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Yet another thing that's impossible to discuss without being strawmanned by both sides. I'm not a hardcore gamer and for the most part play on medium or just slightly above medium difficulty in most video games.
I don't think a dev should have to accommodate customers that they don't want to accommodate, and this goes beyond difficulty. Souls games don't need a difficulty choice in the same way that Firewatch doesn't. Gacha games don't need to improve the f2p experience because those are games for whales.
It's like asking for sex drugs and rock&roll in disney movies and pg 13 horror movies.
I agree in that it doesn't need to be required, but I think you're leaving money on the table and intentionally limiting who can experience the art you're trying to share with the world.
You don't HAVE to include more than the basic colorblind option and maybe some extra visual cues, but games that go farther and allow more people to enjoy their product are better products for it.
Souls games are great. I don't want to 'get gud' so I haven't bought one ever, and with no difficulty drop I probably never will. I don't have time for that. It's not a bad game because they don't have features to make it more accessible to me, but it COULD be a better game if they did.
That's a paradox. Games are in the unique position to make hardship part of the experience.
If you take out the hardship you wouldn't experience the art in the intended way anyway.
Different people have different skill levels, so will experience different levels of hardship. Someone who'd played every Dark Souls game ten times (which isn't that rare) would find Elden Ring much easier than someone who'd never played a soulslike before. If the difficultly could be scaled to normalise for that, then everyone would have a more consistent experience closer to the intended one. It's probably not remotely practical to achieve that in every case, though.
The intended experience is to overcome seemingly insurmountable situations. That can be through brute force (just dodging, attacking) or through deduction (there is a item which kills a boss in 4 hits).
It is about catharsis.
You don't need to have the best reflexes, you need to be involved in the game/world. And that seems to be the problem with people, they don't want that.
It is not about the experience, it is about finishing it. Else I can't explain what "I don't have time for that means"
Like saying I don't have time to read animal farm so I just read the cliffnotes. It is completely absurd because you take time for that other wise you would be missing out on nuance.
Not everything has to be for anybody. But saying "makes this more for people who didn't like it in the first place" is just entitled and rude.
There is so much that is already like everything else with little that makes them stand out. So why take something that is special and make it more generic?
I think you're reading things into my comment that I intentionally didn't put in it. I'm just making the point that games already don't get to control the amount of hardship the player experiences because some players start out better than others, and some improve faster than others. If a game has a fixed difficulty level, there'll always be people who find it easier than the developers intended, and people who'd still be unable to finish it with thousands of hours of practice (and plenty of people will play for ten or twenty hours before deciding they don't have time to find out if they'd eventually get good enough). On the other hand, if a game's got several modes, then there's a good chance a player will pick a difficulty level that's too easy or hard for them, so it could make the problem worse, but, critically, it wouldn't be what introduced it in the first place.
Regarding your point about Animal Farm, it's a bit more like deciding not to read an encrypted copy of the book. It might be a trivial Caesar cipher that could be easily broken, and you could be reading about some animals being more equal than others in a few seconds, or it could be modern AES that can't be broken before the heat death of the universe, or it could be anything in between. If you don't quickly make enough progress to see that you're actually going to get to read it, then you've no way to know whether it's seemingly insurmountable or literally insurmountable.
If someone's saying they don't have time to get good at Dark Souls, they're agreeing with you that not everything has to be for everyone, and they've decided that Dark Souls isn't for them. They don't have to be happy about that, though, especially if they've had to pay for the game to find out.
I think you’re leaving money on the table
For some people that is ok
intentionally limiting who can experience the art you’re trying to share with the world
Almost every musician, painter, or sculptor ever has done that. It is ok.
You don’t HAVE to include more than the basic colorblind option
I think most devs could include stuff like colorblind options or rebindable control schemes and such, and I definitely think they should
better products for it
Difficulty is not the same as colorblind mode. Colorblind mode is the same as creating closed captions for movies, difficulty is the same as changing the movie to fit another audience. Difficulty is part of the game.
it COULD be a better game if they did
It would be a different game, that they are not trying to make.
It's not a bad game because they don't have features to make it more accessible to me, but it COULD be a better game if they did.
They already have this feature. With the exception of Sekiro, you can summon a partner to help you defeat any challenge as long as you're outside the tutorial area.
That, or you can just find enemies you're comfortable with defeating repeatedly and use them to level up until the game is easy enough for you. Or you can look up good weapons and where to find them. Or items that may help in certain situations, or weaknesses the boss/enemy you're struggling against has...
I highly doubt that making an easier difficulty will net a higher cash flow. Maybe short term but the souls games sell as they do because they are known for their difficulty. If you take that away they lose their marketing gimmick.
They'd get immediate sales from me I can tell you that much. And I personally know several people who would buy the games if they had difficulty settings.
Games are rarely art someone is trying to share. They're money machines now.