Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world 18 hours ago
Customisable difficulty. Have a single or multiple presets balanced to what you’d like your players to experience but give me an option to adjust some of the stuff to my liking. There are SO MANY games I’d love to play way more than I do but none of the difficulty options feel “right”, bringing the whole experience down.
It’s also a great feature from an accessibility standpoint - pretty important thing for those who literally can’t play your game for reasons that could be easily worked around if such customisation was there.
“But my artistic integrity and vision!”
No, shut up. Your vision doesn’t mean squat if my experience with the game is annoying to the point where I don’t even care about the lore implication of an enemy placement or how gameplay systems intertwine with themes and story of the game. It’s important, sure, but it shouldn’t be more important than player’s enjoyment of your product.
Balance your game how you imagine it but let me play with the sliders to make it feel how I want it to. Just drop a scary message about it not being the intended way to play and it’ll be fine.
But my artistic integrity and vision!"
No, shut up. Your vision doesn’t mean squat if my experience with the game is annoying to the point where I don’t even care
Nah, miss me with this bullshit. Not every game is for you, and it doesn’t have to be. An artist is not required to water down their vision because you’re picky, just pick a different game.
Video games are the only art medium where people find it acceptable to gate-keep the art from the unskilled or the disabled.
Imagine buying a movie ticket, then the theater goes “no you aren’t good enough at watching movies to watch this movie. You only get to see the first 10 minutes. It just isn’t for you.” Imagine paying to go to a museum, and they tell you “sorry, you are only allowed to look at the art in the foyer because you aren’t good enough to enter the rest of the museum.”
Difficulty settings are primarily accessibility options. Don’t want the game to be too easy? Don’t fucking turn down the difficulty.
Difficulty settings are, first and foremost, accessibility settings.
I have to disagree with this. Difficulty settings are at best a bandaid solution to accessibility. The vast vast majority of difficulty settings change the overall gameplay experience, games are far too complex for ‘just make it easier’ to be an appropriate approach to accessibility.
Just reducing enemy health, simplifying enemy ai, etc. can only make a game more accessible as a side effect, it doesn’t address the actual accessibility issues people might have.
I also don’t think games should have hard modes. They should have exactly 1 difficulty the developers balance around.
There absolutely should be accessibility options that have the side effect of making the game easier but making the game easier is the wrong approach to make it accessible.
My suggestion would be stuff like tuning response windows to the results of a reaction time test, aim assist options, visual cues for sound effects, etc. Those make the game easier but do it by addressing a single specific issue, or combination of issues, someone’s dealing with instead of just slapping on a one size fits all solution.
Video games are the only art medium where people find it acceptable to gate-keep the art from the unskilled or the disabled.
Yes, deaf people are famously well-accomodated by music, and paintings are always very accessible to the blind. Games are the first medium to ever be inaccessible to people.
That’s a pretty ignorant take. I work in a music venue and art gallery as an event planner and curator. I personally know three blind painters who consistently blow me away with what they are able to produce.
One has tunnel vision, and can see an area about the size of a quarter held at arms’ length. He tends to work with textiles and wood carvings, which he can feel.
The second can see shades of brightness, but very little color; she primarily works in shades of grey or sepia.
The third went fully blind in his 20’s due to a degenerative condition. He grew up with full vision, and started painting when he could see. Then he had to adapt later in life as his vision degenerated. He uses paint thinner to thin out the various colors to different consistencies, so he can feel which colors are where. I have one of his prints hanging on my office wall right now, and it is absolutely breathtaking even before you learn he’s fucking blind.
Art galleries have taken steps to make things like paintings accessible to blind patrons. 3D scans of paintings allow people to feel the paint layers on printed busts. Artists like Van Gogh used paint texture as an inherent part of their piece, and galleries have attempted to turn that into a tactile experience. You haven’t truly seen Starry Night until you have seen it in person, (or at least seen a 3D scan of it). Flat prints simply don’t do it justice.
And we get deaf/HoH patrons at concerts all the time. They enjoy the crowd experience, and they can feel the beat via vibration. Hell, I just organized a concert for next week, where we have an ASL interpreter. Deaf/HoH people regularly have music fucking blaring on kick ass sound systems. They may be able to hear certain parts of it if it’s loud enough, or maybe they just enjoy the beat. But regardless of the reason, they absolutely can enjoy music.
Difficulty settings are, first and foremost, accessibility settings.
I’m not opposed to more options but I think this tactic is distracting and generates more pushback than it wins converts.
Are games art? I’d say so, usually. Some are more like toys than art, but many have creative expression
If they are are, must all art be accessible to all people? Well, what does accessible mean exactly? To understand it completely? Then I’d say trivially no, because there are many books that are incomprehensible to many people. No one is going to say “House of Leaves” is inaccessible and the author did a gatekeeping by writing it as such. No one is going to say Finnegans Wake is ableist because it’s hard to understand.
Must all aspects of all art be completable by all people? I’d also say trivially no. You might have a segment in French that doesn’t translate well. You can dub it or subtitle it, but the original experience will remain inaccessible unless the audience spends years mastering French.
I bring that up because some games will have within the game, not a metagame menu setting, easier or harder routes. For example, Elden Ring with a big shield and spirit ashes is significantly easier than a naked parry build. Is the expectation that everyone should be able to finish in both styles? If there’s a hard mode, must everyone be able to finish it?
Should everyone be able to trivially 100% every game?
Personally I think the floor is everyone should be able to interface with the game. Change inputs. Add subtitles.
I don’t really think “I can’t party this spear guy” is an accessibility problem the same way “I’m color blind and can’t read the text” is.
But again, I don’t care if someone wants a god-mode with auto-parry. It just feels like it’s bundling some unrelated ideas together. You’re not necessarily disabled if you’re bad at parrying in dark souls.
I have successfully (?) played (sometimes semi-suffered, cough, Sekiro) through a buncha popular hard games and have a way less „strong“ opinion on this but also think that an „easy mode“ as an accessibility feature is a good thing.
If, for example, a parent wants to connect with their child and also experience that game they‘re playing, it‘s really no big deal to me if they could turn on easy mode in, say, Sekiro to stand a chance. Not like it‘d impact my own experience at all, and I don‘t feel the need to force them to go through my own experience either. In Celeste, for instance, you can literally fly through the whole game if it makes you happy, and yet I still grabbed all strawberries the normal way and don‘t care if others did as well or just flew to them.
It‘s less of a demand from me and more of a „if you can you should definitely include it,“ though. Obviously doesn‘t work for full on competitive multiplayer titles or something similar though.
Sekiro can be used to make an interesting point about easy mode. One could argue that the first playthrough is the easy mode because in new game plus you can give away Kuro’s charm which means only perfect blocks prevent chip damage. Does easy mode mean it has to easier or does it mean it has to be without challenge?
Absolutely. Normal is easy mode, charmless is normal mode and charmless with bell demon is true hard mode. After I completed a charmless run, normal really did feel so much easier.
Whether it should have a dedicated “easy” mode or not, I’m really torn. It took me months to get through my first playthrough but the sense of achievement was immense and like no other gaming experience before. I simply wouldn’t have had that feeling without the struggle. But I also have no accessibility concerns so it’s a very one sided opinion.
I agree to an extent but there’s a difference between “we made a specific design choice because it fits with what we want the game to convey” and “well, normal mode works like X and feels super easy to anyone experienced with gaming but on hard all the enemies are bullet sponges with 5x HP and player dies in one hit”. The latter approach brings nothing to the table and that’s what I’m against. Plus already mentioned accessibility options for those who need them.
Besides, many games ALREADY HAVE easy modes - giving me ability to adjust things manually (which in my case is usually up, not down) wouldn’t affect their vision any more than it’s already possible.
Monopoly has been one of the most popular board games for about a century, and hardly anyone plays by all of the official rules. Once I buy a game, if I want to play with house rules, I should be able to. Putting the sliders and such in game, even with the warning message mentioned above, just makes it easier to do so without having to rely on the community to make mods.
I would like to experience more artistic works, but after two strokes, my right hand is nearly useless.
Miss me with your ableist bullshit.
I’m generally with you, but there are implications for the online game and matchmaking in the likes of Dark Souls games. By the time they got to Elden Ring, they seemed to care way less about things like invasions.
Oh totally, I’m mostly focusing on solo and co-op titles like Terraria/Minecraft/Raft or whatever is popular for multiplayer these days. That said, it’s not like Souls games have to by played with online functionality even now - it’s already off when not in human form after all.
It’s not a perfect choice for every single title but a good chunk of games could support it without worrying about matchmaking and the like.
Lojcs@piefed.social 9 hours ago
I think it’d be better to have assist modes than difficulty options. As difficulty is traditionally associated with changing things like health and damage (or worse, opaquely disabling mechanics) that are fundamental to game balance I think it is too easy to be abused as a cop out from having to balance the game.
Things like slowing the pace of the game, adding aim assist, visual indicators for audio cues, more lenient hit boxes, more frequent saves would be way more useful imo. Optional mechanics or modifiers can exist, but they shouldn’t be bundled with other random stuff.
Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I completely agree that accessibility/assist modes are more important and if I had to choose I’d go with that. Since we’re in a fantasy land however I’m still going to advocate for customisation because, let’s be honest, most of the difficulties (besides “the main one”) are usually not that great.
I’m speaking from a perspective of someone who tends to go for the higher difficulty options which extremely often go with the laziest possible decisions like turning enemies into damage sponge and increasing their attack power. That’s it. Stuff like improved enemy awareness, faster reaction times, smarter tactics aren’t exactly common and that’s my main pain point when selecting difficulty. There are also other things like ammo/loot scarcity, need drain in survival games etc.
Having an option to tweak at least some of these things could help folks like me who often end up in a situation when one difficulty is piss easy and the other feels like a drag. Peoples skills and expectations vary way too and there’s simply no way few basic difficulty settings will be right for everyone. And if someone damages their experience? Oh well, let people make mistakes and take responsibility for their choices. Inform them that changing this stuff will affect their experience and leave them to their decisions. We can’t (and shouldn’t) baby-proof everything, in my opinion.
kuhli@lemmy.dbzer0.com 6 hours ago
I’m fine with that, dishonored 2 did a really good job of this with its custom difficulty option. I’d argue that games should just have 1 difficulty, developers can balance around that. Let people mess with any of the easy values difficulty modes usually change
Essence_of_Meh@lemmy.world 6 hours ago
I’d be down with that. Or at the very least give us modifiers like skulls in Halo games - dunno if that’s just Master Chief Collection addition or if they became a thing after 1 but it’s better than nothing.