games

are something else. No clue where that analogy is going

"Given the chance, gamers will optimize all the fun out of a game"

yeah, no one says Doom is easy because it has an easy mode. You can still brag about beating it on nightmare difficulty.

"I want to preface this by saying I absolutely suck at video games, so my approach or play style was to use everything I have at my disposal, all the assistance, every scrap of aid that the game offers, and also all the knowledge that I have as the architect of the game … the freedom and open-world nature of Elden Ring perhaps lowered the barrier to entry, and I might be the one who’s benefiting the most from that, as a player, more than anyone else."-Miyazaki

I doubt it, the way any fromsoft game is made more or less prevents the addition of an easy mode because everything is carefully balanced and tuned around the current difficulty.

I can't even talk to my friends about Fromsoft games because of shit like this, no "git gud" isn't a valid response to criticism made in good faith.

Buddy, I just wanna vibe with the atmosphere and the scenery sometimes instead of studying the blade or whatever the fuck. It's a video game, relax.

I think this might be the disconnect. If you just vibed with the scenary there isn't much to the games. You could run through the whole game in a few hours. I think Elden Ring only has four or five required boss fights and afaik every other fight is optional and you could run past all the enemies if you want to.

Much of the game - story, characters, and lore - only comes out if you spend a lot of time getting your ass kicked. Most of the game's background comes from random item drops you'd most likely miss if you got through every fight on the first try. There's a lot of information tied up in how enemies fight - similar enemies from different factions have subtly different equipment and weild different spells. Spell mechanics tie in to story stuff.

The other thing is - it's not easy to make the game easier. Most of the fighting relies on learning enemy movesets and timing. If you make the enemies deal %5 of their normal damage you're still not going to win if you can't figure out when you have openings to land hits. You'll end up being knocked down, staggered, afflicted with statuses, and all the rest of it. You could slow down the attack animations, but they'd look goofy af and become even harder to read.

As much as people scoff these games are carefully crafted works of art. There is wiggle room to make them "easier", but only so much due to the nature of the gameplay.

Additionally, the Elden Ring does have many mechanics - coop especially, to make it much more approachable to players who have struggled with previous entries in the series. I rarely seem people who complain about people who complain about the difficulty of the game discuss or engage with these systems.

Finally, i think there's a serious disconnect in the nature of the dark souls gameplay loop. You're supposed to die a whole lot. Every time you fight thrugh an area you have a chance for drops, you gain xp, and if you're paying attention you're figuring out the best path through the area in hopes of getting further next time. That process - advancing, learning, getting xp, dying, and repeating, is the core gameplay loop. If you don't enjoy that you likely won't have fun with the game.

I think a great deal of bad faith has accumulated - many people complaining about "git gud" don't seem to actually be interested in the game, only using it as a whipping boy for complaints about games gatekeeping difficulty. But dark souls and elden ring are generally the only games in the vast sea of available games discussed in this manner. It's these particular games that are essentially their own niche genre that peopke continue to be mad about over a decade after Dark Souls, despite each subsequent game having more features to make the games accessible to more people.

Just FYI, the "author is dead" thing is about interpreting a text directly according to what is actually there, without concerning yourself with what the "Author" may or may not have intended. When you talk about altering a text, by example, modding it or using a Game Genie, this is actually something quite different, because you are actually creating a new text that would then require different interpretations from the reader

I think the assist mode in Celeste is fantastic, especially since it doesn't disable any achievements AFAIK.

I've tried to get into Workers and Resources like 3 times now but every time I get about halfway through the tutorials before I realize I've just been clicking the buttons it told me to and haven't actually been learning anything. Then I look at how many more tutorials I need to fully comprehend before I can even start playing the game proper, and my brain just kind of shuts down.

Yeah, I don't care about having an easy mode - just give me access to the developer console (or even just some config files, I know how to use a text editor) and I'll make my own easy mode, thank you very much (or maybe I'll make a hard mode, you don't know). I can actually respect having a single difficulty mode, since balancing several is a genuinely difficult task - and the vast majority of games with multiple modes don't really do this, they just fall back on the classic solution of "give the enemies more HP and damage", and "I have to hit this enemy 100 times instead of 10" isn't a particularly compelling form of difficulty. Best case scenario would be customizable difficulty, but that's obviously more effort on the part of the dev and I can't demand that - but again, if you just give me access to some way to tweak the game, I can do some of it myself!

I think part of the problem here is that as games are a new medium, we're still in the process of developing the language we analyze and critique them with (and thanks to anti-intellectualism rampant in the community, it's going slow, people got mad about "ludonarrative dissonance" which wasn't even that fancy of a term, like "ludo"'s Latin but "narrative" and "dissonance" are perfectly normal and clear words), and as a consequence a lot of people are falling back on the existing analytical techniques we have. Except the core feature of the artform, the interactivity, kind of changes everything - people love to go on about "artistic vision", but in an interactive medium, the way you experience that artistic vision can be fundamentally different than it might be in a book or a movie.

If you're looking to provide a tightly-controlled experience, where every single moment is delivered perfectly according to your "vision"... then games just aren't the right medium, and trying to do this anyway is how we end up with cinematic AAA slop that constantly takes away control from the player for a cutscene every few minutes and fails you in missions for the slightest deviation from the script. Games actually continuing to develop as a medium requires accepting this interactivity and its consequences, and playing to its strengths rather than restricting it so you can make a mediocre movie with gameplay segments in between the scenes. And part of accepting the interactivity is changing our understanding on what's the "right" and "wrong" way to experience a game - it's significantly more difficult to actually define those concepts here than it would be for, say, a movie.

And besides - your game probably isn't some perfectly-balanced, completely coherent masterpiece, especially if it's some big AAA RPG - no work this massive, made by hundreds of people under time constraints (or dozens of people under even worse time constraints, since you're a AA developer and if you don't release this one on time you're going bankrupt) is going to be. You're going to have that one mechanic that sounded cool at the time but doesn't really fit well with the rest of the game, that one level where you ran out of time and just plopped some enemies down without much thought, that one annoying puzzle or trap that you thought was simple but turns out to be frustrating in a bunch of subtle ways that you missed because you're not Valve and you don't have the luxury of just running a gajillion playtests. Going "damn, this sequence/boss is really hard, I'm just not having a good time here" and wanting to turn the difficulty down for a moment isn't necessarily violating some great artistic vision - maybe the sequence actually just sucks, and doesn't in any way represent what the devs intended for it because they just ran out of time.