I think you mean Loch Ness monster. Loch Ness isn't mythical, it very much exists 😂is the joyous gamer just a mythological construct to fool us into thinking people have fun while plaing video games
it joy gaming's loch ness
not leveling is a thing you can do in the game. I don't understand what point you're trying to makeI don't know why when people talk about adjustable difficulty, they only talk about making things easier, when there has been many things people have done to make things harder. Are people who do no-leveling runs not respecting the vision of the developer too?
not leveling is a thing you can do in the game. I don't understand what point you're trying to make
not leveling is a thing you can do in the game. I don't understand what point you're trying to make
i completely forgot that ds2 had a hard mode covenant (and then an extra hard 'remaster') until they mentioned the sekiro thing in the pod.Modifiers/assists are often also used to make games harder. Think XCOM or Halo's Skull system. Or Sekiros own mechanic they mention in the podcast.
Players having more control over variables can be used to make things harder too. It's not just an "easy mode" thing.
Even From doesn't believe in the "one vision, one way to play the game"
niseag it is. but i hold that loch ness is a cooler name for a monster...I think you mean Loch Ness monster. Loch Ness isn't mythical, it very much exists 😂
It's not, I'm confident that if FromSoft were to add more ways to customize the experience of their games, that it would be thoughtful and well-received. The Souls games had plenty of ways to do this. Nobody was upset about people being able to summon help for bosses. What's upsetting is people demanding that FromSoft change their games to suit their preferences. I'm not talking about accessibility options, that's not the same thing as the difficulty discussion, much as some people pretend it is so they can have the moral high ground in their stance that FromSoft should make easier games.The point I'm trying to make is that there's no one vision that's sacrosanct when it comes to playing games. People have always made changes to make their experiences fit their desires, be it making it easier or harder. So why is adding more options to change difficulty suddenly such a controversial thing?
Oh I agree, out of context "Loch Ness" sounds much cooler than "Nessie." Loch Ness isn't even our nicest Loch, should probably just rename it and call the monster that tbh.niseag it is. but i hold that loch ness is a cooler name for a monster...
i particularly liked rob's(?) point about souls games seemingly being some folks sole source of "difficulty".
Why does no one complain that roguelikes (or lites or whatever) like Spelunky are hard as fuck? Something about a AAA game being hard breaks pe
is the joyous gamer just a mythological construct to fool us into thinking people have fun while plaing video games
it joy gaming'sloch nessniseag
but to get serious, the pod's talk around difficulty/accessibility was great. i particularly liked rob's(?) point about souls games seemingly being some folks sole source of "difficulty".
it kinda grosses me out how the pushback against accessibility in gaming has quickly become "they're tring to ruin muh games". it's like configurable difficulty has become lost knowledge or something. this and the epic game store stuff make me fear we're heading into another dark age for gaming discourse.
I feel like that was a (maybe unintentional) dig at gaming press. Every time a From game comes out...but to get serious, the pod's talk around difficulty/accessibility was great. i particularly liked rob's(?) point about souls games seemingly being some folks sole source of "difficulty".
nah that's a good sub-RTpatrick's self-righteousness on Twitter is getting kinda...a lot. really enjoy his work but may need to unfollow him on there
I keep getting the Brexit ads as well. Specifically aimed at UK citizens (I'm not) living in Norway (I do).
He found the tweet a bunch of people were subtweeting:
Basically that dude was (to my understanding) just trying to make some point about journalists not literally using the job title "games journalist". Like if I'm following what I saw earlier, he meant literally just that exact term and wasn't saying people aren't real journalists/reporters.
But like... you're just kinda throwing that thought out there in a pretty unclear way, where people with ill intent are absolutely gonna read that as mocking journalists and spread it around, and the people who they target are obviously gonna look at it skeptically as well. Cause it's pretty easy and reasonable to read it as something like "nobody actually calls themselves journalists, that's laughable" or along those lines.
It was a silly thing to tweet regardless, plus I think some of the dumb shit being tweeted around the whole Sekiro discussion this past week had some folks automatically assuming the worst about anything mentioning "games journalism."Basically that dude was (to my understanding) just trying to make some point about journalists not literally using the job title "games journalist". Like if I'm following what I saw earlier, he meant literally just that exact term and wasn't saying people aren't real journalists/reporters.
But like... you're just kinda throwing that thought out there in a pretty unclear way, where people with ill intent are absolutely gonna read that as mocking journalists and spread it around, and the people who they target are obviously gonna look at it skeptically as well. Cause it's pretty easy and reasonable to read it as something like "nobody actually calls themselves journalists, that's laughable" or along those lines.
I've seen multiple tweets from game developers and designers to this effect:
and I gotta say, I normally bristle at sentiments like these—they're usually variants of "PC gone too far" alarmism, I think—but in this case I really feel it. Maybe I'm just aging into sneaky conservatism, but this particular public conversation has really frequently tipped into a kind of ascribing of intent that seems like anathema to the nuance that it warrants. Patrick's presence in this has summed that up a few times over—the flip "nah" to Ben, his suggestion that Sekiro just have endless revives as if that's a one-and-done solution, and, in particular, the bizarre "if cheating is a crime, then LOCK ME UP" martyrdom from his article.
the conversation about how to provide for audiences that are historically underserved and underconsidered in the manufacture of 'user experiences' is inherently affinity-based. 'accessibility' is incredibly broad and collects a whole lot of incredibly heterogeneous groups under its umbrella—a huge source of the nuance in this conversation, from the design-side, is that 'accessibility' is not going to mean one thing for all people, and that actually addressing it is more complicated than just 'adding endless revives' to a game. what would that do for colorblind people? for people who have muscular disorders that prevent them from engaging with the game as-is, regardless of how many lives they have? or for people who struggle with harder games because they have been—for cultural reasons, for economic reasons, for social reasons—been unable to spend the time with games necessary to develop the physical and perceptual vocabulary that almost all modern games (to some degree) take for granted in their audiences? even though these audiences are advocating for the same thing, broadly, their actual individual concerns are discrete from one another, and there is no panacea for the problems that games present them with.
because of this, 'accessibility' necessitates nuance to be addressed or applied in any substantial way. this is something that i see a lot of people acknowledging in these conversations, and, to be honest, they're usually people with a horse in the race—disability advocates who understand how much and how little 'accessibility' can be, media scholars who have a critical understanding of the origin and effect of 'accessibility' as a political exigency, and game designers who have confronted problems of accessibility in the course of their work.
and then, in the middle, there's a lot of people who either see (A) people asking for 'accessibility measures' as entitled, whiny gamers or (B) people expressing any nuanced thinking as 'gatekeepers' or 'elitists' who are needlessly denying disabled people tools they need out of (as Patrick implies at the end of his piece) emotional immaturity. there are a lot of people that i'm dismayed to see in that group, and i can absolutely understand why game designers who are having complicated, productive conversations in their own communities might not be particularly motivated to bring those conversations into public. i think that's a pretty bad sign for the community and for the future of 'accessibility' in games—both in how it's realized in games and in how it's perceived by audiences
In my experience usually when people say a game is too hard in these contexts the implicit meaning is "too hard FOR ME therefore I don't play these games", and not "these games are too hard and they should make them more according to my specifications/add an easy mode", which is much more common around FromSoft games, for reasons I said in my last post.
This was a good thread from an actual dev, who echoed what I think is the most important thing in this whole kerfuffle: accessibility and difficulty are totally separate discussions. https://twitter.com/terrycavanagh/status/1115222285311463424
I think Derek Yu said some smart stuff too but I'd have to dig more to find it and I'm working (technically)
In my experience usually when people say a game is too hard in these contexts the implicit meaning is "too hard FOR ME therefore I don't play these games", and not "these games are too hard and they should make them more according to my specifications/add an easy mode", which is much more common around FromSoft games, for reasons I said in my last post.
from software bullshit gets clicks and listens. zeitgeist around it has people itchin to hitch a rideIt is pretty interesting that this conversation never comes up in concerning, say, Baba is You
from software bullshit gets clicks and listens. zeitgeist around it has people itchin to hitch a ride
not pointing out waypoint specifically. EVERYONE is all about this but isn't seeing the forest for the trees.
I'm glad the conversation is evolving, yeah.I mean, there is some of this, in that this is now an expected conversation when a From game comes out.
But also, from what I've seen, Sekiro is the game that people who actually need these options are choosing to discuss as well. So I don't think it's a matter of just it being what gets attention, or at least it's partially because those people are trying to make use of that attention to actually discuss it more seriously.