I'm perhaps more familiar with the complexities of development than you give me credit for. I have been on the receiving end of those lacking technical understanding many times and I fear many times more, and no, I'm not a game dev guru. Please don't argue with a caricature of me and imprint influences on that caricature that are more to do with your attitude than mine. If not for your final comments I'd perhaps not taken it this way.
If you only ever argue on the strictest of realities of what is and not what could be, nothing will change and for those that are happy with the status quo that is, of course, perfect. Unfortunately I believe this industry needs some change, and before we make a logic jump here, forcing a difficulty mode into games is not that change.
Okay so why are you agitating for a regression? FROM is
already the change to the status quo, which if you're just joining us is "the burgeoning art of game design raped and mutilated on the Eldritch altar of mass appeal". See: virtually any beloved franchise with entries before and after the Bush years. And I say "see" and not "play" because in the case of the heavy hitters of this generation, you'll pretty much be watching a movie.
Look, I know what
type of answer you and Jim are looking for, which is: what's the cost in
cultural currency of Easy mode and easymoders, assuming everything else is factored out? Because if the answer is nothing then we return to the natural equilibrium where only YouTubers have a right to bitch. We can have that argument but I think you ought to earn it first by suggesting a minimally plausible revision to the gameplay. What even is the point otherwise? This bit of sophistry about costing nothing to the core group is just a way of tee-ing up the usual horseshit about "look at these entitled, snobby, gatekeeping gamerbros trying to keep everyone out of the party". It's a highly autistic point that fails to grasp almost everything worth grasping about the inclusiveness debate, which I'd go as far as to say is deliberate in the case of Sterling. His argument sucks and deserves to be long-form eviscerated, but I don't see any reason to give you a hall pass based on the "if" of your thought experiment without some basic sanity checks on possible solutions.
Time to say this again but simple HP/damage scaling isn't a viable solution in these types of games. It is barely a solution in other types of games. I hope on that we can agree? Clinging to this sole "solution" lacks imagination, however. My post also did allow, albeit very briefly, for the mode to be an integrated part of development rather than a hamfisted attempt to tack on to the end. As you note it'd have a better chance of good results.
As far as finite resources go, opening up to a wider sphere of customers could provide greater revenue after the fact to cover it and more. Of course, like much of game dev this is a gamble and as such it could fail entirely or just barely break even. Madly throwing more money and more people at the problem can (and often does) backfire too. This is why it is important that the change comes from within if at all. I think It'd need some involvement from the core team with a full understanding of the mechanics alongside more hands to help on that part but could be more possible than you set out.
Your best-case hypothetical perfectly describes the nightmare hell of current
Souls players, which ought to be reason enough to drop it. The way everyone loses here is that easy mode is adopted, shipped, and
actually works the way you want it to
, because you can't name a single franchise that got huge and stayed good. No one can. It's not a mystery, it's just that the relationship is logical and bulletproof: if the five million you spend buys you 20 million in revenue,
you spend more not less. Because duh. Because you would have to be an insane, irresponsible, profit hating, company destroying, mathematically inept, utter fool to do anything else. The free market Illuminati would hire an actual Iga-clan ninja to rip out your spine before you can turn back that clock. You're playing a different game now, i.e., the one Bethesda and Ubisoft are playing, which means you can only get bigger. Easy mode doesn't pre-empt the microtransactions and whatever else, it
guarantees them. The success of
Souls generally illustrates this nicely: every new title is the last one, right? Haha, okay Hideo Kojima. If you say so. Hollywood reboots are the logical endpoint of mono-culture, not revolutionary industry-altering change. For that, you need niches. The only thing guaranteed by the success of easy mode is more dedication and time, by proportion, to easy mode.
Honestly, it requires an exceptionally powerful argument or exceptionally bad faith to say that a niche is best served by courting the masses. The charitable interpretation is that this is the opinion of a tricked person, which means you can't use it for Jim. He sells ads for a living, which means he sells credibility. He knows perfectly well that knowledge has to be valuable to be worth accumulating, which means it has to be scarce, which means it has to be
local. The day you can Google your way through a
Souls game is the day people stop bothering.
Yes, this means that lording it over others is a feature, not a bug. Look at the big picture: easymoders reap the ultimate benefits of hardmoders' dedication. FROM has--not consciously, not intentionally, they're not gods--made videogames as a whole better
for everyone, even people who can't (won't) play their games. Other developers can learn from FROM games, even steal from them. But look at their imitators: they sure can't make them. This is what FROM is
buying for you and everyone else by not being Capcom. They get to be prestige developers who stay small and collect on reputation, you get to benefit from everything they learned by
not listening to your ideas.
Really? I had opinions on this before Jim's video appeared. I'd seen the previous thread(s). I've seen Souls grow as a phenomenon for years but largely experienced second hand. I really dig the Berserk influence, especially given the lack of an adequate game adaptation in that series. Again, I don't demand participation or expect catering to me.
I've thought about and posted the idea of using the core mechanics of the game to provide a better means to tweak difficulty than what others are used to. Not posted at length, but providing looser windows to block/counter and take advantage of openings could move the needle just enough to allow those struggling more than average to progress without compromising the gameplay. Slightly slowing the speed of the peak of some attacks too perhaps. I'm sure that isn't perfect but it at least doesn't strike me as worse than what we usually have to deal with.
Trick question time. Why do you actually want this? I understand completely why the Forbes guy wants it. His paycheck is social currency and "influencer" pillow talk; of course he wants to blow up a rival credmine like Dark Souls. And not to... whatever... but I understand why women and fat guys who may as well be are always leading this charge, too. If opsec=difficulty=authenticity=value is too strict, you send the agents home and nuke the trolls from orbit. Can't exclude anyone, now, can they? It's basic colonialism. Proof? Even if you added a non-broken easy mode that somehow avoids all the other problems, it would be a ghetto for hated posers. They'd be run off the message boards. Unless of course it actually worked, in which case hard mode becomes the ghetto and the whole project collapses. The best designer in the world can't make
Dark Souls both approachable
and valuable. You'll end up with branded hipster-ism and Nintendo chic, a line the series is already perilously close to crossing.
Whether or not you personally acknowledge the value of
Dark Souls' social currency--many don't, fine--the key point here is that someone like Jim or whoever is always trading up. You snitch on videogame culture because it buys you access to society culture. That's how he knows to drop in the usual keywords: toxic, entitled, gatekeeper, current year, etc. "I just don't understand these people" = "I understand them perfectly, hire me to crush them." It's just a way of next-levelling the snobs. Do you see the irony, here? Hardmoders
are the mono-cultural out-group
. There's no inclusion being discussed in this argument. The question is about how intensely can one group be
excluded, i.e., how to take
more from them, which is an argument for players and haters only. Jim Sterling is unquestionably the latter, hence all the disguises. The man is a NARC and you can bet that whatever he thinks about
Souls or anything else he doesn't control is exactly wrong, because his whole brand is sucking up to people who claim with increasing desperation that videogames are an irrelevant retrograde cultural backwater that desperately require the intervention of enlightened media commentary.
His worst case nightmare scenario is that
Dark Souls doesn't need anything from him at all.
︎⬧︎⧫︎
"? Why shackle yourself to the collective concept of uniform language at all?
face cover of God Hand style.
