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Against the extermination of hard games
In this post, I argue against the extermination of hard video games, that is games that are hard to beat, even on the easiest difficulty setting. Those who wish to exterminate these games usually do so by broadly advocating for the implementation of easy modes. I deal with two main arguments, the "narrow liberal" argument and the argument from accessibility. The narrow liberal argument simply asserts that the inclusion of an easy mode does not harm those who wish to play on a harder setting. I refute this by showcasing advantages of unique difficulty settings. The argument from accessibility states that accessibility concerns should trump concerns regarding the enjoyability of the game. I show why this doesn't make sense. Lastly, I take a broader perspective and end up with the metapolitical implications of applying a "narrow" or "broad" liberal worldview.
Whenever FromSoftware releases a new game, a deluge of articles pour down demanding for an easy mode to be implemented. While, ostensibly, these articles are about FromSoft games, most of their arguments apply to any game. Furthermore, in none of these articles is it argued to implement easy modes only in certain types of games. Therefore, in this article, I will argue against the notion that every game should have an easy mode. Of course, I am not the first to do so. Youtuber Ratatoskr has, in my opinion, the best arguments against implementing easy modes in every game and I will draw in part from his work. However, I believe that his videos still don’t sufficiently express just how utterly wrong, egoistic, and exclusionary those are, who aim to exterminate hard games by arguing in favor of easy modes in all games. With “hard games” I mean games that are difficult to finish even for a seasoned player on the easiest available difficulty. In particular, I focus on the subset of games that have a unique and hard level of difficulty.
All articles arguing in favor of easy modes base their thesis on one central argument, which I dub the “narrow liberal argument”.
The narrow liberal argument
Implementing an easy mode does not hurt those who still wish to play at a harder difficulty level because the harder difficulty levels are still available. Nobody is taking anything away from you when implementing an easy mode and there are absolutely no downsides to it.
If this argument was true, the discussion would be essentially over. Unfortunately, it is completely wrong and disrespectful.
Why is it wrong? Even a single, small benefit of a unique difficulty setting is enough to prove the narrow liberal argument wrong. Here are some benefits that a unique difficulty setting provides, and that an easy mode would undermine:
It provides a sense of meaning to your struggles. When beating a challenge in a game like Sekiro, the reward is that you are able to progress through the game. Overcoming the difficulty has meaning because if you didn’t overcome the challenge, you could not have moved on. Conversely, if there was an easy mode, beating the challenge on “normal” only means that you did not have to lower the difficulty in order to overcome the challenge. It, thus, lowers the meaningfulness of your victory.
It provides a sense of unity and comradery. In Dark Souls you can literally see other peoples’ struggles against the exact same challenges that you face. This engenders a feeling of comradery against a common foe, which would be weakened if you couldn’t be sure that they aren’t facing a lesser challenge.
It provides a sense of identity for the game. It is no coincidence that discussions about difficulty always pop up around the release of FromSoft games. The unique difficulty setting has helped to create the identity of FromSoft games as “hard games”. Think of other “hard games”. How many of them have an easy mode? Having a strong identity, in turn, makes it easier for people to understand whether a game caters to their tastes. Everyone knows what to expect from the next FromSoft game. In some cases, the difficulty is the entire point of the game. For example, I wanna be the guy, QWOP, and getting over it are specifically designed to frustrate the player.
It provides a sense of pride when beating the game. The fact that some people cannot beat the game but you can, is a potential source of pride. If you enable everyone to beat the game, it is gone.
It saves on development time spent on balancing the game, which can be used on other areas. If the developers care about properly balancing all difficulty levels, this time save can be significant. If they don’t, which seems to be the usual case, the idea of implementing multiple difficulties is flawed in the first place. In the usual case of “easy/normal/hard”, normal is easy but hard means bullet sponge enemies and difficulty spikes. In some cases, it even ruins the game economy. I started out playing “ELEX” on ultra difficulty as an archer but had to quickly realize that killing enemies wasn’t worth it because I simply couldn’t afford the arrows to kill their bloated health totals. Thus, the difficulty setting didn’t provide a challenge for skilled players, it turned the game into a broken, unbalanced mess. There is no way this would have happened, had the developers balanced the difficulty around skilled players from the start.
It allows developers to generate their intended atmosphere more accurately. Some parts of games are meant to be hard to create an oppressive atmosphere. Others are meant to be easy to create a cathartic feeling in players. If there are multiple difficulty levels, a player may increase the level when the game is “too easy” and decrease it when it is “too hard”, thus undermining the developers intended atmosphere.
It provides commitment to a challenge. Hard games are oftentimes not that enjoyable to play in the moment but they provide more satisfaction when you finally beat them:
image in article
However, humans are impatient creatures who are prone to depriving themselves of long-term satisfaction for short-term enjoyment, e.g. by lowering the difficulty below what it needs to be. If you only have one difficulty setting available in the first place, this is impossible.
It provides peace of mind. In the beginning of a game with difficulty settings, you need to choose a setting without really knowing which one will be best for you. Maybe “hard” is good, maybe enemies are just bullet sponges. Don’t ask me what to pick, I’m here to play the game, not to design it! During the game, you are always faced with the choice of lowering or increasing the difficulty. With a unique difficulty setting, you don’t have to think in the back of your head that you could always lower the difficulty when struggling against a difficult boss. You simply have to…
…git gud. git gud means that there are some challenges that don’t scale to your level and that can’t be side-stepped. It represents the struggle of man to overcome his own limitations against all odds. Failing to git gud means to fail the archetypical struggle of humanity. It doesn’t matter that it’s unfair, it doesn’t matter that others are more privileged than you are. This is your challenge and you need to conquer it. However, if there is an easy mode, you no longer have to git gud. No longer gitting gud means that we lose a part of humanity itself. If you do not instinctively get what I am alluding to, you lack an essential aspect of humanity, sorry. Games are one of the last areas where git gud still applies in the West (another is love) and it does so with relatively low stakes. In the words of one our time’s foremost philosophers Fetusberry ‘Ass Bastard’ Crunch...
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While some of the games given as examples, like Dark Souls and Dwarf Fortress, are memed as being hard, they're really not that hard.
I played Dark Souls after dealing with the far harder Monster Hunter games (the newer games have eased the difficulty curve but get even harder towards the end) before, so it never really felt all that difficult. Nioh also scales up the hurt to far higher levels than Dark Souls, but also gives you the tools necessary to do those fights if you get gud, which is where Elden Ring's last few bosses fall apart. Most Fromsoft Soulsborne games tend to have several mechanics that allow you to trivialize most of the content even if the standard guy swinging big stick will struggle. Usually something involving magic, blocking or parrying.
Dwarf Fortress is not hard. It's just convoluted. You can stick 7 dwarfs in a hole with a tiny patch to grow food and they'll live in happy mediocrity forever. Any difficulty comes from the player trying to do a 'stupid dwarf trick' or RNG sometimes sending an indestructible syndrome-spreader your way.
Stephen's Sausage Roll is by far the hardest puzzle game I played. Nothing else warrants mention in that genre.
And to highlight something in a genre that interests me, the Codemasters F1 games are both the most "mainstream" sim racing titles, but also by far the hardest. Sure, you could whack on all the assists and drop the difficulty to 0 and cruise your way to victory, but the baseline car without assists is one of the the most difficult cars to drive in all of sim racing. So difficult, in fact, that actual F1 drivers criticized it as being unreasonably difficult to drive and unrealistically prone to spinning out of corners. The AI is also extremely aggressive relative to most older racing games. Driving the same car in any other series, even more "hardcore" simulators, is a far more relaxed experience. I believe the 2023 version of the game improved, however this. Similarly, their contemporary "Dirt Rally" games are so much harder than the old "Colin McRae" titles that they might as well be a separate genre. Sim Racing has long had a bit of a problem with a hard=realistic perception, and generally improved simulation has lead to easier driving, not harder.
Dark Souls is like a 6 or 7 on the hardness scale out of 10. It's sometimes challenging but doesn't scale up too far once you've figured out whatever particular gimmicks are useful in the exact title. Monster Hunter and Nioh are more like an 8 because they do in fact keep scaling up in difficulty. Dwarf fortress is maybe a 3 or 4 once you've gotten around the controls because, aside from deliberately challenging yourself, the core gameplay is easier than most city/colony builders. I'll give Stephen's Sausage Roll and the racing games I mentioned 9, because they hit hard and never stop hitting. And the hardest mainstream games tend to be rhythm games on their highest difficulties for the sheer level of mechanical execution they expect. You cannot fire up Through the Fire and Flames on expert and clear it without at least 100 hours of prior practice in either Guitar Hero or in very similar games.
Old games are rarely hard. Contemporary gaming is harder at a baseline for at least some of these reasons:
Whenever I have played an older game that I thought at the time was difficult, I soon learned it was not. I was just younger. To give an example of something I recently replayed, Pikmin's 30 day time limit sounds like a challenge, and my memory of the game was that it was a serious threat. When I replayed it, I beat the game in 11 days, and the time limit was totally irrelevant. Roller Coaster Tycoon is another old game I recently played, and is utterly trivialized by using high ride prices (often 10x the default) and advertising, something the game doesn't clearly explain the impact of but once you know about them it's GG. There are exceptions, like Battletoads and Ghosts 'n' Goblins still being difficult, but these were the exception then just as very hard games remain the exception now.
Well, this challenges a lot of my preconceptions. I'm kind of 50/50 on it. Like, if I take Doom for instance, the original on standard difficulty, with modern ASWD and mouselook controls, is trivially easy. When I was a kid, playing with the default controls that practically had you moving like a tank, I think holding the alt key to strafe, it was borderline impossible. I exclusively played with cheats I found it so punishing at 10 years old.
With the original Warcraft, most of the difficulty IMHO came from the primitive controls. Warcraft II improved on them enough that I didn't find it too severe a challenge with respect to that at least. Starting with Starcraft, despite the group size being limited to 12 units, it's fine IMHO. On recent playthroughs, I did notice that the campaign in Warcraft II seems like more of a challenge, and I found myself actually running out of resources, and not really getting 2nd or 3rd tries if an assault failed. Starcraft by comparison had a campaign that was relatively easier, with more plentiful resources and a less aggressive AI, that seemed willing to let you recover from mistakes until you got it.
But I don't think you can directly compare multiplayer games. How "hard" a competitive game is will always be contingent on the players involved. Likewise, I'm not sure I consider the sort of "difficulty" that hinges on whether you have access to a wiki or not actual difficulty. Looking up what OP strategy works on a boss isn't that much different from the sorts of moon logic puzzles that eventually killed point and click adventure games, and which most gamers rejected as being artificial "difficulty". It's not difficulty, it's just bad design.
That said, there are hard games from back then which still hold up. I find NES and SNES era Mario games just as difficult as I always did. Lately I've been stretching outside of my gaming comfort zone and throwing a credit into the original arcade Gradius from time to time. It felt like a big achievement when I was able to semi-reliably get to level 3.
NES and SNES era Mario games had something most of their contemporaries lacked. They actually controlled well and had good visual clarity, setting the standards for pretty much all later platformers with the degree of momentum and mid-air control offered. This lets the gameplay itself be the challenge, instead of wresting with controls.
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