this post was submitted on 27 Nov 2024
72 points (90.9% liked)
Asklemmy
44149 readers
1461 users here now
A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions
Search asklemmy ๐
If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!
- Open-ended question
- Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
- Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
- Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
- An actual topic of discussion
Looking for support?
Looking for a community?
- Lemmyverse: community search
- sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
- !lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities
~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Why wouldn't the developer want as many people as possible to buy the game though?
From a purely financial view, they don't. There's a reason why games have become as handholdy as possible. And one of the reasons why the Souls series stood out was because it went in a different direction.
Games used to be art and done for passion.
Having to include an "easy mode" in your game has powerful knock-on effects that change how normal and hard difficulties play too. Timings and quantities that would normally be finely tuned and hand-crafted suddenly need to be highly-variable and detract from the freedom of developing for just one difficulty.
That sounds like an entirely surmountable engineering problem.
It's not like games are being written in assembly any more.
It goes deeper than just simple engineering though. It affects tone and overarching game design. It is multiple extra dimensions that have to be considered across every aspect of the entire game. If it is done poorly, you get paper dolls on easy mode and damage sponges on hard and nothing of merit to compensate for these facts. The difficulty of the game goes from being genuine to artificial.
That's why you design for accessibility, and don't try to cram it in at the last moment. It's not actually difficult, it just requires engineering discipline.
There are also plenty of Dark Souls clones for people like you who demand nothing but punishment.
I don't need a game to be hard, I need it to be consistent and well thought-out. Animal Well for example is a rather easy game, but because it only has one difficulty, the developer was able to keep a very tight focus on the world and puzzle design. Everything is layered there, because they don't have to be containerized and sliced into pieces to account for adjustable difficulty settings.
Or they could have thought it out even better and included difficulty settings.
They have every right to ignore accessibility, but it will always limit their audience.
"artificial difficulty" is poorly defined. Most parts of a video game are artificial. You get 100 health and 5 healing potions? Well those numbers were just made up, and could easily have been 50 and 1, or 200 and 10. The boss takes 5 hits to defeat, or 10, or 3?
I think people say "artificial difficulty" when they mean "I don't like this", but that's not very useful for a discussion without digging deeper.
I've never made art (incl. games) with the intention of having as many people view it as possible. Many developers make games as a hobby rather than for mere profit, and some try to draw a compromise in the middle.
I know this doesn't apply as much to major well-known games created by professional game development companies, but there are other incentives guiding development beyond maximizing purchases.
And how many boutique niche Indy games made solely for their artistic merit have you played that actually had an easy mode?
There's a huge middle-ground between pure artistic pursuit and callous profit maximization.
Plenty of the bigger non-profit games (like FOSS games) have easy modes. I'm actually having a hard time trying to think of ones which don't. And I'd call them all niche and indie, made primarily for enjoyment over market interests. In games like STK, it's clear from the bug tracker and forum that the primary devs (passionate and experienced players) are trying to balance their intended experience against accessibility - if some of them just made the game how they think it should be played, it would be very different.