Oftentimes, devs are practically the only person who can. Especially small hobbyist devs. They’ll spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours playing their own game as they build it and forget they have to then circle back and tune it for people who haven’t.
Potentially my hottest take, but this is my biggest criticism of Silksong. Even as someone who likes difficult games, I bounced off it. I’ll get back to it eventually, I know I’ll love it once I crack it, but it was taking a lot of effort I just can’t devote to it right now.
I wouldn’t necessarily say that it’s too difficult or that the difficulty level is bad, but it’s overtuned. The devs spent 7 years developing it, playing it, replaying it, adding, tweaking. I believe they made exactly the thing they wanted, but that makes it very dense and intricate and you gotta be on just the absolutely correct wavelength to get there …
The 3d Ninja Gaiden games (not the NES ones). They are unfairly hard, in the sense that they don’t really teach you how to play them before throwing you at massive problems. There are the people who find (or are told/shown) various cheese strats and thus say the game is easy (“git gud, scrub!”) but without using degenerate strats the game is nigh-impossible. I’ve heard it likened to bringing a brand new player to a fighting game tournament and making their first match against a mid-tier opponent— there’s literally no chance of victory.
I wasn’t expecting this post to bring out this kind of animosity in people. Jesus fuckin’ christ.
Video games are not a public service, there is no such thing as a 100% universally enjoyed video game for a reason. It’s ok that there are different types of video games, folks, be them too hard or too easy for your tastes, it’s kind of stupid to throw these kinds of stones about it.
I mean, is every book supposed to be palatable to everyone? Are we all supposed to feel the exact same way about every piece of art? This is like being mad that Guardians of The Galaxy involved sci-fi and super heroes and wasn’t a WWII documentary because that’s what you’d have preferred to watch.
Some books are written in smaller text than others. Some people have difficulties reading small text. Some people argue the enjoyment of such books is based on the small text. Others disagree and want to be able to experience the book with larger text.
Some texts are too esoteric or hard to understand. Some people argue that the enjoyment of such books is based on the obscure meaning of said books. Others are stupid and should get better at reading comprehension. Git gud, shitter.
Access to color blind mode, input changing, or speciallty is the magnifying glass/fony size change. Dumbing the text down to be more easily understood would be easy mode, dumbass.
Games, like movies, are easily consumed but difficult to create. As a result, everyone and their grandma can critique them and publish on the Internet which only further self-selects for the highly opinionated to do so.
But not all opinions are equal. You can be well studied in your field and generally intelligent, but if you don’t have a relevant background in the humanities and the sciences, you can have complex reasoning but without having the depth, the breadth, and the relevance in the analysis.
Case in point the first replier. The analogy is fine and the deductive reasoning is self-consistent, but they didn’t show the relevance to game design. (Ie. Why must the author make the text size bigger for people who can’t enjoy smaller text, and why must the same apply to games.)
That’s why gamers seem to be notorious for having takes that miss the trees for the forest.
(I am aware that I’m very much at risk of committing this very error with my post.)
I tried Dark Souls, got my ass kicked, tried again, got my ass kicked again, went “huh, guess it’s not for me” and moved on with my life. I truly don’t get this mentality where people think they’re entitled to play a game that was clearly not designed for them.
Is this a cold take? I think its not hot nor cold. Its a medium take.
I think it depends what someone wants out of a game, and I think most people would agree that classes having just brick wall hard counters can be annoying in games where you play as a single character, like everything should have some chance of fighting everything else, even if disadvantaged by class type etc.
Like imagine a game like marvel rivals, but where you just straight up couldn’t hit ironman as wolverine or similar. I think people would dislike that.
In like a real time strategy game though, thats different.
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