Was in a comment section about designing games to respect the player’s time and mentioned I never finished Hollow Knight because it makes you fight the final boss again each time you want to give the secret boss another shot.
Someone jumped in literally telling me “GET GOOD” and when I told them there were other things I’d rather be doing, they followed up with “so don’t get hard games just to complain about.” They never responded when I asked them how I was supposed to know exactly how hard everything in the game would be before I ever played it.
Every fucking time. I swear I can set my watch by it. The Dark Souls series has earned my undying enmity for what it has done to gaming discourse.
I think anyone who doesn’t want accessibility options in games is exhausting. Celeste did it right.
“Oh but it’s not the developer’s vision”
Ok. But uhhh that’s as fucking annoying as getting mad at someone for wanting a salt reduced version of a meal, or adding chilli sauce or whatever. Just let people experience things at a level appropriate for them.
If someone stunts their development as a person by avoiding new experiences or not building skills or whatever you think they’ll get from “the vision” then that’s on them I suppose.
Annoying soulslike fans also don’t respect the developers vision, or they wouldn’t get annoyed at people using summons / pyro / spells / shields / whatever tools the developers deliberately put in the game.
The funny thing is that a very similar issue arose with Pathologic 2. The developers initially didn’t include difficulty settings because the intended experience was a difficult one where the player would struggle. When they received feedback that the game was too difficult for many players to even finish, though, they added easier difficulty modes on the grounds that they would rather players be able to complete the game on an easier difficulty than not at all. The game defaults to the hardest difficulty and describes it as the intended experience but it also says “But go ahead and play on a lower difficulty if that’s what it takes you to finish the game.”
I really think that most people should first /try/ things as intended, but people know themselves and even if someone doesn’t want to engage with a game at all like… who cares? I might find activating god mode makes games about as engaging as writing “I win” on a post-it note and mashing my fist on it but that’s me, if someone wants to play that way then good for them. I play games like aurora 4x sometimes where I literally write software to help me calculate missile engine requirements, many people would probably prefer the post-it note to that haha.
And that’s literally the simple answer to all this supposed controversy. Doing it this way makes it a no-lose scenario. People who want the developers intended vision can have it. People who need or would like it more accessible still get to play it. The developer gets to be confident that people who can play it as intended will probably do so while more people who never would have been able to play otherwise, still get to experience it too, if a little bit lighter of a version than the “intended” one.
But the “git gud” crowd still bleats and moans and acts as if mere knowledge that an easier mode exists would somehow negatively effect their experience. Which reveals that for most of them it’s actually a lot more about them wanting to be gatekeepers than it is about some supposed artistic purity. They should be happy with difficulty settings because if anything it’s an additional feather in a person’s cap to be able to say “yeah, I beat such and such game on hard mode.!” Like, I get to feel pride to be able to say I 100%'ed Aeterna Noctis, contender for the hardest metroidvania, on its hard mode setting. (For the record, I’m not very good at games in general but I loved that one and so I enjoyed practicing it. I was also privileged enough to have the time to do so). It has an easier mode, and I’m glad it does, for altruistic reasons: I’m happy that more people get to enjoy it, and for selfish reasons - I can puff out my chest and boast about how I beat it on the hard mode.
There is no good argument that any difficult game can’t do as Pathologic 2 and Aeterna Noctis ended up doing. Make it clear that the game is “meant” to be played on the hard mode, but give people the option to play it on easier, more accessible modes.
I only found out that I enjoy harder games by being forced to learn to play dark souls. If it had difficulty options I would have set them as low as they go. At the end of the day devs will make their games as difficult or easy as they like, and that’s not a sleight on anyone. I like the aesthetics of RTS games but I friggin’ suck at them to the point I don’t really bother. There’s not really a reason to rail against this, I just find other games that suit me. Certainly accessibility options should be as inclusive as possible but there is a place for games that are just… Difficult, just like there’s a place for super involved novels that I can’t keep up with and obtuse films I don’t understand. Not everything is for me and that’s fine.
What there isn’t a place for is the “git gud” dickheads who should be put into a great big mincer.
i do personally think people should give the “real” version a fair shot, games are made with purpose to evoke certain emotions and i as the author feel good when that connects (and also yeah, you might discover something new you like)
but also i’m not your boss, i’m the author and you’re welcome to kill me and spend your time as you like, if i added difficulty settings i did it in particular ways and with intent to preserve the “real” experience as much as possible, fuckin go for it
The director’s vision argument is only ever used one way. They always say it if a game is too hard for someone, but if it’s deemed too easy by them they have no issue saying the game should be changed to accommodate their taste.
That’s literally why i left paradox forums for good, entire forums were choke full of this, no normal discussion was possible anymore.
this I will always agree with 100%. I’m fine with a game that is hard but not everyone is like me and was lucky enough to be gifted with the hand eye coordination and motor skills that I take for granted. I’m reminded of that every fucking time I play a fromsoft game and end up having to install a mod for large type in the menus, because GOD FORBID someone want to play the game who has poor vision.
And then you get banned from online leaderboards because you had the gall to install a mod that made it so you could actually read context menus and shit. Fuck your vision. Your vision sucks if I can’t actually see it. And frankly I think the vast majority of devs don’t give a shit about adding such features; they’re not prioritized because of the cost:benefit analysis being lackluster. “spending $x dollars on dev time for $y dollars in additional sales, if the projection shows adding accessibility will generally lead to X>Y, why bother?” Kind of thing. But then the worst people ever, culture warrior /v/ trash, latch on to make excuses for the bean counters.
“Oh but it’s not the developer’s vision” yeah cool i’m not omniscient, if someone who i didn’t forsee found a way to play my shit anyway then good for them!
I am teaching myself game dev and maybe I’m not auteur enough or something but frankly I’d be delighted if anyone spent any time on my silly little creations and had any thoughts about them at all.
i don’t think anyone has a problem with color blind settings, subtitles, or turning off shaky cams.
Sure, but Celeste’s accessibility settings go so far beyond colorblind settings, subtitles, and turning off camera shake it’s unreal!
I haven’t really messed around with the accessibility settings for Celeste because I like the challenge where it is, but holy hell can you tweak just about everything about the game experience to precisely your desired level.
Want to change it so that you don’t get fatigued hanging onto walls as quickly (or at all)? You can. Want to give yourself an extra dash or 3? Go for it. Want to slow the entire game down by 10% because your reaction times are just a touch slow? Yeah, you can do that too.
You’re really underselling Celeste’s accessibility features, is what I’m saying. They are gameplay difficulty modifying features, because the Celeste devs understand that a ridiculously hard platformer like Celeste can be made accessible to a much wider audience if you think carefully about gameplay difficulty settings and how to implement them well.
I really do think the existence of Celeste and its accessibility menu should have put this “debate” to bed. Devs should be adding menus like this to every single game. I understand it’s a lot more work, especially to do it well, but it’s work that I think is really important, because I’d like video games to be widely played, by all kinds of people, and having a menu of settings you can tweak to tailor the experience to a difficulty level you prefer can open up these experiences to a ton of people who otherwise would never have been able to play the game.
i’m not underselling celeste, i think there’s a big difference between granular easy/challenge modes and accessibility features.
if something is challenging, anyone can try and be bad at it. if something is inaccessible, some people physically can’t participate at all.
having sound design so immaculate that a blind person can play street fighter is accessibility, the simplified control options are some other thing we should have a different word for because it’s not about mitigating disability.
Celeste’s wealth of settings are interesting but they abdicate the work of designing the learning curve onto the people least able to make informed decisions about it and that has downsides on their experience too. Games are unlike other media because you have to learn a whole new set of rules and mechanics every time and it’s completely unreasonable to put all those decisions on people who have no idea what they’re getting into.