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.
Any time I realize the optimal path is really boring or tedious.
Like, imagine you could sell junk to vendors for money, but for some reason you get more money if you sell them one at a time. Spending five minutes splitting inventory stacks sucks, but it’s 30% more gold and that’s the difference between the cool sword or the basic sword.
A made up example, but hopefully gets the point across.
Related: long travel times with nothing interesting or challenging happening. I remember playing some shitty MMO and you had to like run through a building, go up an elevator, and down a long hallway every time you wanted to learn skills. Just five minutes of nothing. Gotta juice those playtime stats, I guess.
It’s different if there’s stuff to do en route. Monsters to fight or whatever. But when it’s just jogging? Very disappointing.
<span style="color:#323232;">/home/myuser/Games/er_reforged/ERRv2.0.1.1-541-2-0-1-1-1762909215/ERRv2.0.1.1/internals/modengine/bin/me3: /lib/x86_64-linux-gnu/libc.so.6: version `GLIBC_2.39' not found (required by /home/myuser/Games/er_reforged/ERRv2.0.1.1-541-2-0-1-1-1762909215/ERRv2.0.1.1/internals/modengine/bin/me3)
</span><span style="color:#323232;">[RED]Error:[/]
</span><span style="color:#323232;">me3 failed to launch due to error code 1: Unknown
</span>
Not finding a lot of hits online for this problem. I think updating glibc can be kind of dicey?
I think that’s the one I have. They don’t make them like they used to. The Logitech controller I had in like 2008 lasted for ten years. The new one’s right shoulder button stopped working after like two.
The good news is they honored their warranty and sent me a new one for free.
But then the left joystick stopped going all the way up+left.
But then honored the warranty again! That one is still kicking.
So the lesson is: keep your receipt if you buy Logitech.
I also don’t have much patience for “it gets fun later I promise!”.
Guild wars 2 will scale people down for earlier levels, but the majority of content is aimed at the level cap (which hasn’t changed since launch ten years ago).
I don’t know how long it would take a new player to hit the cap. With friends, I think you could get to the cap via crafting in like 30 minutes if they spot you the resources.
Nice! I got the new expansion but haven’t gone far in it yet. I played around with ritualist (my favorite from gw1) but reaper might still be my true love.
But I love that it’ll all just be there when I get around to it, and I can still have fun doing old content. The wizard tower convergence is a recurring favorite of mine.
I was always a guild wars fan, in part because there’s no subscription fee.
Guild Wars 2 is still going. They do expansions every so often, but it’s been almost nothing but horizontal growth. No new level caps or gear tiers. Just stuff like “as a necromancer, you can summon spirits to fight for you instead of getting a death powered scythe” trade offs.
Sure, but that seems like a separate, closely related, topic.
I was mostly objecting to the idea that souls games are just memorizing and pushing buttons. That accusation could be leveled at most single player games, but people seem to mostly bring it up to denigrate souls games.
Multiplayer often has less memorization though, as you say.