Pegasus Actual
Member
It seems like a lot of times endless difficulty settings dilute the gameplay experience. Look at Uncharted 4, you can breeze through it on the easy/normal difficulties basically doing whatever, you don't have to master any of the mechanics. You don't need to ever use stealth and you can swing around with the grapple hook like an idiot. It doesn't seem to matter. You crank it up to the hardest difficulty and all of a sudden swinging around just isn't viable. Not like you just need to get good at it. Or use it at the right times. You just don't do it because if you do you're dead. So you play the world's most boring cover shooter at a snail's pace just to get through it. There's zero satisfaction getting through that game at any difficulty level for me.
So I don't necessarily feel like difficulty settings need to go so that people git gud. I just prefer there is a canonical difficulty where the game ramps up at a good pace and encourages mastery of its mechanics. There's still a lot of room there for easy and hard games. Sometimes difficulty options even do help with progression of mechanics with the right game design. Look at Guitar Hero, you go through one of the lower difficulties, get good at all the songs, and then step it up to the next difficulty, rinse and repeat until you're crushing solos hitting every note on expert mode. But that doesn't exist with a game like Uncharted 4. Nobody booted up the easiest difficulty. Failed, kept working at it... finally beat it, and then progressed to the next difficulty, and then repeated it up through Crushing or whatever they call it. If any poor soul on this earth did actually play through it at every difficulty it was probably to indulge their OCD sensibilities. I'd wager that not a single person on this Earth did so as a satisfying way of developing their skills in the game.
Back in the day you didn't have 'accessibility options'. You had cheat codes. I liked the old branding better.
And take this dude for instance.... born with one arm, plays Rocket League by mashing the controller into his face, and he could embarrass literally anyone on this board in a 1v1:
Nobody even hooked the guy up with that Xbox accessibility controller. Can't argue with his results but having a couple of buttons accessible with his feet, toggle ballcam at the very least would be more efficient.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for games having 'accessibility options' where appropriate, but it kind of makes you wonder how much of it is necessary. Things like color-blindness settings and whatnot are great. But I'm not sure it needs to be an industry-wide mandate. Maybe for the EAs and Ubis of the world but for a small indie team let them put their effort into what they think will be good, not force them to dump their limited resources into making their work accessible.
People act like the 'git gud' crowd is way more unreasonable than it is. Outside of silly egregious examples when exactly have they lashed out? I'm thinking like... Mario Kart shipping with a default option that kept you from turning off the road. In a racing game. Ya know... whose main point is going fast on a track without going off the road. Or when Super Mario added a thing where if you died a couple of times the game would literally play itself for you. In a game that isn't very hard to begin with. Or at least it's certainly much easier than the original Super Mario... which little kids loved. Do kids have too many microplastics clogging up their brains nowadays to find enjoyment in facing a challenge and then overcoming it?
Aside from that it's usually people demanding easier difficulties even when that is contrary to the point of the game. So yeah, if you're into Soulsborne (and I'm not, I keep meaning to try, probably didn't help that I started with Bloodborne and got disinterested thanks to my PCMR FPS snobbery) like... of course you're going to resent people droning on and on about changing the thing that you like to something they like. I see no reason to cheer for a new Ghosts n Goblins having an easy mode. Being difficult was always a part of its identity. They want to trade on nostalgia and then ignore the people who actually have nostalgia for the franchise in favor of chasing every last sale. Do they really think fucking Ghosts n Goblins is really gonna resonate with people who didn't play the old games just because they put an easy setting in?
So I don't necessarily feel like difficulty settings need to go so that people git gud. I just prefer there is a canonical difficulty where the game ramps up at a good pace and encourages mastery of its mechanics. There's still a lot of room there for easy and hard games. Sometimes difficulty options even do help with progression of mechanics with the right game design. Look at Guitar Hero, you go through one of the lower difficulties, get good at all the songs, and then step it up to the next difficulty, rinse and repeat until you're crushing solos hitting every note on expert mode. But that doesn't exist with a game like Uncharted 4. Nobody booted up the easiest difficulty. Failed, kept working at it... finally beat it, and then progressed to the next difficulty, and then repeated it up through Crushing or whatever they call it. If any poor soul on this earth did actually play through it at every difficulty it was probably to indulge their OCD sensibilities. I'd wager that not a single person on this Earth did so as a satisfying way of developing their skills in the game.
Back in the day you didn't have 'accessibility options'. You had cheat codes. I liked the old branding better.
And take this dude for instance.... born with one arm, plays Rocket League by mashing the controller into his face, and he could embarrass literally anyone on this board in a 1v1:
Nobody even hooked the guy up with that Xbox accessibility controller. Can't argue with his results but having a couple of buttons accessible with his feet, toggle ballcam at the very least would be more efficient.
Don't get me wrong, I'm all for games having 'accessibility options' where appropriate, but it kind of makes you wonder how much of it is necessary. Things like color-blindness settings and whatnot are great. But I'm not sure it needs to be an industry-wide mandate. Maybe for the EAs and Ubis of the world but for a small indie team let them put their effort into what they think will be good, not force them to dump their limited resources into making their work accessible.
People act like the 'git gud' crowd is way more unreasonable than it is. Outside of silly egregious examples when exactly have they lashed out? I'm thinking like... Mario Kart shipping with a default option that kept you from turning off the road. In a racing game. Ya know... whose main point is going fast on a track without going off the road. Or when Super Mario added a thing where if you died a couple of times the game would literally play itself for you. In a game that isn't very hard to begin with. Or at least it's certainly much easier than the original Super Mario... which little kids loved. Do kids have too many microplastics clogging up their brains nowadays to find enjoyment in facing a challenge and then overcoming it?
Aside from that it's usually people demanding easier difficulties even when that is contrary to the point of the game. So yeah, if you're into Soulsborne (and I'm not, I keep meaning to try, probably didn't help that I started with Bloodborne and got disinterested thanks to my PCMR FPS snobbery) like... of course you're going to resent people droning on and on about changing the thing that you like to something they like. I see no reason to cheer for a new Ghosts n Goblins having an easy mode. Being difficult was always a part of its identity. They want to trade on nostalgia and then ignore the people who actually have nostalgia for the franchise in favor of chasing every last sale. Do they really think fucking Ghosts n Goblins is really gonna resonate with people who didn't play the old games just because they put an easy setting in?
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