This is a reaction to this thread, which was in turn a reaction to Sekiro's difficulty level, which is very high even by Soulsbourne standards. To sketch the context from which my response comes, I will first quote a conversation held by three members in that thread. (None of them should feel like I am calling them out; their quoted opinions are common and respectable, and were voiced respectably.)
This last opinion is one that I see quite often; see it argued for in Kotaku here, too, with the headline being "An Easy Mode Has Never Ruined A Game." This is an idea that I absolutely disagree with, but I understand that denying it might seem nonsensical at first. Thus, without further ado...
This last opinion is one that I see quite often; see it argued for in Kotaku here, too, with the headline being "An Easy Mode Has Never Ruined A Game." This is an idea that I absolutely disagree with, but I understand that denying it might seem nonsensical at first. Thus, without further ado...
In this thread, I would like to offer three distinct arguments against the idea that easy modes should be included because they help open up the 'intended difficulty level' to players of varying skill levels.
This thread contains no spoilers for Sekiro.
I.
It is well-known that, when given the option, players will optimize the fun out of games. It's up to designers to make this impossible for the players. Inherent in this is the idea that constraining the player's choices can be good game design.
If Sekiro had an easy mode, then it likely would be chosen not merely by people who need it in order to have the intended experience of "overcome something ~3 skill levels above what you can currently handle." It would also be chosen by many, many people whose current skill level is maybe two or three levels below what Sekiro's default difficulty demands, who casually pick up Sekiro, die twice to the first miniboss on its current regular difficulty level, and then go "fuck it" and pick the easy mode. They miss that dying twice, or even fifteen times, is the intended experience. Offering them the option for an easier mode, can well cause them to optimize the intended experience out of the game.
You could make the argument that "maybe if they picked the too-easy-for-them mode, they never wanted the intended experience to begin with, so why force it on them?"
There are two answers to this:
I) When players optimize the fun out of a game, we don't view this as a conscious choice of the player ("Guess they never wanted fun to begin with!"), but instead we view it as a problem caused by the wrong choices on the designers' part.
II) The point of Sekiro (and of many other games, such as Rain World) is to make the player struggle, whereas we also know that players will always do whatever is necessary to avoid struggling -- even if this means lowering the difficulty. When the intended experience is so strongly against most players' instinctual desires, yet when we simultaneously accept that delivering the intended experience is of the utmost importance (and I think we should accept this), then maybe we should just disregard players' expressed desires altogether, in favour of giving them an experience that they might themselves never choose for, but which, ultimately, they might find themselves having loved.
In short: An easy difficulty mode will cause some players to suffer the intended amount, but will cause many others to struggle not at all; it is consistent and coherent to design your game in such a way that the second group's problem is fixed, at the cost of damning the first group. Sekiro's insistence on not having an easy difficulty mode, is thus a totally valid design decision, which seems to me to have been made after much contemplation of the above factors.
II.
Maybe the idea that skill levels are relative, is entirely wrong.
Maybe performing feat A is a qualitatively different experience from performing feat B. For example, there is no sense in which a veteran mountaineer's experience of climbing a high, dangerous mountain, is the same as a layman's experience of climbing some low mountain, even if the relative difficulty is the same. The two experiences are entirely different, and there is no way in which we can communicate the former experience to the layman, if the layman does not themselves make the effort to become the kind of person capable of experiencing this.
I propose that Sekiro's combat works similarly: There is no experience which is equal to the perfection which it demands of its players. No compromises could be made here: This experience is one-of-a-kind, and the only way Sekiro could have communicated it, is to require absolute mastery of its combat system from its players. Sekiro, recognizing this, tries to make this learning process quite smooth, clearly guiding the player on a journey that teaches the player more and more over time, utilizing minibosses that demand more and more from the player as they progress through the game; but there is so much to teach, and so little time and space in which to teach it. The learning curve is necessarily steep.
Above all, I want to stress that the experience which Sekiro offers the player who has been taught how to play it, is tremendous. It is one of the greatest gaming experiences I have had, and I do not think I could have been made to have it, had Sekiro compromised on the demands it makes of me. Had I been given an easy mode, I might have chosen it, and after beating the game I would have felt comfortably like I had beaten the game, not knowing that in fact I had beaten something else, something which is not Sekiro at all, something which is not similar to Sekiro and which cannot be said to hold any relation to the kind of thing Sekiro is trying to be. The two experiences would share superficial elements, such as the graphics and the story, but they would be altogether entirely different things; like twins with entirely different personalities, you cannot know one by knowing the other.
III.
There is commonly this idea that "Having more options is always better." But are there situations where would we view the addition of options as a negative? I can think of many such cases where most people here would agree that these games are not helped by the addition of certain options. Examples include:
1) A story-focused game (e.g. The Last of Us), gaining the option of having characters walk around in swimsuits, so as to broaden appeal to players who like that kind of thing.
2) A game that focuses on an overweight protagonist, gaining the option of making slimmer characters, so as to broaden appeal to players who dislike playing as overweight people.
3) A game that focuses on a black protagonist, gaining the option of playing as a white character instead, so as to broaden appeal to players who only want to play as white people.
In all these cases, the common factor is that the game itself is taking a stand for the legitimacy of some manner of thing or group: Respectively, the right of women not to have their bodies sexualized; the right of overweight people to exist and be the stars of their own stories; and the right of black people to exist and be the stars of their own stories.
In all these situations, we recognize that extra options can absolutely reduce the game's appeal even to people who are never going to make use of those options. These people gain power from what the game stands for, and adding options to broaden the game's appeal, would dilute the game's message. Thus we find that "You're not going to use the extra option anyway so what does it matter to you?" is not a legitimate argument. In the same vein, "This game's insistence on excluding me is disrespectful to people like me" doesn't work either: Games star black people not because the creators are against white people, but because they want to help legitimize stories that are about black people. Similarly, games with high difficulty levels should not be misunderstood to be against people who cannot meet their challenges; they're simply marking the legitimacy of another thing or group. (For more on this kind of thing, but in an unrelated context, I highly recommend TheUnitOfCaring's excellent piece on Competing Access Needs in safe spaces.)
It's pretty clear that Sekiro, like the Soulsbourne games before it, stands for something as well. Uncharitably, you might say it stands for the right of games to be difficult; charitably, you might instead describe it as the idea that "There is immense value in overcoming great obstacles and tremendous odds, and in a time where all players demand that games be made to fit them, it is important to create games that do not meet the players halfway, and for which the players instead must go the full distance themselves." For instance, in the original Dark Souls, it was necessary that the game be very subtle about helping the player, in order for that game's message to be successfully communicated. There was never a dearth of hard difficulty modes in gaming; but it was not until Demon's Souls came out and forcibly took a stand for difficulty, that the greater discussion about difficulty in videogames really broke loose, and all throughout the decade since, it has been the Soulsbourne series that remains at the heart of this discussion. Hard difficulties in videogames would not have had this level of legitimacy if FROM's games hadn't took a clear stance on this topic, and as someone who truly loves difficult videogames, someone who gets incredible personal value from overcoming things that are difficult or even unfair, I am very glad that FROM are keeping up their legacy with Sekiro. The fact that instead of trying to cater to everyone, they take a stance for people like me specifically -- that is something that actually means a lot to me, and you don't just get to take that away from me.
To people who aren't willing to meet a game on its own terms --- people who aren't willing to accept what it stands for, but who insist on having games be aimed entirely at them -- no matter how kind these people are or how understandable their problems may be... To them we ultimately really have only one possible response: Find a different game to play. There are other games that cater to you; let this one cater to us.
----------------------------
- In general, I feel like the idea of "albums/movies/games as safe spaces" is both quite realistic and very undervalued. It explains a lot of media-adjacent drama.
- Celeste's method of supplying multifarious accessibility options with the warning that the player will not have the intended experience if they choose to use them, has been oft-praised as a good solution to this general problem. I think this solution fails, since it does not deal with my point 1, above. It was probably the right solution for Celeste, in which the experience of climbing the mountain remains fairly constant, subject to most of the accessibility options which the game provided. In Sekiro's case, however, this solution wouldn't have worked: The experience of beating a foe who may hit you ten times without forcing you to deplete your whole stash of health recovery items, is qualitatively different from beating a foe who can kill you in two hits, and the former cannot hope to resemble the latter. In Celeste's case, its accessibility options didn't change the game's intended experience too much, and therefore they are fine. In Sekiro's case, I can't think of accessibility options that wouldn't change the game into something so different, that we might as well request the player play a different game altogether.
- In a previous thread I noted that the Soulsbourne games are very aware of the community they're trying to create. This sense of community -- of all players united against a single set of bosses without qualifiers, of everyone fighting the same fight, of no one's suffering being worse than anyone else's because they played on a higher difficulty -- a lot of this feeling would be lost if difficulty modes were introduced. Playing these games introduces you to a community of people -- a very lovely community, as far as gaming communities go -- with whom you can sit down and be told, I know what you went through and I see that you went through it. That's some really valuable camaraderie. People often say it's elitist to want certain games not to have easy modes; I would counter that difficulty modes themselves are prone to breeding elitism.
- Hi, this is my obligatory mention of Rain World. Rain World takes a stand for some absolutely astounding and revolutionary ideas in gaming. If the above words managed to convince you in any sense of Sekiro's right to exist as it is, but you also wish that Rain World were made easier: Please reconsider. The developers of Rain World actually did add an easier mode, The Monk, presumably as a response to the audience's reaction to Rain World's extreme difficulty; but Rain World's entire thematic core revolves around the tremendous difficulty faced when playing as its default protagonist, The Survivor. You will likely have an inferior experience playing as The Monk -- though when I say that, mind the context in which I say this, which with this thread I have now supplied.
