this post was submitted on 06 Nov 2025
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Reading this thread has re-confirmed that gatekeepers are a blight on humanity.
I will cheat in your sacred games and you can't stop me. I'll make my own rules. What are you gonna do about it, break into my house and steal my computer?
If a game is particularly hard, I'll use mods or cheats to make it easier. Gamers who sweat for difficulty can play it as hard as they want. I just want to experience the story, even if my play style goes against the creator's vision.
This is all fine and good, it really as.
I hate to keep overextending the restaurant metaphor, but it's the difference between demanding a world class chef be prepared to make a number of different substitutions on the spot to suit your individual tastes vs. taking the dish home in a doggy bag and then slathering it with ketchup.
It's fine. There's no law against it. It doesn't hurt anyone else (assuming we're not talking about multiplayer here). No one has to care. No one does. Cheating and mods are a great way for you as an individual to tailor a more personalized experience to your tastes with the tools you have available.
Yep. Fling Trainers usually. I pick one game a year and play it for 3 days, no way in hell am I going to get bogged down on grinding things. I'm there for the immersion, the gameplay, and the plot.
If grinding is the gameplay in the sense that it levels up your joystick skills, then fine I'll sit and suffer (Souls / Knight). But if it's grinding for items of all things, no thank you
I don't think you're getting the point here. If you buy a game you can do whatever you want with it. Same goes with developers, it's their creation and they can do whatever they want with it. It doesn't have to please everyone.
"it's my cafe, my creation, and I don't like disabled ramps. I just want to make good food and I don't have to please everyone"
Seems a bit unfair to me
I know it's a quote, but there's a big difference between inclusive public infrastructure and interacting with games.
This is a very bad and damaging take and undermines real accessibility options in games.
You are conflating two different things. The game is the food and the difficulty is a nuanced flavor that results from the individual ingredients. You are arguing that the flavor of the dish or the way it is prepared should be changed for everyone to suit your tastes.
Accessibility ramps are structural and in no way related to the food. I in no way want to be seen as arguing against accessibility because I am a strong believer in it myself. But accessibility comes in the form of color blind modes, subtitles, ability to change or rebind controls. Actual structural issues to the game that allow you to engage with it as it has been designed.
I do not suppose I will get through to people that have already taken up this position, but I cannot allow it to go unchallenged. Difficulty IS NOT (*necessarily) accessibility.
If you want to dislike a game: fine. If you want to critique a game: fine. If you want to say, "I think this game is bad": fine. But do not try to conflate your own distaste with the difficulty level as some accessibility issue.
For a game where difficulty is based on reaction time then it is accessibility. Your whole page of arguments is based on that ableist assumption and doesn't hold up.
Food and cafe is just an extreme example, you don't have to discredit the idea based on the specifics of a cafe. It was supposed to make you think about the problem from the perspective of someone who feels excluded which you didn't do. You just used to to further your agenda with emotive language like "bad and damaging". It's a little bit pathetic actually when all people are asking for is a slider
A game isn't a public service. There are many games where part of the experience is that everyone has to go through the same or similar difficulty and the learning curve involved in that. If that isn't something that you can manage then you don't have to play it.
If anything, demo versions should be more readily available so that you don't end up buying something you can't return.
Who decided that only things that are public services need to be accessible? Why is everyone latched onto that like it's a given.
If your a dev and you have x hits to kill thing x and you don't put in a tiny bit of extra effort to multiply that by a difficulty slider "because of art" then I'm going to say you're a bit of a dick.
Games are barely art anyway. Most are just a toy that you play with for a bit to waste some time
That's not what people are saying, but the entitled attitude here makes it seem as if games are a mandatory interaction.
If you are a game dev and you decide that part of the experience of your game is the difficulty, so be it. Art was never and isn't something that pleases everyone. You can call them a dick but you don't have to engage in what they produce.
That is such bullshit. There is such large variety of games out there that still give meaningful experiences to players that calling all of them "barely art" is just wrong.
Your attitude lacks empathy and my attitude is "entitled"
Empathy to who? People who don't like difficult games but for some reason insist on ruining things for those who do?
Right but a slider doesn't ruin it for anyone though does it
It does on some games, have you not read my previous replies?
Not really
So why should people listen to your arguments?
This describes literally any action game.
And I'm telling you, sliders are not always structurally viable to the game or efficient for the developers to implement. By your arguments here, what do you want? A literal speed timer that slows down the entire game? Should Super Mario Bros. have had an easy mode that runs the game at half frame rate?
Yup, that's the thing with analogies... they don't always fit.
A café is a public place that should accommodate a wide range of guests.
A work of art doesn’t need the same amount of accessibility. Restricted access might be part of the experience.
Access to food is more essential than access to niche art.
There are plenty of places that aren't essential that are accessible just to be inclusive. A theatre for example.
I'm not even disabled and I struggle with games without a difficulty slider. I can't imagine to be actually disabled and excluded just because someone's ego prevents them from adding a single slider to their game.
A theater is a social event and experience. Lots of video games are solo experiences. That’s a huge difference. Social events and activities need inclusion much more.
A dense philosophical book doesn’t need to include a „for dummies“ version. Tarot cards don’t need their meaning printed on them.
I think it would be illuminating for you to try making a game where the difficulty slowly increases, such as Tetris. Once you've done so, add a slider to it so that the difficult does not slowly increase.
You will find the experience completely different when you play. Difficulty in games isn't just about accessibility.
I've worked in and run my own game companies. The request for a slider isn't based in any kind of misunderstanding about how it would be implemented.
For your example in tetris it would be a global multiplier on the speed. The speed would still increase by the same rate but the actual speed is always multiplied by some constant.
The Tetris speed is already multiplied by a constant anyway even if the difficulty isn't exposed. And this constant has to be picked by a designer. All I'm asking for is to expose it with a slider. There is pretty much always a constant like this in any game
What an insane attempt at an analogy lol
For me in Cyberpunk, I hated the breach protocol, and hated how by the time you get the fancy gear, the game is done (never meeting at embers btw).
As a result, on my second playthrough I removed breech protocol completely and 10x'd experience. Was a much more fun experience.
I'm so appreciative of games where that is possible. Otherwise its just a slog for no reason in what is supposed to be an entertainment product.
I also like Atomfalls difficulty settings where you could really change a lot about how the game played.
This was never the argument. Cheat all you want, no one cares.
There's just a bunch of people in this topic that read these developer's own words on their artistic takes and were like, "Wow, uh, wrong? Cater your games to me."
I mean thats how all the people arguing against difficulty options sound.
People need to touch grass. Is your ego really so fragile that you beating a game on hard mode is diminished by someone beating it on easy mode?
The truth is there are really only a "few" games where the difficulty actually matters in that it's a core part of the games experience, but plenty more games that don't have difficulty modifiers or really basic ones where the difficulty has zero actual relation to the game.
No one, least of all me, has been arguing this point. It is not a valid point, I do not give it credit. It's a straw man that keeps getting brought up repeatedly.
This is in fact what is being argued, extensively, yet for some reason you can't see those arguments as valid. I'm out of breath on this topic, truly I am.
I have gone over extensively why adding a wide and nebulous range of difficulty options to cater to the very subjective notion of what difficulty even is to begin with is not free of development time or cost for the programmers when they are tuning every aspect of their game: movement, stat balancing, enemy placement, level design, attack patterns - to their specific vision. It's just not.
Of course it's possible, just like I could wake up and do a 5 mile run every morning but I simply don't because I have neither the time nor energy to devote to that. Dark Souls was already notoriously rushed - looked into criticisms of the late game areas like the Demon Ruins and the dragon butts.
Lol I dont understand why y'all are so focused on dark souls. Is that the only game available?
I suffered through a lot of butthurt comments in this discussion where the people against "easy mode" are acting like all anyone cares about is dark souls having easy mode.
Sure some people are only arguing that. The majority are just arguing about difficulty options in general
Like I already said there are relatively "few" games where the difficulty is core to the game but a shitload more where the difficulty doesn't really matter. And of that 2nd bunch there is a poor selection of difficulty options in most of them.
I couldn't care less about dark souls. Even if it had difficulty options I wouldn't waste my time on it.
Yeah, I love easy mode mods.
I'll play my games the way I like it. I don't care about their or even the developers opinion.
It's fine to do your own thing if it effects nobody else.
I play Stellaris and Terra Invicta in easy modes basically, cuz I just enjoy nation building and the game mechanics. Tho Easy in Terra Invicta can still be a pain if you ignore certain things.
What wild, malformed, and disproportionate response. Blight even. My god my eyes can't roll any harder.
SWATTing is a thing in Murica, so there's that.
Also, cheating is just moronic and it's not you have to play the game anyway.
It's a thing on the Internet, it's not specifically only in one country
SWATTing in other countries?
Is there a comparative statistic for that as opposed to Murica?