I care because the difficulty is 50% of what makes Souls what it is.
Reasons why Souls should not have an Easy Mode:
1. It turns the game from a thinking mans game to a hack 'n slash.
Why even bother with a shield? Just armor up and Two hand ALL THE THINGS!
2. It messes up the servers.
How would you separate easy servers and people who have balls servers? I don't want to fight someone who has super easy mode gear as I progress (slowly) to fight enemies who have actual bite to them. Nor do I want to Co-op with anyone who just one shots the boss.
3.Congratulations, you've accomplished nothing.
I've always said if I had to describe the Souls games' difficulty in one word it would be 'fair'. Enemies got down just as fast as you do and they flinch, have weaknesses, can be exploited, etc. It all comes down to playstyle, how smart you are evading attacks, gear and flask management. When you beat a boss or the entire game you have overcame something. You didn't just bash your way through a linear corridor. You overcame traps, deadly monsters 10x your size and find out a little more about yourself as a gamer which brings me to...
4. Getting rid of the difficulty you lose any incentive to go outside your comfort zone
Why bother with the bow, spells, shield when blindly slashing will do the trick. As you play through the game you will hit several walls in terms of bosses and areas. You have to figure your way past them through what you have at your disposal. Trouble with Anor Lando snipers? Try lighter armor to evade their arrows. What spells would be effective in defeating them? Will you try to fight them at a distance? Will you parry them? Knock them off the ledge? You have the means but you have to learn what works for you.
Watching most people struggle on
youtube and bitch about the difficulty has taught me one thing. People are reluctant to learn. Whenever the game kills them they never learn and blame the game. Adding an easy mode doesn't
fix this.
P.S. Apparently DSP went back to complete Dark Souls recently and is at the
Tomb of the Giants.
Hopefully, addressing your points will answer the other who quoted me, as well:
1. How is that your problem, if the normal game is the design priority, and the easy mode just an after thought for a different crowd of people?
2. I acknowledge this problem, but it's not that hard to fix: make the easy mode offline only or make the easy mode changes virtually nullified in the context of PvP (as mentioned before, a season player will overpower a newbie with a better gear any day of the week).
3. Again, difficulty has its place in the Souls games, but if it doesn't affect you directly how is this your business? You and i will play on normal (and i say this as a terrible player, i'm not good at all) but whoever wants to have a different experience will have the chance to,
without in any way affecting yours.
4. This is also true, but different people respond well to different learning curves, a softer one could do wonders for someone not as good with a controller.
While forcing the unforgiving hard edge on them would just push them away.
I can attest to this, as i sold Ninja Gaiden (3d one) after cursing the Gods in the Alma fight, in the church, while later on getting Black, finishing the game on Ninja Dog mode with a softer learning curve, and THEN being able to beat the original game, once i had understood the logics of the game and got accustomed to the controls.
Thanks to that softer learning curve i've had the pleasure to then experience Ninja Gaiden 2 and other action games, from then on.
It's important to recognize that there are a lot of way to soften the learning curve of the game while still keeping the normal difficulty as a focus for balancing the main game.
Things like: increase the HP/damage ratio for the player and reduce it for the foes; higher souls drop; bigger estus flask; longer I-frame window in the roll animation and so on.
These are all things that could be easily tweaked in an easy mode, and could get a lot of player into the series, without affecting in any way normal players.
Unless we're talking about e-cred and other inane pathetic bullshit that sometimes pops out, when discussing these issues.
This has been discussed to death but I still can't believe there are people who played through the game and don't fucking understand this.
Hey man, good thing an easy mode as i described it, wouldn't negate all that to you.
No matter how patronizing you go about it, you're really in no position to dictate what Dark Souls "is all about", unless you're prepared to say to people enjoying the game with an easy mode, that they're really not enjoying themselves, and it's all an illusion.