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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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Hard disagree. I think the Souls games and Elden Ring are all pretty mediocre. They're fine at some baseline quality, but they're only remarkable because of the arbitrary high difficulty that breeds elitist protectionism that this post is a good example of. Sekiro is the only title I'd unconditionally qualify as "great". Never played Bloodborne.
Basically any game can be made much more difficult through challenge runs or speedruns, and they'd confer just as much intrinsic pride for beating them as a Fromsoft title would at equivalent difficulty. But those challenges would lose the extrinsic motivator of one being able to pretentiously lord their gaming superiority over others, since e.g. saying "I completed [game] in the any% hitless category in under 14 minutes" is a lot less legible to people who don't play it themselves. Conversely, plenty of people know about the reputation of the Souls series.
Even if you personally enjoy that extrinsic motivator, it's undeniable that it creates other problems. Discussions of the game become worse in a lot of ways, with plenty of obnoxious policing on how you're "supposed" to play the game (e.g. "you didn't really beat Elden Ring if you used Ash Summons" or "you didn't really beat DS if you used ranged/magic"). Then there's the people who are so overprotective of difficulty that they'd say any change that would make the game better but also slightly easier is automatically bad. Think the game craps the bed when fighting 2+ enemies? Git gud. Do you think enemies attacking through walls when the player can't should be fixed? Git gud. Think the terrible grab hitboxes should be adjusted to more closely match the enemy model? Git gud. Fromsoft games are the only series I've seen people unironically defend framerate drops as something that shouldn't be fixed since they "add to the difficulty and atmosphere of blighttown".
Apart from the peripheral issues, the core of the game itself is degrading as From runs along the difficulty treadmill, trying to make ever more difficult enemies that are almost certainly made as hard as they are to preserve the series' reputation for difficulty as opposed to any compelling gameplay reasons. The later bosses in Elden Ring are a good example of this, and are something that Joseph Anderson has gone into at length here.
As for the easy mode discussion itself, I propose a hypothetical to you. Say the challenge runners and speedrunners took control of the development of the series and decided to massively increase the difficulty so it appealed to them personally, but you were now excluded. Your first instinct would probably be to retort with "I'd just get better, adapt to the challenge, and enjoy the game even more!" But let's say this wasn't an option. Say you were either hard-limited on your skill such that you couldn't progress, or that the amount of time it would take you would be so high as to be unreasonable. You'd now effectively be locked out of a series you had greatly enjoyed up until this point. An optional easy mode could fix this and allow you to enjoy the games, but oh wait the speedrunners have decided they don't want to do this. They give some half-hearted excuse answers about "developer vision" as to why they say they don't want it, but you know that at least a big part of the reason is because if they implemented an easy mode, then they couldn't be quite as smug when they say they've beaten the game on discussion forums.
I don't understand this perspective at all. That is, I don't see how the high difficulty in these games is arbitrary. I haven't played a single Souls game, but I've spent probably 500+ hours collectively on Bloodborne and Sekiro, and I'm about 50 hours into Elden Ring right now. Bloodborne is my favorite, though Elden Ring is challenging its place at the top while being by far the easiest of the 3, while Sekiro is a close 3rd despite also being by far the hardest of the 3. And in all of these, the difficulty, or perhaps more precisely the challenge, is one of the core elements that make them fun. And it's not that there's some extrinsic motivation in bragging about accomplishing things other people haven't; out of those 3, Elden Ring is likely the most popular and most well-loved, but, again, it's also by far the easiest and most accessible (Bloodborne being a PS4/PS5 exclusive plays a factor here though, admittedly).
It's generally how quickly and mercilessly they punish you that people consider them of high difficulty. To be honest, the main thing that makes these games tougher than the typical game of the same genre is the scaling on enemy damage; in most games, even bosses can hit you 10+ times before you die, whereas in these games, most regular mobs can kill you in 2 or 3 hits. But this is only one piece of the combat design in these games that make them so fun; the counter to this is that, often enough, the player can kill the enemies very quickly just by playing well. Sekiro exemplifies this perfectly with how every miniboss in the game that has 2 lives can have 1 of those lives taken out immediately before the fight begins, essentially halving their HP.
And furthermore, because enemies are so punishing, it forces the devs to design them to be fair. I consistently marvel at how well designed the enemies are in these games in terms of their attack patterns and animations which clearly convey to the player exactly what they need to do in order to avoid damage and to counterattack safely; the tough part is actually executing them consistently while under pressure from a very intimidating-looking enemy (furthermore, the execution is often not particularly difficult due to the slow pacing of these games; the timing precision and reflexes required for even Sekiro are basically nothing in comparison to something like a Devil May Cry). I've watched players with little experience in Souls games take down tricky bosses like the Guardian Ape in Sekiro - a sort of "twist" boss which took me over a dozen tries on my 1st go-around - on their 1st try, merely because they were smarter than me about analyzing their moves and experimenting safely with counters.
I'm also of the opinion that these games would be strictly better if they had easy modes. Beyond the challenge of the games, I'd say the From Soft games I've played are top of the industry in terms of level design for exploration and lore/world building. These are things that any player who doesn't care about the combat could enjoy and appreciate.
For your first two paragraphs, I agree challenge can be fun, but I strongly disagree that the challenge I would face would be diminished if other players could opt for an easy mode. That's the crux of the debate here. From your last paragraph I feel like we probably agree on this point. An easy mode would allow more people to experience the games if the difficulty would have otherwise precluded them, and it would smash the elitist snobbery surrounding the games to a good degree.
Definitely not. I've already responded to your other comment on how these games aren't fair in general. A better lens the "fair" would be "predictable and preventable" that Joseph Anderson has detailed in his video essays on the series. Games like Sekiro nail that concept, while the later bosses of Elden Ring fail horribly. Again, watch the JA critique I linked above for examples of how they do so. Elden Ring is proof that in at least some instances, FromSoft values the elitist snobbery over good game design.
Yes, we agree that these games would be better with an Easy Mode - even moreso, my opinion is that all games would be strictly better with a Dev Mode where any and all cheats that developers use for debugging/testing their games can be toggled on and off at will, including the ability to hop into any place in the game at any time, and this should be unlocked from the very start. These are games, not exams; let me have my fun.
My point, though, is that, at least with Bloodborne, Sekiro, and Elden Ring, the high difficulty isn't arbitrary. The difficulty directly impacts the visceral thrill of playing and mastering these games. It's akin to the thrill of a boxing or MMA match, where no matter how well your favored fighter is doing, a single momentary error can mean getting KO'd. No matter how much you've mastered a boss and no matter how close you are to winning, knowing that you can lose it all from being careless for just a second makes the encounters much more fun and exciting. That the games tend to give you a ton of healing items but requires you to leave yourself vulnerable to use them plays into this high-volatility philosophy, since dying is often not about losing more HP than you have available to you (i.e. including healing items) but rather about making a bunch of mistakes in a row. This also means near-misses can happen fairly often, where you go down to 5% HP but then manage to find a healing opportunity to give you more slack for the rest of the fight, which you hopefully go on to win. There's something to be said about winning the World Series on a sweep, but there's greater thrill in winning in game 7 through a come-back walkoff.
I feel like we basically agree with each other.
You've mentioned "arbitrary" in both your comments so I assume you're reading into that word more than what I meant by it. I've never been opposed to players finding high difficulty enjoyable, I was opposed to them wanting to force that on others who may not want that if they'd also like to play the game, perhaps for other reasons like its lore or aesthetic.
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