Search the Community

Sekiro Should Respect Its Players and Add Big Anime Titties

Even the singleplayer experience benefits from the Lisa Simpson "Challenge you can do" effect tho w/r/t adapting controllers, accommodating colour blindness. Nah, you're right, games accommodating easy difficulty is good in some sense, but Winning feels best when it was Hard to get there. I say this as someone who is not good at videogames lmao Except sometimes. Idk. I think everyone deserves the "Omg I can't believe I actually managed to do that!" feelie.

@Lucy you bring up a valid point bringing up coordination difficulties and var. disabilities, conditions and impairments as reasons to make a game include an "Easy" mode... But I feel like "Easy mode" is a copout. Microsoft have made hella cool steps towards accessible controllers, a lot of games now have HUD and skin adaptations towards making games more accessible to the colorblind... Making the game softer rather than adapting the user experience in such a way that disabled people can smoke ablebodied players on their own merits is in some sense Cheap, y/k? I have some limited experience, though, of adaptations towards disabled use of a computer, being a) being dyspraxic enough that I can still type good, and b) once breaking a collarbone and learning to play CS against bots one handed, c) Spilling a glass of wine on a keyboard to the point that it constantly typed full stops and adapting to using microsoft On Screen Keyboard to the point i could type 70wpm d) playing videogames w/ disabled adults on the reg. e) having a wife that LOVES farcry but gets simulated motion sickness so bad she borks. "Hard" is definitely subjective though, at The Bad Place, there was a dude laughing at the idea that games around emotional intelligence should be a thing, and that games purely about twitch reflex is kind of underselling the medium... and I listed about twelve games that had an Emotional Intelligence route that was done very well... One in particular being LA Noire. (As someone with shit memory, LA Noire made me better at finding things btw... I search my house for dumbshit like my keys now in a systematic way that is like, walk in a repeating line search for the thing, looking at every point in the house once in a big ol sweep.)

Replay value, replayability probably has a lot to do with whether games ought have an easy mode. If ur game is enjoyable on a second playthrough, easy mode is probably a better idea, because you get to like... Get good at the game, and have fun playing it on a higher difficulty the second time through as a norm, and the third time through as HaRdCoRe idk, there's a line in the Simpsons that was Lisa responding to the teech saying; "I thought you said you wanted a challenge!" and she is like... "Yes but a challenge I can DooOoOooOo..." That.

(BTW I switched from Normal to Easy on Bioshock Infinite to clear the final boss, fuck that boss... If you haven't focused on DPS the whole game and instead finesse, and the last part of the game is a TIMED boss with a shitload of health? You fucked up.) (haha "specced for DPS... how do you do fellow kids)

I'd say "let the user choose the experience they would prefer" is valid; but the challenge to that is "It's more important to preserve the artistic integrity of the game". Outside of gameplay difficulty, a game narrative I really respect is MGS2's. Kojima repeatedly messes with the player's expected, anticipated enjoyment in order to make some weird-ass postmodern statement. It's commendable that he chooses not to give the player what they think they want in favor of something arguably better. Games like Dark Souls, I figure, are intended to scare the shit out of you via a rollercoaster effect of heightening monster grossness = AAAAAA FUCK FUCK FUCK I gotta marshal myself to beat this guy otherwise I am going down hard. The problem with an easy mode in such games is like; what if playing on Easy becomes the norm and the effect is ruined? It's a little like putting "easy mode" into a rollercoaster where at the flick of a switch the drops are smaller or the ride is slower. That's not to say difficulty can't Ruin a game, Far Cry 5 introduced a superhard difficulty mode for New Game+ that, because they didn't bother to balance the scripted sections (Such as mandatory vehicle turret sections) didn't give the player challenge but basically made those sections into a savescumming craps game where you might die or else luck the hell out. I'm going to completely hedge and say "Some...times... an easy mode in a game is a good idea?"

I think dude realizes what you're saying, but he's arguing against having an easy option because it encourages people to ruin their own experience, rather than having the intended experience which included being like... Terrified of the models of the monsters because not only do they look scary, they are a threat to your progress through the game, & that Easy mode will just mean that people will be inclined to squash their own experiences, and the monsters will never represent threat. Makes sense to me, but I'd argue that the entry barrier to computer games... Like, if you don't know what certain colours of bars and numbers are typically symbolically coded to mean (Red bar is health, blue bar is shield, yellow means invincible, -0 means no damage,) from past experience you are absolutely Boned if you ever want to get into videogames. Having an easy mode in a computer game means that the bar to getting into videogames as a new player is lowered. And once you're familiar with typical mechanics of games and the tropes of a typical HUD you will probably become a "Normal" player.