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.