Sekiro, Difficulty & the Importance of Perspective (Noclip) - Videos for the 97.4%

Your previous post does have you putting disabled gamers in the same basket of wants and needs. I would recommend thinking about your wording if you don't want to be called up on it by multiple people. You have such a gross and horrible misunderstanding of what this whole thing is about, that I'm just gonna leave it here because you've been clear it's not worth it. Here's one last tweet though https://twitter.com/stevenspohn/status/1114612236121780224?s=19 Please stop being an asshole in future, and allow people to enjoy the same hobbies you do, regardless of who they are. We should be a more welcoming community than this. I consider myself so lucky to be a ""normal"" human that can enjoy these things, but the idea we're excluding people because of "the design" or "not everyone should be able to enjoy every game" makes me sick.

You definitely can with Sekiro, though, it's already been done unofficially with a mod. Sure it's going to take away some of the challenge, but if a person doesn't want the challenge then that's a good thing for them. Your points are proven wrong by games like Celeste and SOMA, the first is a hardcore platformer in which you can remove the challenge of platforming, and the latter is a horror game where you really can remove the scary parts, and as far as I know both of those additions have been praised and have had no negative effects. I do think this is true, but I think it's a bad design choice. I love FromSoft games, but I hate the culture surrounding the difficulty, both the fact that it breeds elitism inside of it, and that it intimidates people who might otherwise enjoy it. I wish my enjoyment of these games could be shared with the "casual" players. One way to remedy that would be to put in ways to make it easier, and I don't see any good reason not to do that.

yeah honestly people getting upset over the discussion just boggles my mind. like, this is what all discussion of all media centers around. "this is what I like, this is what I wish was different" I wish Total War was more faster paced, less realistic, and didn't revolve around routing troops so much. There are tons of people who've been into the series for years who feel the exact opposite way. I thought Blade Runner 2049 was the best movie since Fury Road because it was slow and nothing happened. A lot of other people thought it was terrible for the exact same reason. People are allowed to want things to be different. And hey, if you want to make it clear that you really like that a game is a certain way, express that opinion too! Just don't express it as a contradiction to someone else's opinion that it should be different.

Okay. How do you make Stalker accessible to everyone without making it not Stalker any more? How do you include people who want an action packed experience in Yoshi's Woolie World without fundamentally changing the game? How do you make a high speed racing game for someone with motion sickness, or who has a disability which cripples their reaction time? What I'm saying is there should be a range of games designed to cover the entire gaming spectrum. There should be 400BPM rhythm games that can only be played by 16 year olds who spend all their time on them. There should be games that can only be played by hardcore puzzle fans that just baffle everyone else. The should be games designed specifically for disabled people with different conditions. Any game that anyone wants to make should exist, and it should exist how they want it to. Be that with all the accessibility features or none of them, more is better sure, but a game should be fundamentally changed to suit people who aren't the intended audience or people who can't get the intended experience, regardless of whether those people are disabled or not. You call me a tosspot and an asshole. I'm not the one putting words in other people's mouths. I'm not completely misrepresenting your posts like a fucking twat. If you make a game about music, be it a rhythm game or some innovative indie idea you are by the nature of the game cutting out the deaf, at the same time though you could be allowing the blind to play a game for once though, lord knows they don't have many options. That's what I mean by you can't make a game for everyone, someone is going to be left out. Want a hard game? People who can't play hard games are left out. Want an easy game? People who get bored easily are left out. Want a puzzle game? People who can't do puzzles are left out. Want a game which requires rapid inputs? People with mobility disabilities are left out. Want a game which uses a lot of sound queues? The deaf are left out. I'm all for expanding accessibility in games. I'm just not for patronising people and changing games in an ill-advised attempt to make a game that's all things to all people.

i can't believe you genuinely brought up hard mode yoshi again. do you read your own posts. how do you put "people who get bored easily are left out" next to "people with mobility disabiltiies are left out" and not immediately mash backspace. this isn't a matter of personal opinion, no matter how dead-set you are on pushing that angle it's bizarre that you treat this like a zero sum game. stalker is more than its punishing difficulty. you can easily make a high speed racing game at the very least more accessible for people with motion sickness with tricks like removing camera shake. a celeste-style speed% setting can easily help those with slower reaction times. you can come up with any number of awful reasons to not make games more accessible, but how many of them stand up to scrutiny or haven't already been solved? a game that requires rapid inputs? easy-automatic mode. manual speed setting. turn off QTEs. a game that uses a lot of sound queues? there are any number of sound visualization methods that games can use. mobile fortnite has an audio ring with icons for different sounds. of course you can make up examples of theoretical high-concept indie games that it would be hard to make accessible, but those aren't the games people are asking for these features in

I'm all for adding accessibility options to help people with disabilities interface with a game (color blind modes/remap-able controls/etc) but we have to strike a balance between accessibility and usability. Sometimes just the option to do something itself can effect the user experience, like if Dark Souls had an easy mode I would have most definitely set it to easy early on when I was struggling and missed out on one of my favorite and most inspirational video game experiences I've had in my life.

What I'm saying is games are made with different experiences in mind. You can't make every game accessible because there will always be someone who can't play it, and trying to cater to everyone will never work out. There are people who can't play DMC on easy-automatic because it's too hard for them. There are games which use so many sound queues that visualising them all would make the game unplayable. I didn't even mention Stalker's difficulty, I was talking entirely about its atmosphere which some people can't handle. I'm not saying don't add accessibility options, I'm saying you can't make a game that is suitable for everyone. Even if you included every accessibility option in the world you'd still be leaving people out. What I'm saying is games should provide accessibility options just before point where it would harm the intended experience.

This feels like a semantic objection. Nobody so far has suggested anything that would be impossible to implement. Nobody is getting angry at Yoshi's Crafted World because comatose people can't play it. When people say "games should be for everyone" I don't think the implication is that games should be something they're physically incapable of being. Please, someone speak up if I'm wrong here.

So because you have poor impulse control, no one else should have that option? Like, I'm sorry to say this, but this isn't a problem with designers. This isn't a problem with people who want an easy mode. This is a problem with you. This whole conversation reminds me of a post I read from the RUINER devs about the Cheat Mode they added in an update. It's not even visible anywhere in the game menu, it can only be accessed by hitting F8. If I recall correctly, once you hit it, you're told, very explicitly, that it enables the Cheat Mode and isn't the way the game is meant to be played, and asks you to press F8 again to confirm it. Apparently this entirely optional, entirely invisible Cheat Mode pissed off enough people that the RUINER devs had to make a public post defending it. The sheer thought of that confounds me. You want to know what's really crazy, though? I read about this very early into the game, and then proceeded to not use it. Finished the entire game without using this entirely optional Cheat Mode, even though I knew about it. What a concept. To be clear, I am not saying that all games need all accessibility for all people. There are design limits and physical limitations. You can only stretch a game design so far. But that doesn't mean these games are completely inelastic, either. Variables to control things like enemy health, damage, movement speed, reaction speed, spawn rate, etc, are all things that can be easily adjusted to tailor individual player interests. And if the game is developed with it in mind, even controls for things like overall game speed can be introduced - though this one does require game logic to be done in a specifically tailorable way, and so isn't a plug-and-play solution like enemy health would be. And that's to say nothing of alternative control schemes. But this argument of "Thing shouldn't be implemented because I would use it and ruin the game for myself" is nonsensical. Don't punish other people for your lack of self control.

With hindsight I wouldn't change the difficulty but at the time I would have just thought that was what you are supposed to do if they had presented the option. I'm not saying that you can't provide options I'm just saying that a traditional' easy mode' would be a bad idea. Dark Souls is a good example of a game that doesn't fit because of how much mechanical freedom they give the player to explore so that you can find ways around having to do reflexive challenges if you are creative enough. I'm currently developing a game based off of that feeling I had got when I had worked my way out of a high leveled area in dark souls by exploiting a bug in the game's mechanics that I would have never discovered if I had lowered the difficulty from outside the context of the game's rules.

I'm pointing to people who are asking for these things, and you keep saying "stop patronising people no one would ever want this!!". In the same way you think these video games aren't for disabled people, I don't think this discussion should involve idiots like you trying to stop people from asking game developers for more options. It doesn't affect you, or the way you play games, stop being an idiot. I'm shocked you think accessibility compromises any kind of """"essence"""" games have when there are people out there saying the opposite who make these games. How much clearer can we be. How much more of a bigoted idiot could you be by not allowing people to ask for these things, or at least try different options. We have a fucking DDR Mat which you can use with your fingers, so people who can't use their legs can play. That's AMAZING. And for that person, they're playing DDR.

Are you for fucking real? I highlighted in bold that they should add accessibility options, I've said repeatedly that games should have more options. I didn't say "no one wants this" I said disabled gamers want the ability to play the same games as able bodied people and don't all want to be given watered down experiences. Maybe if you actually read my posts instead of assuming what I mean and literally making shit up you could have an honest discussion. Until you're willing to actually fucking read you can keep calling me a bigot based on nothing, you arrogant prick.

You keep saying that like saying "I want accessibility for everyone" is a defence, but then immediately saying that the thing people are asking for shouldn't be done. I have given direct links to the COO of Ablegamers asking for the thing which you describe as "watering down the experience". What do you want me to get from your posts? You're repeatedly contradicting your own message by saying I want X then saying but not like Y, even though Y is what people want, and Y is what From Software can decide to do or not do, not you. It's not patronising to repeat messaging from, again, the COO of Ablegamers, who is actively asking for these things you're acting like are impossibilities. Not all disabled gamers want the same, are the same, or will ask for the same things. Honestly at my wit's end to make you see that no one size fits all, and asking for this is OKAY. No one is coming to change your video gaming experiences, just let others in on it.

I never said that developers shouldn't add accessibility options, I never said anything about all disabled gamers being the same, I explicitly said that there's no one size fits all solution, in fact that has been the core of what I was saying. If you're 'at your wits end' that's down to your inability to have an honest discussion, because it's you who keeps insisting I hate disabled gamers but repeating it doesn't make it true. I said it's up to developers whether they want to add accessibility features, and if they do which features are appropriate for the experience they're trying to deliver.

I'm not saying you hate disabled gamers, and you have repeatedly generalised the issue in your previous posts to imply that disabled gamers are a single group. I said earlier that if you don't believe that, then you should be wording your posts more clearly because that message was not received in previous posts. I'm going to actually leave it here because I'm not trying to insult you, it's just a topic I'm passionate about having seen the work people like SpecialEffect in the UK and Ablegamers everywhere do. As someone who over the last 5 years has been finding it increasingly difficult to use controllers for longer amounts of time (I can no longer play Guitar Hero, which was my favourite game as a teenager) due to a hereditary disease, I don't want to give up gaming. I appreciate it every time I can play video games the way developers intended, but it might not last forever, and I would love to have options in the future so that I can still experience it. I don't think the developers should be forced to, but I would love it if they did. I apologise for being rude to you on the previous page, it's a heated topic and I still think you're a numpty for pushing back so hard on disabled people asking for more specific options for their needs. But I'll agree to disagree for now.

Games like Dark Souls would not work with an easy mode because the challenge is tightly interwoven with the games themes. If game now are art on the same level as movies and books and whatnot then we should not compromise games where the difficulty is part of the experience. Adding accessibility options is not a bad thing and I love that Microsoft controller that was designed for physically handicapped people but accessibility doesn't mean that you have to dilute the games core. Playing a game like Dark Souls with an easy mode mod is the equivalent of reading War and Peace as an abridged version or fast forwarding through the boring parts of Blade Runner. Plus, not all hard games are reflex challenges, stuff like Shin Megami Tensei or Wizardry offer challenge similar to Dark Souls but in turn based form and the challenge comes from setting up your party properly for the right situations.

You literally called me a bigot. Look, I get that you're passionate about this but that doesn't make it okay to put words in people's mouths. I have no problem with games adding accessibility options, it's generally a good thing. But there comes a point where you have to consider what the intended experience of the game is and whether it will be impacted by the changes you're asking for. You can remove all the monsters from a horror game but that fundamentally changes what the game experience is. In SOMA it was a positive change because the monsters didn't add anything to the game, and in the opinions of many they detracted from the story. In Resident Evil 2 removing the zombies will create an entirely different experience from the intended one, and if the developers don't want to present that alternate experience that's fine. When I said 'not all games should be for all people' I wasn't saying 'fuck off cripples, this is my game' I was saying that in offering specific experiences developers can't cater to everyone even if they try to. It's up to developers to balance how accessible their game is compared to the intended experience.

I think reading through your posts in this thread and the other one, I think you were being bigoted for the sake of "gatekeeping", and telling people what they should and shouldn't ask for. I get it's the internet, but holy shit please read the intent in your posts. I don't know you personally, I don't know your beliefs. I can only assume your beliefs in these posts, where you tell disabled people who are asking for these options that it's the same as if you wanted a hard mode on Yoshi's Woolie World. How fucking insulting. You did say that. You compared being disabled to getting good at the game. You failed to show a basic understanding of the topic or any empathy with disabled people. So I called you what I thought you were. If I'm wrong I apologise, but you have given little reason for me to not believe that.

A lot of the arguments are about the semantics of the word "accessibility". But at the end of the day it seems like the heart of the debate is whether the game's vision should be compromised as an excuse to let more people to see the end of the game or not. Adding an invincibility mode, double-damage mode, or any other cheap way of making a game easier is not an accessibility option for most games. They actively ruin the designers' intention and don't deliver the same experience. In that sense, it's perfectly fair to compare this situation to adding a hard one-hit-death mode in Yoshi. It just doesn't work. Those things can be a bonus, and the devs could decide to include them, but they don't have to because they know it will mess up all the systems they put in place in the game. In other games, if everything is designed with scalability in mind and where difficulty isn't integral to the experience, it's a no-brainer to include it. In Souls games, difficulty and struggle are integral parts of the experience and the narrative, so they included other ways to handle difficult tasks that they thought fitted their vision. Like Janus said, there's no magic formula and you can't expect all games to be tailored for everyone. In an ideal scenario, devs create something with a specific audience in mind, they make a game that's as good as possible for that crowd, and then they should include accessibility settings to let as many people as possible experience their vision. But as soon as an option breaks that experience, they are absolutely in the right to not include it. I wouldn't want someone to experience my game on a superficial level while the real experience flew right above their head. They didn't play my creation, they played a botched slice of it. Different key bindings should be in every game because that's never going to break the intended experience, right? Well yes, but there's some extremely specific cases where even those would break the experience. VR games for example can't be rebound (aside from the buttons) or you would basically not be playing the same game. A game like "Brothers a tale of two sons" wouldn't impact you the same way if they added an "easy" mode where an AI controls one brother. In rhythm games or bullet hell games, easy mode and expert mode are basically two different games in one, because you literally have to redo the entire level design with different design principles and different target audiences in mind. You can't just add a mode where it removes half the notes or half the bullets. So in the end it should be handled on a case by case basis and be up to the designers. They know their vision and their craft more than you do. Accessibility should definitely be more thought about during development, but don't fault devs for not butchering their experience by slapping an easy mode and calling it a day.

Here's a simple question. This is open for anyone to answer, regardless of your stance on this particular debate: Would you rather: A.) Be able to experience a piece of art, even if it were diluted and distorted, and compared to the artists' intentions, completely ruined B.) Not experience that piece of art at all. I think that, when you get right down to it, this is really the core of the disagreement here. Some people feel that if you can't experience the art in its pure, true form, then it's better to not experience it at all. Others believe that it's better to have at least a taste of the experience, no matter how distorted it might be, than it is to never experience it at all. I personally believe that it's better to have a diluted experience, than no experience at all. Not everyone does, and that's a perfectly okay opinion to hold. But I don't think it should be up to those people to decide to impose that on everyone. If a piece of art comes with an alternative, diluted experience, then people can choose to simply not experience that art at all; but if a piece of art doesn't come with that alternative, diluted experience, then there is no choice involved - if they can't experience it the way the artist intended, then they can't experience it all. There is no middle ground, if that alternative experience isn't provided. And I don't think that's a fair choice.

Why not both? You are neither the artist or the person asking, let the artist decide what they want to do, and let the person with these issues ask them without being criticised for trying to "dilute the art" of something you also enjoy. The developer can say no, but there is no harm in appealing for these options from a developer. People are speaking like they are From Software, or they have personal stake in the art of the game. But they don't, so let the developers decide what they do, and any option they pick is their choice, and should be respected. If someone asks for invincibility and From say yes, then are you going to be mad that they're ruining your perception of what the artists vision was?

This counter really doesn't achieve much, but I ask you to entertain me regardless: Does having that invincibility mode as an option, in any way, lessen the experience for people who decide to instead use a controller that takes their needs into account, and play the game in the same configuration as people who don't need those accommodations?

When designing games there are many spectrum and aspects that players find enjoyable: Competition, mastery, social, completionists, autonomy, narrative, to name a few. A game can not satisfy every need without compromising a majority of its creative focus. And such, games that emphasize on challenge may have reasons not to let players have an easy way out, as much as a curriculum choosing not to lower their passing grade for qualifications. Games are in no way obligated to owe their players a play from start to finish, catered to their specific tastes. However, there seems to be misunderstanding between accessibility and difficulty. Difficulty is about mastery in overcoming a designed obstacle; accessibility is letting everyone have the means to participate. Specifics that are not integral to the core experience (e.g. color blind and motion sickness), if can be remedied for inclusiveness, should be included. Common examples such as graphical options for lesser computers and closed captions are curb cut effects that everyone can benefit from. Should the core engagement loops comes in conflict with player impairments, the solution should always be to bring them up to speed wherever possible, not to water down their experience by giving them an easy way out. Easy modes were not originally intended for accessibility, they were made for wide appeal.

If a foreign developer made something I was interested in, I would like them to provide a translation so I could enjoy it. I just don't think they'd be morally obligated to provide one, and if they didn't feel inclined to I wouldn't hold that against them.

Difficulty can certainly aid in accessibility though.

I'm a purist with most games to the point where I believe Dark Souls doesn't even really need the ability to respec skill points, but I'm definitely a big fan of increased accessibility. There's a major difference between 'not everyone should enjoy every game' and 'not everyone should be able to enjoy every game.' One of my favorite games, Furi, is a hard as balls boss fight game where the intended developer experience comes from the unlockable hard mode in an already challenging game. The developers actually have a really excellent write-up where they talk about how they created the game to cater to a specific subset of people who craved a specific, intense experience (link here). It includes bolded statements like Not every game is for you and We can choose to not please everybody. In a game of just boss fights + walking between boss fights, adding Celeste-level difficulty options would dilute the experience significantly, to the point where I personally wouldn't be as interested in playing like that at all. ...but also, three years after release, they totally added a bunch of Celeste-level difficulty options. They did it with the understanding that some people just couldn't manage the boss fights but still wanted to appreciate the narrative, art, and atmosphere. It doesn't prevent people from playing the intended way and allows anyone to experience the game, even if it wasn't what the devs intended. Which is great. Ultimately, all this is to say I agree with you, and think that more devs should be encouraged to add accessibility options like this . Even if it's not pure, true, art, there's still more to appreciate than just the intended experience, and who am I to say someone else shouldn't be able to appreciate those things?

Honestly it feels like there's a "Dark Souls is basically a pile of poop without the difficulty" meme, and it needs to die. Even fans of the series are casually implying it everywhere I see this discussion. Yeah, this is pretty much 100% analogous to how I feel about adding an Assist Mode. They're not obligated to do it at all, but it would just be nice to see because a whole new group of people could share the experience, and it wouldn't mean anything to those who already enjoys the thing.

Dark Souls would be a pile of poop without the difficulty, yes. If you just had to Forward+R1 the whole game, what would you get out of it? Its not like it's an RPG with massive amounts of dialogue and cutscenes, it's a game that is built around the mechanics and the challenge of these mechanics.

I think the hefty amount of videos dedicated to discussing the lore and universe disagree with you here. There's plenty to appreciate about the series outside of its difficulty.

Most of it comes from secondary thing like item descriptions and extrapolation of the world design, the first game as something like 20 minutes of cutscenes/dialogue. Lore and universe discussion is something very much secondary to the whole souls series.