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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've never played the Souls games, so I'll take your word for it that they're not good. But if so, why are they occupy such a large cultural space? Obviously, because they are difficult - that extra challenge is clearly adding something that other actions RPGs just lack. I think it's that - there's a pleasure in overcoming an unfair challenge. And I think a lot of it is the unfairness. Other video games are difficult, but they play by Marquess of Queensbury rules - no sucker punches or surprises.
I wouldn't say they're bad games per se, but they're certainly overrated on their own merits barring Sekiro.
Nonsense, they occupy a large cultural space because they're needlessly exclusionary, which appeals to a lot of elitists. Difficulty isn't hard to find, just try any challenge runs or speedruns for games you already enjoy. But there's a reason why speedrunning is incredibly niche while the Souls games aren't. People like to watch speedrunners but not to actually do it themselves, while the Souls games sell millions of copies, and it's mainly because of the elitist snobbery the Souls games have wrapped themselves in.
I think this take and your favorite Soulslike being Sekiro are entirely at odds, which is what I don't get.
Souls, and to the greatest extent Elden Ring, allow you to use the game's systems, content and options to make the game as difficult or as easy as you want. Even in Demon's Souls, you could essentially powermax your character through repetitive soul farming until you trivialized a lot of the content, serving as a sort of soft difficulty modification depending on how the player wanted to play. There are options in the game that can make the majority of bosses a joke, and the oneshot magic spell is a meme in the Elden Ring community.
Sekiro is not like that. You either have reflexes or you don't. If you don't parry, you're dead. People who don't have the reflexes to accurately do so are never going to be able to complete Sekiro by design.
One of the sillier parts of debating the possible inclusion of an easy mode is this exact line of reasoning. "The devs must not include an easy mode as that would ruin the game... except oh wait they already did! It's [any playstyle I think is too easy]!" My response would be to question why easy playstyles are fine, but an easy mode is perceived as such a sacrilege?
The effect of levelling is overstated. It has its biggest impact at the lowest levels, but even there it doesn't make much of a difference beyond giving maybe 1 or 2 more hits of leeway before you're flattened into a pancake. Weapon upgrades follow a similar path of the lower levels everyone will get being pretty impactful, but there's quite diminishing returns after that. The oneshot magic spell (I'm assuming you're talking about the big beam thing?) is good for Twitter clips and YT clickbait but is way too inconsistent to rely on in any capacity for a first playthrough.
You're not wrong about the general point though. There are definitely things you can do to trivialize the game. Using magic in DS1 feels like you're the only character in the game with a gun, and Ash Spirits trivialize every boss in ER (although in a really boring way, the Joseph Anderson critique I linked above goes into that more).
You don't have to play Sekiro using parries. I did hit-and-run tactics for most of my first playthrough, which is low risk and low reward. It's definitely not the best way to play the game and had I not grinded the bosses after beating the game I probably never would have noticed how well-designed most of them are, but it's certainly possible to do. Heck, new players probably gravitate towards it if they've played other Souls games before.
Also, I don't really understand how that is connected to the overall point. Sekiro is the tighter game overall, but it would still be fine if it had an easy mode.
I disagree so strongly with you and your point is so alien to me that I don't think it's possible we can have any realistic dialogue.
To quote a discussion further up the thread: what is the purpose of the game? Why is it a game? What comprises a game? What is the purpose of gameplay? To me, a game must have win state and lose state. Otherwise, it's not a video game. Otherwise you would have to expand the definition of 'gameplay' to include the act of turning a page in a book or hitting play on a media player for a movie. Winning has meaning because losing matters.
Have you ever interacted with a child and handed them something for free? Expecting them to value it at all is a joke. Make them earn something, something nontrivial, and they will treat it like a treasured heirloom.
The dialogue between the game designer and the player is the point of the game. You seem to be under the impression that the reason games are designed to be hard is to weed out players. I don't think any game designer thinks like this, especially as they are subject to financial incentives that explicitly want the game to find the widest possible audience.
The purpose of a game is to be fun. Difficulty is a big part of that. Something too hard is frustrating, while something too easy is boring. Skill differences between players are wide, which is why the vast majority of games include difficulty options.
For most games this is true, but FromSoft has found a niche where alienating less skilled players is worthwhile for them to prop up the series' reputation for difficulty, which appeals to smug elitists. "Developer vision" arguments are vacuous nonsense that essentially boil down to "you can't criticize any design choices, ever".
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Even if you never valued at all any gifts you have got at birthday or some other occasion, it does not mean that it is universal.
ironically, heirlooms are quite universally in this category
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