I wasn’t expecting this post to bring out this kind of animosity in people. Jesus fuckin’ christ.
Video games are not a public service, there is no such thing as a 100% universally enjoyed video game for a reason. It’s ok that there are different types of video games, folks, be them too hard or too easy for your tastes, it’s kind of stupid to throw these kinds of stones about it.
I mean, is every book supposed to be palatable to everyone? Are we all supposed to feel the exact same way about every piece of art? This is like being mad that Guardians of The Galaxy involved sci-fi and super heroes and wasn’t a WWII documentary because that’s what you’d have preferred to watch.
I like to relax when I play. My days of stressing out over games ended when I had stress in real life.
Reading this thread has re-confirmed that gatekeepers are a blight on humanity.
I will cheat in your sacred games and you can’t stop me. I’ll make my own rules. What are you gonna do about it, break into my house and steal my computer?
God: … I’ll make a game … random spawns … one life … no instructions … no directions … open world … play as you want
And your game difficulty is RNG.
… and you happen to spawn during a period when a game wide PVP session is happening
Sounds sick
Ah, may I introduce you to No Man’s Sky permadeath mode?
Which is unfortunately far easier than you’d think it is. I’ve gotten to the core in permadeath.
I’ve gotten to the core in permadeath.
Before or after you figured out the game?
I’ve had it sinse day one. I’ve had to refigure out the game many many times.
If you’ve never gotten it yet, get “Shattered Pixel Dungeon” on your phone. Completely free game. Most of what you speak of, and you’ll feel like you’ve really pulled some shit off after you beat it the first time.
If you beat it the first time.
My first win was around attempt number 45.
SPD is proof that I’m just bad at vidya. I’ve gotten to floor 10 once. There’s clearly come meta I am missing, but I’ve read strategy guides so I’m just kind of lost at this point.
It’s just fucking hard. All the random builds and bad guys. The best hint is to use small walls to your advantage and to sometimes run away and avoid creatures. After you die and die and die you start to learn how all the baddies move around. You can eventually get good. It took me 45 attempts to get my first win, but I had 10 more wins by attempt 70. I was hooked on that game hard for a while.
All game devs should be forced to play their own games all the way through.
Pathologic 2 Devs
My true desire was for this town to never have a direction or goal marker, not even once. It’s intellectually offensive. Who do you have to be thrust a map marker under a free person’s nose, saying "Here is your goal. You’re too lazy and stupid to figure it out on your own, and I am not without mercy towards lesser minds, so I’ll do the work for you. Go there. Go and don’t forget to thank me for choosing your goal for you. Love, The Powers That Be.
Oh you died? Here’s a debuff. Oh you thought you could save scum to get around the debuff? Ha! That debuff is on all your saves.
Why? We’re Russian devs. Life is brutual and hard and so should this game.
The director should have reasons for the difficulty of the game. Celeste is a Perfect example. It’s hard but it lets you learn and allows you to try again easily even if what you are doing is hard. Hard games that punish you and make you walk for 20-30 mins just so you can learn a few new moves the boss does can be incredibly frustrating. Many people who play these games eventually look at videos online to help after multiple tries because just “getting there” is extremely time consuming. A lot of games have normalized looking things up and that is disappointing as someone who would rather figure it out on my own. But wasting 30 mins to be killed in 2-3 hits from multiple stage bosses is not enjoyable IMHO.
This is the entire problem with modern gaming meta though. There basically is an assumption that people will look up the walkthrough, so you need to scale difficulty with that in mind.
I am like you, and this is a big part of why I’ve almost entirely stopped gaming. Either the game is too hard, or it has like 20 minutes of cir scenes per hour, or it requires an hour of supply grinding any time you pick it back up.
modern gaming meta
Like cyberpunk? The borderland series? Elder scrolls series? Expedition 33? Assassin’s Creed series? Tons more hyper popular games I’m not aware of because I play mostly arpgs too.
There’s plenty games that try to offer easier playthroughs, unless you wish for a game without easy mode but an easier baseline experience, in which case… Pokémon? The TLoZ games from Wii onwards? Idk, there’s plenty and plenty more I don’t know of.
I found expedition 33 to be difficult even in the story telling mode. It suggests a focus on the story, but you absolutely have to scale your characters correctly, learn boss fights patterns etc. I don’t like the fight gameplay (not my cup of tea), so I tried to avoid them, but I couldn’t progress past a certain point. Love the story and universe, but wish they’d made an even easier mode because I don’t want to spend time learning all the mechanics and combos etc.
Weird, I beat everything but the last optional superboss (Simon) in hard (the difficulty before max) and it’s not like I learnt character combos much. Yeah I did learn enemy movesets, sorta, but I always dodged, fuck the parry. Enemies did hit my characters a lot and almost half the turns were spent reviving them, but the revives recover post fight so it’s whatever.
I did reach a point where Maelle and Verso were so strong that enemies hardly got a turn though.
I put exactly 0 thought to the characters builds, so I know it’s my fault and I suspect it’s not that hard. But I literally have no interest in the combat system, so of course the game is not entirely made for me. However, this story mode shows that some devs don’t consider difficulty as a pre-requisite to enjoy their art.
Why not just watch a video of it on YouTube at that point?
Because the game is prettier/smoother running on my computer native res at 100fps, than watching compressed videos on YouTube.
Otherwise yeah I would have watched a play through instead.
Also going at your own pace and being free to explore the environment is more pleasant than watching someone do it for you
Maybe there’s a mod that autowins the battles for you if that’s something you would enjoy? If all you want from the game is the story and the art but go along at your own pace, so not game play videos, god mode cheats might give you what you want. I’m being 100% serious.
I’ll man up at some point and try to beat the game “fair”. But not a bad idea if I still get stuck to just cheat.
I love ULTRAKILL for many reasons, but this is one of them. I would never have completed the Prime Sanctums if I had to wait longer than 1 frame to reset to the checkpoint.
One can think of it just like about a fastfood joint. Two lines of coordinates: food and service, or user experience and mechanics. We do play clunky old games for their plot or shallow timekillers for their gameplay. Striking the right balance that is fitting your core audience is the goal. There, Kodjima thinks about better service, toning down mechanics so that everyone can eat their burger, while Miyadzaki serves artisan sets knowing their inaccessibility is a part of the deal for their niche audience.
Something a lot of people forget is that looking stuff up is not something normalised recently, older games tended to have a freaking manual that explained most bosses and areas, it even gave hints!
I get that you would prefer that, lucky there’s plenty games for both of us.
There were also printed game magazines with hints, walkthroughs and such.
It’s okay to look things up.
Fair point. I always associated those with the fact video games were relatively newer media at the time but you are correct. Some times they would give you maps and instructions.
Respectfully disagree with your stance (which is fine, as fushuan said, there’s games enough for all of us.) When I was younger and played more games, I would frequently look up how to get through them on GameFAQ. The joy wasn’t in figuring out puzzles, it was in getting to see the story unfolding.
And then there’s Yoko Taro, who instead opts for the emotional difficulty in his games
Just allow users to mod the game to whatever difficulty they want and don’t be dicks about it.
Devs get to stick to their original vision and gamers get to have whatever difficulty they actually want to make things fun for them.
Does anyone remember the devs of Diablo 3 saying that the internal team found the game difficulty is too high and then they doubled it.
It may be a difficult debate between accessibility, experience and artistic vision. Though considering how many games are made every year, I think we can have difficult games with no easy mode. People who don’t enjoy them or can’t play them can simply play the thousands of other games.
Don’t get me wrong. I’m all for accessibility. During my time in the video game industry, I personally paid great attention to options for colorblind people. Unfortunately, pretty much everything else was outside my scope. But it doesn’t make any sense to potentially ruin the entire work just so 3 more people on the planet will play it.
If a game is frustrating to play, but I enjoy the story - I watch a playthrough. If a game contains elements that I don’t like - it’s probably not a game for me, so I move on to other games. If I had some disability that made it very hard or impossible to play some games - okay, fair enough, that would genuinely suck. But again, I’d move on to other games.
Of course, it’s possible to add detailed difficulty settings, so that everyone can customize their experience. Mostly a great solution, if the team has the time and resources to implement it well, which isn’t always the case. However, it may still interfere with the artistic vision of the developers.
Some movies can cause epileptic seizures due to some of their scenes. Should the authors throw their vision and ideas out the window, because some people cannot safely watch the movie? I’d say no, because that would kind of ruin the whole point of artistic expression. I think we need to be able to depict and express all kinds and forms of art, even if some groups will be unable to experience them.
Maybe some time in the future we’ll be able to solve all of this easily and reliably (e.g., some kind of neuralink for people with various conditions). But as of right now, it seems to me that this is practically a non-issue. The impact is incredibly limited, while proposed solutions are either costly, unrealistic or straight up counterintuitive.
I’m going to make this point again because it went unnoticed due to the sheer amount of comments, but you wouldn’t complain about a Rubik’s cube or crossword puzzle being too hard or anything else designed to challenge you. I’d argue that without the difficulty of solving a Rubik’s cube that toy would be lost to time. The only reason it still exists today is because it was so hard to solve for children when it was released. Souls games are the same. The only reason we still talk about them and the only reason they gained the popularity that they did is because of the difficulty.
I remember distinctly picking up dark souls on sale on a whim before it started really entering mainstream discussion. The guy working at Gamestop warned me that people kept returning it because it was too hard. I took it home and played it and really learned the mechanics then I brought it to my friends to try. They learned the mechanics and since then we’ve had an unofficial race to see who can beat the newest FromSoft game fastest. It was the difficulty of the game that made it so addicting. Without that the game would be boring and no one would know what it was in 2025. If you don’t believe me install the easy mode mods and come back to let us know what your experience was like.
Yoshi P (FFXIV): “Yeah, the game was a huge cultural hit that grew more successful with each expansion, so I thought to myself… now that we’ve brought in millions upon millions of players, why not nerf all of the overworld content into absurdity to bring in maybe forty or fifty noobs? So I did. And then I changed all of the classes again once everyone had reached max level. Nobody liked that. So I thought… why not do it again?”
Zenimax (ESO): “So I just kind of made up whatever and then dialed the difficulty down to about a tenth of what it used to be. Now overworld content is on par with swinging an aluminum bat through a pile of packing peanuts. Also, the Second Era was filled with superhero sky ninjas with lava wings who rode around Tamriel upon lightning horses and mechanical spiders. Deal with it.”
I don’t think I’ve played a game with fairer difficulty options than Halo: CE. On the lowest difficulty, even your grandma with arthritis can beat it, and on the hardest it’s an actual challenge without making enemies infallibly accurate bullet sponges. But if you can’t do it that way, do it Michael Zaki’s way.
Try Nier Automata
You can install chips in your brain that automates gameplay features. Like getting your turret to shoot automatically, making you melee attack automatically when you are in range, dodge automatically, …
You can really customize your difficulty to the point that the game basically plays itself.
The only downside is that you miss out on using other cooler chip abilities.
Halo CE legendary was 100% an afterthought that Bungie threw a couple of multipliers in at the end because it makes like more than half of your potential loadout worthless lol.
It was still fun, but god damn was it borderline annoying like you’re playing a really unfair zombie survival game.
And then theres LASO lol
That’s for enthusiastic masochists. 😅
And then there is Expedition 33 which added the story mode so that Jennifer English could play it.
And some people STILL can’t beat it without parries.
Granted, I’m in Act 2 (Expert), and I think the ludicrous level factor into damage is to blame. The fact every other (mini)boss you fight is overlevelled, and just a few levels seem to be a 2-3x damage difference, is so stupid, I imagine someone running into 3 in a row and just giving up.
Someone on YouTube made their first playthrough an all-hit run without parries or dodges. On Expert. They had to grind a bit but made it work. I think the Curator fight where he teaches you jumping was the hardest because his damage scales with your level.
spoiler
They even beat Simon without one-shotting him. Impressive stuff.
It really proves that the game can be a normal JRPG, albeit a grindy one in the beginning.
It really proves that the game can be a normal JRPG, albeit a grindy one in the beginning.
It’s unrelated to difficulty, but, is it a good one though? Being grindy to me is generally a pretty terrible thing in a JRPG. Part of marketing for SMTV’s rerelease was nerfing the impact of level on damage, and basically everyone loved that.
I also don’t see many defensive options for the half of the game I’m at besides Maelle’s redirect, or maybe absurd defense/HP stacking, if defense even works.
I absolutely hate parry systems and cheated my way through it, although I lost interest once something spoilery happened to the main character you’ve been playing as.
I was actually optimistic, because I like Mario&Luigi, so these combat systems CAN work. The problem is, the parry systems in E33 are 80% of your success (if you don’t grind), yet are more shallow by comparison, and most of the depth is in the RPG parts that are just a supplement (unless you grind + play on easier difficulty settings, but it seems you need a Picto for AP on damage to let you have fun then)
Both Mario RPG and the M&L games have timing systems I don’t mind. They have pretty generous windows and don’t punish you too severely if you miss them. E33 was brutal on both fronts.
That’s also because M&L requires more attention to get the timing right. You need to look for cues who the attack will go to, see if you can jump on the attack or only over it, hold the dodge button rather than press, or multitask when both bros are being attacked. Or sometimes, DON’T jump, because you then take damage. The games are puzzle/action games with JRPG elements slapped in.
E33 is extremely telegraphed (barring the very rare jukes) so it needs to compensate with tight timing and erratic animations, requiring both higher skill + trial and error. Sometimes have to press another button, but you don’t even need to figure it out (I tried to jump some attacks because of Elden Ring habits lol), the enemy or whole screen telegraphs it. It’s a JRPG with action slapped in, at its core at least.
For another example, Deltarune and Undertale are basically action games too, but do a lot of stuff with their dodging, sometimes even switching genres to platformer/shooter etc.
I “cheat” in M&L by pressing A+B or Y+X at the same time so whichever brother the attack is going to will jump/hit it.
I didn’t mind Undertale and Deltarune’s systems, either. They usually utilized full movement rather than “press the button RIGHT NOW!!!”
Parries is why the game is fun imo
Without it you would just click abilities and win every time I guess. That’s something for someone too.
Some games I’d rather just take the game out of. Like expedition 33 I’d rather just be a TV show to be honest if your are making it that easy
- This goes for every JRPG: if clicking and winning is bad, how is chess popular? It’d just mean the RPG part isn’t balanced (or is not your type of game)
- Mario&Luigi, the only series close to this I’ve played, just does it way better, some dodges require holding, almost all include figuring out who to dodge with, different effects depending on when you jump etc. Parries in E33 come down to timing one button, and occasionally pressing the others with very clear telegraphs. And dodging seems barely more helpful
JRPGs live or die depending on how the combat works, so I think that first point is a little reductive.
Of course… You’d need to balance the game entirely different.
It’s just that the game is made for parries so if you take that out its kinda bland
If you’re an actress and your previous game was Elden Ring, I can see the appeal of trying to put a story mode into your contract.
