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@“saddleblasters”#p71252 This is where I do not agree. Only some games are aesthetic objects first and foremost.
what games do you have in mind?
@““I thought lethal weapon was safe…yeah.””#p71255
Difficult 2D single player action games (often but not necessarily with some form of level design): Celeste (which is the main one I’ve had most in mind for obvious reasons), Flywrench, Dustforce, Luftrausers, The Floor is Jelly.
Obviously the creators of these games were concerned with aesthetic experiences, and some choices about level design were made in service to those experiences — but I think the vast majority of questions were “what mechanics are interesting?” “how can we tune these mechanics?” “what can we do with these mechanics and how can they interact?”
This is of course a very particular kind of game, and not even the type I play or care about the most. I’m not trying to hold them up as “the prototypical game” or anything — they’re just a type of game where questions of difficulty and therefore accessibility are very important. These concerns extend to some other genres too, but I think the farther you get away from 2D action the less important #gamer motor-reflex difficulty is/should be. I hard-agree with what you said about “vestigial hi-scores.”
(I’ve only played a third of one souls game, which is maybe what the “difficulty in games” discussion is actually centered around? so I might just be out of touch.)
While I was out walking to the store yesterday, and listening to the section about accessibility, I considered something new that I hadn't thought of before about the relevance of the whole “developer intended difficulty.”
But first--To the people who say that difficult games _must_ be difficult, and that any method to decrease difficulty somehow ruins the experience, I have only this to say: go suck a lemon. It's very fitting this question was posed when Maddy was around, as the Assist Mode in _Celeste_ and the approach Extremely OK came upon is what I would consider the absolute ideal. Maddy said it best themselves in the episode, if the game properly communicates that the game is 'supposed to be difficult,' if players aren't going to play the game on default settings, the best thing developers can do is to resist the paternalistic urge to dictate what the difficulty should be locked in by not providing flexibility, and just give players tools to configure the game to be difficult _for them._ Difficulty rigidity absolutists seem to believe that only they are enlightened enough to understand that a wholly frictionless gameplay experience is not going to be fun, and that anyone who would cease to have fun while playing a game because they experience no resistance from the game will inevitably blame the game for it, as if they would somehow forget that they tuned the experience themselves and could just as easily re-tune it or even return everything to default settings.
The novel thought I had (novel for me, anyway) is that perhaps the concept of "developer intended difficulty" itself is actually maybe not giving developers enough credit. Developers have way more important things to intend and then execute upon than to make sure that their games soothe the fragile egos of edgelords, if we're talking about things on the level of fundamental building blocks of gameplay cohering into something that is engaging to play. The 'intended difficulty' of a From Software game is partially created by what amounts to fiddling with numbers that can be felt on the surface and are even communicated in game, like player health, player damage, enemy health, and enemy damage. This is what I think a lot of difficulty absolutist types tend to be most directly concerned with, since they flip out if you suggest that individual players should just be able to control these with sliders. To be fair, these are parameters that directly correspond to being able to progress through a game or not, so it's easy to see why so much attention is paid to them. However there is so much more about how a game plays and what can be difficult about it than what can be expressed with just numbers which correspond directly to success or failure. To just think of ones that would apply to 3D action games with melee combat, there are a multitude of parameters that I think express developer intent that are more interesting: animation speeds, animation patterns, input buffering (or lack thereof), move cancelling (or lack thereof), size of player models, size of enemy models, size of hitboxes, hit detection in general, knockback, _types_ of knockback, differences in the rules of knockback between player characters and enemies, knockback as it relates to dangers in the environment... I could go on.
_Super Mario Bros._ represents a much more precise way of separating these two things, while still containing a ton of minute intricacy. A lot of what we could call the intended difficulty is formed around the physics of Mario's jump and movement alone. First off, let's forget subpixels exist. Okay, moving on. When walking, Mario can jump a level horizontal distance of, well, I don't know, so let's estimate it's 8 blocks. When running he can jump a level horizontal distance of, again, I don't know precise values, so let's assume it's 16 blocks. The developer has communicated a lot of their intent with regards to difficult in a very overt way by how the level geometry can be compared to these innate and non-negotiable capabilities of the player character's movement. At a baseline, we obviously know that if the game were to bottleneck the player on to an area that would require a level, horizontal jump with a distance of 23 blocks, the developer intended difficulty would be, well, for it to be impossible to complete the game. If the game were to exclusively feature bottomless pits that are 16 block jumps, or 8 block jumps where running starts are not possible, we could say the developer intended this game to be hard in the sense that it would require likely dozens of extremely precise inputs. If we looked at the real 1-1 and noted how, of the 3 bottomless pits in the level, two are 2 blocks wide, and one is 3 blocks wide, we can say that the developers intended for 1-1 to be easy, but to still have some contour. We could also say if those pits were all 1 block wider, that 1-1 Wide is intended to be very marginally more difficult than 1-1 Standard. However, none of this is even remotely what is interesting about the difficulty that is experienced while playing Super Mario Bros. The actual interesting parts are things that require you to learn and apply skills and understanding much more difficult to describe than jump distances which require a rote execution of a jump with perfect timing and execution. Those step or half-pyramid-like block formations with 2 block wide space in between the two halves of the pyramid, and then a similar one with a bottomless pit in the middle, is profoundly more interesting of a challenge than a really wide bottomless pit. It's asking you to examine your surroundings carefully, teaching you the dangers of clearing hazards without a lot of space leading up to it, and even tempting you to do a cool maneuver by rushing at it at full speed and clearing it with style by jumping the moment you hit a lower step. That all requires a good sense of Mario's jump height, speed, the difference between jumping while walking and running, how you can adjust Mario's jump height by de-pressing the jump button, and so on.
Are modern From Software games difficult because the ratios between player health, enemy health, player damage, and enemy damage are skewed against the player's survival, at least, relatively speaking to other games? Well, yes, and I think that denying that is absurd. However, I think maybe it's not giving From Software and Miyazaki enough credit to say that this is the main thing that make the games difficult in a way that is actually interesting. The games are difficult in a pedestrian way because of said aforementioned ratios, but they're difficult in interesting ways because they have idiosyncratic approaches to how gameplay feels to execute on, and makes the player feel disempowered in ways that produce interesting experiences. I'm sure I could go on in a really granular way about this, but just to speak more generally, it is interesting that our player character does not have unlimited capacity to move while engaged in a fight, and requires breaks in between swings of their weapons. Or that swinging a sword longer than they are tall really does take like 2 seconds and they can't roll to dodge in the middle of swinging it. Or that there is a system for wearing an enemy down with repeated blows, to smash through their guard and leave them completely exposed... albeit briefly. Sure, these are all also expressed and governed by numbers just like health and damage, but the tuning of them simply raise or lower the threshold by which a player can progress, but form a contour and mood and character to the action onscreen. Combat is instilled with more interesting strategic and tactile objectives than the macro objective of reducing enemy health to 0 while preventing your health from getting to 0, like pressing advantages gained through careful positioning and whipcrack precise dodges in order to hammer a powerful foe into momentary but total vulnerability. Creating that depth of feeling in the player is caused by the careful tuning of so many more numbers than just the ones that ultimately determine success or fail states, and, yeah, I'd say whether it is thrilling or not depends a lot on how easy or difficult the numbers make any of that. But it also depends on things that aren't even expressed in numbers at all, and make me think that maybe making you _feel like you are doing something that is difficult_ is a more important than the game requiring lots of precise inputs to trigger the success state as opposed to the fail state: how hype the boss music gets you, how cool or uncool your animations make you feel, how much an enemy scares you or how threatening their animation feels, the difference between an intelligent human foe making you feel hunted or outsmarted, as opposed to a wild beast enemy making you feel overpowered and overwhelmed, and so on and so on on. Is a game "more difficult" if I can get so absorbed in the action on screen, that hoisting my gigantic sword above my head and slamming it into bossface makes my heart pound blood through my veins faster than swinging it horizontally into bossbelly, even though the only real difference in difficulty for me, the player, is gently pressing in a different little piece of plastic? Talk about _that_ with regards to the recent question on immersion.
I was watching some Patreon backer only ACTION BUTTON content recently, and Tim said something extremely interesting about the lock on function while playing through the first section of _Demones's S'ouls's,_ as a response to some common comments about the camera and lock-on function in the modern From Software oeuvre. The games sometimes hide enemies in what we could call plain sight, as in, hidden in total darkness, or perfectly blended into the environment one way or another (like an enemy pretending to be a statue or a corpse), or even just behind awkward level geometry in such a way that the player will have difficulty seeing something even if hypothetically their player character would be able to perceive it clearly. A From Software veteran knows quite well that a reliable way to spot some of these enemies is by clicking in the lock on button and letting the game confirm their presence for you, even if you, the player, can't detect them just by looking at the screen. The strawperson difficulty absolutists I refer to a lot seem to say that this is somehow cheap and that it's an unintended quirk of the targeting system and clearly you're supposed to just repeatedly fall into the same traps on purpose, other more reasonable players would say that since this is a tool provided to you by the game and does still require you to understand how the game actually functions, there is nothing exploitative in using it to overcome a challenge that isn't necessarily about overcoming the quirks of camera behaviour. However, both strawpersons I made up still seem agree that using the lock on function is somehow circumventing something that is supposed to be difficult in a way that is against the 'developer intention,' as if the developers intend for you to not be able to see enemies they placed in particular chubrub sweatrash areas of the level geometry, and you just have to deal with the fixed camera distance showing you a brick wall while a skeleton lunges at you or whatever. How Tim interprets this use of the lock on function, which makes this whole conversation about whether or not this is intended or not feel quite silly in hindsight, really clicks with me, especially if I lightly paraphrase and interpret; he said that the player can consider this ability to lock on to ambiguously detectable enemies as an abstraction of the player character's sensory perception, in a diegetic sense. Just because we, the player, can't see a skeleton through the inky blackness, we can assume that our _character_ can, perhaps they can hear it, feel the rush of air coming towards them as it charges, smell its musty odour, and so on. So there's no real reason why we need to refuse to engage the tool that allows us, the player, to embody the player character more meaningfully. Even more importantly, this still means that the player needs to employ foreknowledge, or listen to their intuition, in order to make use of this technique. The lock on isn't going to be engaged on to a skeleton pretending to be dead automatically, you need to be observent or have experience to be able to make any use of it.
Even if this it isn't necessarily intended by the developers in such a direct way, this is a beautiful way of looking at it, I think. It merges the ideas that it is a circumvention of an arbitrary challenge (grappling with the limitations of camera in 3D action games) but it's in a way that makes it consistent with the "intent" of the game (being a character in a dangerous space using everything at their disposal to survive). The most absolute of the difficulty absolutists would say that it is necessary to the experience of the game to deal with the game on all of its supposed terms, including what are pretty hard to describe as anything other than technical limitations. There is a sort of fun and challenge in that, I suppose. However, giving it the benefit of the doubt and incorporating it as an abstraction of your player character's sensory perception is so much more interesting of a concept.
Maybe what I'm getting at is that there's a big difference between a game being difficult and frictive and thus engaging on a level of both kinetic and/or strategic understanding, and a game being difficult and frictive based on requiring fast reflexes or memorization or precision or consistency in execution. I don't know if I have ever been interested in the latter, even if I can recognize that it is really impressive when people can refine raw skill. I want games to primarily cause me to have to think of a strategy or a tactic or an approach, rather than just to have fast reflexes or be able to execute complex commands on a gamepad. Developers can intend for players to enter into this sort of cereberal immersive experience just as much as they can intend players to be able to imitate the precision and response time of a machine. I thought of a really weird but I think really illustrative example of how difficulty can maybe mean a lot more things than it does now, and that example is _Steel Battalion._ Now, like most people, I didn't play it, so I am going to assume some things about it, although I think those assumptions are probably pretty fair. Namely, that a lot of the "developer intended difficulty" of _Steel Battalion_ is found in using that wacky big ass controller. Something else I think is fair to infer is that, if you were to pare down the gameplay functionality to the point where you could play the game on a standard gamepad, but change nothing else, a lot of the game would be "easier" than the developers intended, because the more concrete parameters that govern the difficulty game (the _Super Mario Bros. bottomless pit width kinds of parameters, if you will) was (hopefully, anyway) tuned with the assumption that players were going to be quite engaged in the learning of how to use that wacky big ass controller. This is so much more interesting of a way to make a game objectively more difficult, without just amplifying the precision or consistency demanded of the player to avoid fail states and pursue success states.
And maybe that is the most comprehensive sort of response I've got to the question of whether or not it is a good idea to just let players freely control superficial parameters like health and damage. A game can be difficult on parameters that are so, so much more interesting than that they require precision or rote execution. Difficulty or friction of some kind is absolutely a lot of what makes games fun, but I think games are sophisticated enough now that we should be giving the concept of difficulty more credit than it just being how fail states happen.
@““I thought lethal weapon was safe…yeah.””#p71255
Oh sorry, I didn’t actually read the part you quoted. I thought you were asking which games aren’t primarily aesthetic objects.
For me personally, Yume Nikki was a big revelation in terms of “games as aesthetic objects.” The Yakuza games are a good example of a game as aesthetic object in a similar way to how movies or novels are aesthetic objects (and we all seem to agree Yakuza would be better without combat lol).
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@“Gaagaagiins”#p71257 tuned with the assumption that players were going to be quite engaged in the learning of how to use that wacky big ass controller.
I like your whole post, but this part specifically made me think that most of the challenge games present to a new player is learning how to use the wacky big-ass controller that is the standard modern twin-stick-with-triggers video game controller. In line with what @yeso was talking about regarding a third-party game-developer-adjacent solution, wouldn't it be great if the consoles themselves came with some sort of built-in training modules to help new players adjust to the weirdness of a controller? The standard tutorials of "look up, look down, okay now go shoot 100 guys" don't seem to work well enough for a new player, as @exodus clearly pointed out. Imagine a set of well-tuned exercises that introduce concepts such as buttons, sticks, and triggers one at a time, and then in tandem. I mean, we don't expect every book to start by teaching the reader to read, do we? I imagine such a game/program exists somewhere, but I think it would be most beneficial if built into the software and explicitly shown to new players.
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@“esper”#p70805 How can a game’s soundtrack encourage gameplay? (13:45)
Celeste is definitely a good example since that music is so chill.
Also, Hades has incredible implementation of music. That quick guitar riff after you beat one of the furies at the end of the first area is great. Also, the ramp up of the music in the final boss gave me a real teeth-gritted, amped-up feeling. I complain about that game plenty, but the music is truly great. I think the soundtrack also has some variation when you play it with the difficulty modifiers (heat) that you can access after your first completed/beaten/cleared run. I didn't play much post game though
Also Supergiant's Transistor had great music as well and a really cool area where you could stare at a digital vista and play with a dog while listening to tracks.
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@“esper”#p70805 Rejj asks: What is the best video game manual you have read? (37:50)
I really like manuals for the art, but my favorite might be the Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring GBA game, which had original art, as well as some bits of lore that, as far as I know, line up with the deeper well of Tolkien stuff. That game is a somewhat interesting RPG that may be impossible to finish (I got hard-locked in the same room on at least 2 playthroughs), but it's release was right around the movies, even though it's not published by EA and is disconnected from the licensed movie games, which were action games.
Even though I never owned the physical game or manual, I'd like to shout out Fire Emblem Sacred Stones for having a detailed explanation of the class system that is not present in the game. The Virtual Console version includes a digital version of the manual, which is cool and should be in more digital products.
Just wanted to chime in on a different topic from this podcast and stick up for the double jump, or at least one specific implementation of it. I‘ve been playing Rogue Legacy 2 and it keeps the movement system from the first game largely intact, or at least I don’t remember any real changes since I played the first 9 years ago. I really like it, including the double jump.
The game starts you off with only a single dash, and fairly soon lets you dash in the air, but in both instances it is purely horizontal (ignoring a random character trait that will let you dash diagonally on some runs). The double jump then is a vital part of your character's vertical movement, along with a spin kick off of objects and even special objects that can reset your aor dash allowance. It keeps layering on from there with triple jumps and triple air dashes and who knows how high it goes by the end. Those jumps and dashes are all a little bit squishy and loose too, with arcs and length that changes depending on how long you hold down the buttons and plenty of lateral control while jumping. But at least now with the two jumps and two air dashes that I have, the game is great to play.
That's because the game focuses just as much on projectiles and combat as jumping from platform to platform. Almost every enemy is more than happy to barf out a variety of fireballs, arrows, or AOE magical explosions, all with different trajectories and properties. There are enough enemy projectiles that the game suggests turning off hit collision with the enemies themselves as the first recommended way to increase accessibility (which, to turn back to the main discussion in the thread, is a pretty robust menu! And maybe clashes with the jokey attitude the game has towards various disabilities by making them character traits!).
But the point is you need a very large amount of vertical mobility in order to deal with the projectile attacks. And I very much like having dashing be horizontal and double jumping vertical, because the difference in acceleration and adjustments possible between the two puts it right into the zone for me of hard enough to feel cool when you are doing it right and easy enough to where you get to feel cool quite a bunch of times!
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@“wickedcestus”#p71261 wouldn’t it be great if the consoles themselves came with some sort of built-in training modules to help new players adjust to the weirdness of a controller?
_Astro's Playroom_ is more than halfway there!
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@“wickedcestus”#p71261 the wacky big-ass controller that is the standard modern twin-stick-with-triggers video game controller
[Here's](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ax7f3JZJHSw) a pretty good example of that problem in action. Not just in a mechanical sense (it is amazing to think how many games ask us to be protagonist _and_ cameraperson simultaneously, and most of us here wouldn't blink), but also in a convention-knowledge sense: knowing the difference between an openable door and a scenery door, knowing that the red barrel will blow up, etc.
Games can assume a lot of knowledge - but when they do, it lets them move much faster in whatever other teaching they need to do (of the systems or of the world/story). What's the balance? A fool's question.
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@“Salloumi”#p71337 it is amazing to think how many games ask us to be protagonist and cameraperson simultaneously, and most of us here wouldn’t blink
I am one of those people who don’t play post-PS1/N64 3D games (unless it’s something I really really want to play like Yakuza/Judgement) because I’m incapable of working the camera with the right stick lol
yeah the dual analogue is the Great Filter of video games in my experience. I may have mentioned this here before, but every time there’s a WW2 COD my dad will buy it for 59.99 and bring it over because he wants to shoot nazis, then plays for like a half hour, totally incapable of the most basic movement. He’s been trying to figure out dual stick movement in 3D space for close to 20 years at this point. Just not possible, like trying to teach your dog to read
I mean, for a lot of third person games you don’t need to be super fluent at dual analog camera controls, especially if there’s lock-on. My friend who doesn’t usually play video games ended up beating Dark Souls for whatever reason, and she still plays it the exact same way I do: she stops the character whenever she wants to move the camera around.
Dual analog controls for first person games are extremely hard though, I think. It blows my mind when I watch my brother play Apex or Call of Duty, and he is just so adeptly looking all over the place while moving exactly where he wants to move, and is somehow able to actually aim and successfully shoot people. I don’t think I’ve ever gotten a single kill in a multiplayer FPS in my entire life, despite trying them quite a few times.
This might also be why Fortnite was/is so massively popular with kids (suggesting that it is perhaps more accessible): the battle royale format doesn’t require you to kill people to feel like you’re doing well — you just have to stay alive, which is a much more forgiving task in the motor reflexes department.
I feeeel like it‘s okay to keep the whole discussion in here? it hasn’t discouraged folks from voicing their thoughts on the rest of the episode, from what I can see.
@“Syzygy”#p71390 I specifically was trying not to frame it in a us vs them way, though what I wrote was probably still very tiresome lol
manuals: i really love the color profile of the included map in the US edition of link to the past, so much so that we framed it and hung it on our wall. it's basically all the colors i like in one image
[upl-image-preview url=https://i.imgur.com/KqgBOr7.jpeg]
(right next to our In This House We Never Run Out of Rings & Gotta Catch 'Em All sign of course)
someone mentioned tunic's manual above. i think i'm near the end of the game, so as a final verdict, assuming no big twist is coming...i completely don't get the function of the manual. you find pieces of the manual written about the game, in the game world. it's mostly written in the foreign script of the game world, but bits and pieces are in english, obviously to give you some idea of what's going on. but that puts it firmly in our world and not the game's?
it can't be both imo, so i just gotta chalk it up as one of the slickest bits of nostalgia bait i've encountered. it really is nice tho, there's bits of pen scrawl and little drawings in the margins, like you'd find if you were digging through a box of your old games in your parents' basement. if you zoom way in you can see staples in the fold.
just completely incoherent though as a storytelling device. it's actually a good example of the game's larger problem which is that it just feels like bits and pieces from other games that the dev liked, expertly taped together, but the seams are plainly visible and there's no thematic intent behind any one choice. souls' exact brand of difficulty where you are punished for impatience, estus flask, modernized link to the past color palette, cute animal player character, zelda-esque get the magical stones roadmap, breathy IDM soundtrack. just don't understand any of the broad-strokes design and aesthetic decisions, it's truly a grab bag
@“Syzygy”#p71400 the discussion wasn‘t seeking consensus, we were trying to narrow down what aspects of a game present barriers to access, and what is necessary design choice vs what accommodations are reasonable while keeping the essence intact. So I think it’s a different conversation than the one we've had here before
Agree with the suggestions made about the necessity to make games (especially big blockbuster ones) more accessible—I especially like the idea of third-party-developed, explicitly accessible versions of games. For most action games I‘d say just giving the player a couple sliders and “cheats” (some kind of skip function!) would go a long way, though I’m certain that's easier to imagine than it would be to impliment, and one solution may only apply to one genre, or one game.
The discussion has gotten away from a few particular points and I hope to annoy everyone by rewinding back to them
(replying to this comment because yeso brought it up but this isn't me sticking my greasy finger right on your shirt don't take it that way; furthermore a lot of what I go on to say here was likely assumed and therefore went unsaid, but just in case)
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@““I thought lethal weapon was safe…yeah.””#p71158 I get that there are games that are conceptually and narratively challenging in the way books are (named a couple earlier), but I’m not seeing how button pressing agility is part of that.
I agree it isn't all the time. Though going back to the language of _video games as aesthetic objects first and foremost_: the aesthetic of the thing is informed in part by how slippery or frictional it is to interact with, right? Of course the greater purpose of that object is not always served—perhaps even _rarely,_ though I wouldn't want to presume this based on my slim knowledge of Video Games as a body of work—is not always served by being more frictional. However, in the interest of providing a specific example of a difficult action game many of us have heard of whose purpose, at least for some people, is served by being (immediately, eventually) more frictional, or at least more complex on an button-pushing level: Devil May Cry. What is "the point" of Devil May Cry?
I don't think anyone having fun with Devil May Cry, no matter how they play it, is playing it "wrong." Let me say that emphatically, without any hint of approaching _buts_ or _howevers_ or asterisks or anything which might be construed as gatekeeping. There are many ways for a player to feel what Devil May Cry is aiming for, which, I think, is to make them feel _like_ the player character—someone who performs, at breakneck speed, impossibly complicated combat maneuvers with balletic grace (and having some guy shout Smokin' Sexy Style!!! in your ear while doing it). For me, the individual that I am, feeling like Dante or Nero or whoever in as near a 1:1 sense as possible, feeling the thrill that they visibly feel (in all those cutscenes) during a fight, means taking a long string of motions and mapping more of them to individual button presses and stick movements; this as opposed to the auto-combo mode, which requires fewer button presses to perform long series of flashy moves (which is available at all times and which, at least in DMC3, 4, and 5, doesn't explicitly lock out any of the game's content (though it does limit your score which is lamentable)). Auto-combo isn't a perfect or even great solution to many of the problems under the umbrella of accessibility but I hope it has allowed some people who wouldn't otherwise have been able to play enjoy one of these games.
I'm being too fussy about this. All I mean is I don't care about DMC because it gives me some kind of rush to know I did something hard that many other people didn't do, but because it demands that I perform, to the extent that I am able, skills I have spent time practicing; the feeling that trying as hard as you can to do something and end up doing it well feels good. Input complexity (resulting in higher difficulty) in a video game can be used to draw this feeling out from a player, though I suppose it depends on the context of the rest of the game to give a player an idea whether that complexity is meaningful to them. One function of accessibility options, as others have already pointed out and gone over in more meaningful detail, is to allow a player to adjust where the line of "trying as hard as you can" meets with a given game's design. Caring about accessibility needn't mean dismissing motor-skill-demanding-ness in concept, even if an incredible number of people online are loudly insufferable about it, even if many games have bad combat and bad puzzles and bad platforming which only get in the way of the good stuff.
—captain
Appendix -
[size=13]I argue with a friend of mine all the time about how I don't think FromSoft games would suffer for having main menu Easy Modes. He believes they would not have become what they are today without the formation of their fan community—true (in a broad chaos theory sense). He argues the difficulty/obtuseness contributed to the formation of that community—again true on some level. That easy modes in FromSoft games _going forward_ would wear away at their identity, something essential to their makeup—I disagree.
It's unfortunate that Souls games are always at the gravitational nexus of these discussions.
What I get out of Souls games is unrelated to and often at odds with their toughness, although I know some feel the same way about Souls or Sekiro or Bloodborne as I do about DMC. Team Ninja's Ninja Gaiden, I suspect, would for me fall in that DMC camp (haven't played it in a long time). Where would Nioh fall? Is Nioh "difficult"?
What accounts for "difficulty" in a puzzle game? How can one or another puzzle game be made more accessible? What is a "puzzle game"? I remember discussion somewhere once about The Witness related to difficulty, that puzzles which ||depend upon color and sound perception made the game inaccessible; a friend of mine with color blindness more severe than mine quit the game because of the offending puzzles, although I think she hated the rest of it anyway.|| In any case I think it's fine to be annoyed at the game for featuring puzzles designed that way, although I would argue _not being able to do all the puzzles_ gets to the heart of what that game means to me. Does that make it truly inaccessible? Or does that mean its meaning is different for different players in a way that is immediately discernible?
what I mean about video games being aesthetic objects foremost is that they provide audio, visual, and tactile impressions to the audience, and this is a primary value because even though there is often a raw, reducible game aspect (pressing buttons at the right time etc), it’s the desire for aesthetic experience that makes video games more than just idk minesweeper or say QTEs of just keyboard inputs with no sound or images around them.
So I’m thinking about accessibility in those terms.
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@“captain”#p71449 the aesthetic of the thing is informed in part by how slippery or frictional it is to interact with, right?
Yeah I think the question is how integrated this is vs how much is doing hard stuff in order to enjoy a sense of mastery for it’s own sake - which is fine of course, but the player threshold for this sense is subjective
And I think the souls games provoke conversation about this because they’re alternately extremely successful in tying all that together and very frustrating off the mark other times (at least in my opinion)
You can control what your IRA is invested in.
[https://www.npr.org/2022/01/11/1072207126/ethical-investing-with-esg-funds](https://)
Oh my first post on an Internet forum since 2006, was going to tweet this but you guys are always mentioning the forums. Probably don’t need to mention love the podcast.