New hard game comes out. Idiot press wants easy mode.

[CritialGaming]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2019/03/28/sekiro-shadows-dies-twice-needs-to-respect-its-players-and-add-an-easy-mode/#7023b76a1639

Oh look it's one of these again. It happened when Dark Souls 3 came out, it happened with Cuphead, and now Sekiro. Respect your players and add easy modes.

No! Fuck you! No!

Sekiro respects you enough to think that you have the skill to handle a challenge. If you can't handle the challenge the fault is with you, not with the game. Nothing in Sekiro is impassible, and the game would be disrespectful imo if it gave you an easy way out.

Improvise, adapt, and overcome. And also maybe get a new job because the video games are too hard for you.

 

[TrulyBritish]

In other words "blah blah fuck you guys for wanting to play games your way, even though an easy mode would be completely optional I don't want this because games should only cater to how I want to play games".
Maybe instead of these journalists learning to adopt the elitist attitude of "git gud" maybe some people should learn how to accept criticism of games they like and figure out that people play games for many reasons.
Why should someone interested in the narrative of whatever world is in Sekiro because you arbitrarily feel they're just not good enough to be worthy, so high and mighty worthy of the privilege to play these games.
And can we stop with the tired argument that games journalists have to be some stellar player to critique a game? They're not hired to be good at games, they're hired to be good at knowing why a game does and doesn't work.

 

[CritialGaming]

snip

It has nothing to do about that. I don't understand your attitude here. It would be the same thing if the article was "My Little Pony needs a hardcore difficulty to respect it's older players".

Not every game has to be suitable for everybody. This discussion has been made already and it's nonsense. The game doesn't have to change it's core design to suit every potential player. It's why target audiences exist, because a product appeals to it's target. While people outside of this audience may find the game and may find themselves loving or hating it, the game isn't at fault that they don't like it or can't figure it out.

It's like hating romance films because there isn't enough explosions. There are movies for explosions, simply go watch those because the romance film doesn't need them. Sekiro doesn't need an easy mode, as it isn't the way the game is designed. A circle isn't a square because it's a circle, you cannot give that circle edges and keep it a circle.

 

[Canadamus Prime]

New round of game critique comes out. Idiot alleged gamers cry foul at implication that people can enjoy the same hobby differently after they spent the majority of their life basing their self esteem, entire personality, and reason to live off achieving imaginary goals.

Don't forget their entire sense of self worth and identity.

 

[BrawlMan]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2019/03/28/sekiro-shadows-dies-twice-needs-to-respect-its-players-and-add-an-easy-mode/#7023b76a1639

Oh look it's one of these again. It happened when Dark Souls 3 came out, it happened with Cuphead, and now Sekiro. Respect your players and add easy modes.

No! Fuck you! No!

Sekiro respects you enough to think that you have the skill to handle a challenge. If you can't handle the challenge the fault is with you, not with the game. Nothing in Sekiro is impassible, and the game would be disrespectful imo if it gave you an easy way out.

Improvise, adapt, and overcome. And also maybe get a new job because the video games are too hard for you.

Who gives a fuck what the jurnos want? They didn't get easy modes the other times, and they're not going to get one now.

I see no point in being angry, it's the same shit we've seen a thousand times before. J person complains about something, and gamers (over)react accordingly. If you love the game, you should be playing the game and ignoring whatever bullshit spewing out of their anal mouths.

 

[Erttheking]

https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidthier/2019/03/28/sekiro-shadows-dies-twice-needs-to-respect-its-players-and-add-an-easy-mode/#7023b76a1639

Oh look it's one of these again. It happened when Dark Souls 3 came out, it happened with Cuphead, and now Sekiro. Respect your players and add easy modes.

No! Fuck you! No!

Sekiro respects you enough to think that you have the skill to handle a challenge. If you can't handle the challenge the fault is with you, not with the game. Nothing in Sekiro is impassible, and the game would be disrespectful imo if it gave you an easy way out.

Improvise, adapt, and overcome. And also maybe get a new job because the video games are too hard for you.

An easy mode in a hard game, how awful. No truly, listen to how mad I sound.

Also

And also maybe get a new job because the video games are too hard for you.

Hm. Let me read the article.

It debuted this new style with Demon's Souls and cemented it with Dark Souls before swaggering across the gaming industry with Bloodborne, my drug of choice and one of the most engaging gaming experiences I've ever had.

Hey, Critical. Favor? If you're going to insult someone for daring to suggest that a game has an easy mode, could please stay away from utterly baseless strawmen? As someone who enjoys Sekiro and From games, I'm sick and tired of any critiques of the difficulty of these games being dismissed with baseless "oh, you only say that because you suck," elitism.

 

[Aiddon_v1legacy]

New round of game critique comes out. Idiot alleged gamers cry foul at implication that people can enjoy the same hobby differently after they spent the majority of their life basing their self esteem, entire personality, and reason to live off achieving imaginary goals.

Don't forget their entire sense of self worth and identity.

Especially since difficulty in FromSoft games is their least interesting feature. If difficulty was all the games had then they would be as popular as they are (especially when the point of the games is to be pragmatic as hell and break it). What really helped sell the games were the atmosphere, world design, and lore.

 

[TrulyBritish]

Not every game has to be suitable for everybody. This discussion has been made already and it's nonsense. The game doesn't have to change it's core design to suit every potential player. It's why target audiences exist, because a product appeals to it's target. While people outside of this audience may find the game and may find themselves loving or hating it, the game isn't at fault that they don't like it or can't figure it out.

Yes, games don't need to cater for everybody, but forgive me if I don't see a reason to just block off people from enjoying a work because they don't enjoy it the same way someone else does.

It's like hating romance films because there isn't enough explosions. There are movies for explosions, simply go watch those because the romance film doesn't need them. Sekiro doesn't need an easy mode, as it isn't the way the game is designed. A circle isn't a square because it's a circle, you cannot give that circle edges and keep it a circle.

It really isn't the same, like, at all. You can't add explosions to a rom com without fundamentally changing the core premise. if I changed "Pride and Prejudice" to be more like "The Dark Knight" it would no longer be P&P, you can't change a facet of that without changing the core.
Games are perhaps unique in that they're a medium of two parts (excluding certain games like, say, Tetris), the more traditional narrative core and the skill part. It is more than possible to change one of those facets without affecting the other. If I changed the gameplay of Mass Effect 2 from third person to first person I can still easily enjoy the narrative. Similarly, people can enjoy a particular form of game style amongst different narratives.
By saying that games shouldn't have an optional easy mode, you're denying someone interested in one facet of the game from enjoying it based on the other. People love Dark Souls not just because of the challenging gameplay but because of the world and the designs.
And again, difficulty modes are optional (hell, often they don't even need to be actually in the game. All those naked runs of Dark Souls aren't in game but people do they anyway for the challenge). If I could make a movie that could successfully be both rom coms and action flicks while offering the ability to be more action or romantic at the viewers discretion, why wouldn't I do that? Why not make a piece of entertainment that more could enjoy at the expense of disappointing none?
The only way this argument has ever worked is if changing the difficulty somehow alters the gameplay so fundamentally as to make even the harder difficulties easy, like if dark Souls just decided to completely get rid of the stamina system for example. And I can't help but feel that argument is more specifically about the laziness of whatever developer it is more than a general argument against the concept of making easy modes in games.

 

[Saelune]

I don't blame people for wanting a hard game to be easy, but I also don't blame a game for wanting to be hard.

 

[Casual Shinji]

I don't know if I feel every game should be easy enough for everyone, but I'm not vehemently against something like Bloodborne or Sekiro getting an easy mode. Maybe it's because I find the high difficulty a bit badly implemented in Fromsoftware games, as generally it amounts to frustratingly mashing your way through its obstacles. Not that this is inherently bad, I just never feel like I actually learned something, just that I've overcome something.

On the other hand I feel a developer should be allowed to make a game how they see fit. I can understand not wanting to strain your psyche for days on end trying to progress past a certain Boss, as I struggled with the same thing, but unless it's an obvious bug that's just the game being the game, and I either play along or play something else. I'm kind of at that point now myself with Sekiro, where I feel like I've gotten all I could get and to contnue will only lead to more frustration than enjoyment.

I do laugh at people who seem to get hurt down to their very soul at the idea of their dick measuring game being open to all.

 

[Dreiko_v1legacy]

New round of game critique comes out. Idiot alleged gamers cry foul at implication that people can enjoy the same hobby differently after they spent the majority of their life basing their self esteem, entire personality, and reason to live off achieving imaginary goals.

Achieving a goal in a game is only imaginary in the context of the story. As in, you can't claim you did what the Wolf does in Sekiro and pretend you're a shinobi in real life.

However, you indeed can say you achieved mastery of the game, as that is a thing you did in reality, not something imaginary. It takes real life devotion to achieve, the same that learning to play an instrument does. Similarly, highly skilled gamers can earn a living off of their corporeal (and not imaginary) in-game achievements. Others use their skill to entertain viewers and earn a living through displays of their skill that way. Again, a corporeal act.


They won't be crowned king of the nation because of what they did in game but in countries like South Korea for example they are indeed treated similarly to how a superstar athlete is treated.

And if you boil it down, how is being good at basketball somehow more "legitimate" than being good at sekiro. Both are games. Yet one of them will make you seem like this super talented guy while the other is supposedly something only someone with wack priorities would be good at. Doesn't make any sense.



If someone enjoys games differently, they can go on and do that. They don't have to finish Sekiro to enjoy it. They can enjoy it their way and get as far as the game allows them. It's weird to imply that because your style of enjoyment is incompatible with a game that there's something wrong with the game. The world doesn't work like that.

 

[Squilookle]

What was that game that came out recently- it had music that only kicked in once you started reaching certain high scores or something, and all the journalists writing about it complained at the game's lack of music

Just remember- there's a fine line between a carefully crafted Nintendo-Hard experience and something that is just arbitrarily hard because it's not quality controlled. I'm sure that Sekiro falls into the former category, but we can't just assume it's always that way whenever journalists cry foul.

 

[Tanis]

Some of us have things called 'jobs' that don't ALLOW us to 'master' every damn game that comes out.

I'd love to play this game, but I also know that I don't have the time (or the skill) to complete it.

Why do children, and the unemployed, think everyone has the 10s or 100s of hours to master every game out there?

 

[Phoenixmgs_v1legacy]

Mark Brown's take on difficulty pretty much mirror's my thoughts:

A player being able to tailor their experience to their preferences should be part of any game. Outside of video games, you can tailor any game to your preferences because the game isn't gated behind programming code. For example, softball is basically baseball easy mode. For board games, players can alter and house-rule anything since it's just cardboard, wood, and plastic. I wouldn't be able to enjoy sports games if they didn't feature tons of sliders because the default settings don't play very close to the real sport. The AI settings in Dishonored are great so you can be like I want to be able to look around corners without getting spotted but increase AI awareness to things (aka you) above them. You can also make guards' searches take less time because who wants to wait minutes for guards to return to normal patrols?

I would prefer to disable all the Souls mechanics in Sekiro because they don't make sense and really only waste time. It makes sense for undead to respawn but not like samurais. Why punish death with losing money and exp when you can obviously just farm those 2 things? The punishment only punishes the player's time and nothing else. Both those 2 mechanics only exist because of the other one. Just because one thing works in another game doesn't mean it'll work in said game. Sekiro does have 2 difficulty modes so is everyone playing on default playing on Easy mode then?

Video game devs are by far the worst at designing games yet the player has the least the amount of control over the game itself compared to every other gaming medium. Plus, house-ruling stuff doesn't ruin games in other mediums, it ain't going to ruin video games either. RELAX.

 

[Gordon_4_v1legacy]

Because an easy mode gateway drug is totally not a thing. No one here has ever honed their skills by playing and then replaying games at higher difficulties to experience the extra challenge.

Goldeneye 007 got this pretty well down pat (conceptually) back in the N64 days

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

I don't blame people for wanting a hard game to be easy, but I also don't blame a game for wanting to be hard.

But also From Software games being hard IS the point of them. Its a niche game for a niche audience. Its kinda like Frictional Games making Amnesia 3 and journalists wanting a 'not scary' mode.
Like sure its fair to want that, but its literally a horror game, maybe get a different critic to review it...

I think if a game sells itself as X, Y, Z, a journalist asking for an Y, Z, mode it unfair. If the game is about X, Y, Z but the reviewer wants an X-free mode, they're not getting the intended experience, and ultimately not giving the game a fair evaluation.

Imagine the headlines. SilentPony's Amnesia 3 review on 'Not scary' mode' "Its not very scary, 1/10"
Gaming journalist would be even more of a joke than they already are.

 

[Saelune]

I don't blame people for wanting a hard game to be easy, but I also don't blame a game for wanting to be hard.

But also From Software games being hard IS the point of them. Its a niche game for a niche audience. Its kinda like Frictional Games making Amnesia 3 and journalists wanting a 'not scary' mode.
Like sure its fair to want that, but its literally a horror game, maybe get a different critic to review it...

I think if a game sells itself as X, Y, Z, a journalist asking for an Y, Z, mode it unfair. If the game is about X, Y, Z but the reviewer wants an X-free mode, they're not getting the intended experience, and ultimately not giving the game a fair evaluation.

Imagine the headlines. SilentPony's Amnesia 3 review on 'Not scary' mode' "Its not very scary, 1/10"
Gaming journalist would be even more of a joke than they already are.

Honestly, I am of the camp that it is not on the game to appease everyone, but I seem to be a minority on that and I don't have the energy to argue with everyone about this right now. But yeah, I agree. If a game is too hard for you, either get better, or play something else. Plenty of games that are too hard for me and I just don't play them.

I think too many people expect games to conform to them instead of realizing there are so many games out there that already appeal to you. Otherwise I am going to start demanding a Hardcore Mode with lots of blood and gore in the next Kirby game.