Difficulty Fetishism: A Nuanced Discussion of Ableism and Difficulty in Games
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 2 มิ.ย. 2024
- Hey, my guy! It's DarkTeaTime. Today's video is about difficulty fetishism, and how the worship of difficulty in games presents a preference for games that are exclusionary to many disabled players. In this video we explore what difficulty fetishism is, the different types of difficulty present in the medium, as well as what disabled players are looking for in terms of accessibility. I hope you enjoy!
If you do enjoy the video, please consider leaving me a tip on Ko-fi! I also offer sensitivity reading there: ko-fi.com/darkteatime
Video Timeline:
00:00 Intro
00:50 Falling Out Of Love With Soulslikes
01:40 In Praise Of Complex Storylines
03:18 git gud
06:38 Infantilization
07:10 Becoming A Disabled Player
08:30 Dean's Shameful 26 Minutes of Gameplay
09:49 We Are An Active Participant In The Magic
10:39 Is High Difficulty Always A Negative Thing?
12:28 Most Distinctive Element Of Gaming As A Medium
14:27 Here's Where The Ableism Comes In
15:26 How To Combat It
17:09 Games As Resistance Machines
19:05 Does An Easy Mode Ruin Games?
20:04 Accessibility Options Only Makes Games Better
22:48 Clear UI And Thoughtful Button Mapping
24:44 Suggestions For Accessibility Features
26:42 Accessibility ≠ Easier
27:16 Giving You A Whole @ss Dollar
29:15 Good Refund And Return Policies
29:55 Listening To Feedback Is Crucial
30:31 Accessibility Can Be Difficult To Implement
31:35 "Easy Mode" Is A Misnomer
32:27 A Possible Solution To The Difficulty Dilemma?
33:14 Not Every Game Should Have The Same Easy Mode
34:00 Being Mindful Of How We Approach Accessibility
35:25 Check Out These Amazing Resources!!
38:58 Outro
SOURCES:
Dread X Collection 5:
store.steampowered.com/app/18...
Dark Souls Creator Contemplates Introducing Easy Difficulty Mode by Polygon's Emily Gera:
www.polygon.com/gaming/2012/9...
The Case for Launching an Easy Mode for Difficult Games by WIRED's Swapna Krishna:
www.wired.com/story/casual-ga...
15 Video Games That Mock You For Playing On Easy Mode by WhatCulture:
whatculture.com/gaming/15-vid...
Indie Boss Battler Furi Is The Wrong Kind Of Hard by Kotaku's Cecilia D'anastasio:
kotaku.com/indie-boss-battler...
Cuphead Hands-On:
My 26 Minutes of Shame With an Old-time Cartoon Game by VentureBeat's Dean Takahashi: venturebeat.com/games/cuphead...
Videogame Culture Needs to Stop Fetishizing Skill by Paste Magazine's Dante Douglas: www.pastemagazine.com/games/s...
High Difficulty Games Don't Have To Be Toxic by WIRED's Will Bedingfield:
www.wired.com/story/high-diff...
With The Help of Friends, Blind Man Beats Legend of Zelda by Kotaku's Brian Ashcraft:
kotaku.com/with-the-help-of-f...
More Accessibility Options Only Make Games Better by WIRED's Carlo Pasquale:
www.wired.com/story/more-acce...
Accessibility Isn't Easy: What 'Easy Mode' Debates Miss About Bringing Games to Everyone by IGN's Grant Stoner
www.ign.com/articles/video-ga...
Gem Hubbard's Coverage of "We're a Pub not a Creche":
• We’re a pub not a crèche (Short)
• Disabled ADULT denied ... (Full Video)
Definition of Creche:
www.merriam-webster.com/dicti...
Can I Play That:
caniplaythat.com/
Game Accessibility Nexus:
www.gameaccessibilitynexus.com/
Able Gamers:
ablegamers.org/
Disabled People Are The World's Largest Minority:
social.desa.un.org/issues/dis...
• Character art by sonnet_vl
• BGM: kaazoom - Dangerous (Pixabay Music)
• Sound Effect: Fupicat - WinSquare (Pixabay Sound Effects)
#disabled #disability #disabilitypride #disabilityawareness #disabledgamer #disabledgamers #gaming #bloodborne #starwarsjedisurvivor #starwarsjedifallenorder #boyfrienddungeon #eldenring #outriders #minecraftdungeons #scrutinized #furi #control #cuphead #faefarm #atari #gothamknights #karao #thatdragoncancer #wolfensteinneworder #legendofzeldaocarinaoftime #hades #supergiantgames #ablegamers #gameaccessibilitynetwork #accessibility #caniplaythat #gaming - เกม
CONTENT WARNINGS: Photosensitivity and strobe warning, stylized video game violence (including g*n violence), ableism, disablism. Let me know if I missed anything, I can add it to the list.
IMPORTANT NOTES: I have been notified that I deadnamed Coty Kraven (the source I was referencing unfortunately used their deadname), as well as Cecilia D'Anastasio being a controversial figure and possibly Dante Douglas. Please keep in mind I am referencing these people's work, but not necessarily supporting them. I was unaware of these things.
Ohhhhh guns! guns so scary!!
You lost me at fetishism. Difficult games are meant to challenge you to test you if you don't want a difficult challenge don't play the game pandering to every person will make the product subpar and lacking in depth
What are the super weird games you name drop at the beginning? I've tried three times and I'm not hearing the correct thing to google
@@shmshare3868 The algorithm hates it
I think the issue devs have with disabled players is that they don't see people with disabilities playing their games and are jabbing at the average gamer with the disabled ones catching strays.
If i make a game, then have a dev QNA and someone comes up and talks about how they are prone to seizures and blind in one eye, my question isn't "Why" but "How" are you even playing this game?
I can't really sit down and put every thought into words so I may come back to edit this to encapsulate more discussion on the entire video but there was a jarring lack on context on the "Dean's 26 minutes of gameplay" that's really important. Cuphead is a difficult platforming shooter and so to have 26 minutes of gameplay where someone does poorly in a difficult game and that be sensationalized sounds downright malicious.
The reality is, Dean is a games journalist, someone who could get early access to games from developers to judge them and recommend them to other players through whatever medium they have access to, videos, blogposts, etc. The gameplay wasn't watching someone have a tough time with a difficult game, it was watching someone not even understand how to hit maybe 2-4 buttons on a tutorial with the buttons to press on the screen for them at all times. I hate to loop it back to infantilization but it genuinely felt like the person who we believed to be playing the game had handed the controller to someone who had simply never held one in their life before.
And then people realized, this man likely gets paid to tell us if games are too hard for general audiences.
Agreed, the editing in this video is pretty misleading as well. Cuphead is a difficult game, and this video showed some of the difficult parts of the game while talking about the criticized gameplay. But the reality is, Dean's gameplay was literally nearly failing to complete the tutorial and struggling intensely with the first stage.
It's okay if this doesn't bother you particularly and you're still fine with listening to Dean's opinions on other games. But at least understand that some gamers are not going to be interested in Dean's opinions after seeing this. This is someone who gets paid to give us his opinion of "Ulysses" who's struggling to understand "Dick and Jane".
I mean she had to fit her narrative before anything else.
Every time I see this argument thrown around I feel torn on it.
On one hand, if you aren't able to understand basic control mapings, you should probably get a grip on them before playing a game as input-demanding as cuphead.
On the other hand, every time I see this argument, the implication is that an average gamer would be better at *journalism* than the person who has a *journalism degree* , and I just think that's very ingenious, because journalists do way more than just give random opinions and be good at games. They (at least should) gather information, analyse it and present it to the public, and I don't think the average gamer is capable of doing that in an effective way.
Another thing to take into account is that GamesBeat (the news outlet that provided those 26 minutes of gameplay) never did an actual review on cuphead. The only article written about the game (that I can find at least) is by Dean himself and is not a review, it's an admission of his own lack of experience with the type of game Cuphead is (literally the first sentence in the article is "I suck at cuphead."). At no point in the article he says the game is "too hard for general audiences" like you suggest (only a general statement about the game being difficult and that's it) and in no way he uses his lack of skill as an excuse to talk negatively about the game.
Dean wasn't even planning on playing the game. The only reason he ended up playing it was because there was literally no one else around that could record footage for the game. It was literally just his job, wether he wanted to or not. If there had been someone else around, that video probably wouldn't exist.
It's obvious why would gamers would clown on such pathetic gameplay, it is admittedly a painful watch. But trying to spin it as an exemplary reason as to why be against game journalists is just silly and overreactive. If anything, it just reminds me of Gamergate, yeugh.
@@NamelessInternaut It's very odd to me to see folks on TH-cam decry "Games Journalists" all based off one guy, who is clearly not a regular gamer, that was told by his higher ups "Hey, we need a video games section to try and appeal to the youth, but we don't want to pay anyone who actually plays games to man it. You do it." and obviously flunk at it. Especially when there are countless people with journalist degrees and experience who have been reporting from the scene since the 90s. Scherier, Sterilng, whether you like them or not are clearly capable games journos yet the Tubers all love to stereotype them as incompetents.
And what's really weird is that, if you're a TH-camr who gives their opinion on games news and/or reviews games, how is that all that different from an amateur "Video Games Journalist"? Aren't you just calling yourself incompetent at that point? Or do they not see the irony? It's just such a strange "Us vs Them" mentality, all from some video by some guy.
@@johnnywakeup5515 Facts...There's also journalist like Yahtzee with all the Second Wind team and Skill Up. I don't think anybody would decry those people as being unskilled.
Some of my derision for certain accessibility features, namely the repeated hints and reminders for how to continue, stems more from feeling like the game is being pushy. I enjoy chilling in random areas of games and looking for secret nooks and crannies, and repeated reminders that I’m supposed to be moving on to my prescribed ‘content’ can take away the sense of agency that allow games to be fun.
thats why these things should be options, rather than things the game forces on you without any choice to disable them. im a big fan of including as many accessibility option as possible while allowing gamers to choose to disable literally every single one of them if they wish. these annoying features are only an issue if badly implemented (not having the ability to tun them off for instance), not because they exist at all. Celeste has a ton of basically cheat-level accessibility option that i feel most players arent even aware of because they just dont use them and havnt checked them out in the settings menu. one options literally lets you slow the gamespeed down to like half, which reduces the difficulty immensely. but for those who prefer a crushingly hard experience, they can play the B-side content with no accessibility options turned on. this is an example of difficulty options done right, so why not have stuff like this in as many games as possible?
The "git gud" people live for Arcade era game design, and I respect them for that.
As for the rest of this:
"If you make a game for everyone, you will satisfy no one."
Design for your intended audience, even if it is only yourself, the broader your design base the worse the end product will be if you aren't building emergent systems.
I love immersive sims, but man they're unpopular games to play and make, basically being proprietary to the [Looking Glass] crew and their successors.
i think the dissonance comes in when a game becomes a cultural icon but you are basically excluded form a massive part f culture because you cant engage with it directly, only watch it forma distance. the difference between watching a party go on via TH-cam and actually participating in the party. even f it might bother some people to have a separate room where the "ugly" partygoers stay in, its better than completely excusing them from the party entirely.
nobody gets mad at a game that does difficulty options well, and since Dark Souls 3 and Eldin Ring are noticeably easier than Dark Souls 1 and especially 2, for various reasons, nobody is complaining about the ability to roll in 8 directions instead of only 4 like From intended with DS1. the lack of good difficulty options is not a technological limitation, or even a style limitation, its a choice. a choice that doesnt need to effect anyone else who wants to keep the difficulty at the default setting. if you want to have more health than normal, you should get tat option. if you want to have more stamina, defense or speed, you should have those options. if you want to have less health, less defense, one hit-death mode, permadeath, etc. you should also have those options. we already ave ways of making games harder than the default, so why not have options to make them easier too?
we shouldnt just trust that all developers are gods at making the difficulty perfect in every game, so a better failsafe incase they mess it up would be to make the settings related to difficulty customizable, the same way the visuals or audio is customizable for those with hearing problems or weak/extra powerful PCs. imagine if a hyper popular PC game were forced to run at their absolute max with no option to turn off RTX or other performance shredding settings? tons of people would not be able to play it due to not having a powerful enough rig.
the only real argument against including robust difficulty options is the potential for the game design needed to make a game have customizable difficulty might alter the way the game is designed, but if they are good at making games, this shoudlnt be a concern. most of the best games ever made have difficulty options and no one can tell how it messes up the games design. eve very hard games like the newer Wallenstein or DOOM games. so this concern seems to be almost entirely theoretical.
TL;DR
games having difficulty options dont tend to make the games any worse for those who prefer harder gameplay, lacking difficulty option is pretty much always a choice in today's times and including these options could do nothing but increase the popularity of many games and thus increase the likelihood of more and potentially better sequels, so long as people are not too closed-off to the idea for the unsubstantiated concerns i mentioned above.
@@kenpanderz I agree to an extent, but I agree more with OP's take.
From a SWE and game development/design aficionado's perspective, it's not just about "being good at making games" (that's no so different of the git gud mentality, tbh). In some games, as in the soulsborne case, difficulty is not exclusively related to damage taken or health bars. Enemy AI, enemy amount, hitboxes, controls, input response, player and enemy animations, delay times, invincibility and parry window and many other things may affect it. It's not so simple as putting an "easy mode" button on the menu. Not to mention the work to implement how the damage should be parameterized in order to keep the game somewhat balanced. Should it be 15% less? 20%? 25%? Should it affect all enemies equally? Should it affect certain enemies more? Less? It's basically making multiple versions of the same game. Even so, for some games/players, damage parameterization can be easy to do and may be enough, but who's to say that applies to every game/person? And who's to say the team can afford that tweaking on detail? Also, some select games let the player customize the settings, like Sonic Frontiers, but honestly, it feels so overwhelming that I don't even bother and just go with the default, even when I want more of a challenge just bc I don't feel like tweaking every option individually and seeing how it will affect the game. I already spend enough time tweaking controls and image settings, not to mention all the testing I do daily at my job... I only want to grab a game, sit down, and play it without having to customize and test everything out in my free time too.
As for "better sequels", it really depends on the team and on what "fans" they attract. I've seen many franchises trying to embrace the world and failing at the very basic of what they used to do before... More is not always better and popularity is not synonymous with quality (and that also means unpopular things aren't necessarily bad, or else we wouldn't have terms like "underrated" or "hidden gem"). Imagine if the Stellar Blade gang got to games like Undertale.
About the cultural thing, why does people have the need to be part of something? Honest question, bc I honestly never understood that, as I never felt like that. On that line of thought, does it mean that if a certain genre or piece of media, say, true crime documentaries with explicit content, gets really popular, they should adapt it so others are able to get aboard that train? In this case, should they censor the explicit content for sensitive people? How about the people who liked it specifically for the explicit content? Wouldn't it also change the "thing" to begin with? It sounds akin to going to another country and push my culture there... I mean, if there's an already established community who likes it that way, if I want to get aboard that train, then I'm the one who should adapt to it, not the other way around. It would be disrespectful and condescending of me to do otherwise.
As for accessibility, I honestly don't mind having the option, but I also don't think everything should be for everyone. That's the beauty of gaming: there's something for everyone out there, specially nowadays that development is more accessible. If the git gud gang and the tryhards wanna have their souls-likes, let them have their souls-like. Live and let live.
The thing about souls games and accessbility is pretty straightforward. While elitism is bad and needs to go, not everything needs to be for everyone. I suck at Touhou, even on the easiest mode, I can't beat a single game. But asking for an easier mode would be pointless, because at that point I might as well not play a bullethell.
In other media, we look a lot at artist vision. We wouldn't like an artist making their horror movie less scary because some people who can't handle scary movies can't get into it. But we have no problem asking a video game creator to essentially make multiple versions of the same game so other people can enjoy it?
Again, if we look at this from a narrative perspective, there are lots of stories out their with themes that make me personally uncomfortable. I'm not about to ask the author to take it out or make a different version for me.
While the toxicity is bad, I think your argument that narriative and emotional difficulty is good but technical difficulty is bad is narrowminded. You are essentially saying that only one type of difficulty and potential inaccessibility is valid. Only one area where the authors intentions matter.
Point of horror is to break you. To make you brave.
I've seen a lot of people using the artist's vision argument whenever they're defending souls games or souls like. But is it truly their vision or it's just gamers imposing their visions? Cause again, she starts her video discussing the discourse surrounding Hidetaka Miyazaki remarks about wanting an easy mode that immediately spurs backlash. Regardless whether it's actually a mistranslation or not, it's funny the same people who always preach about artist vision literally turn against the artist the moment they said something that goes against them. Another example, is when Sifu decided to have an easy mode, there's also backlash and people accusing the dev as being a sellout. If it so much on the artist' visions, why are they're shamed for whenever their vision doesn't really prioritise the difficulty. Suddenly, these devs are "compromising their own visions". It's like they're being hypocrite and actively policing an artist own vision.
Here's my take of it. I agree we should always respect for an artist vision at the end of the day, but I'm allowed to still disagree with those visions or criticised them. That said, having a meltdown about it is stupid. And I'm specifically referring to those people who literally lost their shit over Miyazaki's comment or Sifu's decisions or people who uses mods/cheats to make their single player games easier. Like, who cares if my sister decided to play dark souls with mods that allow her to one shot opponent or have infinite lives, she bought the game, she's allowed to do whatever the hell she want.
And I think you kinda misses her whole main argument here. She's not against the idea of technical difficulty. Her issue is mainly on the CULTURE surrounding games difficulty itself. It's not so much on "technical difficulty is bad", it's more on that "real gamers" exclusively assume that technical difficulty is the only good thing and the other two are just simply irrelevant. She's addressing these kind of narrowmindedness like what you're doing but just the opposite point. Both gamers and even some game devs are literally treating you lesser for playing a game on an easier mode.
I feel like these whole entire comment sections are so fixated on souls games thinking she's attacking them, eventhough she barely talks about them and only address them in the beginning just to share her own personal experience with it. It barely has any weight on the overall point she's making.
@@ZhaneDFrost Good that people like you don't know sport.
@@ZhaneDFrost Yeah, agreed :D You summarized it all so well!!
@@danieladamczyk4024 And the point of challenging games is to overcome challenges. Or quit. It is okay to not be able to beat something. Plently of other stuff out there to play.
Perhaps this is naive of me, but personally, I've never really felt like there's a huge part of the gaming community that shames people for being disabled in anyway, being blind, deaf, having illnesses affecting our nervous system or muscle control that may affect our capabilities in mechanical skill... it's not like most people are shaming players who have a harder time beating a boss because that boss has a sound que they can't benefit from and that makes certain attacks harder to deal with, and accesibility options to help people who deal with these problems day to day is a wonderful addition that is NEVER a bad thing.
The issue is that... it's not really something all games can do. The world isn't perfect, sadly, most cities have not enough ramps to make life easier for someone in a wheelchair, and most games are not programmed with options that'd make gaming a more fulfilling and satisfactory experience for those who face limitation when it comes to gaming. Games like TLOU2 come as examples of great accesibility in games to make sure everyone is included, but those options have a cost.
PROPER accesibility require a level of work and knowledge that not everyone is willing or ABLE to program into their games, difficulty options or lack thereof are a flawed concession devs have to make, making a good game is hard enough, but balancing a game properly to make sure most players have the intended experience and THEN also to take into account disabled players by adding better options to makes sure they can enjoy themselves to the fullest too seems like a biblical task for many dev teams, executives only have money in mind, but accesibility options are a sink of time and effort with not much payoff, the way society is arranged, inclusivity isn't even near the priority list in most facets of our lives, despite the fact that we have more than enough resources for it.
I've definitely experienced a lot of discrimination in gaming circles as someone who's disabled. I guess what makes it muddled is some people tend to not be aware they might be coming off that way, etc. So it often falls into a grey area where people may be casually ableist but not necessarily intend to be so which is not something I tend to fault people for since it's not like they know any better. That said though there are just straight up harsh people I've had run ins with, goes without saying. I don't think it's all gamers though, and I don't think the video is saying that either, it's just more about it being a subset that exists at all.
That aside though,
I'm someone who does game development work and the 2nd half of this comment is an especially interesting angle I'd love to see explored more in videos.
Accessibility is extremely hard to implement that I wonder if I'm capable of it at times since there's so much retroactive changes to make at any moment when they're toggled and that's not even going into the nightmare of QA testing it for bugs. It's a genuinely defeating feeling when you work on something for months that you can't even play, which has happened with me before.
With games like The Last of Us 2 having above and beyond accessibility, it's something I appreciate but also resent in a way.
It's absolutely something to be celebrated and embraced but I wish more developers were allowed to share the inner workings of how they accomplished what they did since I feel like this sort of thing can be remedied by being open about it for other developers to reference and even straight up copy if need be.
I think accessibility can't go beyond the level it's currently at without there being cooperation from fellow game developers and studios, but obviously big corpos don't really like that kind of thing since they wanna have a walled off garden.
That's also not getting into companies being obsessed with patenting features too that can genuinely benefit disabled gamers if all developers/device manufacturers were allowed to use them as well.
Yup. It FEELS like this to em cause of their own obvious issues with the subject. Well said.
That’s because there isn’t. To these people who think with hammers, they can’t help but see nails.
@@PortiaLynnDoll There's an important gradient grid to account for here, [actively vs passively] and [intentionally vs accidentally] being the main considerations.
I'd give more axes, but everyone struggles with 4 spatial dimensions and higher.
Whether a game should include varied difficulty modes should be up to the developers. If a game doesn't have varied difficulties, it's probably because the developers didn't want there to be. If a certain kind of game isn't for a certain kind of player, that's just it. It's not made for that kind of player, and it doesn't have to be. Games are art and developers are artists who should be able to make the games they want to make without having to compromise their vision because some players who the game wasn't even made for in the first place feel entitled to have an easy time. Not all games need to have varied difficulties, but that doesn't mean that none of them should. Not every game should be made to cater to every player.
Obviously it's already up to the devs, not sure why you are pushing for that. but that doesn't mean everyone has to like it. They don't have to cater to everyone, but the argument being made is that catering to more people via optional tools and modes doesn't have to present any downsides. And for the players it helps, it's straight up the difference between the game being good and bad.
If you want the game to be 'not for them', you need to be damn sure you aren't just making things worse by doing so. If I write a book of riddles in English and refuse to let it be translated to French because 'it's not for them', I am actively losing something to achieve exclusivity. But then saying 'lol learn English' to French people just adds spite to the situation. Even if the English version is the true and intended experience, a different experience aimed at someone else can exist independently.
If you play dark souls, you literally don't get the intended experience because it's localised. Does that remove value from the game? Barely. Better to have this option than to learn Japanese before attempting to understand it, because there is so much still to enjoy about this 'easier' writing.
Something analygous exists for mechanical difficulty, if you think about it. 'Bad' players have their own struggle to face on lower difficulty, and the devs should consider that worthwhile for the very same reason they want to give skilled players a struggle on high difficulty. If they exclude one group or the other because they 'won't cater to everyone', they have just delivered less game to fewer people, and that's nothing impressive. Getting the intended experience to more people is the true mark of developer talent.
And this isn't even getting into the disability arguements from the video.
Adding these features is a low effort high reward idea that shouldn't overlooked. And in video games, the devs really can have it all, as hard and easy experiences can be presented in the same product. Sure they don't 'have' to, but that's not the arguement. Only that they could, and some people would love it, while others need only ignore it. The perception that there is something to lose is false, or can be explained, funnily enough, by lack of developer skill e.g. If they make the game worse for the original mode in their attempt to add a new mode, they need to git gud because it absolutely doesn't need to be a problem. Designing levels poorly due to reliance on a minimap might be an example of this.
Thanks.
A game “not being for everyone” is supposed to mean “artistic intent and merit, as well as the core experience of gameplay shouldn’t have to be altered to have the broadest mainstream appeal” not “people who are otherwise in the game’s intended audience should be barred from playing because of their immutable characteristics”
While yes, not all gameplay can be perfectly accessible, and while yes it’s always up to the devs, we shouldn’t normalize excluding disabled people for their disabilities. If someone physically cannot play a game, that’s a hell of a lot different from someone not liking the core gameplay loop or the story. Imagine saying this about a building. Not all buildings need to be accessible to wheelchairs, because architecture is art and art doesn’t have to be for everyone. Or imagine applying it to another group. Like a character creator with absolutely no dark skin tones, but it’s okay because this game wasn’t made for all kinds of people. Sure, it’s the “intent” of the creator, but that doesn’t mean we have to defend that intent. Changing those aspects only expands who can experience the work within the intended experience. Wheelchair users can appreciate the building, and black players can experience the intended gameplay of making a character that looks like them.
Changing the difficulty isn’t changing the artistic merit of a game. The reason a disabled person might need an easier difficulty is because they are effectively already playing on a harder difficulty. All the mode does is put them closer to experiencing the intended difficulty. And if game designers don’t see that, if they think their game is going to be made lesser because disabled people can play, that’s an attitude we should try to change. They don’t have to make difficulty selection, but we should make it so they want to.
@@chickenelafsworld7105 Agreed entirely. Some people forget that difficulty is ultra subjective, different for every person. Without modes there is no such thing as 'artist's vision' for difficulty because the developers, frankly, have a limited idea of how hard each person will find it.
Since we are talking games - entertainment - the 'correct' difficulty must be whatever each individual wants and needs to achieve the experience the developer hoped for. And a fair difficulty is one where all people must put in the same effort to achieve the same accolades. A single difficulty guarantees this will not occur, leading to bitterness, abandonment of the game, and those that succeed using cheese and walkthroughs to avoid the intended challenge because they didn't find the game fun enough to engage with hopeless-seeming challenges. Disability and accessibility considerations only make this more obvious, and arguments against it more oblivious.
Without modes, there is no hope of getting anywhere close to the best, and fairest, the game can be. If the artist intends this weakness to be present in their game, so be it! But they should be aware it's a weakness nonetheless. And again, this is saying nothing of the potential (or guarantee?) for discrimination that comes with this approach.
@@chickenelafsworld7105 You and like minded fail to realize the resources and bandwidth required to add such features and the effects on player psychology.
Making a bank wheelchair accessible doesn’t impact the quality of the banking service received; it only removes a barrier to the service. However, game accessibility and difficulty are embedded in every part of the gameplay experience.
Changes to game accessibility changes the entire gameplay experience which is no small feat. The video creator even shares a quote from a developer expressing the difficulty of adding difficulty modes and many other studios have commentaries/interviews stating the same. It takes significant resources (financial, manpower, time, testing, etc.) to properly balance game modes and add accessibility features. This is why the most accessible games are the highest budget titles.
Besides difficulty of implementation, player psychology can’t be ignored. Players will optimize the fun out of things. Not mention too many options is overwhelming and making them not controllable risks disturbing players who didn’t want them. All these things can keep players out of the desired flow states and experience.
@@Nobody6146 I know it isn’t always easy or feasible, maybe I just didn’t make it clear enough in my original reply. I don’t think accessibility always has to be easy for those implementing it, because a little inconvenience in the moment of making the feature gives way more convenience and joy to the people affected. Obviously we shouldn’t prioritize that over the health of the people creating it, but sometimes the conversation makes it seem like any extra inconvenience is too much in this area, even when the same concepts apply to other features. After all, even wheelchair ramps cost resources and need to be engineered, and buildings designed without care might genuinely make the experience worse for disabled people. Building a ramp with the correct specifications can take creativity and mess with your designs, depending on the space you have. And there are lots of other accessibility features in every day life that should be more common, but aren’t because much like with games, it’s seen as too much effort. It’s more complicated with games, but that doesn’t mean the fundamental idea shouldn’t be there.
That being said, especially since the industry doesn’t currently have infrastructure for balancing accessibility and difficulty modes as much, I’m inclined to show a lot more grace. Especially for indie games. I think we should work to change that, but I’m not so naive as to think we’re there yet, especially since we haven’t even got past the first hurdle of devs and players alike stop seeing changes in difficulty as a show of character and maturity. An ideal world would have specialists focused on making the game accessible, so average devs aren’t spending time and resources on balancing new modes, and so there’s a bit of quality control for the accessibility features.
But again, we aren’t there yet, we have to work to get there. And that starts by changing attitudes from “we shouldn’t have to make accessibility features because they’re hard and resource intensive, we don’t have to cater to everyone, and they take away from the experience” into “we will try to do what we can within our resources to create accessibility features wherever possible, because players of all types should get a chance to experience the game, if possible”
I don't think any sane person is truly advocating for exclusion of Accessibility (even if they think so).
The misunderstanding comes from not knowing "Accessibility =/= Difficulty"
There is a lot of retaliation from those more limited than others, some justified, over this. Deaf, Color blind, or Blind options are not what is being attacked.
Difficulty changing is something that some games are designed for, & others not. To implement this is a heavy task that has diminishing rewards compared to simply balancing the game correctly from the beginning. If people of lesser capability truly wish to play certain games. There are always easier ways to *play* the game. A button that makes everything easier makes it so you might as well be playing another game entirely
& this whole "Dumb" & "Ableism" strawman arguments are very shortsighted of @darkteatime
Ableism can stems from ignorance like what you're doing right now. She literally said people always think of physically disabled people while there's also literally people with invisible disabilities. For example, learning disabilities or ADHD or Autism. Her argument still stands. The word strawman is so overused that it practically lost its meaning. Like what part about this video is actually strawmanning? Just because people are not actively rooting against disabled people, doesn't mean that they're incapable of being Ableist. That's the most barebone black and white way of viewing things. It's like saying you can't be racist just cause you have a black friend. You can still have presumptions of black people and stereotyping them. Or simply be racist to other race or religious groups.
Like gee, It's almost like there's spectrum to this kind of shit. Not all ableist are twirling moustache villain who's actively hating disabled people. Like actively stopping them from having access to their needs or undermining them can still be ableism eventhough it might not be your intent. Again, you're scope and understandings of disabilities are those three and probably like people with physical deformities. But disabilities doesn't just encapsulates those. You seems to lack understanding as well that while ""Accessibility =/= Difficulty", Difficulty directly affects Accessibility.
And funny you mention how "A button that makes everything easier makes it so you might as well be playing another game entirely" cause Street Fighters 6 literally does that and yet you can still play the same game. There's literally a "modern control" option that allows you to execute complex combos by literally pressing a button. Doesn't take anything away at all from the game and if anything, it was praised for it even among hardcore fighting fans. Your point about having an easier ways to play the game is just essentially an invisible easy mode. It's still an easy mode but cleverly hidden. You're just supporting her point and isn't really going against her. Btw, a button that makes your opponent less tanky or less aggressive, doesn't change a game entirely. Don't be so dramatic.
Also, we're talking about gamers here. Any sane person would never advocate for exclusion of Accessibility, but gamers and being sane doesn't really go well together. A sane gamer is like a shiny ultra rare SSR Pokemon.
@@ZhaneDFrost That's a gross generalization
@@furjaden8553 "Difficulty changing is something that some games are designed for, & others not."
Sounds like a skill issue for the devs.
I appreciate the vid overall but I think you're too dismissive of the qualitative aspect of difficulty which weakens your analysis (for example the bit about Fallen Order at 20-ish min). Ultimately it's about emotions - stress, fear, tension, frustration, discouragement, relief, satisfaction, the feeling of multitasking, etc. They are all powerful emotions which are created by or amplified by high amounts of difficulty. Hell, even "quantitatively" many games *do* change on higher difficulties. Entire sections of your moveset can become more situational if not outright unviable, strategies become impossible to execute, consistency drops, attacks can become borderline unreactable in some instances. Trying to downplay it just leaves a big hole in your argument.
The qualitative stuff, the feelings difficulty creates, are things developers can and should use to create interesting experiences for players. It gets more complicated because of the highly mixed multimedia nature of games nowadays (almost all games are "content delivery machines" now to varying extents) and the fact that people with specific disabilities will, for example, feel more challenged by control schemes that are second nature to able bodied people. Thus getting the intended emotional intensity of hard mode on normal mode.
...Though this is even further complicated by the fact that people don't really know what they want and part of the artist's job is to be bold and force people to engage with something they wouldn't engage with normally, which customization options undermine by letting players opt in and out of things freely instead of being forced to engage. AND THIS is complicated by the fact that most games (esp mainstream ones) are pandering bloated products that don't focus on delivering any particular experience, instead wanting to appeal to everybody. Meaning they have no real argument against that kind of opt-in/opt-out approach.
It's a complicated discussion.
The point here (among others) is that what to YOU a normal or easy mode is that, moderate or easy, to some people those modes are what hard are to you. The idea is that even people who struggle with moderate/easy modes are allowed to play too, as they will experience the moderate/easy mode in a similar way to what you experience a hardcore Lunatic+ mode.
Games should have accountability features for disabled players but an easy mode isn’t really gonna help someone with disabilities. if my hand eye coordination is poor take 50% less damage isn’t necessarily going to fix the issue. If I’m color blind and can’t see loot on the floor 25% extra cash isn’t going to solve that problem. if I only have one arm a slowed down fight isn’t necessarily going to fix that. We need real disability options in games not an easy.
I shared examples in the video of how easy modes help me with my disability though. Every disabled person has different needs. I can play harder difficulties, but it can cause my condition to flare and worsen. I change the difficulty mode based on how I'm feeling that day, so for me it is an accessibility feature. But it's not the only accessibility feature. There are many more, and each disabled player needs something different depending on their disability. I agree that we need real and varied accessibility options, and I explore that in the video and essentially agree with most of your statement.
10:32 "we should have the option of playing games in all genres"
As a fellow disabled gamer, I have to vehemently disagree here. I have a coordination disorder and an executive function disorder. Because of that, there are a lot of genres I simply cannot play, and that's perfectly OK. The one that hurts the most fighting games, that genre is just built around an ability I do not have. The complex sequences of button presses are simply too hard for me to execute. I'll admit, it makes me pretty sad that this genre my friends all love is completely inaccessible to me, but if you were to change it make it accessible to me then it wouldn't be the same genre anymore.
But that's the exact reason I love the souls series. I know that when I play Sekiro and my friends play Sekiro, we're enjoying a shared experience. And unlike playing a multiplayer game where I can fall behind, I can take the game at my own pace and still know that I'm enjoying the same challenge my friends did. It might take me months and months to accomplish what they blew through in a couple days, but can still do it. And it's THAT part that people worry about tarnishing with accessibility features. If you introduce difficulty options, you'd lose that monolithic shared experience.
I think the expectation that all games should be accessible to all people regardless of disabilities is kinda... "disablist"? Like it implies that the unique experiences of able-bodied people are in some way less valuable than the unique experiences of disabled people. That if a game is about an ability you don't have then it can't possibly be valuable to the people who do. And that just seems kinda gross to me. I can't coordinate my fingers to pull off cool combos, but my friends certainly can and they seem to get a lot of joy out of it. I don't think it's fair to say they shouldn't have art that appeals to them specifically just because you might end up excluding me.
Honestly this whole video seems kinda gross to me. Have you ever had a piece of art that felt like it was made *just* for you? Dark Souls players have found a series that speaks to them with its difficulty and its exclusivity, and I think it's kinda spiteful that you don't want to just let them have that. I think there needs to be space for some games to be inclusive and for some games to the exclusive. The way you talk about Dark Souls players being protective of the games they love just comes off as really mean-spirited.
Wow, a lot of what you're implying I did here I genuinely did not do. I talked at length about being careful about how we add accessibility to games as to not tarnish the experience for anyone, able-bodied people included. I spoke a lot about (and gave examples) of how adding easier modes or accessibility features doesn't really change or alter the experience in a way the ruins them if implemented properly. Like I said when talking about the Jedi series, I played it on normal when I was healthier, and I played it on easy while my condition was flaring and it genuinely felt the same to me. It was still challenging, and I still have to rely on skill to get through the game. I can still share and enjoy the game with able-bodied friends who played it with different difficulty modes than I did. This is because the different modes were planned for with care and attention, and were optimized to keep the gameplay in tact whilst including more people.
I never once said I don't want able-bodied people to enjoy games, and I never implied that either. I said I want everyone to enjoy them. That includes able-bodied people. Like I said in the video, I (and the people I was quoting) are not calling for a destruction of the medium in any capacity. I (and many others) just want more accessibility features that can be toggled on in the settings for specific people who need them. I never said games should be dismantled until they are unrecognizable and unplayable for able-bodied people. Naturally, some games, no matter how many features are added might still be impossible for someone to play. Humans are incredibly diverse, there is no way to absolutely include every single type of person. But I think it's still worth it to try to include as many as we can. I love games, and I want to share them with other people.
And in terms of the Dark Souls discussion, being so against the idea of other difficulties being added is just silly, as no one is making anyone play an easier mode than what they want to play. Harassing a developer into submission is not protecting the game he created. This simply does not make sense. It's not mean-spirited to say it's shitty to harass your favourite creator so much that he has to pretend he never said the statements in the first place. And his statement was simple: he wanted a wider variety of people to be able to play his games. I personally do not see an issue with his statement.
I'm glad you're enjoying playing souls likes with your friends! No disabled person is exactly like the next, and so while some can't play souls likes, some can. I was merely using it as an example of how some people in the community are obsessed with difficulty for difficulties sake, and revel in exclusion. If you aren't like this and your friends aren't like this, then I'm simply not talking about you.
Once again, I never said anywhere in this video that a game can't be valuable to able-bodied people when it isn't accessible to us. Thanks for watching the video and commenting.
Strong agree! Lovely comment. Difficulty - and the inability to change it - is extremely important to the shared experience of Souls games!
@@darkteatime First of all, thanks for taking the time to reply even if my comment was more than a little accusitory. And I'm sorry if I was unfairly projecting other people's views onto you. I feel very strongly about this topic and it's hard not to be defensive about it.
Essentially my problem is that the Souls series really is threatened by accessibility features in a way most other games aren't, which is why it's such a flashpoint for this whole debate.
Most games, like Jedi Fallen Order, want every player to struggle and succeed roughly the same amount, so including options and accessibility features is just common sense. If you play it and I play it, we'll probably have pretty much the same experience because the game is tailored to each of us. And I think that's a perfectly fine approach to game design, but I don't think it should be the only one.
Even though people fetishize the souls games for being hard, I think if you look at how souls fans respond to new games in the genre, they're actually far more protective of that singular shared challenge than of the actual difficulty. Broadly speaking, Elden Ring is accessible to a much wider audience than Dark Souls 3, and yet there is very little pushback from fans about making things "too easy". Dark Souls fans are actually perfectly comfortable with the game being made easier, it's specifically the addition of difficulty OPTIONS that they take issue with.
Dark Souls' fixed difficulty is so important is because it means that we DON'T have the same experience. We're all presented with the same challenge, and our experiences with it are unique to each of us. If you add difficulty options, you end up homogenizing the experience. I think that there's something valuable about the way Dark Souls does things. There's meaning in knowing that I'm facing the same challenge as other players, even if I'm struggling more than they are. If you break that and tailor the challenge to each player's abilities, you lose something special about these games. I guess what I'm trying to say is that if you made a video essay saying "Elden Ring is too hard" you'd get some comments from shitheads telling you to git gud, but not nearly as much as you would get from posting a video titled "Elden Ring should have a easy mode", if that makes any sense.
As for the harassment of Miyazaki, I obviously do not think harassing people is good or productive, but I'm a little skeptical of characterizing the backlash to that interview as "harassment". It's hard to find documentation about the response to an interview from more than 10 years ago, but I haven't seen any indication that anyone contacted him directly or did anything inappropriate. If anyone did harass him over it, they're obviously assholes.
Anyway, thanks again for taking the time to respond to comments, especially in such a heated comments section.
I do love the little reward other than progression in these games. I wish for more games that reward you with something long-term, instead of instant gratification. I definitely see the value for other ways to deliver story and gameplay.
I don't think all games should fill that niche because it is inaccessible in some key ways that cant be changed without removing its identity. At the same time I don't think these games shouldn't exist in their current state either. I want games like these to exist, an unforgiving world, that CAN be conquered through hardship and/or collaboration.
As a designer there is a big issue with difficulty settings: how do you know what difficulty setting is going to be best for you? That's why I enjoy coop so much in souls games, you can have friends aid you where you can't get through, a wonderful metaphor for life. We need more of these ways to let people decide and pick where and when they need help, and actually let them ASK for help, instead of adjusting an entire game before they even know if they need help.
What do all these games need however? Accessibility, more accessibility options, easier way to handle and control the game, etc. There are many many steps we can take to increase accessibility without changing the "identity" of a game that needs to be worked through.
And we need less shitty elitist gamers. There are people who spend 8 hours on defeating a boss, and people mock it?? Someone who spends that much time and effort into beating a difficult challenge is the type of person we should celebrate!
it is no virtue to not make mistakes, to never fail, to never struggle. Virtue lies in doing what you want to do, DESPITE of difficulty. no one should be mocked for finding shortcuts, for seeking help, or for simply bashing their head against a wall until they succeed. these are not only valid strategies, those are intended and virtuous strategies
hey disabled gamer bro here, how do you square your dislike of how disabled people are continually infantilized (definitely a real thing, to some degree anyway) with your desire for accessibility features and difficulty settings for disabled features that are or at least are seen as kind of infantilizing?
I mean, for me as a disabled person, that isn’t an issue inherent to accessibility, but more how gamers (and in some cases game devs) see them. The goal of accessibility in games is both to make the games more accessible and to create an environment where accessible options aren’t seen as downgrades or babying the audience. Not only does that mean stopping devs who actively infantilize those on easier difficulties, but also implementing accessibility in a way that doesn’t feel intrusive or threatening to abled players who might lash out. The need for accessibility and the wish not to be infantilized are not opposed by nature, but by our culture. We need to recognize that easier difficulty isn’t saying “you’re not enough of an adult for the real game” but “you shouldn’t be physically disallowed from experiencing this just because your disability makes an aspect of the game inherently harder”
I like the think of it not as I’m making the game easier because you can only handle easier difficulties, but that I’m making aspects of the game easier because you’re already playing on a harder mode than an abled player.
@@chickenelafsworld7105 That's a whole lot of words, what you really want is a simpler and easier experience that will hold your hand and won't bruise your ego for holding your hand, and want to use Disabled people for what is ultimately just for YOU and YOUR needs.
look, if Dark Souls or Jedi Survivor is too much for you? Go play Assassin's Creed.
@@Darth_Bateman I never said if/where I need help, no need to get pissy. As a disabled person who also isn’t affected in that area, I find it hilarious that you think I’m using disabled people to get easy handholding. Maybe you didn’t notice, but I didn’t make this video. I never said that those games are hard for me or I use easy difficulties. I just think other disabled people should also get to enjoy them. I care about other people, who knew that was possible?
Not everyone is as obsessed with feeling superior as you, I don’t need to lord the fact that I play harder difficulties over other people’s heads to prove myself. It’s honestly childish that you think you’re somehow cooler or better for being able to play a game better than someone else. Your accomplishments aren’t worth less because others can also reach that. You want games to stay stagnant and inaccessible to meet YOUR need to feed your ego.
If you genuinely think it’s a “skill issue” for people to have limitations from their disabilities, I’d like to see you perform at your same perceived skill level while dealing with disabilities you don’t have now. It’s like telling someone they’re covering for their lack of skill when they say we should provide wheelchairs and leagues for paraplegic basketball players. Some people are already playing the game on a harder mode by virtue of being disabled, and they shouldn’t be forced to spend more time, energy, and effort to enjoy a game just because of a physical limitation. And that’s not even mentioning how not all gamers (especially disabled gamers) don’t have the time to “get good” at a game.
@@chickenelafsworld7105 Wow, that is certainly one way of looking at it.
i think on some level its impossible to offer help to anyone without infantalzing them to some degree. by helping anyone in any way you are insinuating that they would benefit from the help, that they cannot do something as well by themselves as they could with your help. there is no way around this 100%, for those with disabilities or without. but we can improve the world in various ways for people with disabilities while minimizing the infantalizing insinuations as much as we can. we dont call people weak babies for not beating the Asylum Demon with the straight sword hilt, or choosing to farm for the Drake Sword or sprinting through the graveyard for the early Zweihander. those are just options that players can choose to explore if they want powerful weapons early on in the game.
belittling people for wanting things easier is not useful for improving the world, allowing people to have things easier while giving them the option to try harder challenges if they feel like it is a much batter way to engage with society, this includes gaming culture.
I think it's quite the opposite, the reason souls-like games are so popular nowadays is because starting from the 7th Gen, challenge and difficulty in games dipped hard in most AAA games, I remember playing stuff like Assassin's Creed and GTA4 and being annoyed by the complete lack of challenge, it's like devs figured that as long as you fill your game to the brim with near pointless content you can bamboozle the player into believing what he's doing is meaningful and rewarding. As for the addition of an easy mode in a FromSoft game, it's completely missing the point of the genre imo, other than being a development nightmare because of the PvP aspect of the games.
Well, the point I was making in the video is that an easier difficulty doesn't necessarily make the game easier for those with certain disabilities. I don't really think it's missing the point? Using the example I used in the video, I played the Jedi games on both easy and normal, on easy when my condition was flaring, and normal when I was healthier. And it felt the same to me! It was still challenging on easy mode, because at the time I was suffering from brain fog, slowed reflexes and debilitating chronic pain. I still had to rely on my skill to get through it. A game can still be challenging on an easier difficulty if someone is struggling with a health condition. I think it's about choosing the difficulty that works for where your health is at.
tbh there are a lot of reasons for the player to choose easy difficulties, it doesn't always have to be a disability trait. Personally, I play almost every big rpg on the easiest levels possible - because I am interested in the story, and not the grind. The worst thing a game can do for it's story is to throw in mandatory optional quest grind, which destroys the pacing completely and you feel no longer invested in the story. Easy difficulty settings allow you to charge through the main story, without engaging in any grind.
You could also be a more relaxed player who enjoys wandering around the gaming worlds, or even a game-photographer, so you need the enemies to ignore you as much as possible to play like that.
On top of that, yes, easier difficulties and various accessibility options help to bring in new players into gaming. Interestingly enough, physical controls are usually the biggest obstacle for a non-gamers, and the easy difficulty gives more freeway to get used to the controls.
I was really excited for a “nuanced” discussion. You started out with great points and even had “we’ll come back to these counter arguments”. However, no discussion was had. You let your emotions take over in a rant about your desire to feel included and your disdain for the antithesis. The irony of saying accessibility is being reduced and belittled while simultaneously reducing the antithesis and belittling its supporters.
Real souls fans would never make fun of someone for struggling. They'd offer to help.
Damn right. Jolly cooperation is a helluva thing.
There's a gap that I've seen continually be misunderstood for years: this conflation between accessibility and difficulty, specifically mechanical difficulty, and how some folks frame the latter as this meaningless barrier to entry that game developers should be rid of by now, especially when FromSoftware gets brought up. Where I see FromSoftware succeeding in making their games mechanically difficult without becoming impossible is in how they design their games to have options that aid in mitigating the difficulty their games are so notorious for. In the case of the Souls games, you've got everything from the ability to spec into different builds that scale well with a huge variety of weapons, builds that let you fight from a distance, weapon effects that widen dodge windows or stagger enemies, and especially in Elden Ring where they opened things up to an insane degree: the ability to walk away from a boss you're stuck with and go basically anywhere else, gain more power, weapons, or abilities, and come back to a point where the boss you were stuck on can even be trivialized entirely. That's not even mentioning the insane amount of summoning options in that game, to a point where part of the fun is finding them all like Pokemon over just using them to help with fights. The options are nearly endless with the direction Elden Ring went.
Hell, I'd say there's options in Sekiro as well, the game that stumped quite a fair bit of "Souls veterans": underappreciated aspects like the customizable prosthetic arm that can be equipped with a variery of tools like a loaded umbrella that widens the deflect window and protects from firearms, the mist raven feathers that allow you to teleport away from hits, even ones that should have landed, and the fireworks that very quickly stun most enemies, among many others. Then there's the buffs from candies and Spiritfalls, or even weird, esoteric combinations of effects and prosthetic tools, such as applying a weak poison effect to yourself so that the constant damage allows you to use the mist raven's teleportation at will even outside of combat. Add to all that the game's resurrection mechanic that can be upgraded to let you do it twice... and with the proper items to recharge your resurrection nodes, "Shadows Die Twice" can easily become "Shadows Die Four freakin' Times". There's always tools in FromSoftware's games that make their games easier, blended into the worlds they've created and the mechanics they've designed. And whatever BS may come from a tiny fraction of the community that says "you didn't actually beat it because you used summons" or "you didn't actually beat it because you used prosthetics" don't matter. All that matters in these games is if you see "Victory Achieved", "Demigod Felled", "Shinobi Execution" or "Immortality Severed" on screen. These games want their players to succeed and they provide the means to do so in-game rather than resorting to abstract menus. I'd say that's a far more creative way of doing it that also encourages players to explore as much as they can, which is a great way to get the most out of FromSoftware's great level design without having to rely too much on map markers, GPS, constant notifications, and so many other annoyances that a lot of big budget games have been doing for a long time now.
When you're able to bake in what are essentially "difficulty options" into your mechanics, you don't need an easy mode. Where I think FromSoftware genuinely still falls short is in actual accessibility features that can't be resolved mechanically. Colorblind modes, customizable subtitles, better controller mapping, and the like. But when there's still so much of this discussion that's being muddied by all the talk of difficulty settings, I don't see them or other devs with similar intentions not having a tough time going in the right direction when so much of the discourse DOES end up just sounding like their own artistic vision for games is either seen as invalid, or worse, hateful and ableist. Both of which are categorically untrue.
Thank you for this very thoughtful comment! I agree with a lot of what was said here! I think people get way too black and white about things, which is why I wanted to talk about the nuance. Just to be clear, me bringing up souls likes isn't me shitting on the genre or saying it's inherently ableist--I brought it up to mention that current gaming culture can be obsessed with difficulty and often love to shame others who can't keep up or insult the intelligence of those that don't prefer the genre. To the point that they even harassed the creator of their beloved genre over it!
Of course. not everyone is like that. Some of the coolest people I know are huge souls like fans. For me, I want creators to follow their artistic vision, but to also remember that their artistic vision can be broadened to included more people. Tweaks can be added here and there by players who need to toggle them on, and that by refusing to add accessibility features, they are not only excluding a lot of players who would love to play, they are also losing money cause some people are alienated by their rigid point of view.
Thanks so much once again for commenting and watching!
Look, I understand the intent behind the video, and I appreciated it, but I think its boiling this whole issue down to the "it doesn't hurt anyone to have more options" too much without properly engaging with what the other side is saying.
First of all, people just need to come to terms with a simple fact: *not all games are for everyone*. Even without taking into account the point that some people will have a harder time with the game due to a physical or mental disability (which they will find a way to overcome if they *really* want to play the game), some games just aren't for you, me, or that random guy on the street. You may simply not like the genre, style, etc. And that's fine.
There's also the fact that a game is made a certain way, most likely because the creators behind it WANT it to be experienced that way.
For example, I saw another comment here talking about how their brother had a hard time with Hollow Knight, because a feature like being able to see yourself on the map was locked behind a charm, and how that it shouldn't be like that. Thing is, Team Cherry made it so it worked that way because that's *the whole point of the game*. They want you to get lost, explore, and make a mental map of the areas you've been to. Having to equip a charm to know where you are is SUPPOSED to be a sort of "punishment". And they have all the right to make that decision, because that's how they want their game to be experienced.
And like, some games just aren't made to have difficulty settings, because that simply doesn’t work. The Souls series is a major example of that because how the fuck would you balance any of their games around that? Besides being a really hard thing to do, it'd take way too much of their developement time, besides possibly being a breach of the vision they have of their game.
At the end of the day, accessibility features are a good thing, but you can't expect every single game to have them, want to implement them, or even be *able* to implement them. Not all games are for everybody, and that's fine.
As person with autism, i play only the hardest games. Becouse i love overcoming obstacles! It gives me power and hope to oevercome them in real life as well.
Mastering anything was always fetishized. From music to sport. We humans crave improvments. And we do everything to get them.
Instead crying about fate, do what you can. You will not achive everything, but at least you could try.
Gid gut
GID GUT, BABY!
The vast majority of people playing video games don't even really think about disabled players, let alone belittle them. The only ones that do are the very vocal minority who are pretending that they are the voice of the community.
Honestly, the more accessibility options the better. They are great even for people who don't have to deal with disabilities. I can't overstate how good it is to have the option to just hold down a button instead of mashing or being able to change the color on parts of the UI.
All-in-all, accessibility is just a net positive for everyone.
I want to agree, but there's an issue with that in how it feels like there's a lack of a compromise. Not every game can have the same amount of options available, and it's not just at color blind or greater range to sensitivity, it's asking to change the experience and goal of a game so someone who doesn't like that kind of game *might* try it out. It would be stupid to complain a low-intensity media should tackle stories about the darkest sins of humanity and it would be stupid to complain a dark story isn't being made with kids in mind because that's not their goal.
The video talks about wanting to get rid of technical difficulty for an "emotional" one instead, but if a game wants a technical difficulty, then why not just play a different game entirely that fits you? It's one thing to say "hard games aren't for me," it's something else to say "the hard game is bad for being hard and should change for my sake."
The mechanical difficulty in Furi is vital to the message that the devs are trying to send. The game is all about pushing forward through hardship and adversity, which ties in to the difficult nature of the game which requires that the player struggles as much as possible. When you play the game on easy mode, it doesn't have that same effect. If you want a game that pushes a similar message but without the need for quick reflexes and hand eye coordination, I'd recommend something like Kenshi, which is difficult and punishing, but doesn't require a lot from you physically and is relatively simple in its mechanics. I think it would help you to understand how some games absolutely need to be hard in order to get their points across.
Thank you for the recommendation! I understand the message they wanted to send, but I also want people to understand that a game can still be difficult even with tweaks applied for people with disabilities. I think the idea of shaming the player for needing said tweaks just makes them come across like jerks instead of "protecting their vision".
I'm not against games being difficult. Like I said in the video, "easy mode" is kind of a misnomer, and accessibility features don't necessarily make a game easier for those who need those features--easy modes included. Just look at my example of Jedi Survivor! If the tweaks are carefully considered, and applied properly, the experience should remain the same and the artistic vision can stay in tact. It's a delicate balance to strike, but I think it's worth it so we can have more people playing more games. Thanks for commenting!
@@darkteatime So, your problem is just when devs mock the player and put certain parts of the game off-limits for choosing easy mode? In that case yeah I kinda get it. I think the confusion comes from the fact that you didn't talk about the Fallen Order-style difficulty tweaks when you talked about Furi
The thing about mechanical difficulty in video games is that there will always be a push-pull of "how much do you believe in the player's ability to improve" vs "how much do you think the enjoyment of the game is tied to that improvement".
A big reason why DS is "fetishized" for its difficulty is because the developer belief that the player can improve a large amount to take on challenges and that a large part of the game's enjoyment comes from that improvement happened to be true for the audience it found. It's a perfect storm of both the mechanical aspects, but also the narrative details, the story, and the overall atmosphere (as one of the biggest draws of dark settings is difficult decision making and what people do in the face of overwhelming odds).
Of course, that will miss people that do not have the same ability to improve their gameplay to what the developer expects. Disabled people exist, of course, but even just people who do not have the time or do not learn mechanics in the same way (for example, I'm pretty strong at theorycrafting, but I'm pretty poor at learning things mechanically through repetition. It doesn't help I have pretty severe ADHD. So something like Dark Souls will never work for me).
Whether a game needs accessibility options is often a matter of predicting your audience. For example, you pointed out in Hades that the game got easier as the game went on, but the thing is that that game didn't start with that feature in Early Access (as far as I remember). Over time, as they developed the game and realized that their game had a lot of mainstream appeal for players that wanted to experience the story, they started adding those features in. Some games don't necessarily have that privilege because they don't get released in that way.
An example that comes to mind is Final Fantasy XVI, which had some of the most wildly expansive and interesting accessibility options I've ever seen in an action game (lower difficulty was given by the ability to equip gameplay oriented accessories which allowed you to customize parts of the combat engine to be automated or simpler). But it didn't actually work well for the game, because they hadn't realized that the inclination for lower skilled players in action games is to mash buttons. And this was only encouraged by that game's cooldown system, as cooldown systems tend to encourage using all your buttons on cooldown due to uptime. What this meant was that it was a common complaint from lower skilled players that the game did not feel satisfying to play, because the game did not have a good way to encourage you to improve and find the depth in skill combos or timing skills properly, since the people having difficulty with the game would just resort to the accessibility options without motivation to actually go find the depth in the combat system.
Ultimately, if accessibility options is available to a player (and that accessibility option is not extremely niche, like the sounding feature in Street Fighter 6 to help with blind players), then you dampen the encouragement of the playerbase to improve to rise to the challenge you put in the game. Whether that's good or not is ultimately going to be a question of belief of where the fun of the game is, based on what the developer believes and what the playerbase actually interfaces with.
I tend to switch between playing soft and cozy games, and then high difficulty horror games. This week I've been switching between the Sims 3 and Darkwood as I feel in the mood for it. My roommate has a theory that it's tied to my diagnosis of bpd where I tend to feel only in the extremes.
I think developers especially indie don't owe anyone anything and should make more of the games they want. Weather it be super cozy or super hard. And then it's up to the players to decide what is and isn't for them and when.
I don't think it's right for people to shame others for not liking harder games, and I don't think it's right for the other side to insist that things must change for them.
People should be allowed to enjoy things without anyone bullying them or changing what they enjoy.
I'm currently developing games with my friends and it's not easy. Super Eyepatch Wolf said "the worst game you've ever played is a miracle" and he's right.
I'm really good at souls games and I like rising to the challenge. I also like farming with my girlfriend in Stardew. Certain games are for certain kinds of people and that's okay.
Based Darkwood appreciator - lovely game, isn't it? That's the guy they should've put in charge of the next Silent Hill game.
I really enjoyed this video. I'm very much an active player in challenge gaming sphere (which is slightly different in nature from what you're discussing) and am also disabled. The intersection I think also brings out an important question, which is how players end up defining what they consider difficult. It brought to mind a few things.
I think the culture surrounding Let's Plays as sort of "I need to experience all the content and chew through the game as quickly as possible" contributes to the sort of grind culture we see in the games. I think it changes how you play a game when you're performing for an audience (especially when you're playing an edited video versus a livestream) also complicates the dynamics of how players build a relationship with the game. There are a lot of games where "difficulty" and skill is built through repetition or trial and error, just memorizing all the problem areas or learning some obscure, unintentional technique or property in looking up other player's experiences.
For instance, one of the things I've never liked about Persona 3 is that it allows and expects you to use ailments against the monsters, especially in Tartarus Boss fights, but there's no indication of which ones will work other than just experimenting with all of them, which in turn also means having the proper skills on your personas which requires precious in-game resources you'd be wasting. There's a secret boss in the game generally considered the "hardest" boss, but what it actually is is a bunch of hidden rules not told to you in-game about what you can and can't equip or bring. If you break any of the rules you're just insta-killed (and in the original you had to go through a gauntlet of monsters to get to the boss int he first place).
The boss fight basically requires you to bring a very exact set of personas and equip very specific moves and attack in a very set order. To me it communicates an idea that we can think less in terms of challenge and more in terms of how we define what are usable approaches to building a relationship with the game. As a challenge gamer, I find games that essentially force you to interact with them in very specific ways and no other accessible ways make themselves less open to emergent styles of gameplay. Challenge games aren't about seeking out "hard" games but finding ways to create emergent styles of gameplay that change how you approach whatever strategy you'd otherwise rely on. The kind of irony to it is that less difficult games overall lend themselves to way more challenge options or games that open up for different accessibility options also create a lot more opportunities for ways for you to customize your challenge modes. Playing a game for "difficulty" to me is "can you complete this level without the sword/boost ability" and see how it changes the way you approach it.
A lot of games seem to revel in making the game tedious and full of unnecessary administrative steps and the exclusivity that comes with it. I could play Legend of Zelda: Wind Waker without a sail (something I've seen actually suggested as a "hard" mode multiple times) and it wouldn't make the game stimulating or interesting in any way to me.
And to your point, difficulty levels aren't even the only means of accessibility, but I think that belief is so entrenched in the general discussion that one bleeds into the other. Difficulty is one part of accessibility of course, but not the only one.
Metroid Prime Remastered comes to mind in how the discussions surrounding it bothered me. You get a thermal visor in the game with a sizable segment during the game where you have to navigate a facility during a Blackout and rely on heat vision to see in the dark. However, the remaster turns up the blur effect far more from the original (which itself already created photosensitivity problems) to the point where the game creates significant motion sickness problems. It's something a lot of players have commented on, but a lot of the responses to that discussion are basically "I didn't have any problems. Just don't use it. It's not that bad, get over it" none of which is helpful. It's also not a segment that's designed for you to go without the visor as the game is counting on you using it. It's a good case study to look at, but of course I have to warn that it can be very sickening to look at even for reference material given the motion sickness problems.
The top comment is almost always "you don't need it for that long" and not the actual problem that it's causing motion sickness for a significant number of players.
The design philosophy of a lot of Pokemon fan games also come to mind because a lot of them are designed to cater to that higher difficulty crowd in a way that just makes them very tedious.
You raised a lot of very great points and always appreciate what you have to say.
I keep wondering how people do not see it: the most significant achievement of the souls/souls-like category is NOT
in gameplay mechanics, but in MARKETING and PLAYER RESTRICTION. The clever way these games work - is by simply
preventing the player from playing other games. In a reasonably designed game - you can play, stop and continue at any
point - thus able to switch to another game, without sacrificing neither progress nor time. However, when you start (almost)
any one of THOSE games - every cheap trick in the book is used to force the player to spend inordinate amounts of time to
make disproportionately little progress. And even when the said progress is made - next time the player is forced to repeat
most of it again. And then, no time for other games. The big salesman wins.
Why would potential players buy into all of this mumbo-jumbo? Because, the mystical carrot of these things being
somehow "satisfying" is dangled in front of them. And apparently, that's enough. All because one smart dude pitched
the right sale at the right time and got really lucky.
But if we took all the artificial nonsense restrictions and cheap tricks away, what would be left underneath all of that?
A less-than mediocre hack-and-slash, which would instantly lose to the likes of Blade of Darkness or Knights of the
Temple series. The Emperor's new clothes...that's all there is to it. Just in a digital form.
i'm not disabled (yet) but I like to relax when playing games so I pretty much always choose easy mode. having options doesn't hurt anyone
Sad to hear your health is going to be compromised.
@@Rells2coolpeoplehavebadtastes. I have no current anticipation of my health being compromised, but we're all just one incident away, yknow?
@@Rells2coolpeoplehavebadtastes. Also a family history of dementia and cancer
@@orestria Phew, thank God! And true!
@@orestria Yayks!
Something else that feeds into it is that games started picking up steam in the arcades; the difficulty was part of the money-making strategy. Also being in the leaderboards was the point of playing in the first place for alot of people.
When we're having good faith discussions, if someone tells us that their experience would be diminished if there was an easy mode, we have to listen to them. Denying them would be explaining their own experience to them.
Games as an art form have a unique ability to create a link between their interactive elements, like difficulty, and world, story, graphics, music. The game is difficult because the world is oppressive. Knowing that there's an out-of-world (settings menu) ability to make the world less oppressive shatters immersion.
The Souls series has lead to a massive online community of people interested in comparing their experiences. The strong sense of a shared experience that the Souls games promote would be ruined if the experience was segmented into different difficulties. Just as horror movie fans would be less eager to form communities and compare experiences if horror movies began with a scariness selector.
Due to an increase in game development costs, studios are already doing a lot of work to appeal to the average casual gamer, and the vast majority of games already do include a difficulty selector (probably 80-90% of games already?). Calls for all games to conform are, in my opinion, coming after an already endangered species.
Being butthurt over a game having an easy mode, it's not even comparable to people literally incapable of engaging with video games due to limitations. Tell me, how exactly would that person actually is affected when there's an easy mode. Having an easy mode would not reduce the size of the online community. If anything, since it's more accessible, the community would probably be larger.
Disco Elysium, or Fallout are both mechanically easy games and even provide difficulty options. Both games still have a massive online community of people sharing their experiences. You can't compare video games to movie since there's two completely different ways of you engaging with the medium. And if anything, every movie literally gave you an external ways of affecting the not just the scariness scale, but how you engage with those films thanks to streaming service and video playback. You can close your eyes, reduce the volume, lower the brightness and straight up skip scenes. No horror fans will give a shit if you do that. That might made fun of you a bit, but will immediately move on with their life.
You literally arguing about personal opinions and feelings vs actual disabilities or limitations. Easy mode is not just made for casuals, but gamers who's probably getting busier with their work life that they're unable to invest time to 'git gud' and people with literal disabilities. This youtuber literally argued as well when you have an easy mode, that doesn't mean you get a completely braindead game mechanic that provide zero challenge whatsoever. BUT you have a mode that can fit better with your current situations or conditions. That's still challenge but they're fit to your own pace.
Games despite it being an artform, it's unique since first and foremost it's design to be FUN. That's the core philosophy of every games. It's for you to have fun. You stop have fun, you stop engaging with video games. You can still experience other emotions, but you need to have fun doing so. If your way of having fun is with high difficulty, hey, there's always the option for you to do that. But there's other people who want to play video game with lower difficulty, and having that option is nice. It doesn't invalidate your own personal experience. If you're stop having fun just simply by the very idea of knowing that there's an easier option that you don't even have to engage with, then you're being a bit of an ass and self-centered.
@@ZhaneDFrost Regarding "personal opinions and feelings vs actual disabilities". I'm just responding to the common assertion that easy mode only improves games, which is repeated in this video. It's not true that adding easy mode is a tradeoff of nothing, zero, zilch on one side, and accessibility, happiness and rainbows on the other side.
To give another example, adding an easy mode to Sekiro might have caused some gamers to use it for difficult boss fights. For some, the alternative might have been giving up, but for others, the alternative might have been persevering and refining, eventually clearing and achieving a sense of accomplishment that would have been lost out on. Saying "well just don't give in to temptation" doesn't work, because we're just human. If you're going on a diet, you remove junk food and soda from your fridge, don't you? Some of us prefer a game without junk food.
Regarding community size, I can only speak from personal experience, but recently having completed both Jedi Fallen Order and Survivor, I had no interest in comparing experiences with others, mostly because of the 4? difficulty modes. It is at least true for many Souls fans that the sense of community for our games comes from a shared experience and this is important to us. The fact that communities can also form around different kinds of games doesn't refute this.
Instead of demonizing and name calling ("butthurt", "ass", "self-centered") people with different preferences from you, maybe choose one of the 90% of games that conforms to your preferences, and let some minority of games be different and appeal to different people.
8:35 I remember this controversy when Cuphead first came out and the backlash against Dean and his review was largely warranted. You don't need to be good at games to enjoy the medium but a game review becomes pretty meaningless when the person playing it can barely make it past the tutorial. The mechanics of Cuphead are very simple and I believe dean was given access to items you otherwise couldn't get at the beginning for the purpose of the review. Being able to grasp extremely simple mechanics like double jumping or dashing in a platformer is the absolute bare minimum for someone who makes a living from reviewing games.
You don't need to be extremely good at a game to make a review on it but you, at the very least need to understand how it works fundementally and Dean obviously did not.
The problem is that Dean wasn´t there to review cuphead. He was there for other reasons and was asked if he wanted to try it out. They filmed it and put it online because they thought it was funny. But he didn´t write the official review, someone else did.
He did later say, in a tweet I think, that he played it again, got past the tutorial and beat the first few bosses. He said he really liked the difficulty and gave it a 9/10, I think.
In some soul-like, you can look up ways to cheese a boss, or you can get someone to help you. There are ways to make the game easier. Even if someone helps, you can still get better at the game. So there is no shame in getting someone to help or getting carried. Also, the community is willing to help. But in some soul-like, you have to grind for resources that is needed to summon friends. So, I can understand that it is annoying.
Games are art in my mind. Would I ask Michelangelo to record a verbal description of the Mona Lisa? No, I wouldn't do that for any artist and there art piece unless they wanted to.
You can ask artists to give you accessibility options: you can ask writers if they can publish a book in braille or in audiobook form. Painting is like visual poetry, you can give an interesting description of different paintings, it's just that Mona Lisa is kind of boring anyways.
@@Bobogdan258They aren’t just asking, and the complaints have only gotten worse as accessibility has gone up. In this very video; the goal of ruining other people’s fun is outright stated through “combating difficulty fetishism”. Ironic since these types go on about not kink shaming..
Mona Lisa was made by DaVinci
@@bannedmann4469This is incredibly good bait, ngl. Laughed my ass off at this one!
Architecture is art in my mind, so I would never ask an architect to add silly things like “ramps” and “wide doorways” to their building. No, I wouldn’t do that for any artist and their art piece unless they wanted to.
Hm? There’s people who need ramps and wide doorways to get in? Well, they weren’t the intended audience, were they?
But seriously. You don’t have to change the core gameplay experience to make it accessible. We aren’t asking the artists to change their art to appeal to a wider market. We’re saying that disabled people should be able to experience art, so maybe we should stop getting mad at devs for mentioning adding difficulty, maybe we should stop shaming players for being “low skill”, and maybe we should make it clear how important those features are. Much like I think more art museums should include things like descriptions of work and tactile recreations of art that are safe to touch for blind patrons, I think more games should have accessibility settings and difficulties.
I’ve wanted to make video games for a while now, & I’ve been wondering about how I should do some þings, like I’ve been þinking about opening þe difficulty options after betting þe 1st level, as a sort of reference of what “normal” is.
I’m also concerned about some concepts I’ve had, keeping some þings behind a difficult “Hurricane” mode þat’s unlocked after beating þe game on any oþer difficulty. Like I’m þinking of having some optional challenges (nuzloche, randomised Brutes, & replacing early game enemies wiþ late game ones), but adding 5 extra exclusive bosses for some hectic challenges, wiþ at least 2 of þem just being immortal.
But is þat wrong? Should I have a little button to have þem in any but þe first playþrough?
I do plan to have a pause screen wiþ an explanation for how every Brute works, but also how þat specific Brute works
I'm not sure I have all the answers for all of your questions as I'm not a developer myself, but I do know that the websites I mentioned at the end have resources for developers who need help planning their accessibility features in their games! Especially Game Accessibility Nexus and Can I Play that, so reaching out to them might be a good first step.
I'm personally not a fan of locking content behind different difficulties, as some people simply cannot play the other difficulties and then they end up buying a game that they can't really experience the full breadth of. I mostly like the idea of the pause screen with explanations of the brutes, but I have some suggestions on how to make that a little better! I can imagine if it was on the pause screen, that someone who hates hints could pause the game to go make tea or something, and come back and see hints on the screen when they don't want to see it. I'd suggest maybe having an option in the pause menu that you can toggle hints on, in case someone with memory issues etc. needs to see those hints. That way people who hate hints aren't annoyed, but people who need them know where to find them.
Haven’t watched the video yet, but even as someone with a smaller right eye and autism, the entire reason why I want an SBR Soulslike is because Johnny Joestar is disabled and I think the many fights of Steel Ball Run would be translated over really well into a Soulslike as a result of Johnny’s disability.
Also this pairs well with Tale Foundry's video on Kafka's _Metamorphosis_ and how society at large tends to treat disability
If a game is designed to be difficult, it should be, but I also believe fromsoftware and other developers that make games of that style often fail to make them accessible to disabled players, when we live in an era where both playstation and Xbox have controllers designed specifically to be customised for disabled players, and games with over 60 + accessibility settings, I think that's a place where souls type games and often Japanese games in general tend to be failing at
disabled in what way? Honestly i dont see how to make the controls for other types of controllers. Unless they change the button placements and copy another similar game with disabled controllers input buttons.
Inaccessible for disabled players how? If they have specialized controllers, that solves many of the issues.
Something I don't think you covered (though it's possible I missed it) is games which _do_ have difficulty levels, but _don't_ allow players to change it after they start (I'm looking at you, WB games), or restrict when you can change it (I'm looking at you, Ubisoft), effectively leaving people potentially stranded in a section of the game they simply can't seem to beat. _Some_ people may find that stimulating; *I* find it frustrating and infuriating (and has caused me to refuse to continue playing, and uninstall a game that I was previously excited to play).
OH MY GOSH, I wish I thought of that!! That is so true, I've had it happen before where I have to lose my entire save file cause I decided I needed a different difficulty mode. Why is that a thing?? Is it a choice devs actively make, or is it influenced by a coding issue? Yeah that is so frustrating, thank you for bringing that up.
I think a lot of gamers think to make games with easier options or accessibility inherently takes something away from the experience. And in some ways I get that, part of many games is learning mechanics and building skill, and that feeling of triumph can sometimes be lost. And yes, some designers, while trying to be more accessible, make the game pushy or condescending in a way even some disabled players find annoying. But that isn’t inherent. Adding difficulty to a Souls game isn’t invalidating your ability to play it on harder difficulties. You don’t have to play the easy mode. While you might think the experience is “incomplete” others are happy to be able to experience it at all. As much as the easier mode doesn’t have the difficulty that makes you enjoy the game, for the people that need that option the easy mode probably still has difficulties, it’s just that they’re surmountable now. It isn’t changing the core experience of the game, it’s making more people able to experience that core, and decide just like every other person if the game is for them.
People talk about how these features are “intrusive” or how games “don’t have to cater to everyone” but neither of those are what we’re asking for. The pop ups and tutorials and difficulty selections can be made upfront, and then you don’t have to see them again if you don’t want to, it’s that simple. You pick a language and adjust the audio levels and switch on tutorials and captions and easy difficulty. The games can still have aesthetic, gameplay, genre, writing, etc. choices that aren’t for everyone. Games not being for everyone in the sense of “artistic vision shouldn’t be compromised for mass market appeal and different people can like different games” is not equivalent to “some people who are interested in the game and are otherwise in the target market should be unable to play it because of circumstances outside of their control” in any way. Sure, it sadly isn’t feasible for every game to be perfectly accessible, but they should still be expected to try.
It’s like saying that disabled sports leagues shouldn’t exist because sports were intended to be played in a certain way that some disabled people can’t do, so to create leagues with small changes to accommodate that is somehow tainting the experience of playing those sports. Or saying that captions shouldn’t be expected because the intended experience was of voice acting, and games shouldn’t have to cater to people outside of the intended audience of neurotypical hearing people. Sure, not everyone is into sports and not everyone wants to listen to voice acting, and the mediums shouldn’t be changed so that those people will start liking it, they dislike the medium and doing so would lose the beauty in other aspects. But people who already want to experience these things shouldn’t be barred for no reason, the core of it doesn’t have to change for them, just the accessibility.
This video doesnt adress anything about why people are against difficulty modes. Its not a 'nuanced discussion' its a nuanced take on one side while kicking down the other side as fetishists with an obsession. You say that no one is forced to pick a difficulty mode but (presumably as a leftist) you should know that influence and coersion do not have to fall under gun to your head enforcement, having an easy mode at all would make players who underestimate their ability pick it and have a worse time, having a hard mode does the same thing but thr other way around but at least that brings you down to your most fun difficulty. Many games atmosphere and mood are built around their difficulty, the fromsoft games would not have the atmosphere and soft narative you claim to love without the intense difficulty because a big part of that world is that its unforgiving and painful, an easy mode would make that atmosphere hollow by leaving an easy escape route. Developer intentions are super important and not all games require difficultly options, some games want a uniformity of experience that can not be given with difficulty options
Also japanese is an infamously hard language to translate, so claiming that a mistranslation is out of the picture is really just uneducated
Yea she says nuanced yet insults one group in the title. If she was fine with the mocking of lower difficulties like in Wolfenstein then I’d agree, however why should lower difficulty player be able to stand with higher diff players as equals with access to everything. Games should encourage you to play on harder modes to truely appreciate the games systems.
In her own little bubble. Think she’ll delete comments?
Agreed, I think there IS a discussion to be had on this topic, but this isn't it imo, felt somewhat condescending and a little uneducated. I'm sure they could do better.
@mmmarth_ she does a good job of explaining her side of the argument too it's a very well researched video, i just wish she would not brush off one side like their fears and wishes are irrelevant
I hate that video games are called art unless you make a game difficult then its not your art anymore you are just an elitist.
I have never seen anyone make this argument. There are narrative games, idle games, simulators, and dating sims. None of these have any level of real difficulty. I've never seen someone say that the Telltale's The Walking Dead wasn't "art" because it was too easy.
the game CrossCode, a top-down pixel action RPG, has difficulty sliders that allows you to adjust how much damage you take, enemy attack rate, and how fast a puzzle moves (of which there are many in the game). i never touched them while playing, but it makes me really happy to see that they're there and that the game expresses no judgement over adjusting them. the main character is disabled as well and is handled well, i think (though i'm not the expert on that, so i don't want to make bold claims)
For me personally, the best way to make a game accessible is to add a shit ton of checkpoints at almost every step. Both my hands and my feet are affected, but they still work, I can still overcome some mechanical challenges, but if in order to overcome a challenge I have to overcome 3 more that I already completed once, chances are I'm not gonna bother anymore. You can even add an option to jump a few checkpoints ahead, not enough to let you see the finale, but enough to skip a few jumps or a boss u are having trouble with (this would not work for boss rush games thou) For bosses, you can add the option for regenerating health during the fight or and option to make the boss move 2x slower. You can do this for chase sequences too. For single-player shooters you can add an option for aim assist. There is so much that can be done. Not game related, but I think what makes us different from any other minority (and also less visible) is that you are ignored and infantilized, but not hated. People tend to talk about what they hate, and then other people push back against the hate. Do I wish to be hated? No, but I think hate is a fast way to make something known.
The only type of difficulty that is irrelevant - is the artificially manufactured one.
Sadly, this is the most popular one nowadays, occasionally sharing the throne with
the lazily-designed kind.
I am an old gamer who has been at it since the late 1970s. The Atari VCS (2600) was my first experience with gaming at home, though I later went to the Atari 8-bit computers. Also, as with almost every teenager back then, I wasted a lot of quarters in the arcades. I am not disabled, but my reflexes have never been good. When I was young, I was more willing to beat my head against the wall of mechanical difficulty than I am now. I even managed to "git gud" at one arcade game: Millipede. I could even get on the high scores at the arcade. Still to this day, I have the muscle memory, and when I boot up my Atari 800 and play it, I can still get quite far. There were always a few people who were competitive and were butt-heads about it, but most people just wanted to enjoy the games, even if they weren't very good at them. I was (and still am) a nerd and therefore got bullied, but not being good at arcade games rarely made me a target. For people with significant disabilities, I'm sure those arcade games must have been impossible.
Even back then, there were games with other types of difficulty. Affective difficulty wasn't much in evidence back then, and gaming narratives were in their infancy. Gaming narrative was starting to be developed in text adventures, text-and-graphics adventures, and RPGs. Narratives were usually simple and straightforward, but narrative challenges could sometimes be found, particularly in text adventures. There is an additional type of difficulty, and this one figured strongly in early games that did not rely on mechanical difficulty. I would call it "logical difficulty." Puzzles, turn-based combat, and strategy mechanics all require the player to think logically and parse a situation that might be rather obtuse. The early text adventures were known for extreme difficulty of this nature - anyone who struggled with the notorious vault puzzle in Zork II and the maddening puzzle room in Zork III will know what I mean. Turn-based RPGs made a lot of advances during the 1980s, and some became tactically complex. The turn-based combat in Wizard's Crown is particularly advanced and can get downright time consuming. It's a good thing that the game offers a quick combat mode in which the computer AI resolves the combat. However, this mode gives the enemies advantage, so one must be over-prepared to make use of it. As for turn-based strategy games, I never did manage to win Eastern Front 1941. That game is punishing. Eastern Front 1941 notwithstanding, I am a lot better at overcoming logical difficulty than mechanical difficulty. My favorite games from back then had no mechanical challenge at all but required logical thinking.
There is yet another type of difficulty, or perhaps more accurately, challenge. Many games these days offer creative challenges. In the early days, there weren't a lot of these, but they are common now. City builders, many simulation games, and games with significant building mechanics fall into this. Valheim, a game that features significant mechanical difficulty, is also a great creative sandbox. Fortunately, there are difficulty settings and a cheat console to allow creative builders to go wild without having to worry about the monsters.
I sometimes get tired of all the focus on mechanical difficulty, as if this is the pinnacle of gaming. I have never found mechanical difficulty compelling, and I have no patience for it these days. Furthermore, I have no patience for the "git gud" crowd, and I'm far too old and cantankerous to allow them to bother me, though I do enjoy prodding them from time to time. I will shamelessly use easy modes and even cheats to get around mechanical challenges if I want to experience other aspects of the game. If an action-oriented game offers something of interest to players who are interested in narrative, logic, or creative activities, then I think it is good when there are workarounds for players who do not like mechanical challenges.
i wish more people would embrace he "by any means necessary" style of playing games. it shouldnt matter how you play a game as long as its singleplayer, what should be the sole focus of a game is how much the player enjoy playing it. and if the mechanical difficulty of the game doesnt make them enjoy it, then the game is failing at its purpose for that person, and there should be options available to not have the game be completely ruined for them just because of a single point of failure.
if one aspect of a game ruins the game for people, i would call that bad game design in the same way that if any one thing goes wrong in a program the whole program crashes, thats bad coding. a program should be deigned o handle small issues without crashing, a game should be able to handle slightly differing player preferences without having to be remade entirely. if every game only released with one graphics settings with no option to change it at all, id say that would ruin gaming for alot of PC players, both those with very weak rigs and those with alien technology rigs. it shouldnt be up to the developer to completely decide what graphics settings your device should have, the player should have as much freedom as possible to tweaks graphics setting to their preference. difficulty should be the same way as much as possible.
I disliked a menu of "Accessibility Settings" in one of the games I played because I genuinely just suck at videogames. Using Accessibility Settings feels like I'm rolling around in a wheelchair because I'm being lazy. I'm basically "appropriating" something not meant for me.
I just hate bad game design being excused simply because the product has a nice packaging (graphics or art direction)
Hey there, certified bad game designer here, really liked your video and gave me a nice new perspective on difficulty. This video really has me thinking about further ways I can make my game more enjoyable for a broader range of audiences, very well discussed.
You can do what you want. I'm gonna destroy more zakus than the entire zeon army in SD Gundam Genesis.
Amazing vid!! I’ve been saying this for years!!! I need more accessibility features in games for tweaking the experience just right. It is also super true that many gamers are extremely ableist; whether or not they understand or want to admit. ❤❤
Also!! The treasure chests in Persona 5 make a sparkly noise!
While watching this video I found myself thinking about difficulty and on what points I disagree with to get to a more rounded conclusion I agree with.
First of all, I think pretty much all games are fun through learning.
From learning rotation speed and lineups in competitive shooters, to learning about a dramatic story and world to learning how to interact with every last piece of game design.
Where I think the trouble comes in is that learning subjects and style/motivation differs for everyone.
What I personally enjoy about good difficulty is how it forces me to interact with every facet in a game. For example, I mostly play games in a bit harder for the first time to “learn the basics” and then again on max difficulty for full depth exploration of what the game has to offer. It just sometimes needs a motivation/reason to learn it. Now note on how that engagement doesn’t necessarily exclude lower accessibility levels but rather points as to why difficulty can be needed.
I still believe that developers should have control over their intended experienced and if they want to enforce it on you. As sometimes people don’t really know what they want. These are rare cases but totally valid in my opinion. (This control over emotional experience includes difficulty as it should go hand in hand in the best cases for best effect)
Still, I mostly agree that games should have more settings to individualize the wanted experienced as most games are not too sensitive for such changes and even games like dark souls that had to “force” people to find their luck now have gained so much popularity that that shouldn’t be the case anymore. By now people should have learned that difficulty is not about boasting about it but can elevate your experience and with that I hope more developers feel free to put trust in people to choose for themselves.
Now with that all said I hope y’all found my comment interesting and something to think about.
Thanks for reading and challenge yourself however you see fit best
Personally, I don't feel that satisfaction everyone is talking about.
Beating a difficult challenge after multiple failed attempts feels either hollow (mindless repetition of the "correct solution" until it eventually works), or disappointing.
The best feeling in terms of difficulty for me, is when you feel like you barely managed to succeed in something on a first or second try.
(I also need certain accessibility features in order to engage with the game on its intended terms - Celeste is doing difficulty great, but Hades absolutely doesn't)
For example, Hades only provides damage reduction as an "easier" mode - and it does nothing to help me parse the explosion hell on screen.
That is totally fair! Games should be fun, and if that makes it less fun for you, people should respect that. If someone else wants to play on nightmare mode cause that floats their boat, more power to them!
But I know what you mean, sometimes that gameplay loop is really unenjoyable for some people. Myself included! When I was healthy, sure! But now...Especially while I'm in constant pain, have brain fog, and can barely do "normal tasks" in real life sometimes, it doesn't always feel good to be struggling all the time even in the digital world. I agree with you that just barely scraping by but managing it the first or second or even third try does feel hella good.
The last of us part 2 has the ability to hear items but I think it might be a visual cue if that makes sense? There is a listen mode in the game and sounds that enemies make are highlighted in this mode so maybe it works like that for items I don’t know as I’ve not used the feature. I know the last of us does have some really good accessibility options in general. You can also customise things like health, enemy health, enemy and ally aggression, and recourses.
Also any opinion on the difficulty of resident evil games? They don’t block the true ending from you but they give you extra rewards for beating the game on higher difficulties and also trophies/achievements for completionists. Also with some resident evil games you can buy the unlockable weapons for really cheap. RE7 even goes one further and has these items that improve your base stats making every difficulty easier if you choose to use them and there’s I think 5 of them and you can get them all for less than £3 or like 70p each if you just want the one that increases your movement speed. These aren’t in game unlockables though, they’re just dlc to make the game easier. Cool they exist for people buy maybe not great they’re behind a microtransaction.
This is why I want to make all the difficult levels in my game call everything but the easiet one increasingly mean phrases for "go outside" or "player, we tell stories here". And just name the hardest difficulty "only content creators will play this or we'll be very disappointed in you all"
A permadeath mode called "I'm begging you, touch grass"
Hi, I'm a gamer on the Autism Spectrum who also has non-verbal learning disability, among other things. I'm so glad you made this video, since I tend to talk about this stuff a lot. I can handle slower mechanically difficult games like the first Dark Souls, but a lot of games put a lot of their difficulty on stuff like reflexes and coordination, and that starts to become increasingly inaccessible for me, to the point where a game feels way harder than it should be, or outright unplayable. The big things for me is precision movement/timing and ESPECIALLY sensory overload. As an example I really like a lot of Fighting games, but certain games, like a lot of platform fighters, require button presses so quick I cannot physically execute them. This is why I tend to trend towards games like Skullgirls which have rather forgiving input readers and cancel systems that make timing hits for combos more accessible. The second issue though, that I see commonly in FGs but also almost every modern game as well, is sensory overload. Games will oftentimes have super detailed characters and backgrounds, bug flashy particle effects, and game elements that move across the screen really quickly and if this gets bad enough I literally cannot process what's happening onscreen. A big example of a game that does this for me is Ultrakill, which I find super fun, but need to play with the speed decreased (Which is luckily an option, though I have my gripes with the implementation). At it's normal speed, Ultrakill is literally unplayable for me, I cannot parse what is happening onscreen at all. Another game I love and play a lot that unfortunately has minimal options for this is FFXIV. A lot of raids, especially modern ones, have big flashy effects and super intricate arenas, but a lot of modern raids are also almost impossible for me to play due to an inability to turn off or lessen stuff like boss or environmental effects, so I feel like I might as well have the screen turned off whenever one of these attacks come out.
A lot of this I see actively praised by designers and artists cause it adds to how impactful attacks and effects feel, but I almost never see discussion on how this can adversely affect players, people seem to always misunderstand how intense this is when I tell them or seem incredibly dismissive of the issue. I've had people act like this is an excuse for me making a mistake, when all I want is to just be able to see what is going on enough to play the game without feeling blinded intermittently.
This issue is incredibly common in games of all eras and I wish this was more understood and there were more options implemented to help.
I hate any mechanic that requires precise timing, they're always so hard for me to pull off.
This is an actual fair point - even as an autist who loves difficult games, I can't stand Ultrakill. Way too much shit happening on the screen in that game.
As for Phoebe: Actual skill issue.
@@smergthedargon8974 i have some issues with coordination so it's not a _skill_ thing.
@PhoebeTheFairy56
I'm hoping an argument doesn't come out here, though yeah, as someone who also has motor issues, fine timing is intensely hard, because my mind really can't register timing in increments smaller than around like, a quarter second. This makes timing mechanics oftentimes feel borderline random to me
However, from experience, it definitely can be trained and improved, though it's always harder for me than most of my friends to get it right
Admittedly I still think these mechanics are *fine* not every game needs to be accessible to every single person, I kinda doubt it'd be entirely possible.
But with things like parries and dodges, I'd just want some sort of indicator like how Bayonetta has enemy weapons glint before an attack is sent out.
For the most part, I could see how an individual could come to some of these conclusions but I cant take "difficulty fetishism" seriously as a term.
The concept of taking difficult games and shaming them for not having built in solutions to accommodate every kind of disability while adding a fetish tag for good measure seems a little silly/unfair.
I've played every souls game plenty of times and if you're having trouble getting past a part it's not the game assuming you're dumb or the devs getting their fetish high over in the corner.
The best thing to do is to grind for an hour or explore prior areas. You might find a new ring or upgrade material you overlooked as well as gaining money/xp(souls, blood echoes, runes etc.)
Also, learning the tells of the enemies' patterns is a good way to get used to bosses as well. staying observant in general will save you from traps and ambushes more often than not.
There is one accessibility option is to avoid hand cramps, the Switch pro controller and mouse and keyboard and extra grip for the switch is the only controllers that don't seem to make my hands cramp up.
While i do have an adapter for the N64 eventually the buttons become delayed and i have to reset it again, it is only good for maybe 10 minutes which is really annoying which sucks.
Also i am very okay with easy modes or even letting the player cheat through there game(as long it's not online of course).
It’s clear you don’t understand the other side of the argument. You extrapolate so hard on quotes relevant to your opinion and do nothing more than quote opposing opinions before moving on and saying “it’s easy to included accessibility” and “adding it doesn’t hurt the experience of other players.”
If you reflected on the games you mentioned that had great accessibility, you’d learn a lot. Those games have enormous budgets and resources to accomplish the task, and even still similar studios don’t do it because of the investment cost. Also look at the reception of those games being tailored for “everyone” and see the disparity of how “less skilled” gamers enjoyed the game compared to “higher skilled” individuals. Clearly a focus on accessibility can worsen people’s experiences and it should. The 2 are widely different audiences.
Ok, in the case of Dean...he couldn't get past the tutorial. How are people supposed to take his word, when he's not a that level? That's like picking a dentist who's not good at fixing teeth.
I also don't care what difficulty people play on, you'll eventually get good, so who cares. For me, I welcome the challenge.
Hmm, it just hit me that some gamers might see tweaking the difficulty of games with cheat codes. I 100% understand they are not even close to being the same thing, but I can see some folks making that flawed connection. In general I dislike the purity mentality in any kind of medium. Like, there is only one way to experience something, with little to no variation. There is only one way to play. Only one way to enjoy something. Meh, going off on a tangent. Thanks again for raising my awareness and making me think. Enlightening video per the norm for me!
Miyazaki never said that he was considering adding an easy difficulty to Elden Ring, that was Polygon blatantly lying, as they are wont to do. There was no backlash against him, because nobody reads Polygon.
As a matter of fact, Action RPGs are built from the ground up with a dynamic difficulty selector, it is the most essential building block of any RPG. Elden Ring being completely open, allows any player to very easily become overpowered early on and cheese most if not all boss fights, just like in FFVII you can go to any beach on the world map and get the Big Guard spell with an enemy skill materia, which trivializes the entire game, or a player can more broadly just grind whenever he gets stuck.
As a matter of fact, Souls games are not difficult games. The more apt description would be that they are games with an extremely well curated difficulty curve and a great understanding of pacing and downtime.
If you want to see a difficult game, try ranking top 1000 in any Osu! song. There is no difficulty curve and there are no ways to get around the difficulty in any way, it is completely inaccessible even to people who played Osu! for years.
Using s_xual lingo in a transparent attempt to make people uncomfortable doesn't help your argument.
There's no "fetishism" of difficulty. The challenge is a fundamental and essential building block of a videogame.
You can take away the story and the graphics, but you cannot take away the gameplay.
In its most basic form a videogame is an interactive toy. If you take the buttons out of the flipper, all you are left with is steel balls in a colorful and noisy box.
Thus, the answer to the question "Does an easy difficulty ruin games?" can be nothing but "Yes".
To put it another way, if all you want out of a videogame is the story (I.E. you want a movie) then you are exactly where you need to be, as youtube provides you with exactly that. Just search the name of the game and either "all cutscenes" or "longplay" and you are served, free of charge. For many games with cryptic narratives there are also extremely well produced long form video essays relaying the complete stories, again completely free of charge.
With that objective fact taken into consideration, one has to wonder what exactly drives this impetus to demonize the most essential building block of videogames.
It can't be that you're being underserved, because you aren't.
It can't be that games aren't accessible, because they are, and the handful that truly aren't are not being mentioned.
Regardless of Polygon lying or not. That article did blew up, and there was backlash. You clearly didn't watch her video entirely when making this comment, cause she literally addresses that yes, if a game is too easy, you're just playing interactive cutscenes. That's why she said easy mode is not an easy task for game dev and there's different ways of approaching it depending on the game. There's no universal easy mode. Your point about dynamic difficulty selector is one of them genius. It's still technically having an easy mode. Her criticism on souls like game has nothing to do with difficulty. It's how she felt most of them feels repetitive. I don't necessarily agree with her, but I can see why. She's clearly simply having a burnout of the gameplay loop which is fine. She's not so much giving a review but just pointing out her overall feelings when playing souls game.
'Thus', the answer of "Does easy difficulty ruin games?" is Fuck NO.
The irony in your comment is amazing. You don't even realise that you just proposed an easy mode. Having an ability that made things easier is literally an easy mode. And have you been living in a cave. Cause the last time I checked, almost every massive games out there has an easy difficulty. Non of them are ruined by it. Here's a breakdown of my experience with Ghost of Tsushima that has an easy mode. Me chose 'Hard'. Me play. Me happy. Game not ruined. Simple as that man...
Same with Elden Ring. Me chose not use magic. Me play full melee. Me chose not to cheese. Me have fun. Game not ruined. Just like how devs cleverly hide their loading screens, they had been doing the same with difficulty as well. Doesn't take away from the fact the game is still loading when that happens nor the fact that it still has an easy mode when you engage with items that make it easier for you. If anything, Elden Ring is an exemplary way of implementing easy mode without shaming the player or making them feel less because of it. Which you know, is her main issue btw. How games discouraging you from playing easy mode eventhough some of them like Wolfenstein literally have them. They actively insult you for simply engaging with the easy mode. Like she said, why bother having an easy mode then?
When you mentioned the feature of games giving reminder of the controls, I was immediately reminded of Monster Hunter: World! If you haven't played the game in a long time, the game will automatically give you the tutorials from the beginning of the game as you play, and you don't even have to go back to old levels or anything for it to work! You just pick up where you left off and the tutorials will happen as you play and they even have voice acting reading the tutorials out loud! As annoying as I personally found this, since I didn't really need it, this video made me realize that it's probably really great for people less able-minded than me
Dark souls 1 isn’t about beating gwyn by changing the difficulty to easy, it’s about you, the chosen undead, reaching the end of your tale. It’s not about upgrading weapons and leveling up. It’s about learning and adapting, which includes co op. If you won’t do that much you deserve to go hollow.
This is gonna be a long comment, but I just wanna say that this was a fantastic video! Well edited, Well researched, and proposes a lot of interesting points. As cliché as this sounds, I'm genuinely shocked that video has under 1000 views as of writing this. But going to my actual topic, one great way I've heard mechanical difficulty described was done my Masahiro Sakurai in his video "Squeeze and Release". This is where he brings up that games can bring satisfaction by putting a level of stress on the player, and then releasing said stress to give a feeling of relief and satisfaction. One thing he doesn't bring up in that video (but does sort of bring up in others) is what happens when there's too MUCH stress on a player. When there's so much stress to the point where it breaks someone. One insanely important aspect of difficulty is that everyone has a different level of stress that they can take before it just becomes painful. Someone who is fully able bodied and is a seasoned player of a genre might might have a high stress tolerance, while someone who is new or has a disability might be a lot lower. That lower stress tolerance means that it doesn't take as much for the player to feel pressured and receive the same satisfaction of release as the able bodied veteran.
This is why games with Assist Modes and fully toggleable difficulties are so important. Dead Cells is great example of this as the game is intended to be hard, but the Assist Mode gives you the keys to so many aspects of the game to adjust to your level of tolerance. I ended up using it to turn the damage received down to 30%, and I was still getting served! But it felt a lot more manageable with the level of stress I could personally take for feeling that it's too much. Dead Cells tells you in the Assist Mode menu that the game was meant to be difficult, but you are free to adjust the game how you wish. I adjusted the game to a level where I still feel like I was getting the intended experience, but just more tailored to me. I still felt like I was experiencing the game as it was intended due to knowing what the game was meant to be like, AND by knowing that the adjustable difficulty was still part of their overall gameplay design and philosophy.
On the other hand, one thing that genuinely pisses me off is when people say that a game like Elden Ring is more accessible because there are builds and items to make the game easier. No. That's not how that works. Accessibly is something that is ever present and always there to make it easier for anyone to try the game. Powerful items do not make the game more accessible, it just changes the playstyle. Sometimes, those playstyles might make the game easier, but that's not the same thing. Not to mention a lot of these items are things you get later into the game. Saying that powerful items are accessibility options like this are like saying to someone in a wheelchair that there's a ramp they can use... but they have to get up 30 flights of stairs first. If they can't even get to the building in the first place, then what's the fucking point.
Difficulty is such nuanced topic that I think so many people just immediately write off. There's so many aspects that can make a game difficult that people don't even realize. Much like games themselves, it's a combination of so many factors and moving parts that make it greater than the sum of its parts. And sometimes people can't engage with these factors for whatever reason, and we need to figure out how and why.
Yeah, I've been thinking about accessibility as I've been developing an FPS/Platformer. Right now, it has no accessibility features, and I'm left with the interesting question of what I can add with zero budget and bad coding. The core movement is weird, focused around moving with a lot of momentum and very low friction, so I'm thinking maybe adjustable kyote time would be handy, and easy to implement. Also I was thinking about making a halo-esque regenerating shield an option, off be default. Both of these are really easy to add, and make platforming and combat easier respectively.
By the way, have you ever struggled with spatial orientation in 3d games?
Control is a good example of what I mean, but I experience it in most of them in general.
(and it feels like having to personally walk the entire way to the other wall only to find out that it's the wrong wall, and you have to do it all over again)
The game remains difficult to the point of being unplayable - and I'm not sure if I want to try invincibility (the last remaining option).
How're you struggling with something as basic as orientation, especially in a game with a map?
@@smergthedargon8974 it is hard to tell what I'm looking at when the camera is moving.
And the map doesn't do anything - it puts all layers into one, which isn't useful in a maze of staircases.
@@user-df5nb8zy7e Do you suffer from some sort of visual processing impairment? I don't understand how one can find moving a camera to be so disorienting.
@@smergthedargon8974 not sure.
I don't have any problems like this in real life.
However, I read that many people playing 3d games for the first time experience this (and even motion sickness sometimes), and my case is quite close to "first time".
@@user-df5nb8zy7e Oh, yeah, that's normal. The main thing I'd suggest is cranking up a game's FOV slider (to ~100 for first-person games, third person games usually have it much lower ~50 to 70 but don't cause as much motion sickness IIRC)
I think that The Game Bakers may not be the right studio to highlight as having a more general philosophy of "harder is better." Since Haven was absolutely the opposite in terms of difficulty, while giving more complex considerations to the narrative of the bi-tagonists' relationship growth. FURI was definitely intentioned difficulty as metaphor, which I took as the struggle for freedom in the face of the prison industrial complex.
I think its more hype than anything. Dark Souls has a difficulty setting, its called preparing your build, and painstakingly upgrading your build, then the game becomes easy
Git better
I agree mostly with what you’re saying, accessibility should be in games without a stigma attached to it. That said I think Bloodborne is a bad example as it’s an RPG. Put lots of levels into health and the game will get easier. Sekito on the other hand… That said, it sounded like it wasn’t for you which is perfectly fair. Great video essay overall.
Thanks so much! I'm glad you enjoyed it! Yeah Bloodborne definitely isn't as difficult as say Sekiro. I was thinking of it more-so as an example of how the gameplay style doesn't work for me, but regardless of personal taste I have had my intelligence insulted for not preferring souls-likes in general even though it's not my thing. I definitely could've been clearer on that point!
Although, with Bloodborne-- I think with the learning curve with choosing the right character build for the right experience, I've known some people who chose an origin for their character that sounded cool narratively...but made it extremely hard for them to play and didn't realize it was the origin they chose, and by the time they realized they didn't want to restart their entire file so I think they ended up abandoning it.
@@darkteatime Great point on the character build being a challenge for new players. I struggled with that myself and I think that's a problem with most Soulsborne games. Sorry to hear you were insulted for not liking something. I'm not a fan of the whole "git gud" mentality as I'm not very "gud" myself.
Anyway, I really appreciate the response. You deserve more subscribers! I feel like you have a unique perspective that the games industry needs to hear.
From one chronically/mostly invisibly ill person, thank you for this discussion.
You are so welcome!! I'm glad you enjoyed it 🙏✨
hope its a good vid!
Is there a script version of this video?
I agree that more accessibility options are very important in video games moving forward. I do wish you had not cherry picked games that relied exclusively on reflexives and physically ability when discussing difficulty though. There are a huge number of games that have no physically challenging aspects but that none the less are considered very difficult. Would have like to see you address that with regard to difficulty punishing the disabled.
Thank you for highlighting the importance of a good, clear UI. I work with UI designers and it's really frustrating when a game I come back to after months or years just feels completely foreign because the UI won't tell me anything.
Adding easy mode is a much more complex tradeoff than adding accessibility features though. In some games adding difficulty sliders has no downsides, whereas in other games it has noticeable downsides. It may seem weird to say that adding features can be a bad thing, but for some intended experiences, the lack of features is itself a feature. This video by Ratatoskr gives a pretty good analysis of why some games should have many difficulties, and some games should have only one:
th-cam.com/video/pKyKGuGU4bw/w-d-xo.html
Great video ^^
I'm someone who's into fighting games and becoming disabled basically rendered them unplayable for me without very extreme setups that only do so much for me, even the ones people consider '"dumbed down" and simple to control.
The things about elitism and stuff is something I've experienced since there's a huge part of the FGC that is hellbent on keeping things extremely aloof and rigid for not much good reasons, at least in my opinion.
Especially in regards to movement tech in games like Tekken 7 where it's required to grind out complex repetitive inputs to literally just move around at a basic level, which was something I used to do effortlessly when I was more able bodied, now I have to stop playing immediately when I do something like that for more than 2 seconds.
(The movement tech is called Korean Backdash if you're curious, I heard it's less required in Tekken 8 which is cool if true.)
That's also not even getting into soulslike stuff too as someone who loves those games. The amount of self shaming from people doing things like using co-op and NPC summons to help with fights is baffling and indicative of a toxic desire for validation to me.
Its especially weird that its for for a primarily single player game that has no competitive elements whatsoever outside PVP....
... Which most of us just casually playing and using assistive features probably won't be playing much of.
We can't use the things like NPC summons that make the game more approachable in that anyways unless specific matchmaking rules are turned on, which also allows the opponent to use them too.
But that's also me having a good faith interpretation where they're hellbent about the PVP solely when in reality its just for the game's entire existence.
I'm glad you also brought up the differing types of difficulty too. I feel like there's a very absolutist black & white angle many people view this entire debate through.
The kind where they think people like us want to indiscriminately compromise the vision of a game or see it as an attack against them and their hobby when it's often already acknowledged that games are complex and there's no sole solution to all of the accessibility issues there can be and us mainly wanting to open a dialogue about it.
It's hard to talk about this sort of thing too since people tend to feel persecuted thinking its targeting them when its obviously just about like the more extreme prevailing mindsets rather than every single person who likes difficulty.
Regardless though, keep up the great work as always ^^
humnnn... sounds like a skill issue
You can't practice your way out of a disability
@@PhoebeTheFairy56You can, I have after all. With enough will power and practice next to anything is possible. I have one good thumb, other may as well be an accessory. But I still play on par with my fellow gamers for the most part. So to you I say, git gud... In the least toxic way possible.
@@celiafrostborn it's still not a skill _issue_ though, it takes a lot _more_ skill for someone already at a disadvantage than it does for other people. I don't think it's fair to expect people to put in more work just to keep up with those who find it easy
@@PhoebeTheFairy56yes you can. I have a disability, severely limiting the use of 5 of my fingers. And I love Souls games because I crave the challenge. It’s part of how I fight against my disability rather than letting it define me
@@ardentlyconfused3503 you still have to put in far more effort for the same results, though
My brother sent this to me with the message "I think all of our bitching about how rare accessibility features are summoned a video essay from the void' so I knew I needed to check this out.
I wouldn't say myself or my brother are disabled, per say, but I have some issues with fine motor control and him with navigation and spatial awareness, alongside both of us having minor memory issues.
One big accessibility thing that's helped me was Ultrakill's auto aim, I play with it set to ~20%, this creates a small area around the crosshair where your gun will sort of tilt slightly to find targets for you. Meaning that I don't need to be totally precise to land shots even on fast moving targets but it doesn't feel like it's holding my hand the way a full screen auto aim would (though Ultrakill DOES let you crank it all the way to 100 if you want)
My brother desperately needs map markers, especially ones to mark the player's current location. As such, when he played Hollow Knight the Wayward Compass taking up a charm slot was a massive point of frustration since it was like being actively punished for turning on what should be a standard accessibility feature.
Examples aside, always glad to see people speaking up about this stuff and I am 100% here for asexuality videos since I'd like to see more ace rep myself.
Yeah to be completely honest I've always been a bit iffy on the wayward compass. On the one hand it's a very simple feature that could've just been on by default. On the other hand it being a charm encourages you to learn the map and locations since realistically you wouldn't be able to know where you are.
As long as all the difficulty levels are fun for their respective target, it's fine. That said, this is not something feasible, both because of resources and competence from the part of the devs.
This is what too much Twitter does
You watch the video or just read the title?
You call this resisting arrest? We call this a *DIFFICULT TWEAK!*
I neeeeed a medic baaaag
This is the kind of topic that's better suited for a podcast format than a video essay.
Both sides have good points to be made and unfortunately, you don't get a chance to hear them when it's just one voice making an argument.
Given the current state of politics, it would be refreshing to hear an actual discussion and civilized debate about difficulty in video games.
Very well written and interesting video about an unpopular subject, but I don't like the parts of the script appearing on the screen, I think it would work better if they appeared less often, to highlight important parts and such
Not that I cleared any of it but souls likes were such a welcome fresh breeze in the landscape when it launched as during that time, there was too much hand holding in the majority of available games then that it just felt like going through the motions and at that point I might as well have been watching a movie while being able to give minimal directions.
One thing that should be improved for various folks though are controllers that help with most if not all accessibility issues. It could be an untapped market for all we know.
Howdy there! I'm a game developer myself who is absolutely in love with the entire soulsbourne ring series (whatever it's called now lol), and just want to say that your video is very interesting! I've often thought about how I could make a soulslike that is accessible to a more wide range of players, while keeping the difficulty and charm I've come to love from the series. I find, when done right, soulslikes aren't actually that difficult, but rather force you to learn the movesets of the enemies and bosses you fight. Nailing down that rhythm to an encounter, and knowing when to dodge and when you have an opening to attack is what makes me attempt bosses while wildly underleveled over and over again. On the other hand, this tends to dissuade some of my friends from playing. I wish I could hand them these games I love so much, and have them experience it the way I do, to love and cherish it to that same degree. This is a constant battle I have with myself as I make games, and has lead to me giving up quite a few times on projects I was really excited about. Your video helped me sort of look at accessibility in a new kind of way, and I hope I can use what you've talked about in this video for my games in the future! Continue the great work
it is really simple: there aren't many difficult games in the vein of souls around, so people that like them, will get defensive about changing them. since there is more piss easy games around for you to play instead than you'd ever have the time for. just play a different game, instead of trying to change the few we have that are to our taste. trying to change these few games instead is such an egotistical thing to try, it's ridiculous. just play one of the COUNTLESS other games...
No, accessibility options do not make games only better. It's hard to imagine you argueing all of this in good faith, when you honestly claim sth like this. It's so easy to think of sth to disprove this. For example: many players would use them to optimise the fun out of their gameplay, a well known phenomenon.
Obviously there are some accessibility options that would not have any such impact though, which would be fine, noone has ever said otherwise though, at least that I have seen.
Great video! While I have seen a few other videos on the subject I really think this one did the best job of educating me on the subject and being entertaining along the way, as someone who is not limited I learned a lot )there is so much more I want to write נut it doesn't work because I'm not good at English) Great vid over all!! good job
So first i want to make it clear this is NOT a critique on the video or you i think it's a great video, i just subbed to your channel i didn't knew but i quite enjoyed this video and will watch several others
Also to anyone answering try to be respectfull i will do the same... also english isn't my first language so if i got any word wrong i apologize for that too
But i disagree alot, most of this video can be resumed into difficulty settings= acessibility settings
And i don't think that's the case, a game can and should(and in my humble opinion must) have acessibility settings, colorblind mode, things that lower the particles, a mini-map, a trail on said mini-map, the ability to redo tutorials(nioh 1 and 2 allow that wich is super cool tbh)
But not all games should have difficulty settings, some games are meant to be hard to overcome those challenges, that difficulty is part of some games, this is not for all, ofc there's alot of games wich should have those difficulty settings but not all require one, fromsoft games (or soulslike) are fun precisly due to that challenge to me at least, they pushed me to not just run away from the challenges but to face them and thrive with them.
Story time at the end of the comment
For me the best way to put is that well yeah not all games are meant for everyone
I don't like pvp i suck at it, i won't ask if the other players can lower how they play so i can try to have fun, I don't like sports games, same thing and surely(not calling you Shirley btw) there's games that you don't want to play since they for some reason don't click with you, and that's not the games fault.
And this is not an abliest thing since like i said it's not acessibility, it's difficulty.
Now difficult games most of the times lead to toxic communities, keyword beeing most, i'm on 2 groups on facebook(just as an example) one for Nioh players and the other for all women/non-binary who enjoy souls games and it's the best communities i seen since well forever, all good people all nice folk(i know i see alot of toxic people so i wanted to give these 2 gold examples of good communities :) )
Story time(i promissed and i shall deliver)
I also used to not enjoy difficult games, didn't saw the appeal
Until i tried Hollow Knight, i loved the game(after giving up for 6 months but let's not talk about it)
One day i faced a boss called Nightmare King Grim!
He's absurdly fast, so much hp, does alot of damage, i couldn't understand him, i almost gave up(again)
But day after day i kept trying, kept pushing it, until after 5 days i did it, i defeated him, and i felt like i was soaring through the sky
It was perfect. And i promisse you every gamer who faced him and defeated him the first time probably felt the same, if it was easier well... it wouldn't have been as good, because the happiness comes from this hard game well being hard, through overcoming the challenge. And this game clearly isn't for everyone, same thing with idk call of duty or fortnite wich clearly aren't for me, and full respect that, I'm not owed the game to change just so i can experiment it
with all of this said i still enjoyed the video, thank you for it
will see alot more after this one have a good day you and everyone! :D
Thanks so much for commenting and subscribing, and for the story time! Just to clear some stuff up, I am not against games being difficult! Like I said in the beginning, it can be really satisfying to work really hard at something and finally crack it. When I talk about advocating for more easy modes, I mean what I said when I was talking about the Jedi games--easy mode doesn't necessarily feel easy and can still be challenging if you are dealing with specific disabilities. Like Swapna Krishna said when I quoted her: easy mode is kind of a misnomer. It's just applying tweaks to make the game more playable for different types of people. Like me, easy mode on Jedi Survivor was still challenging for me cause I was dealing with brain fog, slowed reflexes, and debilitating chronic pain. I still had to rely on skill, and I still felt triumphant when I defeated bosses that were difficult for me.
And I did talk a lot about how accessibility does not automatically equal an easy mode, but since this video is about difficulty fetishism, difficulty modes needed to be talked about too. I had a whole section where I talked about other kinds of accessibility features too, and also talk about how a lot of people boil down the entire discussion to just difficulty modes when there is a lot more to it.
I wasn't always disabled in the way I am now, so I know what it's like to play a really hard game on a hard difficulty and succeed, and how good it feels. I just want more difficulty modes and more accessibility features so others can experience that too. The whole idea is you pick the mode and features that will be tailored to you, so you can still be challenged, and experience the difficulty of the game as it was intended BUT tweaked for your condition and your physical capabilities. And sometimes, that's an "easy mode". Even if it doesn't feel easy to the player!
Those communities you mentioned sound awesome! I've engaged with some pretty awesome communities centered around "usually toxic" game fandoms too. I play Nioh 2 as well, but I take long breaks cause it can be physically painful for me. The character creator is so good, I was so happy I could accurately create one of my OCs! And the "I'm not calling you Shirley" thing made me laugh, hahaha!
I respectfully disagree that all games need to have easy modes, but also grant that overall I have mixed feelings about it. I really enjoy souls-likes and engaging with my friends who also enjoy them - we all know we played the exact same game with the exact same difficulty and when we discuss it, that adds something to the experience. It might be somewhere close to elitism, but it's not a fetish. There is a great feeling of comradery attached, which I don't feel to the same degree in games with a variety of difficulties. At the same time, souls-games do have amazing worlds and story-telling that aren't found nearly anywhere else in gaming and it's a shame some people will never experience them.
Out of curiosity, would you also advocate for there to be an easy-mode explaining hard-to-understand game-stories and topics in all their detail and nuance on the screen? Surely, it would destroy all discussion and thoughts to be had on the experience, since you could just refer to the 'easy-mode' for answers? I like to dive into lore in games, discuss theories and the like, but that would effectively kill doing so. I also happen to really dislike visual novels - but I don't advocate for them to add nail-biting difficulty so I can enjoy them. I know that I'm not their target audience and they shine how they do exactly because they do not try to include me.
I fucking loathe censorship, but I stuck with your video despite the censored words piling up for the sake of the subject.
Not every luxury should have to bow to everyone’s needs. If you were okay with the lower difficulty mocking then that would be fine but you are even against that. How is it fair for those who just cruised through the game just smashing attack button to stand on the same level as those who actually learnt how to play. Of course they deserve more rewards and cool features as they bothered to engage with the game
i also take massive breaks in between playing Dark Souls 1. ive only ever gotten to about the moth boss or the hydra. im probably never going to beat the game, especially with how daunting it is to pick up in the middle of a game like this after not playing for months. its just... not for me apparently. though i still wish i could enjoy the game without these anxieties that might aswell be physical walls for me.
Pretty great video
Personally, I think its nice that even fighting games now are trying to be more accessible. Though imo its implementation is nowhere near where it needs to be. Tekken 8 just has its special style but it pretty much is unusable for ranked play past a certain point. Imo the best way to make fighting games more accessible are controllers and characters designed for disability in mind. This combination can introduce even more players to the niche genre without sacrificing fundamental tekken in any capacity.
you don't get it
As much as I feel for your want to experience any game without feeling like you're going through a great undertaking or mocked for playing differently, I don't agree with the NEED to have games cater to your capabilities. It's a plus to have a game do that for you but not every game is for everyone, just like not every movie or book is for everyone. You likened a game and the player to a conversation. While we would like to be able to talk and get along with everyone, we can't expect to always enjoy that interaction. I'm sorry you feel ashamed about performing badly in a game, but don't be, that is your experience with the game. If you don't like how a developer treats you with the case of wolfenstein, just don't give them your money, you're not obligated to consume all media.
The only thing I feel like might be uncompromisable in your discussion would probably be the game journalist story. Someone who judges a particular form of media (or anything for that matter) should be considered trustworthy by the audience. Note the specific use of the word trustworthy. Gamers, as the audience, feel that for you to be a trustworthy critic of games you must have passed at least some benchmark of skill. It's completely on the audience's prerogative to trust or dismiss his work based on his capabilities. It's not on the audience to make him feel better about his skill in a game. He should be comfortable in his field of expertise.
Different types of difficulty is very important. I have been playing through Horizon: forbidden west and I really do like it. But it has a difficulty system that boils down to you having more health and the enemies having less health. but the things I have trouble with in the game are the big robots attacks being hard to dodge and their weak points being hard to hit. All the strong attacks knock Aloy down for a bit which is annoying. And in the lowest difficulty mode I still spend about 40% of the battle laying on the ground, even though the battle takes just 1 minute instead of 2. And the big robots move their bodies around so quickly (for me) that I often have a situation where I´ve missed the weak spot so often, that all my missed arrows have dealt enough damage to just kill the robot. If there was a difficulty which has the damage levels of normal difficulty, but just has the big robots move 20% slower that would be the perfect difficulty for me.
I think the issue devs have with disabled players is that they don't see people with disabilities playing their games and are jabbing at the average gamer with the disabled ones catching strays.
If i make a game, then have a dev QNA and someone comes up and talks about how they are prone to seizures and blind in one eye, my question isn't "Why" but "How" are you even playing this game?
Have a comment for the algo. :)
I think you talked about a lot of important things in your video and while I do agree with most of your arguments, I do not think the discussion was nuanced at all. There's good reasons for difficullty in games and I do believe game devs should be free to at the very least suggest how a game is meant to be played. However I do think that the "some games are not for everyone" argument is largely bullshit. Games as a medium of art are unique in the way that you might actually not be able to fully consume it as you would do for a movie, or a book, just becuase they requires skill and thought and dexterity. Accesibility should help gamers reach the end of their games no matter their disabilty or skill level, in an ideal world at least. You watch a horror movie and if it gets too scary you can close your eyes and wait, but you'll make it through. But you're not making it through Dark Souls if you can't roll. Devs should in my opinion account for gamers that need these options but also preserve their identity and vision implementing them in a way that works for the game.
But I have to say that mentioning the Dean Takahashi situation without providing full context feels disingenous. Yes we laugh at the guy because he's bad at the game, but there's also the discussion about game reviewers and if they should be good or not at games, and who's writing these reviews that are so important in the modern landscape. I think not metioning that whole deal made me feel like I couldn't fully trust you, even though I largely agree with what's being said. It's like 1% of the video but I feel it is really damaging to the argument you're trying to make.
Even then, I enjoyed the whole thing and I think it really adds to a conversation that's important to have. I think you communicated your feelings and experience very well and it made me think about how we percieve others, because we're clearly talking about more than just videocgames at the end of the day. Will watch a couple more of your videos for sure :)
I'm shit at shooting game, as I can't really notice details so my aim is always at the general direction of the enemy, and hope they die. In contrast, I can at least play more modern souls like game and finish them.
So here I'm, not playing most shooting game or even when I'm playing them, I didn't expect to win or do good in them, but just to enjoy (being killed multiple times without seeing enemies as in). So no, I don't think the game need to be easier or need to cater for more audience. We are already in a very niche market and people STILL asking if Elden Ring can have scaled difficulty, while definitely not willing to pay extra for their extra work
lol, nothing says "nuanced" like buzzwords used by ideological zealots