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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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I couldn't disagree more, as someone who thinks From Soft's games are some of the best in the industry - Bloodborne and Sekiro are probably easily number 1 and 2 as the best games of the last 2 decades IMHO, though I'm about halfway through Elden Ring, and I'm pretty sure by the time I'm done, that will steal number 2 from Sekiro and possibly number 1 as well. The unique difficulty setting just doesn't add anything to these experiences, and they would be strictly better with an easy mode (Sekiro and Elden Ring both arguably have different difficulty modes, via the Demon Bell in the former and Fia's blessing in the latter both increasing the difficulty, so adding an easy mode wouldn't be much of a leap). I don't find your arguments compelling:
There is no intrinsic meaning in moving on in a game. The meaning is only in what the player puts in it, because it's a game, rather than something of actual consequence. A player is free to place meaning in beating the game in Normal mode instead of dropping the difficulty to Easy, and if the player chooses to place less meaning in that compared to beating the only difficulty mode available without hacking the game, then that's a free choice by the player, not something imposed on them by the game.
This is also something that's entirely by choice on the player. Furthermore, in games like, say, Devil May Cry which does have difficulty modes, you see no shortage of comradery between players who bond over beating the game in the hardest difficulty. Souls games themselves all have pseudo-difficulty modes other than the ones referenced above, through New Game+, which scales the difficulty through damage numbers bit by bit each iteration. There's already a stratification within these communities where people bond over specifically beating the various challenges at the highest New Game+ when the scaling caps out (e.g. Sekiro caps out at NG+7, i.e. after 8 playthroughs, the rest of the playthroughs have identical difficulty).
This is one of the stronger arguments here, but it also has to be weighed against the experience of the player. I'm sure FromSoft gets marketing benefits out of their games having this unique-difficulty reputation, but I don't care about benefits to FromSoft, I care about the benefits to me, the player.
This is, again, a free choice that the player makes about comparing oneself to others. And, again, there's plenty of pride in communities for games that do have different difficulties, where the hardest difficulty is the one that brings the most pride. Again, this is even the case for From Soft's games, where some people don't consider you to have truly beaten the game unless you beat it in the highest NG+.
This is also an arguably strong point, but frankly, Easy Mode is basically trivial to tack onto after the game is developed. Just scale the numbers by an order of magnitude or more. There's no need to make Easy Mode balanced in a fun way, because it still serves the purpose of accessibility. As well as offering experienced/good players a silly and light-hearted way to experience the game.
What the developers intended isn't really important; the player has no responsibility to make sure that the devs that they handed money over to sees their artistic vision realized. The player is there to be entertained in exchange for their hard-earned money, and if that involves experiencing the game in a way that doesn't fit the intended atmosphere, then they ought to experience it that way.
This is the one that I disagree with the most. I've yet to play a hard game that I've liked which was not enjoyable to play in the moment. Again, I'm playing Elden Ring right now, and the boss that beat me the most was Margit the Fell Omen, (the first boss of the game for most people, I think), which took me 24 tries. I enjoyed each and every one of the 23 failed attempts that led up to the victorious 24th. Because the game's combat mechanics, the boss's movesets and AI, and the stakes of the fight that were built up from the game's lore all made the experience of tackling this challenge fun. There's no shortage of games that are even more difficult than From Soft's games, but also not fun. We just call those bad games that aren't worth playing.
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