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How video game difficulty became a cultural battleground - Eurogamer article
- Thread starter Arion
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JustAnotherOtaku
Member
One of the most disappointing trends in the industry (among fandom anyway) in the last few years is the notion of 'not all games are for everyone'.
By all means, keep Demon's Souls hard and challenging at its default level, but offering an easier mode (or harder) in addition to this hurts no one, except, apparently, the fragile ego of the 'git gud' crowd.
Give us more difficulty options, more accessibility options, more diversity and the industry will keep moving forward in a positive, healthy and inclusive way.
By all means, keep Demon's Souls hard and challenging at its default level, but offering an easier mode (or harder) in addition to this hurts no one, except, apparently, the fragile ego of the 'git gud' crowd.
Give us more difficulty options, more accessibility options, more diversity and the industry will keep moving forward in a positive, healthy and inclusive way.
If you had actually read the piece before rushing to post, you might have gotten to the conclusion:
also, anecdote I saw on twitter the other day: https://twitter.com/Skye_pls/status/920038407597973506
That's exactly how I feel. Reviewers should stick to what they understand. Let the Tom Chicks of the world review strategy games, and the Heidi Kemps of the world review fighting games. That's what they're good at.
You do not want to see a Tom Chick review of a fighting game or a Heidi Kemps review of a strategy game. They're both good writers, but you can't write well about something you don't really understand all that well. Using those names because they're the best reviewers I know for those genres which I follow, but I've seen them in the other's territory, and it's pretty cringey. Not meant to be a criticism of either person.
That said, no excuse for harassing someone because you see them as a threat to your identity.
You do not want to see a Tom Chick review of a fighting game or a Heidi Kemps review of a strategy game. They're both good writers, but you can't write well about something you don't really understand all that well. Using those names because they're the best reviewers I know for those genres which I follow, but I've seen them in the other's territory, and it's pretty cringey. Not meant to be a criticism of either person.
That said, no excuse for harassing someone because you see them as a threat to your identity.
Huge Succeeded
Banned
Not all things are for everyone and they don't need to be. A few hard games here and there won't keep gaming from moving forward in a positive, healthy, and inclusive way.
FlutterPuffs
Member
If you're not interested in a review, read a review from someone you trust. It's that simple.
There's no problems for reviews from unskilled reviewers, because those gamers exist.
Rickenslacker
Banned
Regardless of difficulty, not all games are for everyone, and that's something true of every medium, and that's fine. Trying to do so would be a mess, and you'd lose the expression in the experience. If I don't like multiplayer, that doesn't mean every multiplayer game should have a single player component, for example -- and this extends beyond mechanics and systems, some themes are things that aren't to everyone's tastes and shouldn't be changed to accommodate everyone.
Sir Ilpalazzo
Member
A Demon's Souls with an easy mode would not be the same as the Demon's Souls we actually have, even for players with no interest in playing on anything but the hardest mode. Look at the majority of games today - and how most major releases have had any semblance of challenge segregated into their hardest modes - and you can start to understand why Demon's Souls gained the reputation (and spawned the series) that it did through the developers' decision to create one unified difficulty mode.
If you can't play a game well, then you can't understand it - and if you don't understand a game, how can you analyze it in any meaningful way? This isn't to say that someone who doesn't understand a game can't still communicate the experience they had with it, but someone who does not lack that understanding is still going to be able to better communicate what the game is about even to an audience that lacks expertise. I think this kind of thinking is what gets us reviews like Jim Sterling's Vanquish piece, and the infamous IGN reviews of God Hand and Worldwide Soccer Manager 2009 - which simply don't have merit even to people who don't know how to play the games.
Gravy Boat
Member
To an unskilled gamer the right reviewer is someone who is also unskilled. As someone who rarely plays racing games, Im not going to go out and buy a racing game based on the word of someone who is an expert at them, as an example. Im going to get a better idea of wether or not I should buy it it if the person doing the review also rarely plays racing games.
Why should devs who want to create a hopeless and oppressive atmosphere in their games be forced to compromise that by making it easy?
The games want patience and awareness to be important and an easy mode where you can mindlessly slash through everything would ruin that.
This. For longrunning series of relatively complex games, I also think reviews benefit from reviewers looking at them both from the perspective of a new player (has all the new systems created a labyrinthine web of mechanics that's impenetrable, or is this clearly a great jumping on point?) and a veteran one (what specifically are the changes from the last one?). Some of the better reviews for things like Monster Hunter put one or the other in a boxout. Where I'm familiar with those games, a review written to explain the basics is a waste of time for me when really I'm interested in the endgame play, but where it's a series I've never played, im not overly interested in the point of view of someone who has played the last six games for a thousand hours and can no longer see what's confusing to a beginner.
KonradLaw
Member
Difficulty is cruicial part of game design. Trying to force everyone to cater to less skilled crown makes as much sense as requiring every movie to have action scenes, because plenty of people only like those in movies. Or sticking to games, it's like complaining some casual game doesn't have hardcore option or that walking simulator lacks a challenge.
It fine when developers themselves create varied difficulty levels, but acting like the entire gaming industry owes you to have every game have easy or hard mode isn't realistic. There;s so many games being released every year that everybody will find plenty of play. There's no reason to expect every single game to cater to everyone.
It fine when developers themselves create varied difficulty levels, but acting like the entire gaming industry owes you to have every game have easy or hard mode isn't realistic. There;s so many games being released every year that everybody will find plenty of play. There's no reason to expect every single game to cater to everyone.
TannerDemoz
Member
Eurogamer absolutely killing it with their longform articles
Just because the difficulty level of an 'easy' mode is reduced to the point where a reasonably skilled player that should be playing on 'normal' can mindlessly slash their way through, doesn't mean that an unskilled or physically impaired player won't still find it hopeless and oppressive. All the lack of an easy mode does is act as a gatekeeper. Not everyone has a high level of motor skills, there are varying degrees of physical impairments that get forgotten in the rush to dismiss easy modes as 'for casuals' too.
Seems like you're addressing a different subject than the OP article?
JustAnotherOtaku
Member
I read the article, it was the last line "video games are for everyone, even if some video games are specifically for someone" I was more referring to in my comments.
I was also summing up my own thoughts on the whole difficulty debate as there have been a few threads on the topic here recently.
JustAnotherOtaku
Member
Yeah, as I said in my response to another poster above, I was tying in my thoughts on the recent difficulty/accessibility debates we've had here recently. The article covers some of that.
Riposte
Member
You have it backwards: The notion that 'all games are for everyone' (i.e., aiming for the lowest common denominator) is the more modern trend. The form you use, "difficulty is exclusionary / morally wrong, ergo you just hate diversity you gamer-nazi", is a very recent development.
And let's be honest, it's not the people who like getting their ass kicked in videogames who have the fragile egos here.
What about Dark Souls 2 then?. For those that don't know DS2 actually had a second difficulty mode. Very early on in the game you could join a covenant that would make the game harder by giving enemies more damage, health and damage resistance. What if DS2 also had a covenant that made it easier? If the harder difficulty mode did not detract from the core experience why should the easier mode?
There already is an easy mode - summoning.
The counter movement against less mechanically involved games has always been weird to me. It's fantastic that games can focus on different aspects of interaction, not just player skill.
It's also ridiculous how eager parts of this movement is to jump on any perceived slight against difficult games. Some were really eager to set up Cuphead as the next battle between "purists" and reviewers, to the point where even after the dust settled I saw comments about how it's so great that a game that journalists didn't get had been released. Meanwhile, it's sitting at an 89 metacritic score.
It's also ridiculous how eager parts of this movement is to jump on any perceived slight against difficult games. Some were really eager to set up Cuphead as the next battle between "purists" and reviewers, to the point where even after the dust settled I saw comments about how it's so great that a game that journalists didn't get had been released. Meanwhile, it's sitting at an 89 metacritic score.
I honestly don't even understand the notion of "every game should be accessible to everyone." Not in terms of weird gatekeeping, or policing who "deserves" to get to play what but like...
Why? Why do people want this? Who are these players who want to play ~everything~ as a matter of course? (Are they all super rich or something?)
Is it the desire for some sort of weird, broad, clinical level of consumption like you can get with books or movies, where if you just sit there and watch or force yourself to read the material that you aren't synching up with you're still able to finish? Because that strikes me as the edgiest of edge cases. And even for those people, if you aren't enjoying the game in it's natural condition, how much are you really going to lose from playing it in an e-z consumption mode VS just watching a Let's Play? Hell, if I'm being totally honest, there are some games that I actually am a fan of who are better off consumed that way than actually playing them. I'm looking at you, Asura's Wrath.
Am I just self absorbed for disliking games that aren't up my alley? Whether it's because of challenge being too much for me, like in shmups, or because of the nature of the content, in the case of something like Dear Esther. Why do people want to like these things that clearly don't agree with them, for one reason or another? Are they that desperate to contort their own perspective on these games to match the hypothetical group consensus? It's okay not to like things, even if the main reason you don't like them because you have difficulty with them.
Why? Why do people want this? Who are these players who want to play ~everything~ as a matter of course? (Are they all super rich or something?)
Is it the desire for some sort of weird, broad, clinical level of consumption like you can get with books or movies, where if you just sit there and watch or force yourself to read the material that you aren't synching up with you're still able to finish? Because that strikes me as the edgiest of edge cases. And even for those people, if you aren't enjoying the game in it's natural condition, how much are you really going to lose from playing it in an e-z consumption mode VS just watching a Let's Play? Hell, if I'm being totally honest, there are some games that I actually am a fan of who are better off consumed that way than actually playing them. I'm looking at you, Asura's Wrath.
Am I just self absorbed for disliking games that aren't up my alley? Whether it's because of challenge being too much for me, like in shmups, or because of the nature of the content, in the case of something like Dear Esther. Why do people want to like these things that clearly don't agree with them, for one reason or another? Are they that desperate to contort their own perspective on these games to match the hypothetical group consensus? It's okay not to like things, even if the main reason you don't like them because you have difficulty with them.
The argument that difficulty modes wouldn't affect the game is an odd one.
You can use the same argument to say that Dark Souls should have an extensive Tetris clone themed around the game as an option in its main menu. It wouldn't detract from the game in any way, and would let Tetris fans enjoy the game more, so why not?
The fact is that difficulty is as much an attribute of a game as art style, music, gameplay mechanics or anything else, and I believe devs should be able to make the games that they want.
Take a game like Undertale. The difficulty in that game is an entirely self imposed challenge. The game gets insanely easy if you level up, but keeps challenging if you don't. This difficulty is the entire point of the games plot, and adding an easy mode would somewhat compromise that narrative. If in that game the player wants an easier time, they can level up, but doing so is itself a narrative choice. Adding an easy mode option would rob the player of the in-game moral dilemma centered around the difficulty. It's existence would be outright removing an aspect from the game.
And, of course, that isn't to say it would ruin the game. You could argue that the ability for lesser skilled players to play the game is a bigger positive than the hit to the story is a negative, but you aren't the one who gets to make that decision. The games developer is. And, again, whilst it's completely fine and hell I'd even encourage people to voice their opinions on the matter, stating that difficulty modes can never have an affect on a game is just wrong.
If you want to argue that a game needs more difficulty modes, do it within the context of the game itself.
You can use the same argument to say that Dark Souls should have an extensive Tetris clone themed around the game as an option in its main menu. It wouldn't detract from the game in any way, and would let Tetris fans enjoy the game more, so why not?
The fact is that difficulty is as much an attribute of a game as art style, music, gameplay mechanics or anything else, and I believe devs should be able to make the games that they want.
Take a game like Undertale. The difficulty in that game is an entirely self imposed challenge. The game gets insanely easy if you level up, but keeps challenging if you don't. This difficulty is the entire point of the games plot, and adding an easy mode would somewhat compromise that narrative. If in that game the player wants an easier time, they can level up, but doing so is itself a narrative choice. Adding an easy mode option would rob the player of the in-game moral dilemma centered around the difficulty. It's existence would be outright removing an aspect from the game.
And, of course, that isn't to say it would ruin the game. You could argue that the ability for lesser skilled players to play the game is a bigger positive than the hit to the story is a negative, but you aren't the one who gets to make that decision. The games developer is. And, again, whilst it's completely fine and hell I'd even encourage people to voice their opinions on the matter, stating that difficulty modes can never have an affect on a game is just wrong.
If you want to argue that a game needs more difficulty modes, do it within the context of the game itself.
JustAnotherOtaku
Member
For me, as someone who loves shmups, but isn't skilled enough to do a 1CC run anytime after getting the game, I start on the easiest difficulty, learn bullet patterns and so on and then move up a difficulty level and slowly make progress that way.
I think this debate gets caught up in the notion that games have to be ultra-easy or ultra-hard. I like difficulty levels as a way of being able to learn the mechanics of a game and then steadily give myself more or a challenge.
Easy mode devalues games. Not all games, but games inherently built around challenge or skill. This applies to games that have some kind of degree of storytelling, too. You might think it doesn't, but it does. Video games are an interactive medium and so even the story itself in them isn't solely expressed through cutscenes or text, but also through gameplay. The story in a good video game happens directly to you. It is no surprise then that if the story is supposed to have some sort of challenge, that it should be a challenge to you. What's the point of hyping up a powerful opponent only to find out he can be pushed over in a couple of QTEs? But what about easy mode? Pick your own tuning, right? Well that lane also comes with its own disadvantages. Part of enjoyment a lot of people [citation needed] derive from video games comes from overcoming a challenge. A tough part makes you want to overcome it to see what's coming next. If you can just change to easy mode and breeze through, well... You simply won't be able to have those kind of feelings created for you because you took an easy way out. It is indeed a non-binary issue that every game maker has to solve for themselves, but it is quite silly to ask for easy mode in every game. You can read War and Peace in a brief retelling for younger audiences and not deal with the intricacies of Tolstoy's writing and language but... did you really read War and Peace then?
Boy I love me some book analogies.
Boy I love me some book analogies.
cireza
Member
This is exactly what I meant but I realize you covered the point better than me.
JustAnotherOtaku
Member
I suppose that analogy works well with games (usually older ones) that allowed you to only progress to a certain point on lower difficulties and only see the true ending on normal or hard.
What would easy difficulty look like for a book though? Side notes explaining complex themes or issues? Is an audiobook an 'easy mode' since you don't have to give the text your full attention? And would someone consuming a book in those ways not be as into it as someone who sat down and read through it over a couple of days?
MajinSweet4
Member
The thing I find strangest about the difficulty debate is the argument that all games should have a multitude of difficulty options for the sake of being inclusive. Because yeah, that makes sense. Making all artists for a certain medium conform and be restricted is going to open things up for more people.
Yeah, difficulty can be used as another tool to make the player feel a certain way (although he's not saying anything new, Mark Brown made this argument well in this video on Dark Souls).
The new Blade Runner is fresh in my memory, so that works too. It's not trying to be a movie for everyone: it requires a lot of attention and patience, and it's on the viewer to think about its themes and character motivations. I saw someone argue that they could have put an out-of-the-water character in it to ease the viewer into some things like genre conventions. This, wouldn't necessarily make the movie bad, but it would have been fundamentally different.
Some (maybe even most) games don't have to stick to one challenging mode (story modes for certain RPG's is super cool imho, even if I don't use them), but some are bettter for it. Not everything has to be for everyone. (and I believe this is what Parkin is saying in his article)
Boss Doggie
all my loli wolf companions are so moe
Difficulty won't really change anything, if someone doesn't like fighting games, difficulty wouldn't really make the person go into it - at most he'd probably get a different perspective.
You are conflating two different things then.
You are conflating two different things then.
I'm not sure the article delivers the information its title promises, but it was a decent opinion piece nonetheless. Arguments like this one want all the well-spoken voices they can get.
Still, I've yet to see any new reasoning on this subject for quite some time. No one's been able to reconcile the opposing values of accessibility and difficulty as a part of the art. Proclamations of "options don't hurt anyone" and "it's okay to not be entitled to every single thing" clash against one another, and neither is moved. This article is no different in that regard.
For my part, I respect and appreciate game design that speaks its meaning mechanically. When that conflicts with accessibility, that isn't a flaw in the design; the conflict itself is a piece of the design like any other, and it deserves to be read. Whether that means it be praised, questioned, or condemned is something that will have to be figured out through criticism of the entire work, for each work. Where it hurts the work, let it be called out and panned.
I've played countless challenging games, some much more meaningful than others. If I look back overall, it may well be that meaningless quarter-eating is much more common than meaningful challenge. But as long as there exists even one valuable experience to which challenge was essential, I can't agree with shortsighted, reductive calls for universal accessibility. Exclusion is absolutely worth rallying against in general principle -- but art is not best judged by generalities.
Still, I've yet to see any new reasoning on this subject for quite some time. No one's been able to reconcile the opposing values of accessibility and difficulty as a part of the art. Proclamations of "options don't hurt anyone" and "it's okay to not be entitled to every single thing" clash against one another, and neither is moved. This article is no different in that regard.
For my part, I respect and appreciate game design that speaks its meaning mechanically. When that conflicts with accessibility, that isn't a flaw in the design; the conflict itself is a piece of the design like any other, and it deserves to be read. Whether that means it be praised, questioned, or condemned is something that will have to be figured out through criticism of the entire work, for each work. Where it hurts the work, let it be called out and panned.
I've played countless challenging games, some much more meaningful than others. If I look back overall, it may well be that meaningless quarter-eating is much more common than meaningful challenge. But as long as there exists even one valuable experience to which challenge was essential, I can't agree with shortsighted, reductive calls for universal accessibility. Exclusion is absolutely worth rallying against in general principle -- but art is not best judged by generalities.
Glass Rebel
Member
I agree.
Games like Dear Esther should have a hard mode with shooting sections for gamers like me. The boringness of walking simulators is excluding us.
Imo:
-reviewers should be skilled enough to play the games they review, are we really discussing this?
-all games should have a difficulty option
-developers are free to do harder/easier games(but there should always be a difficulty option)
-purists/elitists/whatever people and communities are a poison for the thing they say to love(think fighting games that some people say should be multiplayer competition focused and think of the launch of SF5, think of those who say that the only good shoot'em ups are bullet hell and think how niche the shoot'em up genre is now compared to 80s and 90s when it was probably second only to platformers and so on)
-reviewers should be skilled enough to play the games they review, are we really discussing this?
-all games should have a difficulty option
-developers are free to do harder/easier games(but there should always be a difficulty option)
-purists/elitists/whatever people and communities are a poison for the thing they say to love(think fighting games that some people say should be multiplayer competition focused and think of the launch of SF5, think of those who say that the only good shoot'em ups are bullet hell and think how niche the shoot'em up genre is now compared to 80s and 90s when it was probably second only to platformers and so on)
Exactly this.
Uh, thats like a totally different topic.
Additional difficulty levels also impose additional costs to the development team though. They need to add new UI elements, QA those, QA the whole game on different difficulty levels to ensure it's balanced across the board, etc. It's a ridiculous amount of effort if you want to do it right. Just asking the developers to add more content can be infeasible.
Summoning isn't a straightforward easy mode. It's balanced by increasing invasion chance and by giving enemies and bosses more damage resistance. In some cases summoning actually makes the game harder than going solo.
SolVanderlyn
Thanos acquires the fully powered Infinity Gauntlet in The Avengers: Infinity War, but loses when all the superheroes team up together to stop him.
TL;DR "Gamer culture" is toxic. It thrives on excluding others and protecting video games as a totem for a select few as their bastion of worth in the world. I say this as a man who, as a child and teenager, thrived on the very same thing I now condemn. It's not a good place for anyone to be, socially, looking for those who are in and judging or berating those who are out.
Games are evolving and the concept of a "gamer" should go. Not everyone plays games to git gud or get the highest score or learn all the hitboxes or have the highest ilvl or what have you, and not everyone has to be.
Good article.
Games are evolving and the concept of a "gamer" should go. Not everyone plays games to git gud or get the highest score or learn all the hitboxes or have the highest ilvl or what have you, and not everyone has to be.
Good article.
JustAnotherOtaku
Member
Possibly the most sense I've seen in this thread so far.
I experienced this in PC Master Race and CRPG elitism, both are extremely toxic.
Nah. The damage resistence is tiny if you only summon 1 person. Three people pummelling a boss would be over in 5 seconds with normal health.
You can also just play offline and summon npcs.
Phrozenflame500
Member
I pretty much completely agree with this, and honestly this always felt like more of an internet culture issue then a developer one. The resurgence of indies and more niche AA titles means that there are plenty of titles that appeal to many different types of gamers and there's no need to for any one title to appeal to everyone at the same time.
The real issue is that certain groups of people are incredibly dismissive and obnoxious when it comes to titles that don't cater to them in particular, and are unable to accept that the industry is capable of serving many different types of people simultaneously and that's a good thing.
personally i don't think a reviewer should spend too long on difficulty because it is Subjective from person to person .
one random player might consider a game like Dark souls to be easy as shit while another might think it is Hard as balls .
And in some cases if a difficulty option is not available or even the highest Difficulty is not challenging enough there are players who put self imposed restrictions on their game play to make it more difficult then the designers intended.
for e example :doing a no sphere Grid playthrough in FFX or never upgrading your guns and Armour in a game .
Even myself encountered this recently with my nephew who spend days being stuck on a boss that i simply breezed through .
Was he that bad at playing games ?
no , it was because it was a genre of game he wasn't used to playing making it harder for hem then for me who has played those types of games for decades .
one random player might consider a game like Dark souls to be easy as shit while another might think it is Hard as balls .
And in some cases if a difficulty option is not available or even the highest Difficulty is not challenging enough there are players who put self imposed restrictions on their game play to make it more difficult then the designers intended.
for e example :doing a no sphere Grid playthrough in FFX or never upgrading your guns and Armour in a game .
Even myself encountered this recently with my nephew who spend days being stuck on a boss that i simply breezed through .
Was he that bad at playing games ?
no , it was because it was a genre of game he wasn't used to playing making it harder for hem then for me who has played those types of games for decades .
KonradLaw
Member
So? There are countless games being made for those people, so I don't see what's the problem with small number of titles not catering to that crowd
MajinSweet4
Member
Literally no one is saying otherwise. And you're really behind the times when it comes to gaming "evolving". Roughly a billion people play video games regularly. That sure is some serious exclusion! I seriously don't understand where people are coming from with posts like these. It's straight up delusional or you haven't been paying attention to the industry for a long time. The amount of games that target people that want to "git gud" or "get the highest score" or "learn all the hitboxes" are an extreme minority. So I got some good news for you. If you don't care about those things, you're in luck. The vast majority of games are being made for you. Congratulations, you literally have nothing to worry about.
It's fascinating how we go from ignoring the artists intention and freedom talking about difficulty options from using is as a shield when people just want decently clothed females in some games.
Pretty much.
Pretty much.
SolVanderlyn
Thanos acquires the fully powered Infinity Gauntlet in The Avengers: Infinity War, but loses when all the superheroes team up together to stop him.
Sounds like we're mostly on the same page about games moving forward as a medium and more people playing them on the regular, but did you read the article? There is something to worry about; the people who aren't leaving the old exclusive ways behind, the people harassing journalists and filling communities with toxicity at every turn. Hell, all you need to do is boot up a competitive shooter and you'll probably find a good few in no time.
Maybe these hardcore elitists are a minority, maybe you're right about that - I don't know, it's likely that you are. But they're souring the gaming community as a whole with their archaic mindset.
Edit: I'm not saying that difficult games shouldn't exist, not at all. It's when that difficulty becomes a badge of worth over others who don't care about that sort of thing that it becomes an issue, I.E. harassing journalists or shitposting on video game forums or whatever. There's nothing wrong with competitive gaming or games that are intentionally designed to challenge the player, the problem lies in the attitude of a loud and toxic subset of people who judge others on criteria that those others don't care for.