Comment on Gaming Pet Peeves
Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net 11 hours agoThank you for saying difficulty as an accessibility feature. So many people think difficulty is something inherent to a game’s design but completely miss the fact that difficulty is subjective.
Every game should have difficulty options. No exceptions.
Good games have a difficulty curve that scales, usually they just speed up level by level.
"Life is just like tetris, it just gets harder, then you die." - Mark Twain
You can't make an 'easy' mode for tetris, but you could effectively start at level minus 10 or something.
I disagree with the idea that every game should have a difficulty option. If the difficulty is there just for the sake of challenge, then difficulty options should be there because in that case it’s not all that different than setting self-imposed rules for additional difficulty. But when difficulty serves a bigger purpose I can absolutely understand keeping a level difficulty experience.
For example in ARC raiders the ARC are so dangerous that they’ve pushed people underground and going topside is this risky endeavor. But if the ARC were pushovers you get this narrative dissonance where the enemy is supposed to be so dangerous that humans can’t thrive but when you fight them they die instantly so why can’t humans thrive? ARC also pose as a balancing act to the game because if the ARC weren’t dangerous the game would just be PVP with looting. You have to take ARC seriously even if you know how to deal with them because of how easily the script can be flipped on you. ARC raiders obviously doesn’t really have difficulty options because of its multiplayer nature but it does show that difficulty can have a narrative impact and difficulty can impact how you approach the game. If the game was easier it would arguably end up as a worse experience.
And difficulty can also be used to make you feel a certain way. This is why I’ve argued against Dark Souls needing difficulty options (and to be clear, I’m talking about ONLY Dark Souls 1). There’s a reason some people call Dark Souls a cathartic experience, because that’s what the game is going for. Lordran is a world in despair. The end of an era is coming and the world has been plunged into decay. The denizens of Lordran have fallen into despair, given up and hollowed. And Dark Souls wants you to feel that. Dark Souls wants you to feel the despair and find the will to continue despite that despair, lest you become one of the hollowed people of Lordran. The game is challenging specifically to make you feel like you’re being treated unfairly, like you’re against impossible odds, like you’re supposed to fail, like there’s no point playing and just give up and never play again. Because when you eventually overcome that unfair and impossible scenario you’ve failed a dozen times all the emotional tension gets released and you achieve catharsis. If you don’t feel the failure you can’t feel the catharsis thus by making the game easier the game loses a part of what it is.
Dark Souls is not a game, Dark Souls is a piece of art. We give other art the respect to be their own thing. People accept Kafka novels are hard to read. People accept The Downward Spiral is hard to listen. People accept Requiem for a dream is hard to watch. But when Dark Souls is hard to play we complain? I say let art be art. If we want to treat games as art then every game can’t have difficulty options. Some games can, will and do use difficulty in a way that elevates their artistic vision. In my eyes denying games the tool of difficulty is to deny that games can be art.
You are failing to see that people with some sort of disability are already against impossible odds, not only in the game but in life. They already know that feeling you talk about, why not let them partake in this piece of art? It will still be a challenge.
If your worry is that normies would exploit this and not “earn” their victory, it also does not affect your experience of the game at all. Just like nobody is going to force you to do a SL1 run - that’s a choice-, why not have that the other way arround? :)
You are failing to see that people with some sort of disability are already against impossible odds, not only in the game but in life. They already know that feeling you talk about, why not let them partake in this piece of art? It will still be a challenge.
That is just opening up a whole other can of worms. Would you argue sim racing games should cater to people with disabilities? Should puzzle games cater to people who don’t have the capacity to solve puzzles?
If your worry is that normies would exploit this and not “earn” their victory, it also does not affect your experience of the game at all. Just like nobody is going to force you to do a SL1 run - that’s a choice-, why not have that the other way arround? :)
I love how you instantly assume the kind of person I am. Yeah, it would be my choice to do a SL1 run, the game isn’t designed around doing SL1 runs. The game is designed around evoking a specific emotion that requires people to be challenged enough to feel like they’re overcoming a challenge. How do you feel like you’ve overcome a challenge when you just turn off the challenge when it gets too tough?
Not everything is for everyone, of course. But I argue that everything, any game genre should be accesible for anyone who wants to try, and like with anything else, people will filter themselves out if it’s not for them.
I love soulslikes, I love the struggle. but I also happen to be intimately familiar with disability, and I know that disabilities and people with disabilities are all different. A blanket accesibility solution like difficulty opions would just level the barrier of entry for some people with a disability. That’s what I’m arguing should exist. So more people get to experience this piece of art. ¯\_ (ツ)_/¯ that’s just my take.
Also, I’m not assuming you to be any kind of person, it’s just the most used argument against difficulty options I’ve seen.
Whats difficult for you is impossible for others. Difficulty options are accessibility features and nothing will ever convince me otherwise
And not everything is for everyone. Do you think (former) drug addicts would be comfortable watching Requiem for a dream? Would you argue the movie needs a cut that is suitable for addicts?
If you have a specific trigger you may want to research the movie ahead of time for content. Resources like does the dog die help. Depending on your exact needs you may be able to use other tactics like watching with a friend.
With games this is different in a couple big ways.
* Difficulty is tuneable after the fact. The developer had to make choices about the numbers and implementing them in a way they can be scaled isn’t necessarily more work. Lazy scale the number difficulties are still more accessible than single difficulty.
* Games are often too long to reasonably ask a friend to help you re-edit it by dealing with a specific mechanic every time. It’s also likely that a friend may not enjoy waiting around for their time to shine.
With movies, there are still accessibility things that people do rightly complain about, like the sound mixing. Whispery actors mixed purely for movie theaters is an accessibility problem, even if it’s not typically framed that way.
Dark Souls is a game though. That’s just the word for the medium.
Thank you for completely missing my point with this pedantic response.
I got your point, but you’re welcome anyway.
Games can be art even with adjustable difficulty.
Again, difficulty is subjective. The art of gaming is in its storytelling, not it’s arbitrary mechanics that gate access to that story experience
The art of gaming is in its storytelling, not it’s arbitrary mechanics that gate access to that story experience
What kind of storytelling? Because if we’re talking about just the story it might as well be a movie or a book. It needs to have interactivity and that interactivity needs to support the story. So if the story is about hardship how can the player feel that when nothing is hard? To come back to the ARC example. How would it make sense that ARC have pushed humans underground when you as the player don’t fear ARC?
It doesn’t have to make sense. Gameplay mechanics and the in game world are two different things.
Again, difficulty is subjective. What is “hard” for one is easy for another. So let the player decide how hard they want their experience of the story to be.
Well I think your mom only has easy mode.
Good for her. I’m glad she is having an active sex life and enjoying herself. No shame in being sexually promiscuous.
You have a point or just here to be prude?
I completely disagree. Difficulty is not an accessibility option. They are a cheap way out of fixing more complex problems, but ultimately easier difficulty just means that you won’t have to interact with the game as much to get through it. No problem if the parrying lacks clear indications when you can just take the very weak hits from the enemies instead of learning the parry system.
But for most games, it doesn’t really impact anyone if you add a difficulty slider, so game developers just do that instead of dealing with accessibility issues in their core systems.
And then there’s the souls games. These games would become objectively worse by adding a difficulty option. When overcoming impossible odds is the core principle of the game, then adding a slider to make the odds mildly inconvenient instead of impossible will actively jeopardize that very principle!
In fact there are countless stories of people with severe disabilities who found new hope in clawing through the souls games. They let go of their learned helplessness precisely because they realized that what their playing is hard and failing over and over again is an important part of the process.
That being said, the souls games do deserve some criticism in some aspects regarding accessibility. There’s a lot in the UI and feedback department that could be done to improve accessibility without having a negative impact on the game itself.
Yes agree.
I cant get into elden ring because I'm not learning anything when i die.
The odd time i get a dodge, or, parry or combo to work right, i can't repeat; so i'm obviously not picking up the right cue or the timing. Maybe it's steamdeck controller lag or something.
Or maybe i'm just too old - i spend half an hour here or there.
I just can't do 5-15 hour long playing sessions anymore which might be what it takes to learn this stuff.
I'm not sure they should change it to make cues more obvious though - there are just some games I'm going to be shite at.
I don't want it to be Moonstone on the amiga, turned into dull as shit within a few hours.
paraplu@piefed.social 1 hour ago
Granular difficulty options also help. Things like being able to make the parry timings easier or harder than that rest of the difficulty.
If your difficulty presets are turning a bunch of levers at once, letting folks make their own can be very helpful.
There’s also things that aren’t often considered difficulty, but that can definitely make a game harder for some folks.
With Witcher 3 the only way I was able to play it successfully was modding it to be able to ignore a bunch of mechanics I found tedious. Things like ignoring carry weight, turning off item durability, lengthening potion duration, having items scale to my level, and hoovering up loot. Inventory management is often exhausting for me.
It’s not an easy fix this can break a game’s economy, and I think I had separate mods to reduce the impact of that.