“Games Need Easy Mode”
Game Journalists and Their Ilk: “It’s ableist to have a game be this hard! It’s exclusionary! It’s keeping people out of the hobby!”
Actual Disabled Gamers:
Stop using disabled people as a cudgel to spare your own ego and push your own agenda. If you actually cared and respected people with disabilities, you’d not be advocating for ‘easy mode’ or ‘story mode’ under the guise of “ableism”, you’d be advocating for better control functions.
Git Gud.
Okay so
It’s not ableist and we do need better control systems for people who are disabled
BUT
There’s no damn reason not to put in an easy mode. After All, what if grandpa wants to play, or maybe a kid wants to have a go?
You should have an easy mode as an option. It doesn’t take away from other people’s experiences, it helps them enjoy the game more and most importantly it lets them practice for if they ever want on a harder difficulty.
Not having an easier option might not be ableist, but it’s still gatekeeping.
“What if a grandpa wants to play”
What if a grandfather wants to play a horror game, but his heart and blood pressure won’t allow it? Shall we just remove all the horror elements from horror games? All the tense moments?
Some games have a required skill level. Sometimes you’re not going to be able to reach that skill level. Or you may have to work hard to do so.
You are not OWED a completion just because you purchased a game. You earn that completion and that requires finishing the game as the developers intended as part of the game’s experience. Which includes difficulty.
@thespectacularspider-girl
How does an easy mode even impact you. Don’t like it? Don’t play it.
It is literally that simple.
Adding additional options makes games accessible to a wider range is that really so bad? If more people buy the game then that increases the likelihood of other similar games. Now more games is a definite benefit.
Shadow of the tomb raider has pretty good difficulty customisation.
Find the puzzle solving boring and want to get on with the action and difficult fights? That’s an option. Want to work though the tombs with limited help? Go for it. It put the control into the hands of the player.
You get to play the game you want.
game doesn’t have an easy mode, which does not impact you at all.
don’t like it? don’t play it. there’s entire hundreds of games that are not sekiro that you can play.
why does sekiro have to compromise their artistic vision to appease you and people like you?
the director of the various souls series and the spiritual successors and games like that has said that his games are intended to reflect a distinct experience, and that they’re like a stew in that they’re slow cooking and about the journey.
if you just pummel your way through it on an easy mode, you’re going to miss a bunch of the intended experience. it’d be like fast forwarding through a dvd to try to watch a film (which would not work at all).
these games are built around a loop of getting beaten down by something difficult, and then approaching it again, engaging a major foe, and slowly working out how to defeat it as you go.
you come up against something difficult and then, you eventually conquer it and feel euphoric in your accomplishment.
and people keep mixing up “accessibility” with “difficulty”, which is frankly really insulting towards disabled people.
when nintendo makes the headass choice to make motion controls mandatory, nobody says shit about that.
when there’s no colorblind options in a game, nobody says anything about that.
when there are no subtitles in place for the hard of hearing, people that have trouble distinguishing or disentangling words or even just people that like having subtitles, nobody says shit about that.
but the split second a game is somewhat difficult, able bodied players with fragile egos and a stubborn refusal to try to learn how to play start to line up and demand changes that’d remove or water down the qualities that make the game what it is
Trust me lack of subtitles annoys me so much. Let’s push to make them more standard.
I hadn’t thought about high contrast/making games colour blind friendly before. I think that’s a great idea.
Let’s push for greater accessibility as well! Think about how big of a difference it could make for gamers.
I agree that accessibility and difficulty are different, but they are not completely separate issues.
Also I completely agree with you about how amazing it is to complete a difficult game. It is amazing. But honestly? Having different difficulty’s isn’t going to affect experienced gamers who only play expert mode. It’s would help people who have never played that type of video game get into new games without it feeling daunting. It could help people who aren’t great gamers become better. It could create more accessible games for a lot of people.
