Honestly… I disagree. What is accessibility? Every souls game has been beaten with dance pads, rock band drum kits and guitars. They’re also frequently beaten by people with serious disabilities using specialized controllers. Input speed is not an issue here, Souls has always been about carefully choosing your moves to manage the end lag and stamina cost of your actions. It’s about making the right move, not about moving quickly or pressing a lot of buttons at once.
IMHO, accessibility is frequently cited as an excuse for lower difficulties here, when in reality the difficulty isn’t a serious part of the barrier for disabled players. It could use better accessibility options, like configurable colourblind modes, audio indicators, more configurable text size, some kind of clear colour indicators on attacks for low vision, but difficulty? No.
There are also lots of good reasons not to add explicit difficulty options, which is y’know, why From Soft haven’t done it yet.
That’s a fair argument then, but… this is literally what accessibility means, whether or not you can “access” the thing.
If someone isn’t willing to invest the time or frustration into Souls, then fair enough, but that’s a matter of priorities/convenience, not a matter of accessibility.
Also, frankly, the difficulty of Souls for regular people is insanely overblown. Stuff like “Prepare to Die” is just a marketing gimmick, and the games have become substantially easier and more flexible over time. Like in Elden Ring, where you can leave bosses for later, and can frequently just bypass them entirely, experiment with an insane variety of builds, use effective ways to grind ridiculous amounts of souls, and just generally become ridiculously powerful. They’ve done essentially everything but creating an explicit “easy mode” to make the game playable for as many people as possible. If you want an easy mode, basically every souls game has builds or guides that function as that easy mode.
Difficulty counts as an access barrier. You always have to consider that there are people who, for whatever reason, have a skill capacity that is lower than required for the game in question. And for those people the game will be inaccessible.
Time is also an accessibility factor. If a person with a disability or lower skill has to grind and extend the playtime for 3-4x what a normal player would have, that’s not inaccessible but it’s less accessible comparatively. Especially if that kills the fun.
That being said obviously these things can be tweaked within reason and the problem can’t be solved for every player unfortunately. And they don’t need to be. Some games can just be too hard for some players.
The ultimate point for me just seems to be that the community needs to be listened to. You shouldn’t ever be in the positions as a dev where you are telling disabled or low skill gamers to get good or no dice. If a large portion of people are saying “I’d love to enjoy the art you’ve made, but I can’t. My disability/inability is stopping me” then I’d change my approach.
I think there is a balance that can be struck, grinding is one of the balances and you’re right there are ways to make those games easier that way. But the other people are also right, the games need to be hard sometimes. I just want people to stop being dismissive of people who want to enjoy the same entertainment and art but can’t just because of difficulty.
Apologies in advance for the essay lol, Souls is one of my favourite franchises, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and talking about these games.
You always have to consider that there are people who, for whatever reason, have a skill capacity that is lower than required for the game in question.
I don’t think Souls requires any amount of skill beyond just… basic understanding of how to control a 3D character. They even tutorialize that, actually. Everyone starts somewhere, I personally got thrashed immediately after the tutorial in Dark Souls 1, and it took me hours to beat the first proper boss, with many deaths to regular enemies. Like any good video game, Souls teaches you the skills you need progressively, and gets gradually harder and asks more of the player over time. It’s not like just starting Guitar Hero on the highest difficulty, the game is balanced for anyone.
Time is also an accessibility factor.
I don’t actually think these games require an excessive time investment. Howlongtobeat puts Dark Souls Remastered’s Main Story at 30 hours. Even if you’re somehow spending 4x that time, that still only puts it at 120 hours, which isn’t unreasonable, lots of games have runtimes around that length.
I also take issue with the idea that you can consistently take 3-4x longer than most. In reality, you only get seriously walled a handful of times learning the game, and surpassing those tough challenges teaches you how to play. For example, in Sekiro, I got walled for hours on one of the games earliest minibosses, but once I got a solid enough grasp on the game to beat him, I wasn’t seriously walled like that again for several hours of gameplay. Getting stuck just means there are lessons you’re learning, and you tend to remember what you struggled hard to learn.
The ultimate point for me just seems to be that the community needs to be listened to.
A key part of developing anything for millions of people is that you have to learn what feedback to take and how to implement it properly. From Soft absolutely has listened to their community. First of all, there’s a vocal community that doesn’t want difficulties, which is what this whole post is joking about. I’d argue From Soft have done a phenomenal job of listening to their audience, and catering to the niche of people that want a tough, unyielding experience is how they’ve slowly built themselves into the multi-GotY juggernaut they are now.
But second of all, they’ve put a ton of effort into introducing ways to make the game easier. In Sekiro, if you’re hard stuck on a boss, tough luck, that game is mostly linear, and has key story moments that leave you no alternatives but to “git gud”. In Elden Ring, you can go elsewhere to learn the game more against a different boss, level up, and come back. In most cases, you don’t even need to come back. You can also explore different builds, respec your character, try a different weapon or spell or summon, summon a friend in multiplayer, go find more equipment, anything.
And personally, I really preferred Sekiro, it’s my favourite game they’ve ever made. I got stuck for hours on every key boss, and that game absolutely wiped the floor with me. It has barely any buildcraft, you truly do just have to “git gud”. And the purity of that experience really speaks to me and what I want out of a game. There’s no “questioning if I’m doing it wrong”, I just need to get in there and learn the required skills head on.
Ultimately, I’m really just tired of being villainized (not that your comment is doing that, to be clear) for wanting some games to pursue a single well-crafted and balanced hard experience that challenges me to push myself, when basically everything else on the market is pursuing the widest audience possible, with aggressive hints telling you how to do puzzles before you can even think, and several difficulty options that make things incredibly easy, at the cost of the harder difficulties usually being poorly balanced and uneven. I’m not going around saying every Mario game needs to be a Kaizo, with no way to tone it down, but it feels like many are coming to my favourite games and telling me they’re bad for being what I love.
Especially when I feel like From Soft is hitting that balance you’re talking about, and giving the player lots of options, but some people will seemingly just never be satisfied until they can choose “Easy” from the start screen. I don’t feel like me or From Soft is being dismissive when there are an abundance of accommodations and options to make things easier, you just need to actually engage with the game to use them.
I wanna play a game with story interspersed with fun action combat… not keen on dying a million tonnes until I learn the timings for each enemy in order to be able to defeat them and get the next bit of story. Soulslike games aren’t accessible to me.
I mean, Souls is accessible to you, it sounds like it just isn’t for you. There are tons of games that I wish were made in a way that I’d enjoy more, features I’ve disliked, etc. But in almost all of those cases, someone loves those features the way they are, as is.
Like, for example, I don’t love JRPG combat. I would love to play and enjoy Persona 5, but eh, I’m just not interested in investing in those systems to play that game. But that game is beloved, as is. I would never go petition Atlus to make Persona 6 into a Soulslike so that I “could” play it.
And that’s great, there are a ridiculous amount of great games coming out every year, far more than I or basically anyone but full-time streamers have the time to play. So just… go play what you like?
Trying to make games that are “for” everyone is how we end up with soulless bland titles like Ubisoft keeps pumping out. Good games have to take risks, and make interesting decisions that alienate some and engage others.
I enjoy souls games and I’m okay with their difficulty but I honestly don’t get how the possibility of an easy mode upsets so many people. It doesn’t require much development time, if any, to scale down enemies.
This isn’t like implementing something that doesn’t exist or that fundamentally changes the gameplay. Scaling already exists.
It has literally 0 impact on your experience and would allow others to enjoy the game as much as you do.
This isn’t like implementing something that doesn’t exist or that fundamentally changes the gameplay. Scaling already exists.
Scaling sounds like it’d work, but in actuality, these games are designed with tough mechanics that you really have to learn before they make things more difficult. Take Sekiro for example. The endgame bosses will absolutely bully you. I’m not sure even 10x damage and health would help you get past the final boss if you don’t know what you’re doing.
While playing through the game, I got stopped in my tracks several times, stuck on a boss for hours while I learned how to parry, manage my stamina, deal with perilous attacks, etc. If I had been given a massive power boost, it would’ve only delayed my being forced to learn. And then, later, a much tougher boss would’ve stopped me in my tracks anyway, and I would be so behind on learning that it might turn into an impossible wall. Suddenly your “easy mode” has a much rougher difficulty spike than normal.
And the games are full of things that aren’t made easier by just… scaling. Like managing deathblight, areas like Lake of Rot, stuff like the awkward parkour and areas where you have to play around not falling off. That stuff would have to be reworked to accommodate a player who hasn’t learned proper positioning, or blocks, or just… the general tools of mastering the gameplay.
Slapping a basic scale on the game is a poorly thought out approach that would do more harm than good. To do “easy” right, you’d want a proper balanced game, with reworked timings and boss movesets, and frankly, I don’t think it’s worth the effort and extra development time and cost.
It has literally 0 impact on your experience and would allow others to enjoy the game as much as you do.
Two things here.
A) Adding an easy mode actually would make the game worse for me. When I’m stuck on a hard boss, grinding attempts for hours, that isn’t immediately fun. It builds to a worthwhile payoff, which is why I love these games. But when you’re in it, an easy mode makes you feel like an idiot, wasting your own time suffering when you could walk right past at any moment. Except that lowering the difficulty to bypass something feels terrible, and also, puts you in the position I described above. It robs you of the satisfaction of conquering it and replaces that with guilt and feeling like you couldn’t do it.
B) Someone cruising through on Easy wouldn’t “enjoy the game as much as I do”. Engaging with, and mastering these mechanics is a huge part of what makes these games enjoyable. Skipping that side of the game, jumping past the difficulty robs you of the satisfaction of beating it.
Also, I think many people would enjoy the experience Souls offers, if they’re willing to give it a shot. One of my best friends used to play every game on easy, “why struggle when I could move on and see more of the game?”. He got into Dark Souls 1, and had a hell of a time with it. But because there wasn’t an easy mode, he persevered, and found he loved the stiff challenge and the payoff of beating a boss that really challenged him, and in finding mastery in the mechanics. He’s now a diehard, who’s done SL1 runs of many of the games, and usually starts new games on Hard these days. In a world where DS1 offered an easy mode, he never would’ve tried the designers intended experience, and Souls would’ve been just another decent action adventure.
Souls is offering a rare experience, with tons of alternatives that do offer an easier time. Why not let it shine and highlight what it does better than anyone else?
I don’t really think this is a good argument. Other games offer enjoyable experiences on normal difficulties and then offer a serious challenge by scaling up in higher difficulties. I remember original God of War (ps1 or ps2) was stupid easy on default difficulty and quite hard on the highest difficulty.
Your point 2) is just your biased view of the world, really. You think other people can’t enjoy something as much as you unless they do exactly as you. Different people like different things and it’s nice to have a choice. I don’t think gatekeeping game genres just because is a good thing.
Sure, lots of games offer high difficulties, but often, those aren’t nearly as good as game that’s tailored from the ground up to make that experience good in the way Souls is. Scaling Health and Damage makes things hard, but frequently just turns enemies tanky and slow to kill, or forces you to play the game super cautiously. That’s fine, and an easy to add option for diehard players, but it doesn’t hold a candle to what a game designer can accomplish when creating a bespoke experience. That’s what Souls is, and what has made it such a smashing success.
Also, I don’t think it’s just a biased worldview here. What you’re suggesting is just subtracting mechanical depth and mastery from the experience. It’s not like an easy mode would add anything to the game, it would only take my favourite things about it, and move you out of the carefully designed, bespoke experience into a crude imitation of it.
Your agency is taken away here for good reason, so that you don’t make the experience worse for yourself. If From Soft didn’t believe in the experience they’ve crafted, they would’ve added a simple scaling difficulty like you’re suggesting years ago, but the artists who make these games have consistently decided to resist the pressure and make the game they want to make.
In addition to the other comment, you can easily choose to make the game easy. The developers just ask that you pay attention. You can go explore and increase your level and improve your equipment to trivialize almost everything. If you choose the right gear, most bosses are very easy. You just want the victory handed to you, which is fine but that’s not the game they made. It’s totally OK to not like the game, but don’t pretend that’s the same thing as accessibility. You’re perfectly capable of completing the games. You just don’t want to. That’s cool. Go play any modern AAA that coddles you.
Honestly… I disagree. What is accessibility? Every souls game has been beaten with dance pads, rock band drum kits and guitars. They’re also frequently beaten by people with serious disabilities using specialized controllers. Input speed is not an issue here, Souls has always been about carefully choosing your moves to manage the end lag and stamina cost of your actions. It’s about making the right move, not about moving quickly or pressing a lot of buttons at once.
IMHO, accessibility is frequently cited as an excuse for lower difficulties here, when in reality the difficulty isn’t a serious part of the barrier for disabled players. It could use better accessibility options, like configurable colourblind modes, audio indicators, more configurable text size, some kind of clear colour indicators on attacks for low vision, but difficulty? No.
There are also lots of good reasons not to add explicit difficulty options, which is y’know, why From Soft haven’t done it yet.
Accessibility isn’t just a case of ‘accessible to the handicapped’, man.
That’s a fair argument then, but… this is literally what accessibility means, whether or not you can “access” the thing.
If someone isn’t willing to invest the time or frustration into Souls, then fair enough, but that’s a matter of priorities/convenience, not a matter of accessibility.
Also, frankly, the difficulty of Souls for regular people is insanely overblown. Stuff like “Prepare to Die” is just a marketing gimmick, and the games have become substantially easier and more flexible over time. Like in Elden Ring, where you can leave bosses for later, and can frequently just bypass them entirely, experiment with an insane variety of builds, use effective ways to grind ridiculous amounts of souls, and just generally become ridiculously powerful. They’ve done essentially everything but creating an explicit “easy mode” to make the game playable for as many people as possible. If you want an easy mode, basically every souls game has builds or guides that function as that easy mode.
Difficulty counts as an access barrier. You always have to consider that there are people who, for whatever reason, have a skill capacity that is lower than required for the game in question. And for those people the game will be inaccessible.
Time is also an accessibility factor. If a person with a disability or lower skill has to grind and extend the playtime for 3-4x what a normal player would have, that’s not inaccessible but it’s less accessible comparatively. Especially if that kills the fun.
That being said obviously these things can be tweaked within reason and the problem can’t be solved for every player unfortunately. And they don’t need to be. Some games can just be too hard for some players.
The ultimate point for me just seems to be that the community needs to be listened to. You shouldn’t ever be in the positions as a dev where you are telling disabled or low skill gamers to get good or no dice. If a large portion of people are saying “I’d love to enjoy the art you’ve made, but I can’t. My disability/inability is stopping me” then I’d change my approach.
I think there is a balance that can be struck, grinding is one of the balances and you’re right there are ways to make those games easier that way. But the other people are also right, the games need to be hard sometimes. I just want people to stop being dismissive of people who want to enjoy the same entertainment and art but can’t just because of difficulty.
Apologies in advance for the essay lol, Souls is one of my favourite franchises, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and talking about these games.
I don’t think Souls requires any amount of skill beyond just… basic understanding of how to control a 3D character. They even tutorialize that, actually. Everyone starts somewhere, I personally got thrashed immediately after the tutorial in Dark Souls 1, and it took me hours to beat the first proper boss, with many deaths to regular enemies. Like any good video game, Souls teaches you the skills you need progressively, and gets gradually harder and asks more of the player over time. It’s not like just starting Guitar Hero on the highest difficulty, the game is balanced for anyone.
I don’t actually think these games require an excessive time investment. Howlongtobeat puts Dark Souls Remastered’s Main Story at 30 hours. Even if you’re somehow spending 4x that time, that still only puts it at 120 hours, which isn’t unreasonable, lots of games have runtimes around that length.
I also take issue with the idea that you can consistently take 3-4x longer than most. In reality, you only get seriously walled a handful of times learning the game, and surpassing those tough challenges teaches you how to play. For example, in Sekiro, I got walled for hours on one of the games earliest minibosses, but once I got a solid enough grasp on the game to beat him, I wasn’t seriously walled like that again for several hours of gameplay. Getting stuck just means there are lessons you’re learning, and you tend to remember what you struggled hard to learn.
A key part of developing anything for millions of people is that you have to learn what feedback to take and how to implement it properly. From Soft absolutely has listened to their community. First of all, there’s a vocal community that doesn’t want difficulties, which is what this whole post is joking about. I’d argue From Soft have done a phenomenal job of listening to their audience, and catering to the niche of people that want a tough, unyielding experience is how they’ve slowly built themselves into the multi-GotY juggernaut they are now.
But second of all, they’ve put a ton of effort into introducing ways to make the game easier. In Sekiro, if you’re hard stuck on a boss, tough luck, that game is mostly linear, and has key story moments that leave you no alternatives but to “git gud”. In Elden Ring, you can go elsewhere to learn the game more against a different boss, level up, and come back. In most cases, you don’t even need to come back. You can also explore different builds, respec your character, try a different weapon or spell or summon, summon a friend in multiplayer, go find more equipment, anything.
And personally, I really preferred Sekiro, it’s my favourite game they’ve ever made. I got stuck for hours on every key boss, and that game absolutely wiped the floor with me. It has barely any buildcraft, you truly do just have to “git gud”. And the purity of that experience really speaks to me and what I want out of a game. There’s no “questioning if I’m doing it wrong”, I just need to get in there and learn the required skills head on.
Ultimately, I’m really just tired of being villainized (not that your comment is doing that, to be clear) for wanting some games to pursue a single well-crafted and balanced hard experience that challenges me to push myself, when basically everything else on the market is pursuing the widest audience possible, with aggressive hints telling you how to do puzzles before you can even think, and several difficulty options that make things incredibly easy, at the cost of the harder difficulties usually being poorly balanced and uneven. I’m not going around saying every Mario game needs to be a Kaizo, with no way to tone it down, but it feels like many are coming to my favourite games and telling me they’re bad for being what I love.
Especially when I feel like From Soft is hitting that balance you’re talking about, and giving the player lots of options, but some people will seemingly just never be satisfied until they can choose “Easy” from the start screen. I don’t feel like me or From Soft is being dismissive when there are an abundance of accommodations and options to make things easier, you just need to actually engage with the game to use them.
I wanna play a game with story interspersed with fun action combat… not keen on dying a million tonnes until I learn the timings for each enemy in order to be able to defeat them and get the next bit of story. Soulslike games aren’t accessible to me.
I mean, Souls is accessible to you, it sounds like it just isn’t for you. There are tons of games that I wish were made in a way that I’d enjoy more, features I’ve disliked, etc. But in almost all of those cases, someone loves those features the way they are, as is.
Like, for example, I don’t love JRPG combat. I would love to play and enjoy Persona 5, but eh, I’m just not interested in investing in those systems to play that game. But that game is beloved, as is. I would never go petition Atlus to make Persona 6 into a Soulslike so that I “could” play it.
And that’s great, there are a ridiculous amount of great games coming out every year, far more than I or basically anyone but full-time streamers have the time to play. So just… go play what you like?
Trying to make games that are “for” everyone is how we end up with soulless bland titles like Ubisoft keeps pumping out. Good games have to take risks, and make interesting decisions that alienate some and engage others.
I enjoy souls games and I’m okay with their difficulty but I honestly don’t get how the possibility of an easy mode upsets so many people. It doesn’t require much development time, if any, to scale down enemies.
This isn’t like implementing something that doesn’t exist or that fundamentally changes the gameplay. Scaling already exists.
It has literally 0 impact on your experience and would allow others to enjoy the game as much as you do.
Scaling sounds like it’d work, but in actuality, these games are designed with tough mechanics that you really have to learn before they make things more difficult. Take Sekiro for example. The endgame bosses will absolutely bully you. I’m not sure even 10x damage and health would help you get past the final boss if you don’t know what you’re doing.
While playing through the game, I got stopped in my tracks several times, stuck on a boss for hours while I learned how to parry, manage my stamina, deal with perilous attacks, etc. If I had been given a massive power boost, it would’ve only delayed my being forced to learn. And then, later, a much tougher boss would’ve stopped me in my tracks anyway, and I would be so behind on learning that it might turn into an impossible wall. Suddenly your “easy mode” has a much rougher difficulty spike than normal.
And the games are full of things that aren’t made easier by just… scaling. Like managing deathblight, areas like Lake of Rot, stuff like the awkward parkour and areas where you have to play around not falling off. That stuff would have to be reworked to accommodate a player who hasn’t learned proper positioning, or blocks, or just… the general tools of mastering the gameplay.
Slapping a basic scale on the game is a poorly thought out approach that would do more harm than good. To do “easy” right, you’d want a proper balanced game, with reworked timings and boss movesets, and frankly, I don’t think it’s worth the effort and extra development time and cost.
Two things here.
A) Adding an easy mode actually would make the game worse for me. When I’m stuck on a hard boss, grinding attempts for hours, that isn’t immediately fun. It builds to a worthwhile payoff, which is why I love these games. But when you’re in it, an easy mode makes you feel like an idiot, wasting your own time suffering when you could walk right past at any moment. Except that lowering the difficulty to bypass something feels terrible, and also, puts you in the position I described above. It robs you of the satisfaction of conquering it and replaces that with guilt and feeling like you couldn’t do it.
B) Someone cruising through on Easy wouldn’t “enjoy the game as much as I do”. Engaging with, and mastering these mechanics is a huge part of what makes these games enjoyable. Skipping that side of the game, jumping past the difficulty robs you of the satisfaction of beating it.
Also, I think many people would enjoy the experience Souls offers, if they’re willing to give it a shot. One of my best friends used to play every game on easy, “why struggle when I could move on and see more of the game?”. He got into Dark Souls 1, and had a hell of a time with it. But because there wasn’t an easy mode, he persevered, and found he loved the stiff challenge and the payoff of beating a boss that really challenged him, and in finding mastery in the mechanics. He’s now a diehard, who’s done SL1 runs of many of the games, and usually starts new games on Hard these days. In a world where DS1 offered an easy mode, he never would’ve tried the designers intended experience, and Souls would’ve been just another decent action adventure.
Souls is offering a rare experience, with tons of alternatives that do offer an easier time. Why not let it shine and highlight what it does better than anyone else?
I don’t really think this is a good argument. Other games offer enjoyable experiences on normal difficulties and then offer a serious challenge by scaling up in higher difficulties. I remember original God of War (ps1 or ps2) was stupid easy on default difficulty and quite hard on the highest difficulty.
Your point 2) is just your biased view of the world, really. You think other people can’t enjoy something as much as you unless they do exactly as you. Different people like different things and it’s nice to have a choice. I don’t think gatekeeping game genres just because is a good thing.
Sure, lots of games offer high difficulties, but often, those aren’t nearly as good as game that’s tailored from the ground up to make that experience good in the way Souls is. Scaling Health and Damage makes things hard, but frequently just turns enemies tanky and slow to kill, or forces you to play the game super cautiously. That’s fine, and an easy to add option for diehard players, but it doesn’t hold a candle to what a game designer can accomplish when creating a bespoke experience. That’s what Souls is, and what has made it such a smashing success.
Also, I don’t think it’s just a biased worldview here. What you’re suggesting is just subtracting mechanical depth and mastery from the experience. It’s not like an easy mode would add anything to the game, it would only take my favourite things about it, and move you out of the carefully designed, bespoke experience into a crude imitation of it.
Your agency is taken away here for good reason, so that you don’t make the experience worse for yourself. If From Soft didn’t believe in the experience they’ve crafted, they would’ve added a simple scaling difficulty like you’re suggesting years ago, but the artists who make these games have consistently decided to resist the pressure and make the game they want to make.
Exactly!!!
Not every game is made for you!
Don’t like the gameplay or the challenge, you are welcome to switch to something else.
Why do people expect everything to cater to their preferences?
In addition to the other comment, you can easily choose to make the game easy. The developers just ask that you pay attention. You can go explore and increase your level and improve your equipment to trivialize almost everything. If you choose the right gear, most bosses are very easy. You just want the victory handed to you, which is fine but that’s not the game they made. It’s totally OK to not like the game, but don’t pretend that’s the same thing as accessibility. You’re perfectly capable of completing the games. You just don’t want to. That’s cool. Go play any modern AAA that coddles you.