I mean, movie studios would put out versions for broadcast television all the time back in the day and no one ever said the originals were cheapened or worse for it.
Changing the difficulty in a game isn’t much the same anyway. You’re not chopping away content and removing objectionable content. Last night I went and killed some dude who was beating me up before. Now I had another ten or fifteen levels and a stronger weapon and I trashed him. If, ten/fifteen levels and a weapon ago, I had damage/health multipliers equal to what I had last night, it would have been the exact same fight. No choppy bowdlerized version, just me killin’ some dude.
Do you feel this strongly about modding? All those players out there compromising the artists’ true vision for their game? Did the guy who added a Pause button to Elden Ring commit some sort of artistic sin?
Oh, they’re absolutely made worse by it in my opinion. But in Cubsfan’s scenario, we have some kind of algorithm to do it automatically and it’s being done specifically for a group of people who want it. Not being foisted on viewers by an external moderating agency. Seems like everybody wins.
The originals? I mean, I might joke about Strangers in the Alps but it never made me like the original cinematic version of The Big Lebowski any less. If anything, it added to the humor of the experience.
I would suggest it’s an analogy that can only be taken so far since the manual dexterity to do a Rubik’s Cube isn’t very similar to the dexterity/skill to play most video games.
No, but that’s not relevant to the analogy. I’m making a point about accommodations provided by the creator to broaden the audience of people who can enjoy the product.
I would suggest that there are people out there who don’t have the mental dexterity to understand a Rubik’s Cube solution, though – at least not without becoming too bored or frustrated first (along the lines of people who become bored or frustrated trying to “solve” Dark Souls or Elden Ring).
Maybe, but you have to learn ER fights as well. So both require a degree of mental acuity but only one requires the physical skills to complete it. Most people I’ve seen talk about the difficulty are talking about the second part.
If you could just leisurely type in “Shield, Shield, Slash, Roll, Jump-Slash, Slash” once you knew the “mental” solution like one can leisurely twist a Cube’s faces, we might be onto something.
Sure. So is there anything wrong with the cube being packaged with a sealed hint sheet to help those folks along? Does it change or damage the experience for anybody else?
There are plenty of hint videos for Elden Ring out on the internet (or at least, there will be) that can make a player’s life easier. Do they make it easy enough for the game to be enjoyable by every person on Earth, regardless of ability? Probably not, but you could probably say the same thing about any puzzle.
That’s not relevant to what we’re talking about, which is the design philosophy behind Elden Ring’s difficulty.
And you still haven’t considered the hypothetical - would that sealed hint sheet damage the Rubick’s Cube experience for players who don’t want to use it?
I warned you it was idiosyncratic. I alluded to this upthread, but: for some reason, which is surely irrational, certain kinds of choice in video games give me extreme anxiety. I struggle with choosing character classes in a game like this, but I can usually manage it. But picking a difficulty level messes with my head. I hate it. I spend the whole game wondering if - no matter how much fun I’m having - it’d be more fun if I had made it easier or harder. In some cases, I literally freeze and never play the game, instead starting over half a dozen times on different levels and then fleeing to something less daunting, like parenting children. To use your Rubik’s Cube analogy - which is a good one! - I’d poke around without opening any envelopes, open one or the other, skim the hints, panic, and throw the whole thing in a box.
Like I said, weird, and not worth basing anything on except that I am relieved when I boot up a FromSoft game and pick “New Game” and don’t have to choose how hard to make it.
Okay dude, I concede that you’re a big ol’ edge case weirdo.
Not too weird, though. I think lots of players have hangups like that about different things. I’m the type of player who finishes a game with hundreds of unused consumable items (because what if I need them), and who ends up with piles and piles of skill points (because what if I put them in the wrong thing) that don’t get used until scaling forces me to make decisions.
I want to drill down on this a bit, because I think it’s an interesting point. A few people have mentioned the summoning mechanic that exists in most Souls games, which allows the player to bring in other players or NPCs. In most cases, this absolutely trivializes otherwise difficult fights. In Demon’s Souls, as a ferinstance, there is one boss that is pretty difficult if you fight it on your own. There is, however, an NPC summon and if you summon it, it will usually kill the boss without your intervention (you’re free to chip in and speed things along, but the summon does 90% of the work if you let it).
Note that this is an NPC summon, so it doesn’t even require you to be online to use it. If you summon in other players, you can get even more powerful results. I leaned on this mechanic to get by a lot of content over the years - the hardest boss in the original Dark Souls (a pair of bosses who tag team you and power-up the survivor if you take one out) was absolutely impossible for me, but I summoned some guy I’ll never meet and we finished the fight without me needing to heal even once.
So, in your view, does this count as a developer accommodation that increases accessibility? If it doesn’t count, why not? I’ve seen some flip responses to it but to me, this is unequivocally what is being asked for - a way for weaker players to bypass the more difficult content and see the rest of the game without having to grind or increase their mechanical skill.
ETA I know, I’m obviously an edge case, which is why you’ll never hear me complain out loud if they ever do add a slider (even if I grind my teeth).
If it’s a slider you can adjust mid-game (as many are) then this seems easily solved: If you feel the game is too easy, make it harder. If one boss is giving you ulcers but you don’t want the trash mobs to be a joke, lower it for the boss fight and pop it back up. For people who need their gold star, add a trophy/achievement for “Completed Entire Game on Nightmare”
In education this would (more or less) be called a modification, not an accommodation. In this case the gameplay is being fundamentally changed by summoning a buddy.
A very simple example: imagine that I have to fight King Cecil. In order to defeat him, I have to spent time to learn his patterns, discover his weaknesses, etc. Say an optimal win-case looks like this. I have to:
Evade his primary attack pattern 10 times.
Properly execute a specific attack 10 times.
Take damage no more than 3 times.
A difficulty change that cuts Cecil’s damage in half means I can now take damage 6 times. A change that cuts Cecil’s health in half means that I only have to perform my specific attack 5 times and only have to evade his primary attack pattern 5 times.
But the important thing here is that I still have to:
Learn his attack patterns.
Properly utilize my own attacks.
Not get hit too many times.
I’m still, fundamentally, playing the same game you are. I have to do all the same stuff. I just don’t have to do it with quite as much consistency or precision.
But if I just text you and say, “Hey storyteller, come and kill Cecil for me so that I can move on,” I’m not really engaging with Elden Ring at that point. And that may be totally fine, because if that’s what I need to keep enjoying the game then it’s good that it exists as an option. But it’s not the same thing as a sliding difficulty - I am doing a completely different activity to move on from Cecil.
This is the most important thing. Difficulty settings don’t let you bypass content. They help you engage with it.
This is in response to several of the posts above so I can’t quote.
You guys are focused on the wrong aspect of my point. If you play a different version of a game than me it certainly does not effect me. At all. I really, sincerely don’t care if you enable god mode in every single player game and march straight the end unscathed. Peace. We are in violent agreement there so restating it isn’t necessary.
I play Diablo 2 exclusively single player, but online. I have a single character, a lvl 90 Necro, and I have been grinding and grinding trying to find a Deaths Web wand because its very powerful and one of the rarest items in the game. It wouldn’t effect anyone else’s game experience to just let me create one out of thin air. But I can’t, the loot grind is core to the game, so letting people generate whatever they want when they want it undermines the game at a fundamental level. Remember when duping killed D2? The same goes for Souls games.
If you believe that video games, like music, movies, painting, writing etc…, are “art” and the artist creates a video game experience that incorporates difficulty into the central to the artistic vision, as this artist does, you can’t characterize them as unreasonable because they don’t want to compromise the core of their creation by including a slider. You can want a slider all you want, I don’t begrudge you for wanting a slider, but don’t paint Souls purists as condescending or as “try hards” when we say the game isn’t for you. It doesn’t have a slider so it isn’t for you. Now if you don’t view video games as art then the argument breaks down and we will just disagree.
