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

I mentioned hard mode in Yoshi once and it's the only thing you bring up when trying to argue against me, I've only replied to you about it because you keep bringing it back up while ignoring every other example I've given. You've also ignored me saying accessibility options are good in every post I've made replying to you. The only suggestions by others have been Assist Mode, which doesn't actually help that much and really just changes a game's controls. Slow down options, which are fine unless speed is the point (and with Sekiro being the fastest From game since Armoured Core I would think it is). And invincibility, which functionally is just the easiest mode you can get and doesn't work in a game about overcoming hardships. If you don't mind I'll message you on discord about what you think should be options in a strategy game, on the weekend (got a mths and test tomorrow and need to study). I think we fundamentally disagree on how far developers should go in including accessibility options and neither of us have much to gain from continuing this particular conversation.

Absolutely. It's something I've seen people struggle with as a software developer (never want a blind woman crying in front of me again as we discuss software and accessibility), and it's something I'm beginning to struggle with video games. We can be better, and in that pursuit I should be better when talking about it.

Personally I'm of the view that some games just really fucking suck for accessibility modes Mario carts accessibility mode is excellent however it's very difficult to put something like that and let's say tomb raider or dark Souls because of how extremely complicated that is Just look at dark Souls leveling system. Outside of a difficulty about the game really sucks for accessibility.

No it's not, it's just not. This is something you HAVE to think about as a designer because poor impulse control is universal and can be integral to the games design. Being forced to play in a certain way can absolutely be a great way to design games and many games fail to deliver their intended feel or emotion because there are always options ready change things.

This is the most laughable concept I've ever heard in ages. The entire concept of games as an art-form buckled by the weight of this post. I find it kinda hilarious that this point gets raised so often in these conversations. There's so many more ways to tell a story than stuff like narrative. The player is given a chance to be the one to tell the story and the developers have so many ways to tell it. If they want the player to feel overpowered badass who cuts through soldiers like butter, they'll make Dynasty Warriors. If they want to make two badasses fighting each other, they'll make DMC3. The thing about the latter is that it doesn't really work without Vergil being a tough as balls enemy to fight. How are you supposed to convey that the character you're fighting is a badass who's on your character's level when he just eats shit when its time to fight his boss. Any form of cutscenes showing otherwise would just be hollow flair to the actual meat of his character. Don't really have much to add to the difficulty argument but I find ignoring the game part of video games is just weird if you want to take the medium seriously at all.

Nah, you're just moving the goalposts in every direction possible to avoid anything that doesn't end with "icemaz is absolutely right in every possible context, don't bother engaging a differing take". You also haven't remotely addressed how these option should or could be implemented which is pretty telling. As to the proper actual subject hand devoid of politics and junior high ethics flag waving, not every accessibility option can fit every game, and as someone whom actually has to take things like this in every day, there's some ground floor caveats: Does the game support behavior scaling in a manner that can accommodate various mean levels of interaction? Fighting games come to mind immediately. As MaxDood has been pointing out all month long, spacing and combo execution are considered base entry skills, and it doesn't matter how complex the combos get, it's still considered by and large an entry level of competence. Now this actually isn't an absolute as anyone who can play high level tekken can tell you combos that require 1/60th of second to get 100% versus 0%, not everything is actually that cut and dried. The compromise Harada came up with for disabled and new players with was a preselected venue of four canned combos that do between 27 and 40% damage on a normal lifebar. Said combos are visually distinct, to let both opponents know what's occurring. It's a compromise, and it does affect midrange gameplay greatly. An expert player is very, very unlikely to be bodied or even set up for these combos, and to my knowledge no one using them has ever placed at any official tourney higher than final 64, for pretty obvious reasons, so you'll find very little complaint about the system outside of people of so-so skill in online only matches. Other things are plain as day and simply require cognizance. I remember hitting up NRS multiple multiple times with alternate life bar colors, and I had access ot the the team, not marketing, and it still took them a literal decade to figure out maybe making green lifebars that turned red with equal tonal quality wasn't a terribly bright idea, much less covering blue/yellow color blindness. They did eventually figure it out, and it basically took nothing to implement other than a couple lines of code. ASfor less specialized games, any game requiring timing or multi-timing needs to be evaluated on a case by case basis, and there is no absolute solution nor, even a suite of best practices that can cover everything and in the case of AAA, someone needs to be convinced that this time and money spent is directly in their financial interest. ME3MP had a disable gamer's club and the surprising motif aside from 'your AA and postprocessing solution/custom vision modes is totally fucking with my myopia and epilepsy hardcore" was one button kinda fucks everything up, we need to be able to bind or not bind stuff as each gamer needs it to be' and the most ~caring~ and ~progressive~ dev's initial response via Chris "any exposed flesh on any character below the chin is the Patriarchy" Priestly was literally 'fuck you'. Other non marketing devs with actual brains in their heads luckily intervened, but their responses were pretty much in line; EA wasn't going spend money, editing your coalesced.bin was potential grounds for banning, even if all you did was separate keys or deactivate the hard coded AA and vignetting, and if you did this on console a ban was almost guaranteed. ME:AndDramaDuh had the same issues, and this time there was no official forum to address anything, and twitter was equally a dead end as the hilaribad production values overshadowed everything else by an order of magnitude. That's by and large going to be your standard response from most devs in AAA, where the cost of putting in and balancing against auto-macro and time/effect scaling options is going to cost real actual money. If any devs were actually serious, they'd have a framework in place as soon as code was ready to deploy to account for this stuff, particularly shortcut and timescale implementation. As for Sekiro in particular, it's very very transparently plain that journalists are simply full of shit as usual. Virtually every Name of Infamy in the game aside from Snake Eyes and Giraffe can be killed by running away, and using single string attacks whenever the obvious opening presents itself. Literal one button gameplay with seconds long tolerances, and every counter tool you need to beat the game is available between the first three bosses. Any actual extended gameplay sessions would have revealed that, but no one complaining played the game much at all. In the end it comes to cognizance and money.

I wish people understood that video games are an interactive narrative and part of that narrative is difficulty. Altering that difficulty can indeed change the narrative. Some games are about struggle, and if that's not fun to someone thats fine too.

Yeah and developers are free to have their vision fit whatever they want. Itsuno who made Devil May Cry wants his players to feel stylish first and foremost, so he adds a lot of things to help out inexperienced players like variable continue states, easy mode and automatic mode. I wouldn't use any of those mechanics but it still fits his vision as a creator. I think the problem starts when developers have their visions muddled with trying to appeal as many people possibly which is why this conversation is this heated in the first place with Sekiro because the difficulty is an inherent part of the experience. As a media purist who prefers going through stuff the way creators intended them (original language, desired difficulties so and so on) it gets confusing when difficulty is used as a marketing gimmick to make hardcore masochists feel better about themselves rather than giving the intended experience. I'm fine with varying difficulties in DMC games because I trust that developers would balance the experience for all difficulties but this is not the case for a lot of developers, a recent one that comes to mind is the new God of War where they have a difficulty called "Give me God of War" and from what I can see it's just a long-drawn number battle instead of something that would test your skills within the game. I wish more games are more clearcut in what's the intended experience or not like the Persona games where the developers clearly state that if you play the harder difficulties, you clearly hate yourself.

There will always be exceptions and that's fine. I can envision games that are incompatible with such basic accessibility settings of subtitles and colorblindness. Just be prepared to make a case for the exception though.

If a person wants a hard game, Is that allowable? Eris and Icemaz, that questions for you. Is is it even okay for someone to want a difficult game? I’m getting the impression that if I want that, you’ll think I want to exclude other people. I don’t. So are my desires over ridden by others?

I don't think they're arguing that there can't be a hard experience, but that they want an easier experience along with it. However I haven't gotten much more than that. The level or methods they find easy acceptable at could still be considered impossible or frustrating to others. Which is why I'm trying to nail down how easy the game has to be. How many people have to be able to experience the full game for it to be considered it at the right level? And then there's the discussions on how difficulty conveys story. Hollow Knight for example has the Grimm troope DLC. The questline itself has some difficulty, but at the end you're faced with one of the hardest fights in the game, requiring good pattern memorization and reflexes, and punishing harshly for mistakes. But you could always go to a certain other character and finish the questline that way instead to get completion. Is that an acceptable alternative? If you can't beat him, the game gives you an out. However, you're getting a very different experience if you decide to banish the troope instead of fighting the Nightmare King(Both in implications for what you've done, and the actual experience in doing it).

That can be easily solved with a little note saying 'this is the way the game is intended to be played' at whatever difficulty the designer wanted it to be played at. People with disabilities are obviously not necessarily going to experience that difficulty the same way, and there's literally no reason accommodating that with optional, easy-to-implement modes of ability compensation should impact a regular player's experience I literally said that something easier to implement like difficulty should be the standard, not more complex assist systems. I'm not sure what music or art have to do with this conversation at all, also your conclusion is trash. "why is there a ramp to the museum I don't want that ugly ramp there they should walk up the steps LIKE THE DEV INTENDED"

Is there anything wrong with games having an assist mode if the devs have the time to make one?

no If that's what the devs intended, then so be it. But having journalists throw a fit because they can't play video games and people eating it up because of "inclusiveness" and "morals and ethics" is absolute hogwash.

I meant it more in the sense that there's no downside to every game having an assist mode if the devs manage to include it, it's only beneficial to gaming as a whole. Note that I'm not talking about difficulty level here or changing how a game is designed, simply adding an assist mode. The only valid argument against an assist mode is dev time but if that's not an obstacle then it should be included.

They're advocating less for difficulty and more for accessibility to these games

Again. If the dev wants to include an assist mode, that is fine. If the don't, that is fine too.

holy shit we KNOW IT that journalist are fucking shit you massive fucking crockpot of garbage have you even given a single chance to read the shit you wrote? Have you like, given into consideration that a handicapped person with issues regarding accessibility because this game just like many others lack the very basic option to customize your keys, that all their plight and differences are straight up minimized into your shitty crusade against ppl who write bad articles? none of this is about forcing video games to do the Only Right Thing of watering down muh gameplays so that they can satisfy these requirements for the oh-so-over-privileged ppl who cannot enjoy the games in the same way we do. It's not destroying your shitty vision on how the game is meant to be played, because that thing straight up doesnt matter if anyone can play the game however they want, YOU included. You've successfully dragged down the entire issue that affects video gaming in general and has been in a very nice process of being fixed to "fucking journalists" like some sort of a gamergate mongroel you are that possibly cannot let anyone touch your gatekeeped luxury entertainment media, just in case they actually enjoy that stuff on the same level as you do. None of these things that are actually asked for, and not made up requests and scenarios that you create to support your shitty argument, are even that hard to introduce or were never introduced to begin with. In so many games nowadays you can straight up tweak fuckload of gameplay settings like in Dishonored, and there are actual initiatives for more accessibility in video games. Here, if you genuinely care about this great entertainment media that is video games, check up on just how easy, simple, and actually popular ways of making the games more accessible is - http://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/celeste-assist-mode/ Or don't, because evil journalists are out to make your games bad. And that's all that matters, doesn't it? To make sure that you shit on whoever is the current boogeyman so that you can feel good at the cost of other ppl. Fuck off.

Another victim of Gamergape

Just throwing this out here, since this IS what we're all talking about, since some people maybe aren't fully aware of it yet. Microsoft is genuinely the coolest company out there with this stuff., Their accessibility controller and everything they're doing with this stuff is pretty fantastic. I want to see every company, Nintendo, Steam, Sony, etc making a universal standard that can be used on all devices. Devices such as theirs really can change the way people with these issues can play One issue with this type of stuff of course is affordability. https://www.gamestop.com/gs/images/content-pdp/xbox_adaptive/Xbox_AdaptiveController_GS_2_960x300.jpg https://www.geek.com/wp-content/uploads/2018/11/switch-xbox-adaptive-625x352.png https://compass-ssl.xbox.com/assets/d3/9d/d39d37c7-deb8-4088-bd2e-f2bb15631bc6.jpg?n=Assistive-Tech_Feature-0_Strengthened-Community_1040x585.jpg It's good to see alternatives as well http://www.marketwire.com/library/MwGo/2016/4/28/11G095603/Images/adaptive-gaming-8002-39eab2602c2d95738d3befe8b3ad5aa6.jpg https://www.amsvans.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2013/05/lp-pad-xbox-controller.jpg As well as the hundreds of 'custom' controllers people build.

Well I asked more because of the things that have been said about wanting a hard experience in this thread. Some people have disparaged that as "elitism". Accessibility is only a good thing, and something I genuinely want more of as long as it doesn't interfere with the devs vision for the game by drastically altering scope or scale. But I think, as you've stated in your most recent post, that getting the tools into peoples hands so they're more readily able to play these games due to that, is probably going to push accessibility a lot further than just changing "difficulty".

I can see why people want games to be more accessible and so more people could enjoy it despite their own limitations, but one thing to consider is that not every dev have the resource and time to make their game more accessible while also developing the game. When they can barely finish the game sometimes, it is unreasonable to ask for something more like these in my opinion. I am all for third party or community effort to make games more accessible, but I wouldn't consider it a thing that should be demanded from devs. On the other hand, NOT giving a difficulty option to player can also be part of the narrative sometimes, or in the Souls series' case, it is part of their identity and the genre defining element as well. Games like DMC can get away with things like Auto Combo when the developer simply intended for players to be stylish in these games. It just doesn't really work in Souls games where dying over and over again and the player failing until they adapt is part of the experience. Trying to simpify this process just cheapen the effort. At this time and age where video games are more accessible then ever, if a dev wants his game to be difficult, let it be. Demanding an "assist" mode that stray away from the vision of the dev isn't acceptable and doesn't really help the game nor the dev. Games being inaccessible due to difficulty and a game being inaccessible due to players disabilities is different. The former can be solved by the players themselves by learning more about the game and discovering new tricks within the game mechanics, or in general, "git gud". The latter is an unsolvable problem faced by players with disabilites and it is a thing devs should consider when developing the game with their vision in mind. Lastly, if somebody just wants to "explore" or "feel" the atmosphere or design of a game, they can always just watch a Let's Play or Stream of the game these days. Even if they really wanted to do it first-handed, no one is stopping them from using cheats or trainers to make the game easier for themselves, as long as it doesn't affect the experience of the others.

Thank you for proving my point. And thank you for being my first perma (that I can remember) What was the shock image?

Assist modes are an accessibility option just like subtitles and colorblind modes, it's completely unrelated to game design. Don't confound assist modes with challenge difficulty. Assist modes are supposed to be an option you need to get out of your own way to enable to make a game accessible at all for some people. It's supposed to run completely separate but parallel to gameplay without the assist. What would you lose from more games having an accessibility option you will never personally use or even come across but let more people partake in an experience they'd otherwise have to avoid?

Nope, and they should be more prevalent, frankly.

The affordability wouldn't be as big of an issue if Sony, MS, and Nintendo could create a universal adaptive controller because then you don't need a different one for every system. Really just use the Xbox One one, it's (almost) perfect anyway.

Why does it matter how this started? I don't see how journalists are part of this equation. Even if they're inept at games (which is debatable - I don't think we should generalize), why should that stop developers from opening up their games for as many people as possible? I don't think devs should be FORCED to make their games accessible, but what's the harm when it's all optional?

My point is, compared to subtitle or colorblind modes, the implementations of Assist Mode can be very different depending on the game, and the same implementation in one game might not work or suitable for another. The implementation of an assist mode is directly tied to the game design and you can't really separate the two, unless you mean "Assist Mode" as in official cheats or trainers for the game that just outright ignore the balance of the game. As I've mentioned, games like DMC is able to do it because it doesn't inferere with the goal of the game in the first place, whereas games like Dark Souls could be very tricky to handle as the concept of an Assist Mode could go directly against the narrative. Not to mention all the extra resources needed to provide such a feature while still ensuring the quality of the experience for players using this mode. This could easily take more resources than to calibrate the game for a colorblind mode. Therefore, I don't think it is that unreasonable for devs to pass on providing an assist mode when it can easily be out of their scope, especially for cases where it may go against the game design.

Yes? This is what an assist mode is as opposed to a lower difficulty level. It's a way to customize the game for people that can't play the game in the original intended way be it because they lack the skill or they have a disability. "Assist mode" is used as a term specifically because it's not supposed to change how the game is designed for normal play, it's literally just extra accessibility options. It differs from the usual "difficulty select" options in that it's not about a curated challenge level, it's about giving players the tools to customize the experience to account for their specific circumstances.

and it won't be an accessibility option, but rather an alternative mode within the game that offer a different expereince if that is the case. That's how it differ from subtitles or colorblind mode, these are not changing how the game is played, not changing the intented experience and not changing the fundamental game design. When the vision of the dev is to create a difficult game, having them design a mode that make the game easy is directly going against their vision and does not work for the design they have in place.