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I am of two minds here.
I don’t really care if people use the options, but I also believe that difficulty options are only good when done in one specific way; by adjusting the number and type of mobs in every encounter and not just giving them more/less heath and damage modifiers.
The former actually creates difficulty differences. The latter just makes things a breeze or a slog compared to the default (and design intended) difficulty.
I get your point. I’d say tho that when I have the choice of having just an ok version of difficulty options instead of none, I’ll take the ok version.
I do like the few times I have seen games with two different difficulty settings and I tend to use those more. Games where they have difficulty for the action, and a separate difficulty for the puzzles.
Depending on the game, I’ll crank the puzzles up to the hardest or lowest. The newer Resident Evils? Harder, pls. Onimusha back in the day where every puzzle was just a slider? Easiest. I’d skip them entirely if I could.
Yea! I always look back fondly on Shadow of the Tomb Raider and its awesome difficulty sliders. If more developers included stuff like that, we all would be much better off. And people wouldn’t be so hell-bent on hating difficulty options then, I presume
I bet this person plays with a controller while sitting in a chair. Fucking noob. Sit on a bed of nails and just wave your hands in the air like a real souls player.
Kinect controls sound awesome lol
But it only works 73% of the time. Completely random and you have no control over that.
Sounds like the original PC port of DS1
The thing is, if a game gave me a difficulty option, I probably wouldn’t play the game on the “ballbustingly hard” option that gives me those highs you get in soulslikes after beating a seemingly impossible boss
Some people just can’t let others have fun. Difficulty options don’t have to be used if you don’t want to. Just crank the difficulty up to 11 and tell everyone how badass you are. Or just play the game like the rest of us and quit bitching.
If you can’t stop yourself from lowering the difficulty because you got sad from the boss beating you that’s a you problem not a game problem.
My least favorite was Resident Evil Village. I kept dying during one part because I hadn’t played a console shooter in forever (and there was a glitch causing the game to be black and white but that’s a totally different topic). The game asks “You wanna lower it to easy?” Sure. Why not. Lonakd behold, you can’t bump the difficulty back up once you do and I didn’t want to play through hours of content again. Horrible design in my opinion.
Yes exactly! I’m one of those people who can’t help lowering the difficulty given the choice, even though I know I’ll enjoy the game more if I keep at it, but that’s a me problem. I prefer games with a good normal mode and more organic difficulty settings, but I certainly don’t think that’s what every game should be like
These people shit on accessibility because they see it as something that other people need, not them. The attitude is that if you aren’t good at a game you simply shouldn’t play. It’s fundamentally a lack of empathy.
My go-to argument when people take that stance is to ask “Do you think you’ll still be playing games when you’re 50? When you’re 60? When you’re 70?”
Their answer of course is invariably yes, they will, and so my follow on question is “Will you still have the same lighning reflexes then, that you do now?”
That usually gets the point across.
Right now they can look down smugly from their pedestal, but some day there will come a time when their own body fails them and they can’t make it through Dark Souls 12 anymore, no matter how much they enjoy it and want to finish. And when they complain on Steam all the kids will say “just git gud lol”
Who’s the one crying then?
Accessibility options are important for all of us, no matter the reason. We should all get to choose.
I play Celeste with accessibility on and set the game speed to 90%. It’s amazing. Still difficult but the hard hard hard sections don’t take me literal hours to finish.
50, 60, and 70?!
I just hit 40 and my hands just aren’t what they used to be. Twitch gaming has lost its appeal when I tell my hands to hit the button and they’re like “hold on, gotta stretch out this neuropathy for a minute”.
Empthy is indeed the problem, and it’s a problem fucking everywhere. I don’t know exactly what we’re doing wrong, but the number of people who never learn to look at situations from the eyes of another person and really think about it is too damn high.
Twitch gaming has lost its appeal when I tell my hands to hit the button and they’re like “hold on, gotta stretch out this neuropathy for a minute”.
Me trying to play anything but a tank in hero shooters. lol
While I agree, just play whatever you want and stop gatekeeping, I do think there’s a degree of bad design that often happens around difficulty sliders. Many games will have different difficulties that boil down to something like, “Easy: enemies have half health and do half damage”, “Medium: 1x health and 1x damage”, and “hard: 2x damage and 16x health”
Instead of a pretty well tailored, and maybe difficult challenge that can be overcome with skill or by using the game’s mechanics, you just have a game that either doesn’t challenge you or does, but every fight is going to be bullet/damage sponge hell.
This is pure stupidity in action. I don’t even care if that person’s actually smart IRL, this is stupid. Like, Top 10 levels.
Edit: as someone who’s played through all of Dark Souls and Elden Ring and enjoyed the difficulty, I would never have finished the new installments of God of War if they didn’t have difficulty options… The default difficulty it sets (I can’t remember how they’re named) whooped my butt more than I could comprehend, the combat dynamics just wouldn’t click for me and I’d end up having to repeat standard mob fights as often as I would a DS boss. Dropped the difficulty down a notch, and got good only as I was nearing the end of the first one, which allowed me to go into the second on standard. What a story I would have missed!
I’ll second God of War 2018. I died so much in the very first encounter. I ended up getting good enough at the game that I actually did a second playthrough on Give Me God of War, but I had to get there first.
It’s just about accessibility for me. Barring people from experiences because they’re not mechanically good enough for the game just sucks. I somewhat get the argument of “maybe it’s not for you, then”, but the solution to the problem is tangible and possible. Not sure what the issue is
Exactly! And I’m even thinking about kids, tbh!
I mean, I’m one who advocates for ignoring age limits if you really know your kid well, for instance. And I’m imagining someone picking up something like GoW for their very mature and complex 10-year-old who’s super into Greek mythology, as they’re starting to introduce video games into the kid’s life. Then, they proceed to watch that poor kid getting wiped over and over and over again because the game didn’t have a difficulty slider. Now, if that kid’s sensitive, that’s probably something that will put them off gaming for a good while, if not maybe forever.
Edit: I know it’s more Norse mythology, the whole story in my head was based on the premise of “oh, my kid loves Greek mythology, maybe this’ll pique their interest related to Norse, maybe parallelisms, maybe understand the commonalities, etc., etc.”
I think age limits are an interesting topic. Growing up, I did get all sorts of games bought by my parents that weren’t “age-appropriate”, and I think I ended up just fine. However, I think it depends on the age gap between the child and the content they’re consuming and the overall cognitive maturity of the child. Like, I’d constantly see primary school children beg their parents to buy them GTA 5 when I was working at GameStop, and if the parents actually caved in and wanted to buy it, we’d educate them on the contents of the game, so they know what they’re buying for their kid. They’re absolutely not old enough to “get” what they’re seeing in the game and up until a certain age, they can’t differentiate between what’s fiction and what’s real.
I’d say 10 is still a tad too young for GoW - any of them, really - but I’m not a parent. The most important thing is that the parents are present during their child playing the game or consuming the media to educate them on the contents, explain things that they might not get, in general just talking to them and not leaving them to it.
But to get back to the topic :D Yea that would have sucked for the kid - good thing we have difficulty options in most games these days!
Oh, yes, agreed! Should be determined on a case-by-case basis, and the parents should always be the ones to have final say. As you’ve offered this example, I’d offer the flipside, there may be things inappropriate for some children even if they meet age requirements! And, again, down to their parents’ best judgement!
Same as yourself, I’ve been trickle-fed more mature stuff as I was growing up. I was lucky enough that mum actually took an interest and at least gathered some superficial information about the stuff I wanted to try out, to determine if yes or no. For instance, she got me the Serious Sam games and GTA III as I entered 6th grade, and they were perfect! Until then, it was mostly old platformers, cute puzzlers and point-and-click adventures, to get used to computers. As soon as she noticed I started listening to more mature (i.e. edgy) music and showing interest in more complex books, she considered I was mature enough to handle games!
As a counterexample, I walked in on her watching Alien when I was three, and I suffered from night terrors for a good couple of years afterwards!
Of course, it must be said that games are VERY different now than they were back then, with the addictive elements being reinforced in order to squeeze Whales and get players hooked on the ecosystem… GTA III was literally child’s play compared to the hellscape that is GTA Online, for instance…
Edit: then again, if I hadn’t been traumatised by Alien, I wouldn’t have developed a fixation with horror and the grotesque, and would have missed out on so much hidden beauty!
A self-anointed gatekeeper rallying for a purity test circlejerk, how unexpected!
In my soulslike community? Never seen that before
8 year olds, dude
Based, soulslikes should be difficult or not be called soulslikes.
Beep.
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