and done well in, is Tyrian. I'm similarly terrible at most platformers and sidescrollers and never seem to get better at them no matter how much I try to practice (Spelunky, for instance), though there are a few that I've done well at and enjoyed (Stealth Inc 2, for instance), and by the time I finished, felt a sense of mastery of. I don't know what the difference is between the ones I can't seem to get good at, and the ones that I can master, but there's clearly a difference there somewhere. I also find roguelikes the opposite of fun, but that's a whole different thing (it has the same feeling as if you build something cool out of Legos, and then someone throws it in the trash). I have also not been good at, or even halfway competent at, a fighting game since Street Fighter II (not that I ever had the opportunity to play it enough to get really good at it). I can't seem to do the quarter circle whatever things well enough to satisfy the modern games, and the timing continues to be an obstacle.

Since Celeste was mentioned, I want to note that it's one of those games that I couldn't get very far in because of the platforming, until I said fuck it and turned on all the accessibility options to basically just let myself fly through the levels, skipping the platforming, so I could see the plot. Because, to be clear, I was only playing because I wanted to see the plot. I don't enjoy platforming - I find it incredibly frustrating (with the aforementioned rare exception of Stealth Inc 2). If I'm trying to play a platformer or a fighting game or anything remotely bullet-hellish, it's probably because I want to see the plot. So I can see how options like Celeste has could potentially be a good thing. I should note, though, that even with Celeste's accessibility / god mode options, I never finished the game. I actually lost interest partway through. Going from impossible (for me) difficulty to no difficulty was not the solution, apparently. But Celeste did not seem to have whatever it would take for me to enjoy the platforming, no matter which options I turned on (I tried them individually before I started combining them). But I couldn't tell you what that would be. I've never figured out what it was about Stealth Inc 2 that made it playable, masterable, and enjoyable for me, in contrast to virtually every other platformer I've ever played (I like Terraria too, but I wouldn't call it a platformer). I have no idea how the plot goes in Gungeon because it has no way to make it easier, and the difficulty was such that I only ever made it to the second level less than a third of the time, and that was as far as I ever got. There are many other such games that I had to turn away from even though I was interested in the plot. (It's funny, watching someone else play games on YouTube isn't really fun either)

And yet, curiously, I only seem to have difficulty with timing in those kinds of games. In first or third person shooters, I don't have any difficulty with timing (now, I'm terrible at sniping in basically all FPSes, with the exception of the DMR and battle rifle in Halos 1-4, ODST, and Reach, where I can land repeated headshots at range on a moving opponent, but I continue to be terrible with the actual sniper rifle). In the original Star Wars Battlefront, I mastered the timing to such a degree that I regularly fought rocket-launcher-armed enemy players in the multiplayer at point-blank or near-point-blank range and dodged all their shots by simply not being where they were aiming when their weapons fired. I used the handheld mortar weapon and won those duels virtually every time, despite them dropping mines that I also had to avoid. It honestly felt more like being a Jedi than playing one in (the original) SW:BF2 did, even though everyone in SW:BF1 was just a regular trooper. But of course that was also a long time ago, and virtually everyone (else) used the rocket launcher, which made it easier. I used it also if I couldn't use the mortar; only two of the four factions had it, iirc. I could name other examples, but probably the difference isn't the 3d vs 2d, but that it's easier to process everything in the 3d games because they're less overwhelming. I only had to track usually one, at most two enemies at a time in SW:BF1 because the bots and most players weren't at a skill level where they were even a challenge - I would just instakill them and move on. Unlike in the typical bullet hell game, where you tend to have numerous enemies you have to track as well as numerous projectiles, and where your ship explodes if they so much as scratch the paint (of course, those rockets in SW:BF1 would also instakill if they hit, but tracking one person's reload time is a lot easier than tracking a dozen enemies and 90 projectiles or whatever).

Rather than the usual method of "this is the normal mode but you can make it easier if it's too hard," or worse when there's no way to make it playable for you, what I have found that I have enjoyed most are games where there is a baseline difficulty level, and then you have the option to make it harder. For example, Christine Love's (@love) Get In the Car, Loser has the devil's clock which you can turn on to add additional challenge to the game. It basically gives the enemies additional abilities which kick in after a bit during the battles. Max Payne 2 has the normal difficulty level, and if you beat that, you unlock the next difficulty, and so on, and if you get so good at the game that you successfully beat the hardest difficulty level, you get a special ending - the ending of the game actually changes. I beat it on that difficulty back in the day. Deus Ex (the original), has multiple difficulty options, but also has such a range of weapons and items and different ways to play, that you can create your own challenges, like a self-imposed no-gunpowder-weapons challenge, or a non-lethal challenge (I made an exception for the bosses). For me, at least, the self-imposed challenges were what made it really fun to replay.