For those curious, the opening clip is from a terrible film called Tourist Trap that I watched this weekend. Weird moaning mannequins was like a big part of it. It's rubbish don't watch it.
i also hate hard modes that only opens when you finish the game, i lost my batman save game and had to play the normal again just to unlock the advanced again
Same on both of these I miss when there was a cheat code to unlock hard mode From the start. Want the second quest on Zelda 1 name yourself Zelda boom hard mode want a less Difficult to game Over mode in contra Konami code. Cheat codes are legitimate ways to play single player experiences. Video game Gatekeeping is stupid. That said easy mode and hard mode Behind paywalls is even stupider as is pay to win and elite level multiplayer Cosmetics probably shouldnt be rewards For Being a whale they should be awards For being really good at the game I have a feeling the people who get mad at easy modes in hard games think only skilled players deserve to see the ending. I wonder if they hate let’s players who beat sans so people who suck at undertale can see the genocide ending Did they get mad when Avgn started showing the victory screen of Nintendo hard games. So only people who Gitgud deserve To See the you won screen. I could never get past level 3 of Battletoads is it bad that I know what the levels Past that are because of Diabetes’s let’s play?
@@brandonporter8509 I wonder if it isn't that there are players who know that they're going to chose a easier path if it's available rather than try another 10-20 times and therefore doesn't want it to exist. Then I guess it's the fear that the balancing of other difficulty modes will take away resources (time/money) that could've been spent on bugfixes, polishing etc. But it's just a few guesses.
I was thinking that, if I could make a game, the easiest mode would at first appear to be the very hard mode. Like, it would be on the bottom of the list after the actual hardest difficulty, be called "Very Hard" or something like that, all to prove some sort of point and troll people going for the hardest difficulty.
I'd probably make one with a generic looking action star type guy and any time you walk into a room full of bad guys you press button and win and the bad guys just die in a mushroom cloud, people would eat it up
Hahaha. That is too good. Remember when games had cheat codes like unlimited ammo or god mode that would make games like Dark Souls actually accessible?
Here's my "easy mode": When I played WoW, the only way for me to play a healer was with an add-on. Some people don't like it because it didn't make me a "true healer" and others understood why I did it. It helped me actually see the party's health because the bars were bigger and clearer to see, and I wasn't staring at a quarter of my screen the entire time. That, and people not knowing their defensives or how to do mechanics meant me having an add-on saved their butts too many times to count. *It was a play style choice to make my game experience fun for me instead of more frustrating, because games are meant to be fun.*
This story in particular makes me laugh because my brother loves to regale me with stories from his WoW days. At one point, he and his roommate's PC was so bad they had to mod the game so the UI was outside of the game window, and the game window was like, the size of a GameBoy screen. And he was still an amazing healer. One of the best.
There won't actually be one. By then the HARDKORE GVMERZ will have been transformed into masses of squealing slithering entrails that live forever out of sheer transcendental spitefulness. The gaming industry will have overrun civilization, and all human endeavour and activity on a global scale will be geared towards a single dystopian "live service" that will bear a striking resemblance to Pong.
Sadly in 2022 the easy mode will only be available through day 1 DLC and you buy "gems of easing" in the microtransaction store that allow you to use it for a single twenty minute session.
is it time for the 2021 update or new edition of this vid? this vid should have a yearly edition, or more. it's still as urgent today as before if not more... now it's not only 'cause of difficulty, but just any QoL option, not only for accesibility or color blind peoplr, but just the mere fact of having some nice features or just some options in any game (say different resolutions, or simply a zoom or scaling option) has become a whole problematic controversial thing in some communities, also for indie titles, early access titles, any game!
@@absolstoryoffiction6615 hey dude, are you, like, okay? you keep posting about the "evils" of "sjws" in comment threads where nobody's talking about that. is something wrong?
Except, these days, especially in gaming, most time the way they enjoy their leisure time does actually affect the way i do. Since casuals buy into literally every shit practice the publishers get away with it and the games i play become more and more incomplete, in cases utter trash and that's not the only problem they have....
The last five minutes of this video perfectly crystallized (in a way I've never been quite able to articulate) the reason I play video games even though I have never considered myself to be particularly any "gud" at them. Challenge for its own sake has never been fulfilling for me. I play games because of the experience -- the combination of music, art and world design that makes me feel like I have left my living room and entered a world of monsters, soldiers, dragons, or even an alternate version of myself. For me, video games can be transformative in a way that others art forms cannot. I have mentally beaten myself up or years because I cannot memorize boss patterns or seem to land a jump in Super Mario brothers. Hearing Jim describe his own reasons for playing clicked for me in a way that I've never even considered. Thanks for this, Jim. It was definitely my aha! moment as a gaymer.
(TLDR; thank you for this comment, sorry for this ramble!) That is very well said! I was about to concur and write "I play for the story", but that's not exactly right: walking simulators tend to bore me without a strong premise to back them up, as do collectathons without the appropriate atmosphere. Conversely, I can spend literal hours replaying the same level, chasing the next bit of lore, intrigue, or making sure I've 100%ed a game I really like. As you pointed out, games have the power to engage the player in ways other art forms cannot (with ludonarrative dissonance, for instance...); and I'd happily walk through digital hell and back without a walkthrough for the chance to experience something memorable. As a girl playing a lot of video games, I'll admit "gitting gud" was somewhat part of my mentality growing up. I've felt the need to justify my investment more than once, as I was evolving -and still am, to a point- in an environment in which this was uncommon. (Not that it makes my attitude any less insufferable, but, you know? I quick to go on the defensive :D) I'm glad I realized what I truly enjoyed about gaming though, and I'm grateful for the variety of games and game discourse available today for allowing me that. PS: I know Jim has made a video about it already, but have you played Hypnospace Outlaw? It's really very good, and still haunting me a good month after completion. Seems to be in your ballpark!
That's a beautiful reason my friend and I'm glad you understand your reason to play. I'm on the inverse. Personally enjoy the challenge in my own time, and that's why i play fighting games honestly. Also as someone who's spent hours practicing combos for a character, don't beat yourself up cuz you don't think you can do it. With enough time anyone can do it, just look at professional fighting game players like BrolyLegs and Sven. Both of them are street fighter players. BrolyLegs Can't use his hands and uses his face to push buttons and work the joystick. and Sven is completely blind and uses the sound queues from character attacks to understand whats going on, on screen. These guys have disabilities that would prevent a lot of people from even considering playing games but they took it too the next level and play competitively in fighting games, and consistently win. You'd be surprised what grit will get you through.
absolutely. even as someone who loves arcade games I can fully agree with this. even a challenging game still has to convince on other levels as well. I wouldn't have played Cuphead or Hollow Knight if they wouldn't have convinced me with the art design.
I completely understand playing for the story.. however in my opinion what gave these games the edge was the difficulty. It was something you don't see so much nowadays. It was frustrating to learn but felt good once I got the grasp of it. It's not for everyone and I understand that... If the casuals really want to play for the story, I don't see why the developers can't put in a mode where you can't die. That why you get your cake and eat it too. It wont effect the rest of us who enjoy the difficulty. Then everyone is happy. You get your story and we get our difficulties... However I must ask, is there so few solid games with story that you had to come to these type of games to get it? Knowing they are maddening hard?
Someone should make a series of mods just named "gud" which provides a customized way to adjust the difficulty for notoriously difficult games. Then whenever people say "Get gud" to people that are struggling with a game, they'll be providing useful advice.
Actually there are two games, Rebel Galaxy and Space Rangers 2. In Rebel Galaxy, you choose the missions and these have dificulty acording to the equipment you have, from very easy to very hard, these rewards acording the dificult. These allow the player to adjust the dificulty, of the game in te way you want. In Space Rangers 2 you can adjust the dificulty from the text story quest, to the enemies, to the ground missions, to the pirates, you create the dificult. The same in several tropico games, you create the dificult. I can name startopia, whereyou adjust parametres to he dificulty. THe idea of adjusting parameters is not new theproblem is that today we dont have grey, or the games are easy or to fucking hard. Personaly i hate hard games, i want to have fun no chores
Game difficulty is just stupid in most games anyways. Heres what increasing the difficulty does 90% of the time. Increase enemy health, increase enemy damage. Boom increased difficulty.
I think the easy mode discussion might be another side effect of the increasing trend toward pop culture fandom as tribal identity. More and more people seem to be treating the entertainment that they enjoy as some sort of self defining personality trait. So if you find you enjoyed Dark Souls et al. and fancy yourself a "true" From Software fan, it's entirely possible that you've absorbed the narrative of the FS difficulty and baked it into your sense of self identity since you 'got gud" or whatever. If your sense of self identity is tied to that narrative, then I can see why you might find the idea of changing that narrative threatening. If it's possible to play the game on easy mode, then simply being a From Software gamer isn't the same sort of badge of honor or whatever. The problem with all this really lies in using a piece of pop culture triviality as a foundation to build your sense of self around. But as long as we are going to live in a society which encourages us to buy the latest bit of distraction and obsess over it rather than actually talking to each other about how miserable and dead we feel inside, I think this kind of thing is only going to continue.
But the community around FromSoftware games are like a family, everyone went through the exact same challenges and thats kinda cool when sharing experiences. Like you beat the boss this way, while I did it this other way but its the exact same boss we fought.
@@Krytern It IS fine. It's your fucking life, build your personality around whatever you want. Stop telling innocent, harmless people that they 'life' wrong
"I'm angry because someone is enjoying this single player game in a way I disagree with despite it having no effect on my own experience!" Also shoutouts from the Fire Emblem fandom!
You can still have cheat codes in video games though. The only difference is that since the PS1 era, cheat codes have become associated with separate accessories you need to purchase like GameShark, GameGenie, etc. Those still exist, even for the PS4. There is no "solution" to this debate. This debate is about people's ego, and any solution available cannot fill that void.
A guy i grew up with played more games than anyone i know. He was a gatekeeping type of guy too. One day, out of the blue in his late twenties, he had a stroke. Had to relearn how to move his body. Still can't feel half of it. Games accessibility suddenly became very important. The tune can change quite suddenly for any of us -- including those who scream and cry about the sanctity of gaming and they heresy of sharing games with filthy casuals. And even if you aren't met with sudden tragedy like the guy i mentioned, you WILL get old. Your health will decline in a multitude of ways. That elitism inevitably fucks over everyone. It's pointless. it's cruel. it makes no sense.
That's one hell of a tragedy. Goddamn. Hell, i'm in my mid 20s and already I can tell that i'm not doing as well as I would when i was still a teen; my reflexes have gone to shit and i can't do FPS games good anymore.
Never understood the Dark Souls argument … the game literally has an easy mode … I beat Ornstein and Smough by summoning someone better than me and letting them do all the work
Yes but Sekiro doesn't have any summoning because it would conflict with the narrative. The issue I have with Sekrio specifically is that any easy mode wouldn't be the same to implement as in other games, and would probably ruin the experience. It's not something like an FPS where you can just change damage numbers and call it a day, Sekiro is much more meticulously balanced. I don't take issue with other games having difficulty settings, but I believe it's a developer's choice, and the people asking for an easy mode specifically should really stop wasting their time and just watch a RUclips playthrough or something. The thing I most take issue with though is the over dramatization of the idea that playing these games with a mod or something robs you of part of the experience, as these games are designed with the difficulty in mind as part of the experience. I don't care if people do it, I just also agree with the idea that you are missing part of the experience. I played DS2 first, and did it entirely in co op. Then I went back and played DS1 solo, and playing these games solo is an entirely different experience that I wish people wouldn't be afraid to stick with.
@@marciamakesmusic I feel like by default: 1) Enemy health should be lower 2) They should have more cool down in between attacks. 3) Player health should be much higher. Any one of these would drastically improve the game.
@@marciamakesmusic I wasn't saying the game was bad. I just always think that enemies hit a bit too hard. It was just my opinion really, and the fact that the game gets praise does not refute any of my arguments at all. (Also, sorry that I am a month late in response. I forgot I commented this.) Edit: I don't mind the Snake Eyes mini boss, but the fact that she takes out (roughly) half of your health hitting you with the side of her gun is stupid.
@@HonsHon The enemies hit as hard as they should. For people who are bad at the game, a slight change in damage would not make much of a difference, and at high levels of play you're very rarely getting hit.
Slight tangent: I wish more developers of games with combat systems understood that difficulty can be more than just raising the enemies' health/lowering your health. The variable combat and puzzle difficulty in silent hill mentioned in the video is a good example of this, but I don't see this being done often enough imo.
Exactly, but that's also why difficulty shouldn't be lowered in those kinds of games. It defeats a lot of the difficulty of the puzzle as well as the actual combat by allowing you to explore puzzles leisurely. It inherently changes the way the game is played, and is not the same kind of experience. For some of these games, it's a negative, but for others it only changes it. To claim that the experience is identical is just ignoring how we play games
@thewerepyreking If we have different skill levels the experience is inherently different though. You clearing a puzzle in 5min that may take me an hour to beat, or vice-versa, *is* a different experience. If what you want is for every player to have the exact same experience you *need* to scale the difficulty to their skill level. But nobody wants to have the exact same experience. I may love to spend hours solving every single puzzle, while you may want to get through them as fast as possible, to reach some other part of the game that you find rewarding. In this case, the differing experiences we would have would actually make the same game more entertaining for *both* of us, instead of it being either-or. It’s an easy mistake to make; thinking that others have the exact same skill sets as you do, and that all they may need to beat a difficult challenge is enough determination, but that simply isn’t the case for many people.
Someone taking the elevator doesn't diminish me taking the stairs. My taking the ski lift doesn't diminish those who make the climb. In the end we all want the same thing from a game, to have fun with it.
This analogy doesn't make sense because you're missing a key point. If we're relating this to sekiro, You get the same achievement for climbing the stairs as you do for taking the elevator which doesn't make sense.
@@memebobs9011 I don't agree, I think the analogy is sound. In the comparison taking the stairs has a different personal gain than the escalator; it satisfies the needs of my hypothetical "stair-based exercise plan." This is analogous to the more rewarding experience of playing Sekiro at a well tuned difficulty, instead of on an easier mode that doesn't challenge the player appropriately. In both cases the better outcome for my hypothetical, personal, long-term goals is to do the activity that is more immediately demanding, rather than utilizing the less demanding, temptingly easy alternative. To your point specifically, while both methods take you to the top of the stairs, only walking up the stairs satisfies my personal desire to commit to my stair-based exercise goals. Likewise, both play styles take to the end of the game, but playing on an appropriate level of challenge instead of a much easier one (relatively speaking) results in two different experiences of differing personal value. Ultimately, the satirical jab of my comparison is the observation that this particular argument against easy mode is the same as asking dev's to fine tune their games' difficulty level to just your own skill level at the detriment to other players with little more reason than not wanting to have to (learn how to) exert the small amount of self control needed to play a game (or ascend stairs) in the way that is best for your own personal needs and abilities. If I was going to argue this point beyond the satirical jab, I'd probably next bring up the hypocrisy of denying significant accessibility options for a significant number of people for your own, far less significant accessibility request (so insignificant that it can hardly be called little more than convenience, rather than full blown accessibility).
@@extragarb My point is that you shouldn't be able to breeze through sekiro on an easy mode while obtaining the achievements that were specifically designed for their "normal" difficulty. Unless they put something in the game that made it to where achievements couldn't be earned in easy mode it just wouldn't make sense in terms of their design philosophy.
@@memebobs9011 Oh, I didn't realize you meant literal achievements! Yeah, if an easy mode was added, it would be fair to restructure which achievements appear for which criteria. It's certainly not unheard of for different levels of difficulty to have different achievements tied to them. That said, I think regulating the achievement economy isn't a big concern. I'd say making the game fundamentally accessible to a significant number of people is more important (for games with prohibitive challenge ratings like Sekiro). There are lots of simple ways to correct any impact accessibility implementation might have on the achievement economy.
So you're saying that there are many different aesthetics games can deliver on, and that people look for in a game!? WHAT A REVOLUTIONARY CONCEPT!!!!! XD
The only reason I don't think different difficulties in from games make sense is because all of the achievements are based on the single player experience. If you could pick an easy mode the achievements and trophies would be trivialized to the point where there would be no "prestige" in completing a from game.
@@DigitalDaydreams so there is no prestige in completing anything because it only matters if your world revolves around it. Video games are a sector of society. There will be prestige in completing anything to the fullest possible point. It's called dedication.
I like how you mentioned celeste, because celeste is a game that you can become invincible at anytime, and the game doesn’t bar you from getting anything with assist mode on. You can collect everything in the game and the game doesn’t care if you are or are not invincible. And it literally doesn’t detract from the experience at all.
I must say, the answer seems pretty clear to me: insecurity. People insecure in themselves latch on to "good at video games" as an identity trait, and that prestige doesn't mean as much if the game doesn't force others to struggle. Being good means nothing if there aren't people to lord it over.
And I honestly can’t imagine anything much more pathetic than grown adults basing their entire personality and sense of accomplishment around completing a game. Do they even hear themselves? I guess if you’re not accomplishing much else in life, you have to scratch up something to feel superior about.
It's kinda implicit now. FucKonami is written into the very DNA of the Jimquisition, and need only be highlighted when they do something newly egregious.
A rough list of games they've made in 2018 and 2019: 2018 Jikkyou Powerful Pro Baseball 2018 [ja] (Japan only) Mantis Burn Racing (physical format in Japan only) Metal Gear Survive Pro Evolution Soccer 2019 (Europe, Australia & North America) / Winning Eleven 2019 (Japan & Asia) Super Bomberman R Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner MARS (Europe, Australia & North America) / Anubis: Zone of The Enders MARS (Japan & Asia) 2019 Pro Evolution Soccer 2020 (Europe, Australia & North America) / Winning Eleven 2020 (Japan & Asia) That's where FucKonami went, they're barely in the game business anymore. Look up Jim's latest video on Konami, now that they're not really making games anymore they're... Kind of behaving more respectably than before... =/
Personally I love the challenge of overcoming hard games, I feel proud when I beat something seemingly impossible, but unless you're a gatekeeper why should it matter? If including an easy mode doesn't affect your prefered, 'authentic' experience of a game, and let's more people enjoy, then all the better. Divinity Original Sin 2, and even the Mass Effect series had options to make the combat a breeze if I remember.
Because maybe it affects the creator of the work? Did you or Jim consider that? I know Jim's not creative, but let's assume he was, and I demand a version of his video's where he edits out all the shitty jokes... B-but it's not affecting anyone else, right? Why won't he give me the easy-version of his video's, dammit!!
Hmm that's a good point that went over my head, you're probably right that this sort of thing can influence creators to 'pander to the masses'/ 'casualise' their games because it would get them more sales. In that case, its possible that there's the danger a game could lose like fan-favored features deemed too complex or whatever for people new to a series or something, and I'd be upset if they made the next Souls game super easy because of the discussion over Sekiro, but as long as they don't make the game built and balanced around 'casualisation', and that it would just an optional mode or whatever you could choose, then I think that would be acceptable. You made a good point though, I failed to see it like that.
Ah, I've missed Duke Amiel. He does a fine job of conveying the sheer arrogance of the people who insist that X particular circumstance (e.g. good at Cuphead or Dark Souls) means they are better than other people, and that those people need to be told so. I'm pretty good at Dark Souls, by the way. Hardly the best, but good enough to enjoy the games, which is all I think anyone can hope for. And if you don't like the game, or its difficulty, then that's perfectly alright and I hope you enjoy some other game or thing instead.^^
I've been playing Shin Megami Tensei IV recently. The game gives you the option to turn the game to an easier setting at any point after you've died twice. And being a Shin Megami Tensei game, you're lucky if you reach the first boss before dying twice. And I haven't touched it. I don't want to, because I tend to find the series has a good balance of difficulty versus frustration, with the random encounters being able to wipe the floor with you if you don't know what you're doing to be a key part of the series. But at the same time, I get why people play the games on easier difficulties. The game can be brutal, and not everybody has the time and patience to fuse the exact right team to get through a battle. At the same time I have a tendency to play hack and slash games on the easiest difficulty available, it just makes it easier for me with my clumsy hands.
I bought the infamous Devil May Cry 3 game for PS2 over a decade ago. It's known for being one of the hardest PS2 games ever in its original release, and as a kid, I did not know this. I still remember playing the first level about 3-4 times, rage quitting and NEVER touching it again. That game has been sitting on my shelf for like 14 years.
The heart of the matter is this: "I want to have what I like, but I don't want you to have what you like." This is what makes people say "There shouldn't be an easy mode". They want to have something to lord over others, i.e. "I can play through this game. You can't. That makes me better than you." ...When what they really should be doing is building up some sense of self-worth that's not anchored to something as ephemeral as relative skill at certain video games.^^
The Martial Lord of Loyalty They are not entitled to buy the game. If they buy the game, they'll have to respect what the game is trying to achieve and what type of audience it appeals to. Not every game has to be made for everyone.
@The Martial Lord of Loyalty That's a very lame analogy. Does buying musical instruments guarantees the owners to play notes that require skill?? No. They have to learn and put the time and effort.
@The Martial Lord of Loyalty Yes, it would be pretty daft to buy musical instruments without any intention to learn it, just like it'll be daft to buy FromSoft games without any intention of putting work into it. Easy Mode requires quite some amount of time as the developers will have to reshuffle game mechanics from scratch since difficulty is part of the game design and every thing that's in the game is revolved around that level of difficulty.
@The Martial Lord of Loyalty Sekiro will have to change alot of elements. First of all HP in Sekiro doesn't matter that much as depletion of posture leads to one shots. Making attacks slower would certainly matter but it could be for more or less. Slower attack animations can disturb the rythm of swordplay, so parrying would become more trickier. Only way to lower difficulty would be to change and adjust enemy A.I which takes quite a lot of time.
Finally, imagine not being good at a certain game, and feeling so entitled that you want to disregard the entire reason that game was created in the first place - to overcome challenges. But fuck the Devs ayy, because triple aaaaAaaaa gaming.
Challenge in videogames is like spiciness in food, it comes down to taste. If you underestimate how much you can handle, you might be missing out. And if you're only eating the hottest peppers or completing the most difficult games to show others how tough you are, you're probably at risk at getting yourself an ulcer.
Actually a pretty decent analogy ngl Similarly, there are some foods that just don't work without a certain degree of spice. It's part of the recipe, and the chef specifically cooked it to go well with this level of heat. But just as well there are a lot of foods that could easily be made blander for people with milder pallets without compromising the integrity of the dish, and the fact the guy next to you doesn't have as much spice as you do shouldn't impact your own enjoyment.
@@raymondthrone7197 Taking it even further, going for something way spicier than you can handle means that you won't be able to taste it at all through the heat and thus won't really be able to appreciate the finer details. There shouldn't be any shame in going for the two pepper rating instead of three.
If people don’t like challenges that’s okay. If they do that’s okay as well. but neither of them can attack the other for not being like them. this is common sense, we leaned this in the fourth grade.
The entire point of these pissing contests is to salve people's egos with the power of nosiness. People usually never learn that lesson, which is easy to observe by looking at the average homeowner's association.
Gamer Justice Warriors are notoriously hypocritical. They will argue that the artistic integrity of a game should be supported when censorship issues arise but will also complain that games should not have political statements in them when they disagree with the politics in a game thus challenging a game's artistic integrity. They'll pick whatever philosophy fits what they want at a particular moment and then drop it for another when they want something else.
You can apply that to just about anything, I remember this one feminist I ran into saying how games are all about the Male fantasy like skyrim because it's a power fantasy, yet when I mentioned games like dark souls which are emasculating, they want an easy mode, fucking pick one, but that's the futility in trying to please everyone, your not going to, so you might as well not
This argument literally works in the inverse as well. The same people who defend controversial (i.e. leftist) politics in games on the basis of artistic expression will turn around and feel entitled to be able to finish games that weren't made for them.
@@WhySoSerious55 Talking of cheats. I think IDDQD was the first cheat code on PC that I've ever used. The Konami Code (maybe Contra NES) was probably the first cheat I ever experienced. Anyway my opinion now is that do what ever makes the game more fun. Never cheat in multiplayer games though. That's just bullshit.
To your endcap, Jim: I play games for the escapism. If there's a challenge. Cool. If there isn't? Awesome. I like games where I can lose myself. Because the world is shit, it's filled with things that make me anxious and depressed to a debilitating level. Games can be an important escape that let me forget that. That's fucking magical.
Hell, personally speaking I liked Dark Souls but not for the difficulty. Once I got past its deliberately opaque interface I found it as hard as your typical Castlevania, albeit with much less interesting minions. What appealed to me about Dark Souls was the world itself. Castlevania was a huge inspiration on the Soulsborne games and the world of Dark Souls felt like if Dracula had won at the end of a Castlevania game, ruled in darkness, and then committed suicide out of apathy and boredom. It's such a unique world in gaming where it has a very unique vision of nihilism, purpose, and dread thag invites the player to think, or dare I even say it, *challenge* themselves in philosophically. Gazing upon the dying world and pondering on the idea of fate and meaning was way more interesting to me than an singular encounter.
DaVeganZombie same for me, I could care less about the difficulty I just want a world to fall into and enjoy. Games like Skyrim where there are many different difficulty’s, I never touched the difficulty and just played at default because I enjoyed the world
I recently had my literal 3 year old niece try playing some old Nintendo games and honestly, a zero difficulty "toddler mode" actually sounds brilliant for those scenarios. I can't see why that would be controversial.
It's up to the devs... Forcing them to choose... Politics have done better and more. In the end... Not everyone lives and some people die. It is a lesson to learn. Just as those who wine when they never even bought or played the game in the first place. "Life isn't fair... And some humans cannot handle grim realities..."
I'm only at 8:25 of the video, but so far it seems to me the arguments against easy modes is that it encroaches on the self-esteem of people who define their identity through video games. Who's only source of achievements is beating games, who game, not to have fun, but to substitute for actual meaningful life experiences. Anyone who plays "casually" (though 100% completing Witcher 3 even on easy mode isn't exactly a casual commitment) thus takes the honour that is meant for the good players and devalues their achievements. I suck at games. All of them. No matter how much I play them I never get better than "mediocre". Thus I can only play games that either have an easy mode or where my boyfriend can help me beat the Kayran so that I can finally save Temeria (he also beat the Draug for me). I play Path of Exile on easy mode by having a pure phys skeleton necromancer. I don't mind that I suck at the games because exactly 0% of my personal value depends on how well I play games. (I do, however, take pride in my ability to write item filters. Despite not being the programmer in the relationship I write the filters for us.) And I'll teach my 2 - 6 children that it doesn't matter if you suck, all that matters is that you're capable of playing the game with your friends and get to experience enough of it to be fun.
That's exactly the point. I mean I have over 500 hours on dark souls 3, but I still much prefer playing it with friends and co op, and thorouhgly feel invasions as a major annoyance, and thus I don't feel bad for having summons etc. sadly I often get so much flak for the idea, as "invasions are punishment for playing with phantoms", like it playing the game like I want needs to be punished
@@HoneyDoll894 SO many game communities have this sickness where, if you think one aspect of the game is stupid, they immediately tell you to play something else and that this game obviously isn't for you. It's the same with Final Fantasy XIV. I complained that 144€ a year are way too much money for a regular MMO, no matter how good the support is. But immediately I was accused of not even liking the game and wanting the programmers to starve. I actually am very open to paying the developers, I am not open to paying the CEO's tenth Porsche. Oh and that time I complained that the fight mechanics were super boring and repetitive (it's essentially the same two buttons over and over at level 15), obviously the same reaction. Until one sane soul eventually told me that the combat mechanics get interesting at roughly lvl 80 and that they suck at low levels now because they kept changing the game balance over the years in order to serve the endgame.
@@notpointed Here's my suggestion: Games should have Dark Souls difficulty. Hide OP loot somewhere on the map, like the Drake Sword. Normal players would not see it as an insult to their intelligence, and people who are having a hard time can google it or find it accidentally. That way, the bosses don't become easier for easy mode, but you become stronger in a way that makes sense in the game. Like Castlevania SotN, where you could crouch in a corner behind a hidden wall for 10 seconds, and it would give you weapons that do 2x the damage you do at that point in the game. This is the ideal way to handle difficulty, and is why Dark Souls can be completed by even the most casual of players as long as they have the courage to play the game in its entirety.
@@gu3z185 Why would an easy mode insult anyone's intelligence? And even with the drake sword Dark Souls is too hard for me so I can never play it. Which has nothing to do with my intelligence, so no idea why people feel that's at stake here.
Ego plays a role in literally every single human accomplishment, whether it be running a marathon, or having a high-status career, or sleeping with lots of people. People always look for ways to differentiate themselves from others
@Jason Voorhees he does his job which is running his jimquisition show on RUclips and voices his own opinions on the gaming industry. If you don’t like what he’s doing then why are you here then?
You say that, but the fact that so few of these games exist and only come out every few years only highlights how entitled those complaining about difficulty are. They have SO many other games they could be playing.
Generally speaking I play games on hard mode, I enjoy the challenge, learning from my mistakes and all that. That's also why I love fighting games. Some people don't, they want a nice cruise through the game while enjoying its many fun qualities without painful deaths. That's fine, that doesn't affect me in any way, do what you want it's your life, there's no reason for me to care.
I'm pro-challenge but also pro-easy mode, and accessibility options are a must. My only concern is the design of an easy mode somehow compromising the hard mode. (It shouldn't, but it's possible that they fundamentally design the entire game in a simplified way. I think it's perfectly possible to cater to both crowds and make both happy.) I'd also encourage people to try pushing themselves as far as they can go. It's all up to you and sometimes we just wanna relax, but I never thought I'd be a challenge seaker until I tried Doom 2016 on "Ultra-Violence" mode. Now I'm hooked on that high. It's a great conversation all around! I want more people to play more games :)
@@RacingSnails64 yeah a lot of difficulty settings are just lazily slapped on out of obligation, rather than implemented in a way that improves the game. you know the type: hard is +50% enemy health, easy is -50% health. sure, it technically makes the game more difficult, but they're usually balance where you have the choice between the game being pathetically easy or just turning it into a bullet spongy slog. difficulty options can be good, but designers have an obligation to adapt their game to the best way possible instead of just making it an afterthought.
If a Dev wants to add an easy mode into THEIR GAME then let them. If a Dev does not want to add an easy mode into their game then THEY DONT HAVE TO!!!!!!!
Exactly! I remember (and liked) the old days where you could play the game on Easy, but then the game would end before the final levels, and/or instead of the ending, you got a message that says "Now beat the game on a higher difficulty setting!"
The Fapologist no I want beacuse I’m not a kid I just won’t buy that game that’s not for me not everything has to be for me I’m not a self entitled little shit that’s needs everting to be made for me
Imagine being so entitled that you accuse developers of being problematic for not catering to your specific skill level. It would be like chastising an author for using SAT words you're unfamiliar with. It's insane. Not every game has to be for you.
I don't want (hard) games in general to become easier but I'm not against an easy mode or people using mods to make the experience easier, whatever makes that person have the most enjoyment.
Dank Johnson exactly. Those people have paid for their copy of that game, they can play it however they want and find entertainment in what they want. We all want single player games, so we can have our own experiences , yet arguments about other peoples playthroughs are had. It is stupid.
What's easy for one person could be hard for another, so having an easy mode won't detract from the experience for anybody. People shouldn't have to go out of their way to mod a game to make it accessible and enjoyable.
@Orga777 When game journalists can't even get past a tutorial level, I agree. Beyond that though, I feel they can be not that good at video games and it is still OK. Besides, it might just be they aren't good at a particular type of game, like I've died on 1-1 in Mario, yet load up Ace Combat or Midnight Club and I'll beat the game on hard with the starting vehicle!
My two favourite games of all time are Ecco the Dolphin and Ecco: The Tides of Time. They're notorious for being piss-hard, and there's even a funny tweet from series creator Ed Annunziata admiting that, yeah, they made it hard because rentals were a thing and they didn't want people beating the games in a weekend. But them being hard isn't why I remember them. Not the main reason. The main reason is that they're timeless, unique, strange stories that look into what it might be like to be a dolphin, expressed through the medium of a 2D Genesis game and steadily going off the rails into bizarre sci fi stuff. The music is haunting and beautiful, the writing is poetic, the first game starts out as 'dolphin loses family in a storm' and progresses to 'dolphin goes back in time to be given superpowers by a psychic DNA strand so he can fight the aliens who stole his family' in the first one and all the way through 'your time travel in the first game broke the timestream, now fix it' in the second one. I remember them for sparking a lifelong appreciation of cetaceans. And yeah, I'm proud of myself for beating the first game without cheats or savestates, but that's just it. I'm proud of MYSELF. And this was years, YEAAAAAARS after I first got into the series. I always turned on godmode when I played as a kid and enjoyed zooming around the levels and experiencing the story. Anyone who comes to Ecco that way, or through watching a Let's Play? Please come on down and be in the fandom! We're lonely! Being more into the fandom side of games - like, write fanfic, draw fanart, come up with meta - has always been a kind of weird experience, because that kind of creativity is so looked down on by the Get Gud types. Like if more people enjoy the game, more people are gonna make beautiful things based on it. Isn't that a net positive? tl;dr I very agree with that outro, and play more Ecco the Dolphin please
Royston: "Shall I feed you the red or the white grapes, m'lord?" *sighs and speaks to himself* "The young master just experienced a hollow victory of his own, methinks..."
@@absolstoryoffiction6615 More like "There are options and game modes in this game that I don't like or want to play, DELETE THEM YOU ****** ********** **** ****** **** **!", because critique of a game is one thing, Anthem comes readily to mind, and inane demands that the company change their game to fit you and only you is something else.
This was interesting. I thought he was talking to me most the time but I realized like 3 mins in I just like hard games. I would never be upset there was an easy mode tho, these people exist? I guess everyone will get upset about something.
His comment section when he was originally talking about that Starfox game was just pure hazardous waste. I didn't agree with fellow Dark Souls/hardcore gamers then, and I still don't now. I grew up with videogames, and hard as shit videogames, Devil May Cry is the one that always reminds me of this argument. Real quick summary to anyone not familar, Devil May Cry had a game mode called easy automatic that was offered if you died 3 or more times in the first level, and it basically made combos easier, made you fire faster and all the enemies were generally easier, the didn't do certain moves, etc. That was the only way I could play DMC at the time, but because that mode was there I was able to sink my teeth into it and enjoy every minute of it and have been a ravenous fan ever since. I came back to the game last year with the remaster, and honestly the Phantom boss was just merciless, even with Dark Souls under my belt and a full decade+ more experience at gaming, that fight was hard as hell. Also, to the gitgud crowd, DSP beat every single one of those games and Sekiro, and he's legit the worst "hardcore" gamer I've ever seen. You can blunt force trauma your way through all of those games, they just won't be fun. We should be fighting gross monetization, not difficulty settings.
Just like people exist who are upset that the game doesnt have an easy mode and that "Sekiro is disrespecting them". Not sure why Jim posted comments from RANDOM trolls on the internet rather than the article that started this whole conversation in the first place. The problem is on both sides and I agree with Jim on the matter but just show both sides.
Take it from me. I'm shit at SoulsBorne, my motor impairments are pretty valid reasons for my playing Souls and Sekiro on PC with trainers - there's a bar I just can't clear, purely physically - but I've met elitist knobs who outright insulted me for playing privately on my own damn consoles. I've said it before and I'll say it again: people who get upset over difficulty tiers in games strike me as under-achievers. When you're dissatisfied with your life and find solace in demanding games, anyone confronting the same challenge with various degrees of assistance will strike you as a personal slight. It is, after all, the one thing that brings you a sense of completion. I don't give a shit, personally. I play games to have fun. If getting my groove in Sekiro means I use a trainer to Godmode my way through Ashina on my first playthrough because I just can't time my parries right, then that's what it means. If I could and if the skill ceiling were something I could break through, I wouldn't use it. Again - disabled gamer, here.
@@McSquiddington But but but.....what about my hArDCoRe gaMER feewings? You hurt them now. :( Now I can never overcompensate for my lack of personality and general toxic character traits again by telling random people online they are horrible human beings for playing a game that they bought the way they choose to.
@@RedFloyd469 Yeah, no shit. I always roll my eyes at shit like this. I'd maybe understand if SoulsBorne games operated on shared instances and trainer users blew past content right in front of Vanilla players, but these are all fundamentally asynchronous games. It's all just useless ego bruising and a waste of energy on the part of the Git Gud crowd. Like, seriously. If my evening out the difficulty curve makes me a casual, hand me the fucking meme t-shirt and get it over with. I'll wear it the same way Nolan North and Troy Baker wear Filthy Casual tees - and that's an actual clothing brand.
Sekiro does have modifies in it to make it even harder and I think there's even some boss fights tied to the harder difficulty that you wouldn't encounter without it. I don't know how far they go with rewarding you for that as I haven't tried them myself but I think most gamers that play From Software games would agree that learning how to defeat the game's challenges is its own reward.
In brief: those who demand that games do not include an easy mode would dread that a random person could achieve the same recompense than them, being able to say that they finished the game, with much less effort than they did in the first place, as if their toil (and the worth they gained through it) became a waste of time just by the fact that an easier route existed...
This is what Achievements should be for. You ONLY get that special gold stamp if you've beaten the game properly. Other games (Terraria) should immediately turn off achievements for multiplayer, because kids cheat on MP, and use item glitches and other cheaty things hunting for achievements they did not earn. Having cake AND eating it...what an idea
I don't think many people are arguing that games should not have difficulty modes. I think people are annoyed at difficulty modes because it devolves the gameplay experience if you're gonna be lazy with it. Here's what I mean by that: Dark Souls 1 had poise. You could face-tank a boss with Havel's and beat it easily, no timing, no dodging, nothing. Obviously people will be pissed, because the bosses of a game SHOULD BE HARD, it's what sets them apart from other enemies. Hollow Knight had this problem when there was Quickslash 1.0 in the game. You could mash X on any boss, and basically instakill them with the right charm layouts. People hated it because it ruined good bosses. When you use the same strategy for Gwyn as you used on Artorias that you used on Kalameet, the bosses blend and become indistinguishable. THIS IS FINE. Have this in games! Make it so that IF YOU WANT, you can go to some secret spot in the game, pick up Gigachad armor 10000, and instakill bosses. Helps the easy players out, it has never affected the normal players. This is how difficulty should be done. The game should make you feel smart for finding the Gigachad armor, and the game should make you feel stoic for not using it. It's a win win. That's my story. Thanks.
Yes, that whole debacle about driving assist. All the tryhards insisting that it would allow you to win races without even touching the controllar, and then Jim posted a video showing it couldn't even handle a race on _easy mode._
I just hated that the option was on by default (and never told you it was on so I had to notice it in a race to actually play the game I wanted to play) and the only way to turn it off was to press start during a race and press a button for a somewhat vague icon representing it.
The teenagers and young adults i do support work for, who all have disabilities such as Cerebral Palsy, sure love the "journalists want to destroy gaming by including a subgroup that doesn't deserve consideration" rhetoric. Bemusingly, over time CheatEngine has proven a core part of my support worker skillset.
I was always annoyed by the video that came out of the disabled gamer beating Sekiro. Yes, it's great that he wasn't affected by his disability, but to use him, solely him, as a single unit sample 'group' to prove that accessibility isn't necessary, always bugged me.
I know I’m late to the conversation but I’m not against more accessibility or customisation I just think that some games don’t need to have a easy mode
@@DantesInferno96 People who are working full-time and have a family might not _be able to_ invest more than a handful of hours every weekend. And hey, if you don't want those people playing your games, that's fine, but then don't complain when developers instead make games that those people _do_ play, because they're easier to pick up.
@@rolfs2165 that is fine, then. You can play Minecraft and other low effort, easy to play games. Candy Crush is a popular choice amongst middle aged people.
That's just a click baity article, though. The article written merely to stoke outrage and rile people up in order to garner attention for itself is a separate matter. Frankly, it's funny how easily manipulated the fun-police are. Easy mode is fine. Or no easy mode and a game that lets you approach things in different ways or gives you other ways to customise the experience for yourself. I think that the biggest issue is still in how the From games are marketed. Yeah, they can be hard, but mostly they're really no harder or easier than a lot of other games. Usually they only portray themselves as "hard" by having a somewhat oppressive atmosphere or (in some past games) needlessly omitting certain longstanding gaming conveniences like pause. If the games hadn't been marketed as hard, I don't think there'd be any real talk about the difficulty. Maybe some of the obtuse storytelling (for better or worse) or the visuals and level design. But difficulty? Kind of a minor thing, overall that gives a lot of people the wrong impression. _Truly_ difficult games can be a total pain in the ass and usually aren't worth playing unless you hate your free time. But From games that claim to be difficult are usually just a bit time consuming _at certain choke points._
I will give you that one. But you don’t go to a KKK member for racial equality. Some people make terrible representatives for an arguement. If this video had been the article published, the “easy mode” discussion would be much more constructive than it currently is.
In my opinion? If a game doesn't have an easy mode, then that means its standard difficulty is how it is meant to be played. If a game has an easy mode, it's like how Bayonetta handles it. To experience the story more or less uninterrupted. That said, using a cheat? I'd be a hypocrite if I said that's scummy, considering how I play Final Fantasy IX.
"how it is meant to be played" Yeah but that doesn't matter. The devs have an experience in mind. But they can't replicate that experience with everybody because some people are too good and some people are not good enough (there's also a frustration threshold to take into account), so the normal mode is not "how it's intended to be played" it's "how it will work the best for the majority of the audience" But the simple fact that they added a hard mode prove that being able to customize your difficulty will in fact help getting the optimal experience for people with different skill level: In the case of the various hard modes (and there are plenty), they're here to get people with high skill the same experience as people with average skill. Exactly in the same way, there should be an easy mode for people with low skill to get that similar experience too. Similar difficulty =/= similar experience because people are not the same.
I still think the best option is a clearly labeled *_Assist Mode_* like in games such as Celeste, with a clear, firm disclaimer saying what it is _("This is not the way it's meant to be played, it's only meant for people who otherwise really don't enjoy the game or can't play it properly.")._
What about people identifying as an "apache helicopter"? /s EDIT: Can't believe i have to spell it out... Captain Obvious, everyone who does is being sarcastic... Just like i was when writing that statement i think you should wait until you hear what they have to say, even if it's bullshit and you don't agree... not like they'll change your mind if you don't want to.
@@TheBEstAltair Run away from those people too, in case they have a knife. Or just because I know exactly what they're going to say, and i'm not wasting my time on them.
I tried playing Sekiro for a week. It harmed me, gave me stress. Literally a year later a friend told me about the easy mod. I'm now playing and having fun doing so. I'm working on a master's degree, that's plenty difficult. I don't want that on my video games too
A gaming journalist couldn't get good and so he whined about the take being too hard, instead of reviewing the game like they should have, except they can't review what they can't play.
@@Jdeadevil And once again my opinion on humanity drops a little more... If I didn't love the things I do about the Internet I would have stopped using it years ago and gone back to the library. Anyway thanks for the answers and best of luck you.
@@nofriendzjustaname9337 And once again my opinion on humanity drops a little more... If I didn't love the things I do about the Internet I would have stopped using it years ago and gone back to the library. Anyway thanks for the answers and best of luck you.
@@SeasoningTheObese What a waste... That people defend them. Just like SJWs. "Every Game should have an Easy Mode." = "Every game should have DIVERSITY of characters from women to wamen."
I am a firm believer that we wouldn't be having this conversation if it weren't for click baiting writers grandstanding in their headlines about what a company "needs" to do, or how they self-righteously cheat in a game. Nobody really believes modding a game is morally wrong or that the color blind need to be punished for their disability. But the headline isn't "Let's make accessibility features an industry standard so everyone can git gud!" or "Let's all integrate full mod support for a fun individualised experience!". Let's not blame the hormone-addled teens and socially impaired hardcore fans for their anger and hyperbole at calculated provocations. Let's blame the muck rakers who choose to stand in the way of a meaningful conversation for a quick buck.
Basically. No body cares if someone has to cheat to beat a game, but boasting about it as if it's an achievement is obviously not going to impress anyone with their head on right.
prdalien0 I believe you’re both wrong. People do care. Remember the latest Mario Kart having an easy mode? Some people were absolutely furious. While headlines telling devs what to do are certainly not helping, it’s hardly the only issue.
@@LordAJ12345 I don't remember but there's clearly a difference between a game like mario kart and sekiro. MK is a party game, it's intended to be casual from the ground up. And I don't mean casual in a bad way, but the devs want anyone playing mario kart to just pick up a controller and be able to play. From want their games to be learnt.
This Here, The true discussion should be about accessibility features in games not game difficulty, Keymapping, mod support and colourblind modes should be the minimum for games
this is a discussion born and fueled by the marketing and content created around the games that are in the discussion saying "i cheated sekiro to beat it because i couldn't beat it normally (there are many reasons that one might not beat a game other than skill)/ because it was pretty fun" is okay but the people who actively demand (like that ludicrous article by forbes saying that sekiro "disrespects it's players" by not having an easy mode") stuff like that are just shit-stirring for the sake of getting hate-views then there's also the marketing as jim said, is dark souls hard? i mean yeah i guess you can say it's hard though that's very subjective, but the marketing for dark souls was basically "sadism simulator 2011", which is both inaccurate and also shit-stirring
I just had a chill when I imagined the AAA publishers selling games with hard-coded difficulty level and selling different difficulty levels separately or as DLC. Brrrrrrrr!
Its ridiculous how blown up this subject gets. One person I kept up with that was discussing it only mentioned Sekiro as it was a recently released game. Their entire point was about games that have little to no accessibility options (like controller support, remapping buttons, etc) and how to get developers more on board with adding such features, and it was instantly warped into: "get gud, scrub. Dis game isn't supposed ta be ez. Da gams vision would be ruined!" The conversation had nothing to do with difficulty (even though multiple difficulty settings can make a game more *accessible*), again, that's just what people warped it into.
I have a different take on this subject. This desire to exclude the 'casuals' is actually a reflection of the 'hardcore' gamers' own fear of exclusion. Before Dark Souls, the obsession with appealing to everyone meant that games became easier and more approachable, and those who wanted hard games weren't actually marketed to as much as after Dark Souls. I think that this 'get gud casul' attitude is actually rooted in a fear of returning to a market that ignores niche gamers entirely. The rise of EA and Activision and all of the other AAA giants has corresponded with a general exclusion of niche markets, and it's easy to draw an 'us or them' mentality from that. My own opinion on the subject is that the ultimate arbiter of an easy mode or not should fall to devs, the only ones capable of really knowing if it meshes with their design vision.
Some games just literally can't get an easy mode either, like online games - an example being how arena shooters are notoriously hard for beginners and that's mainly why they're barely played by anyone today.
I think you just summed up all of my fears regarding easy mode. It always begins like this, when a great series becomes mainstream. It could mean that future games would be made with the casual mass market in mind, and the niche hardcore gamer be just an afterthought.
It's also worth noting that when a huge crowd is asking for easy modes, there are no hardcore gamer groups coming for casual games and demanding a "hard mode" to make specific games more enjoyable for them. Without the likes of Dark Souls these people might easily run out of challenging stuff to play - and nobody else seems to really care about them as customers. No wonder they want to keep some of their bastions intact.
Very good video! One thing I want to touch on is the idea that you don't care if an easy mode exists or not: you did an excellent job tying it to being like an accessibility issue so that certain other people can enjoy the game as well as anyone else, and if that's the case, then not caring about whether or not those people can enjoy the game is, I think quite literally, sociopathic. I think the best response is to want very much for difficulty settings to exist for those who need them, even if you don't. And because we should care about those people, we should encourage developers to do what they can to be as inclusive as possible whenever possible. Because we should care about and empathize with people, even in the abstract. An indifferent, uncaring stance on the presence of options that allow people to have as much fun with a game as anyone else is clearly amoral, at best.
On a much smaller scale, this happened with the newer Fire Emblems. They added the option of Casual mode where if a non-critical unit is defeated during battle, they retreat to tend their wounds for the rest of that map. Afterwords, they'll be available again. Nintendo did this because they wanted to reintroduce the series to a wider audience and reinvigorate the franchise. And I'm glad they did! More people playing a game I like means it's more likely to receive continual development! Back when I had way more time on my hands, I didn't use casual mode. The game that introduced it, Awakening, has your character in the position of a tactician and in the game they laud you on how well you've done so far. I wanted to feel like "the genius tactician" so I played again and again until I could get through the game without using a unit and with as few resets as possible. But now that I'm playing through the game again, I'm so glad for casual mode. I just want to re-experience the story and the characters and having perma-death off lets me enjoy the game without min/maxing nearly so much. Later on, the franchise received a third mode, Phoenix mode, where if a unit was defeated in battle, another unit would need to go assist them and give them a pick-me-up and they would resume the battle right then and there. (And to me, it sounds exactly like when in RPGs we use the equivalents of Phoenix Downs or Resurrection Scrolls, etc.). Twice, I've had a friend who didn't want to play the game because they felt bad when they let a unit die by accident. Phoenix Mode let them enjoy the game a lot more than they would have, if they even played at all. Plus, it's easy to justify in my mind that this would be acceptable in game as well since it's all about armies of bonafide heroes running around being heroic. Of course they'd have their universe's equivalent of Resurrect on hand en masse. This also got touched on in another game series I love called X-Com. In the re-imaginings of the old games, you can enable a mode called Ironman Mode to make it so you can't save scum and any death/injury is permanent. And that's cool that it's an option. Hell, there's even a Bronze man mode now where if something happened that you didn't expect, you restart the mission instead either save scumming or having to accept what happened. (And in games as full of bugs as the re-imagined X-Coms, this is definitely a good idea). ADDING MORE CHOICES, MORE VARIETY, AND MORE ACCESSIBILITY TO GAMES YOU ENJOY IS A GOOD THING! IT LETS MORE PEOPLE PLAY AND MORE PEOPLE PLAYING AND GETTING INVESTED IN A GAME YOU LOVE MEANS YOU'RE MUCH MORE LIKELY TO SEE MORE OF THAT GAME AND FRANCHISE. Why is something like that so frickin' hard to understand?
Huh, turns out I was always playing on Bronzeman Mode just by self-enforcing the rules. ...and by self-enforcing the rules, I mean... I've played Enemy Unknown/Within a _lot_ and I somehow never even realised you _could_ savescum during a mission in the default mode. Also, yeah, a fine choice as a game to love - once you know the basics but before you've learned all the tricks, I've never played another game that's close to as good as the Strategic layer of that game at constantly making you feel like you're one more urgent matter away from being overwhelmed (as I say, as long as you've got the basics down)... but you've almost always put out one fire just before the next one ignites. It's a _phenomenal_ piece of game balance to pull off. As for the Tactical layer - what is there to say about it beyond, "don't try to use your Heavies' or MEC Troopers' primary weapons - it's a recipe for being driven mad by the RNG. Heavies do Suppressing Fire and, in a pinch, blow things to bits with their rocket launchers, MEC Troopers are great at a lot of things but, if you want them to do damage, their optional punch attack does a really solid amount and _can't miss -_ the sweetest two and a third words in the English language." You learn those things, you stop being driven mad by misses because the game is good at onboarding you to play-styles for Snipers and Assaults that give you 100% chances to hit (and if your Support hits something during a turn in which they had nothing better to do but shoot something, that's just gravy), the combat becomes fun beyond believe.
My thought on the matter are complicated, because it's a complex issue. Now, obviously greater accessibility is always a good thing. Also obviously, no game *needs* to include an easy mode. These are two truths essential to preface and frame the rest of the discussion. The question which arises from them thus is: "in what scenario would (or could) the presence of an easy mode do enough damage to overcome the benefit of greater accessibility?" And that's a non-trivial question. The knee-jerk reaction of "there is no such scenario because you don't have to play on easy" isn't actually sufficient. For one: a poorly telegraphed easy mode. The more options a game gives you for what game you're going to be playing, the more obscured the developer's intended vision becomes. If the game doesn't clearly state "this is the way we intended the game to be played. Use other options only if you think you need to" then people can end up giving themselves a sub-par experience without realizing it. *I* might end up giving myself a sub-par experience, since I rarely play on the hardest difficulty on a first run because I assume it's not the intended difficulty. Celeste, paragon of game design that it is, provides a perfect example of signposting with its assist mode. Now, that's all well and good, but that's assuming some degree of incompetence on the developer's part. Why can't we just say "all games should have an easy mode, just properly signpost"? Well, implementing an easy mode takes time. The more time is spend creating and properly balancing an easier difficulty, the less time is spent on the intended difficulty. Creating a good experience for everybody isn't a bad thing, but it's not strictly better than creating a great experience for some people. The less time is spent on the easy mode, the more important signposting becomes and the less people using the easy mode will enjoy it. Still, these two on their own probably aren't worth the removal of an easy mode entirely. The remaining two points are rather specific to Fromsoft games, and are what tip the scales for me on those counts. First: if the point of the game is high difficulty, allowing an easy way out can be detrimental to the atmosphere. When I was playing through Dark Souls 1 the only reason I was able to get past the hardest bosses was because I knew there was no other way. Artorias especially, since there are no npc summons for that fight and by the time I was playing no players were putting their signs in that area. That oppressive atmosphere would have been notably diminished if I knew that I had the option of an easy mode, even if it would mean starting a new character. If that's never happened to Jim then hey, good for Jim. Maybe it never happened to anybody else in the world, in which case good for everybody else in the world. But it happened to me. My experience would have been worse. This isn't as much of a thing in Sekiro though, since the difficulty isn't really part of the narrative there and the atmosphere is overall way less oppressive. Second: it creates inconsistencies in the community. Fromsoft games have always benefited greatly from the community that forms around them. Much of that is thanks to the shared struggle, which wouldn't necessarily be diminished by an easy mode because those using it would probably be doing so to achieve equivalent struggle, but a strong backbone of that is that everybody knows that everybody else faced the exact same challenges. They didn't all have the same amount of difficulty with each one, but any discussion of those difficulties is within the framework that they fought the exact same boss that did the exact same damage and had the exact same health. Creating multiple versions of the game that could be people's first experience diminishes that. It's actually one of the reasons why Dark Souls 2 discourse isn't as interesting to me: Scholar of the First Sin completely re-worked enemy placements, so discussions between people who played different versions have a lot less common ground. And also if anyone is going to say "wouldn't the game being accessible make the community better because so many more people could take part?" No. A larger community is not inherently a better one. It's not inherently worse either, I'm not claiming that "the casuals would ruin our perfect walled garden," but if a larger community comes at the expense of something that made the community so appealing in the first place then it's probably better off as it is. These are also why mods that make games easier don't really come into play. They're obviously not part of the intended experience, didn't take any developer time to create, and it's exceedingly rare for people to use mods their first time through a game. And it's not like any of these are reasons the games would be *ruined* by an easy mode. They wouldn't be. They would still be phenomenal games. But they would be worse games, at least for myself and people like me, who I assume exist.
Thank you oh so very much for this mini-essay. It is exactly the kind of thing I want to hear about in this discussion that is too often boiled down to one side or the other of 'games should all have easy modes' or 'games don't need to cater to everyone'. I personally lean more towards the importance of developer intent when it comes to difficulty, but I can also appreciate the importance of the player's experience of that difficulty and how they deal with it. Like you said, it is a complicated topic, one that could be fascinating to discuss, if people would just calm the hell down and stop taking the other side's arguments as personal attacks. Oh, and certain people _stop with the personal attacks_ as well. That shit solves nothing and only makes discourse more difficult.
Thomas Jenkins I disagree about accessibility. A lot of the time it’s just a matter of supporting alternate button mapping and custom controllers. From Software is actually fantastic about accessibility. A man beat Sekiro with only his breath because he is quadriplegic.
I think this attitude is a symptom of our hellish modern culture. Young people are given fewer opportunities to get a real education, a real career, a real avenue of growth as an individual with their own actual real world skillsets. They're expected to participate in an unfulfilling service industry job or some kind of "gig economy" pseudo-contractor bullshit that offers no prospects for the future either in career advancement or growth as a human being. Even if you get a decent education and somehow aren't crushed under debt, you'll probably wind up working a bullshit job because bullshit jobs are just about all the labor market is offering anyone anymore. As such, we've got a large population of young men whose only outlet to express their self improvement and growth is through getting good at videogames. Anything that can be perceived as devaluing the sole achievement they're allowed to have in life is viewed as a personal attack.
I think I know what it's going to be, from the tags, as a disabled person, I'm intrigued (not that I wouldn't eat up the Jimquisition every week) EDIT after watching: Oh, cool, he DID mention disabled people being used as props in the argument (this goes both ways btw) but yeah I basically agree with everything else too
It's almost like "neckbeards" doesn't actually describe real people and it's just a generic insult that can be applied to anyone, while girls, who don't have beards on their necks, can also be hardcore gamers.
@@AusSP This completely ignores the point that there are way more *actual* neckbeards there though. You can yell idiot at any crowd but if you yell it at a group of mentally disabled people it's quite a different story from using it to insult just anyone
Yeah, I thought "neckbeards" have generally been the shut-in nerds that are often hardcore gamers? They're trying to use it the opposite way now it seems like.
To this day I don't know what neckbeard means other than the literal meaning of course. It's also a stupid thing to call people as an insult where arsehole is perfectly fine. So I will never go out of my way to learn it's filthy casual meaning.
I can only explain this as people applying PvP logic to PvE games. Easy, medium and hard aren't levels you have to climb to get to the top, but modes of engagement. It's like being strong: if you need to piss on weaker people, you're missing the point. "being stronger" is a shit attitude, "being strong" is above that shit.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with developers adding an easy mode or whatever, there is however something wrong about people claiming it's disrespectful of the developers not to add it.
Ben Richards I don't know, I tried pyromancy and I feel like magic is more powerful (but I play as a sorcerer so maybe that's normal, I guess pyromancy is better if you don't want to base your character around it...). But yeah, Dark Souls already has several "easy modes" that make the game more fun.
Kutlu Mızrak I like Dark Souls and I want to finish it, but I’m such a huge coward that I don’t dare entering new areas because I know I’ll be ambushed by freaky monsters... I had to listen to happy music in my phone just to break the terrifying atmosphere of the New Londo ruins. It was hillarious to explore a dark cave full of ghosts while Elvis was playing in the background.
@MrPicas - Oh, you'll want to use a few of those cursed bones or whatever if you're going to New Londo. They let you hit the ghosts, and you can get a few of 'em from a corpse in a large pot near the bridge leading into that whole area. None of which, of course, is the least bit obvious until you get Stockholm Syndrome and start thinking like the game designers.
Why do we play games? That's an interesting question... I play games for a lot of different reasons, but the games I enjoy the most are the ones that let me create my own characters and stories. It's why I love RPGs and MMORPGs, but also games like The Sims and the LEGO videogames... Basically I'm sold to a game with a good character creator.
People's love for character creators in some games has always been interesting to me. I've seen people dismiss Sekiro because it doesn't have a character creator like in Bloodborne or Dark Souls. It's just weird to me since you pretty much immediately cover your character with armor and never see their face again (of course some helmets show the face). In games like Monster Hunter you can choose to hide your helmet so you can always see the face and hair etc. so it does make more sense. Though I can see the complaint of not having armor customizability in Sekiro since that's something you actually see all the time. Not having those options doesn't personally bother me at all. It's cool to have them but on the other hand playing a dedicated character like Sekiro or Geralt in the Witcher series makes the story much more interesting to me.
@@zemrood I don't understand how people could completely dismiss a game because there's no character creator. It happened with Nioh too, probably many games. I can understand wanting to create your own character, but, like you say, games that have a story almost always benefit so much more from a dedicated character. I hate silent protagonists that just stand there and occasionally you have to pick a dialogue option or nothing at all. The immersion is completely gone at that point.
MrPicas Well a games main purpose is to entertain players right. And players can find entertainment in any game if they want to. But the player can also decide whether they are entertained or not. For me story is a huge deal, that is where I find my entertainment in games. At the end of the day, YOU are buying the game and YOU are playing, it is useless to argue about how someone else is playing it, especially if that game is a single player game.
The main reason sekiro was disappointing: I can't be a titty ninja instead of just some dude. His name is "the wolf" FFS, why does he have to be a static character? Also no dressup, what the fuck
@@PurpletridentYou find immersion in playing a dedicated character while I personally feel off when I've got a Commander Shepard and I see that his story is not my own, neither are his choices and in no way is he an avatar of myself. I feel way more immersed when it's my own character and my own silent dialogue options that I can voice in my head. I'd rather have no voice at all then a voice that isn't my own or the one I wouldn't imagine being on my character. In Fallout 4 it was quite a bummer for me since Fallout games have always been about the silent immersion and while FO4 let me create my own character it didn't let me change the voice and that really pissed me off, I didn't want to hear the guy or pick the streamlined 4 pretty much the same dialogue options ever. Fortunately, I modded the Voice out and changed the dialogue wheel to a bar to make it more like the previous games for my own fitting. And yet again, this is just how I enjoy my video games, if somebody likes FO4, whatever. I just don't and I would like the game much less if I didn't have the option with mods.
There’s a very distinct difference between people wanting an easy mode and people wanting accessibility options. I understand the argument of authorial intent, but I genuinely feel adding accessibility options for those who may need them wouldn’t affect the core game for players that choose not to tweak them.
@@vinx.909 Not always, though. And the wording of wanting an easy mode I think skews the argument into a different conversation. It's assuming people just want the game to be easy, rather than _easier_ in certain aspects. Tweaking the window of opportunity on parries, for example, is a different way to tweak overall difficulty than making the player just flat out deal more damage and take less, which is what a lot of 'easy' difficulty options tend to do.
@@thegameneededme5 what you are describing isn't really a difference between accessibility and difficulty but instead between different forms of difficulty. many games just install a damage modifier to the players damage input and output which works but also very lazy and doesn't affect the games difficulty but instead just how forgiving it is. other games allow you to actually tweak stuff which is a way nicer and better form of difficulty that allows a much wider range of people to get an experience much more like they want it.
“Git Gud at dealing with different difficulty modes” lmao 😂 that’s probably the best thing I have ever heard and I really relate to that thing where the games offer to turn down the difficulty I’m like no game I don’t need your pity I will figure it out lol
I buy games for pure enjoyment, not competition! I have a full time job and children so I obviously don't want to spend my time grinding through every game I buy.
Yeah, I think that's totally valid. There's just a contingent of people who believe the universe revolves around them and their need for validation through "difficult video games", and any loss of their privilege is an affront to their elitist world view and a shock to their apparently fragile egos. Having to _select_ Hard Mode from the main menu is just too much for their delicate constitutions to bear. It's... too difficult for them.
Right? I love that there are both easy games and hard games. I get to choose what to play depending on my mood and people who only like one or the other have something to play, no matter who they are... Everyone should be happy but no where there are humans there are idiots.
I am in the same position as you Ohknock, but I have the opposite problem. I can't stand games that have low challenge to them. I get bored of them quickly. So the only games I do buy I do want to be challenging so that I don't get bored with them. I don't do it for validation or achievements, or anything like that, I just want to be challenged. @@Caitlin_TheGreatAnd to the argument of just select hard mode, that is not valid in 95% of games. The vast majority of the time hard modes are just more HP sponge, or you take more damage. I can't think of a game in the last decade where hard mode did something fundamentally different to the games play. The souls games are difficult in the design of them. Unlike games from way back that were coin crunchers or such, which were difficult as a method of making them longer. Now don't get me wrong. I'm perfectly ok with Sekiro and souls games in general having an easy mode, I just don't see why they are required. If they had them, thats great! I genuinely want people to play these games and have fun! But very few games have this style of difficulty. Where difficulty is baked into the design process itself.
@@DomSithe your point is kinda contradict, sir. You see, challenges in game would make you fail at some try, the failure will incite you to try and retry to overcome errors, retrying means you have to spend more dedication which has same concept as addiction (to do better). But you don't have all the time right? what im saying is; it is okay to give up on hard games, it is not a shame to say the fuckin game is too hard. Gamers have a blockheaded pride when it came to a genre of "hey i can do that part easily while you struggle". In the end you have a tendency to sacrifice enjoyment for pride. "if it's not fun, why bother?" -Reggie
@@Caitlin_TheGreat Aren't the people demanding sekiro be changed because it didn't suit them, the entitled babies who think the universe revolves around them? I mean, if it's too hard for you, just play a different game. You're not entitled to has be every game cater to you after all right?
@@oldm9228 true, even something like model building has its small share of gatekeepers, with "snap builders" being decried as not being "real modelers." It's really annoying for anyone trying to get into new hobbies to be constantly reminded that these activities "aren't for them."
I typically play a game once for the fun, then if I really liked it, again for the challenge. I don’t have the patience to play a game for the challenge the first time through
![Noob To Max With DRAGON REWORK In Blox Fruits [FULL MOVIE]](http://i.ytimg.com/vi/LnBMOinoOvA/mqdefault.jpg)
For those curious, the opening clip is from a terrible film called Tourist Trap that I watched this weekend. Weird moaning mannequins was like a big part of it. It's rubbish don't watch it.
Thanks, mate. Thanks for that.
don't tell me what to do
I could have gone my whole life without seeing that
Sounded like the messengers from Bloodborne.
Fuck the FromSoftware fanbase. They are now officially the worst fanbase on the fucking planet.
The only time I have issues with 'easy mode' is when the only way to enable it is with money.
i also hate hard modes that only opens when you finish the game, i lost my batman save game and had to play the normal again just to unlock the advanced again
Same on both of these I miss when there was a cheat code to unlock hard mode From the start. Want the second quest on Zelda 1 name yourself Zelda boom hard mode want a less Difficult to game Over mode in contra Konami code.
Cheat codes are legitimate ways to play single player experiences. Video game
Gatekeeping is stupid.
That said easy mode and hard mode
Behind paywalls is even stupider as is pay to win and elite level multiplayer Cosmetics probably shouldnt be rewards
For Being a whale they should be awards
For being really good at the game
I have a feeling the people who get mad at easy modes in hard games think only skilled players deserve to see the ending. I wonder if they hate let’s players who beat sans so people who suck at undertale can see the genocide ending
Did they get mad when Avgn started showing the victory screen of
Nintendo hard games. So only people who Gitgud deserve To See the you won screen.
I could never get past level 3 of Battletoads is it bad that I know what the levels Past that are because of Diabetes’s let’s play?
@@brandonporter8509 I wonder if it isn't that there are players who know that they're going to chose a easier path if it's available rather than try another 10-20 times and therefore doesn't want it to exist.
Then I guess it's the fear that the balancing of other difficulty modes will take away resources (time/money) that could've been spent on bugfixes, polishing etc. But it's just a few guesses.
@@RannonSi
Depends on the game... Ever seen a Difficulty Mode in Puzzle Games???... It doesn't exist.
I think if I made a video game, there would be a "Comically easy mode" where the enemies just shoot each other
I was thinking that, if I could make a game, the easiest mode would at first appear to be the very hard mode. Like, it would be on the bottom of the list after the actual hardest difficulty, be called "Very Hard" or something like that, all to prove some sort of point and troll people going for the hardest difficulty.
I would create a game where the enemy also have ammo limit
I'd probably make one with a generic looking action star type guy and any time you walk into a room full of bad guys you press button and win and the bad guys just die in a mushroom cloud, people would eat it up
Hahaha. That is too good. Remember when games had cheat codes like unlimited ammo or god mode that would make games like Dark Souls actually accessible?
I'd personally call it "Gaming Journalist Mode"
Here's my "easy mode": When I played WoW, the only way for me to play a healer was with an add-on. Some people don't like it because it didn't make me a "true healer" and others understood why I did it. It helped me actually see the party's health because the bars were bigger and clearer to see, and I wasn't staring at a quarter of my screen the entire time. That, and people not knowing their defensives or how to do mechanics meant me having an add-on saved their butts too many times to count. *It was a play style choice to make my game experience fun for me instead of more frustrating, because games are meant to be fun.*
This story in particular makes me laugh because my brother loves to regale me with stories from his WoW days. At one point, he and his roommate's PC was so bad they had to mod the game so the UI was outside of the game window, and the game window was like, the size of a GameBoy screen. And he was still an amazing healer. One of the best.
Funny how today addons are basically expected to the point late game hard content is balanced around the level of people who use them
I'm looking forward to the 2022 edition of this video.
That's when bloodborne 2 will be out
There won't actually be one. By then the HARDKORE GVMERZ will have been transformed into masses of squealing slithering entrails that live forever out of sheer transcendental spitefulness. The gaming industry will have overrun civilization, and all human endeavour and activity on a global scale will be geared towards a single dystopian "live service" that will bear a striking resemblance to Pong.
Sadly in 2022 the easy mode will only be available through day 1 DLC and you buy "gems of easing" in the microtransaction store that allow you to use it for a single twenty minute session.
Just a few more months now mate!
is it time for the 2021 update or new edition of this vid? this vid should have a yearly edition, or more. it's still as urgent today as before if not more... now it's not only 'cause of difficulty, but just any QoL option, not only for accesibility or color blind peoplr, but just the mere fact of having some nice features or just some options in any game (say different resolutions, or simply a zoom or scaling option) has become a whole problematic controversial thing in some communities, also for indie titles, early access titles, any game!
being good at dark souls isn't a personality.
Please become top comment
THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS.
That hurts :,(
@James Connolly 1916 keep that bs on Reddit
@James Connolly 1916 enjoy your trolling. I hope you find something to do with your life
But Jim, surely you understand that some people consider the way strangers enjoy their leisure time to be of absolutely life-altering importance.
Force Change or Support Change?... It seems most prefer to force their ideologies on others. lol
@@absolstoryoffiction6615 hey dude, are you, like, okay? you keep posting about the "evils" of "sjws" in comment threads where nobody's talking about that. is something wrong?
I enjoy Anthem and play it everyday do you guys still hold the same view point?
Except, these days, especially in gaming, most time the way they enjoy their leisure time does actually affect the way i do. Since casuals buy into literally every shit practice the publishers get away with it and the games i play become more and more incomplete, in cases utter trash and that's not the only problem they have....
@@crushlemons I dislike Anthem, but I could literally not care less if you do, or indeed if anyone does. It doesn't affect me one iota.
The last five minutes of this video perfectly crystallized (in a way I've never been quite able to articulate) the reason I play video games even though I have never considered myself to be particularly any "gud" at them. Challenge for its own sake has never been fulfilling for me. I play games because of the experience -- the combination of music, art and world design that makes me feel like I have left my living room and entered a world of monsters, soldiers, dragons, or even an alternate version of myself. For me, video games can be transformative in a way that others art forms cannot. I have mentally beaten myself up or years because I cannot memorize boss patterns or seem to land a jump in Super Mario brothers. Hearing Jim describe his own reasons for playing clicked for me in a way that I've never even considered. Thanks for this, Jim. It was definitely my aha! moment as a gaymer.
(TLDR; thank you for this comment, sorry for this ramble!)
That is very well said! I was about to concur and write "I play for the story", but that's not exactly right: walking simulators tend to bore me without a strong premise to back them up, as do collectathons without the appropriate atmosphere. Conversely, I can spend literal hours replaying the same level, chasing the next bit of lore, intrigue, or making sure I've 100%ed a game I really like. As you pointed out, games have the power to engage the player in ways other art forms cannot (with ludonarrative dissonance, for instance...); and I'd happily walk through digital hell and back without a walkthrough for the chance to experience something memorable.
As a girl playing a lot of video games, I'll admit "gitting gud" was somewhat part of my mentality growing up. I've felt the need to justify my investment more than once, as I was evolving -and still am, to a point- in an environment in which this was uncommon. (Not that it makes my attitude any less insufferable, but, you know? I quick to go on the defensive :D) I'm glad I realized what I truly enjoyed about gaming though, and I'm grateful for the variety of games and game discourse available today for allowing me that.
PS: I know Jim has made a video about it already, but have you played Hypnospace Outlaw? It's really very good, and still haunting me a good month after completion. Seems to be in your ballpark!
That's a beautiful reason my friend and I'm glad you understand your reason to play. I'm on the inverse. Personally enjoy the challenge in my own time, and that's why i play fighting games honestly. Also as someone who's spent hours practicing combos for a character, don't beat yourself up cuz you don't think you can do it.
With enough time anyone can do it, just look at professional fighting game players like BrolyLegs and Sven. Both of them are street fighter players. BrolyLegs Can't use his hands and uses his face to push buttons and work the joystick. and Sven is completely blind and uses the sound queues from character attacks to understand whats going on, on screen. These guys have disabilities that would prevent a lot of people from even considering playing games but they took it too the next level and play competitively in fighting games, and consistently win.
You'd be surprised what grit will get you through.
This is now my favourite comment I've ever read on RUclips.
absolutely. even as someone who loves arcade games I can fully agree with this. even a challenging game still has to convince on other levels as well. I wouldn't have played Cuphead or Hollow Knight if they wouldn't have convinced me with the art design.
I completely understand playing for the story.. however in my opinion what gave these games the edge was the difficulty. It was something you don't see so much nowadays. It was frustrating to learn but felt good once I got the grasp of it. It's not for everyone and I understand that... If the casuals really want to play for the story, I don't see why the developers can't put in a mode where you can't die. That why you get your cake and eat it too. It wont effect the rest of us who enjoy the difficulty. Then everyone is happy. You get your story and we get our difficulties... However I must ask, is there so few solid games with story that you had to come to these type of games to get it? Knowing they are maddening hard?
Someone should make a series of mods just named "gud" which provides a customized way to adjust the difficulty for notoriously difficult games.
Then whenever people say "Get gud" to people that are struggling with a game, they'll be providing useful advice.
Actually there are two games, Rebel Galaxy and Space Rangers 2.
In Rebel Galaxy, you choose the missions and these have dificulty acording to the equipment you have, from very easy to very hard, these rewards acording the dificult.
These allow the player to adjust the dificulty, of the game in te way you want.
In Space Rangers 2 you can adjust the dificulty from the text story quest, to the enemies, to the ground missions, to the pirates, you create the dificult.
The same in several tropico games, you create the dificult.
I can name startopia, whereyou adjust parametres to he dificulty.
THe idea of adjusting parameters is not new theproblem is that today we dont have grey, or the games are easy or to fucking hard.
Personaly i hate hard games, i want to have fun no chores
They'd have to host it on GitHub as well, so that "git gud" just means you want them to have the latest version of this difficulty-changing software.
Game difficulty is just stupid in most games anyways. Heres what increasing the difficulty does 90% of the time. Increase enemy health, increase enemy damage. Boom increased difficulty.
@@liger04 Perfect
Well git gud is actually the best advise you can give :P its basically like saying practice
I think the easy mode discussion might be another side effect of the increasing trend toward pop culture fandom as tribal identity. More and more people seem to be treating the entertainment that they enjoy as some sort of self defining personality trait. So if you find you enjoyed Dark Souls et al. and fancy yourself a "true" From Software fan, it's entirely possible that you've absorbed the narrative of the FS difficulty and baked it into your sense of self identity since you 'got gud" or whatever. If your sense of self identity is tied to that narrative, then I can see why you might find the idea of changing that narrative threatening. If it's possible to play the game on easy mode, then simply being a From Software gamer isn't the same sort of badge of honor or whatever.
The problem with all this really lies in using a piece of pop culture triviality as a foundation to build your sense of self around. But as long as we are going to live in a society which encourages us to buy the latest bit of distraction and obsess over it rather than actually talking to each other about how miserable and dead we feel inside, I think this kind of thing is only going to continue.
Attention is currency in the market place of ideas :)
But the community around FromSoftware games are like a family, everyone went through the exact same challenges and thats kinda cool when sharing experiences. Like you beat the boss this way, while I did it this other way but its the exact same boss we fought.
So wearing my Nike™ shoes doesn't add any intrinsic value to me as a person? What paradigm am I gonna use, now?
@@imo098765 Did you miss the point of his comment or do you actually think it is fine to build your self identity around a difficulty level in games?
@@Krytern It IS fine. It's your fucking life, build your personality around whatever you want. Stop telling innocent, harmless people that they 'life' wrong
"I'm angry because someone is enjoying this single player game in a way I disagree with despite it having no effect on my own experience!"
Also shoutouts from the Fire Emblem fandom!
I felt that too
No mom I’m not going to swap to casual mode! I’ll just reload if anyone dies and pretend I’m somehow above that casual junk ;)
@@astrayl Isn't that the truth of it.
@@astrayl This is why I shamelessly play casual...well, used to, im gonna try and make an effort to do classic these days. That should be fun.
@@astrayl yeah I play classic out of pride but casual was definitely more fun
"sekiro doesn't need an easy mode... sekiro doesn't not need an easy mode either".
this is probably the fastest I've liked a jimquisition.
It's Jim Sterling's Magic!
@Jason Voorhees what's that? You're an ass?
@Jason Voorhees go fuck yourself
@@bernardoheusi6146 go fuck yourself
you can download a trainer for sekiro making it super easy(only for pc of course).
This is what happens when including cheat codes stop being the norm.
do you remember having all the cheat codes loaded into your muscle memory, where you had to cycle through to find the code you want?
Cheat Codes are cool. Debug Mode? OOOOOOOH
You can still have cheat codes in video games though. The only difference is that since the PS1 era, cheat codes have become associated with separate accessories you need to purchase like GameShark, GameGenie, etc. Those still exist, even for the PS4. There is no "solution" to this debate. This debate is about people's ego, and any solution available cannot fill that void.
Give me the money!
Darn, I fucked up:
*show me the money* !
A guy i grew up with played more games than anyone i know. He was a gatekeeping type of guy too. One day, out of the blue in his late twenties, he had a stroke. Had to relearn how to move his body. Still can't feel half of it. Games accessibility suddenly became very important.
The tune can change quite suddenly for any of us -- including those who scream and cry about the sanctity of gaming and they heresy of sharing games with filthy casuals. And even if you aren't met with sudden tragedy like the guy i mentioned, you WILL get old. Your health will decline in a multitude of ways. That elitism inevitably fucks over everyone. It's pointless. it's cruel. it makes no sense.
That's one hell of a tragedy. Goddamn.
Hell, i'm in my mid 20s and already I can tell that i'm not doing as well as I would when i was still a teen; my reflexes have gone to shit and i can't do FPS games good anymore.
Man, that was a point I hadn't even considered, and a very important one at that.
All debate aside, I hope that he is doing fine.
I doubt he was asking the game to be easier
Never understood the Dark Souls argument … the game literally has an easy mode … I beat Ornstein and Smough by summoning someone better than me and letting them do all the work
Yes but Sekiro doesn't have any summoning because it would conflict with the narrative.
The issue I have with Sekrio specifically is that any easy mode wouldn't be the same to implement as in other games, and would probably ruin the experience. It's not something like an FPS where you can just change damage numbers and call it a day, Sekiro is much more meticulously balanced.
I don't take issue with other games having difficulty settings, but I believe it's a developer's choice, and the people asking for an easy mode specifically should really stop wasting their time and just watch a RUclips playthrough or something.
The thing I most take issue with though is the over dramatization of the idea that playing these games with a mod or something robs you of part of the experience, as these games are designed with the difficulty in mind as part of the experience. I don't care if people do it, I just also agree with the idea that you are missing part of the experience. I played DS2 first, and did it entirely in co op. Then I went back and played DS1 solo, and playing these games solo is an entirely different experience that I wish people wouldn't be afraid to stick with.
@@marciamakesmusic
I feel like by default:
1) Enemy health should be lower
2) They should have more cool down in between attacks.
3) Player health should be much higher.
Any one of these would drastically improve the game.
@@HonsHon Well the game got incredible amounts of praise the way it is so idk what to say to you
@@marciamakesmusic
I wasn't saying the game was bad. I just always think that enemies hit a bit too hard. It was just my opinion really, and the fact that the game gets praise does not refute any of my arguments at all.
(Also, sorry that I am a month late in response. I forgot I commented this.)
Edit: I don't mind the Snake Eyes mini boss, but the fact that she takes out (roughly) half of your health hitting you with the side of her gun is stupid.
@@HonsHon The enemies hit as hard as they should. For people who are bad at the game, a slight change in damage would not make much of a difference, and at high levels of play you're very rarely getting hit.
Slight tangent: I wish more developers of games with combat systems understood that difficulty can be more than just raising the enemies' health/lowering your health. The variable combat and puzzle difficulty in silent hill mentioned in the video is a good example of this, but I don't see this being done often enough imo.
Exactly, but that's also why difficulty shouldn't be lowered in those kinds of games. It defeats a lot of the difficulty of the puzzle as well as the actual combat by allowing you to explore puzzles leisurely. It inherently changes the way the game is played, and is not the same kind of experience. For some of these games, it's a negative, but for others it only changes it.
To claim that the experience is identical is just ignoring how we play games
@thewerepyreking If we have different skill levels the experience is inherently different though. You clearing a puzzle in 5min that may take me an hour to beat, or vice-versa, *is* a different experience.
If what you want is for every player to have the exact same experience you *need* to scale the difficulty to their skill level. But nobody wants to have the exact same experience.
I may love to spend hours solving every single puzzle, while you may want to get through them as fast as possible, to reach some other part of the game that you find rewarding. In this case, the differing experiences we would have would actually make the same game more entertaining for *both* of us, instead of it being either-or.
It’s an easy mistake to make; thinking that others have the exact same skill sets as you do, and that all they may need to beat a difficult challenge is enough determination, but that simply isn’t the case for many people.
"True hardcore gamers"
*Uses a picture of Cylons*
Honestly, quite fitting
I know right. Cylons are awesome.
should we start calling elitist gamers toasters?
Frackin' toasters!
Someone taking the elevator doesn't diminish me taking the stairs. My taking the ski lift doesn't diminish those who make the climb.
In the end we all want the same thing from a game, to have fun with it.
But, but, the fact that your elevator is right next to my stairs makes it really hard for me to keep up my stair-based exercise plan!
This analogy doesn't make sense because you're missing a key point. If we're relating this to sekiro, You get the same achievement for climbing the stairs as you do for taking the elevator which doesn't make sense.
@@memebobs9011 I don't agree, I think the analogy is sound. In the comparison taking the stairs has a different personal gain than the escalator; it satisfies the needs of my hypothetical "stair-based exercise plan." This is analogous to the more rewarding experience of playing Sekiro at a well tuned difficulty, instead of on an easier mode that doesn't challenge the player appropriately. In both cases the better outcome for my hypothetical, personal, long-term goals is to do the activity that is more immediately demanding, rather than utilizing the less demanding, temptingly easy alternative.
To your point specifically, while both methods take you to the top of the stairs, only walking up the stairs satisfies my personal desire to commit to my stair-based exercise goals. Likewise, both play styles take to the end of the game, but playing on an appropriate level of challenge instead of a much easier one (relatively speaking) results in two different experiences of differing personal value.
Ultimately, the satirical jab of my comparison is the observation that this particular argument against easy mode is the same as asking dev's to fine tune their games' difficulty level to just your own skill level at the detriment to other players with little more reason than not wanting to have to (learn how to) exert the small amount of self control needed to play a game (or ascend stairs) in the way that is best for your own personal needs and abilities. If I was going to argue this point beyond the satirical jab, I'd probably next bring up the hypocrisy of denying significant accessibility options for a significant number of people for your own, far less significant accessibility request (so insignificant that it can hardly be called little more than convenience, rather than full blown accessibility).
@@extragarb My point is that you shouldn't be able to breeze through sekiro on an easy mode while obtaining the achievements that were specifically designed for their "normal" difficulty. Unless they put something in the game that made it to where achievements couldn't be earned in easy mode it just wouldn't make sense in terms of their design philosophy.
@@memebobs9011 Oh, I didn't realize you meant literal achievements! Yeah, if an easy mode was added, it would be fair to restructure which achievements appear for which criteria. It's certainly not unheard of for different levels of difficulty to have different achievements tied to them.
That said, I think regulating the achievement economy isn't a big concern. I'd say making the game fundamentally accessible to a significant number of people is more important (for games with prohibitive challenge ratings like Sekiro). There are lots of simple ways to correct any impact accessibility implementation might have on the achievement economy.
...Star Fox being playable by children is...a bad thing?
They might grow up to be furries after seeing Krystal! _gasp_
She isn't even in Star Fox Zero. v.v
@@Rawnblade13 Star Fox Zero takes place before Star Fox Adventures so obviously Krystal isn't in it.
I know right, never understood getting mad over a game having an easy mode. it's absolutely stupid and elitist.
Viewers might want to mute the first four seconds.
Too late
why
*Lewd.*
Where was that from?
Where the hell were you 4 seconds ago?
So it turns out that challenge & fun are experiences that overlap on occasion but are not inextricably linked.
Sorcery.
@Joshua Kierstead Facing a challenge is the equivalent of feeling miserable, I guess.
So you're saying that there are many different aesthetics games can deliver on, and that people look for in a game!? WHAT A REVOLUTIONARY CONCEPT!!!!! XD
The only reason I don't think different difficulties in from games make sense is because all of the achievements are based on the single player experience. If you could pick an easy mode the achievements and trophies would be trivialized to the point where there would be no "prestige" in completing a from game.
@@DigitalDaydreams so there is no prestige in completing anything because it only matters if your world revolves around it. Video games are a sector of society. There will be prestige in completing anything to the fullest possible point. It's called dedication.
I like how you mentioned celeste, because celeste is a game that you can become invincible at anytime, and the game doesn’t bar you from getting anything with assist mode on. You can collect everything in the game and the game doesn’t care if you are or are not invincible.
And it literally doesn’t detract from the experience at all.
I didn't even know that was a thing while I was playing it.
I must say, the answer seems pretty clear to me: insecurity. People insecure in themselves latch on to "good at video games" as an identity trait, and that prestige doesn't mean as much if the game doesn't force others to struggle. Being good means nothing if there aren't people to lord it over.
And I honestly can’t imagine anything much more pathetic than grown adults basing their entire personality and sense of accomplishment around completing a game. Do they even hear themselves? I guess if you’re not accomplishing much else in life, you have to scratch up something to feel superior about.
This is what happens when a society raises an entire generation or two of infantilised man/woman children an.
@@TheAlmightyAss
Politics: "Wars... Wars everywhere... Fun times."
The stench of soy is truly gut wrenching.
@@hatemongerofthetoxicbrood6561 learn basic chemistry some time.
Alright, let me just as this, immeasurably important question.
Where the hell did FucKonami go?
I... that's a good question.
Is Konami dead already?
Didn't you notice? They don't make games anymore.
It's kinda implicit now. FucKonami is written into the very DNA of the Jimquisition, and need only be highlighted when they do something newly egregious.
A rough list of games they've made in 2018 and 2019:
2018
Jikkyou Powerful Pro Baseball 2018 [ja] (Japan only)
Mantis Burn Racing (physical format in Japan only)
Metal Gear Survive
Pro Evolution Soccer 2019 (Europe, Australia & North America) / Winning Eleven 2019 (Japan & Asia)
Super Bomberman R
Zone of the Enders: The 2nd Runner MARS (Europe, Australia & North America) / Anubis: Zone of The Enders MARS (Japan & Asia)
2019
Pro Evolution Soccer 2020 (Europe, Australia & North America) / Winning Eleven 2020 (Japan & Asia)
That's where FucKonami went, they're barely in the game business anymore. Look up Jim's latest video on Konami, now that they're not really making games anymore they're... Kind of behaving more respectably than before... =/
Personally I love the challenge of overcoming hard games, I feel proud when I beat something seemingly impossible, but unless you're a gatekeeper why should it matter?
If including an easy mode doesn't affect your prefered, 'authentic' experience of a game, and let's more people enjoy, then all the better. Divinity Original Sin 2, and even the Mass Effect series had options to make the combat a breeze if I remember.
Because maybe it affects the creator of the work? Did you or Jim consider that? I know Jim's not creative, but let's assume he was, and I demand a version of his video's where he edits out all the shitty jokes... B-but it's not affecting anyone else, right? Why won't he give me the easy-version of his video's, dammit!!
I also seriously don't like his SJW attitude. Can Jim produce non-SJW video's for those rational people amongst us?
Hmm that's a good point that went over my head, you're probably right that this sort of thing can influence creators to 'pander to the masses'/ 'casualise' their games because it would get them more sales. In that case, its possible that there's the danger a game could lose like fan-favored features deemed too complex or whatever for people new to a series or something, and I'd be upset if they made the next Souls game super easy because of the discussion over Sekiro, but as long as they don't make the game built and balanced around 'casualisation', and that it would just an optional mode or whatever you could choose, then I think that would be acceptable. You made a good point though, I failed to see it like that.
I absolutely love the aristocratic Jim Sterling bit, I really liked your videos that were just him reading comments and I miss them!
Those were embarassingly pompous, and cringey. Thank god he doesn't do those anymore.
Duke Amiel du H'ardcore is amazing.
I always thought that was a drag character.
Ah, I've missed Duke Amiel. He does a fine job of conveying the sheer arrogance of the people who insist that X particular circumstance (e.g. good at Cuphead or Dark Souls) means they are better than other people, and that those people need to be told so. I'm pretty good at Dark Souls, by the way. Hardly the best, but good enough to enjoy the games, which is all I think anyone can hope for. And if you don't like the game, or its difficulty, then that's perfectly alright and I hope you enjoy some other game or thing instead.^^
itchy just like the comments he was reading
I've been playing Shin Megami Tensei IV recently. The game gives you the option to turn the game to an easier setting at any point after you've died twice. And being a Shin Megami Tensei game, you're lucky if you reach the first boss before dying twice.
And I haven't touched it. I don't want to, because I tend to find the series has a good balance of difficulty versus frustration, with the random encounters being able to wipe the floor with you if you don't know what you're doing to be a key part of the series. But at the same time, I get why people play the games on easier difficulties. The game can be brutal, and not everybody has the time and patience to fuse the exact right team to get through a battle. At the same time I have a tendency to play hack and slash games on the easiest difficulty available, it just makes it easier for me with my clumsy hands.
I bought the infamous Devil May Cry 3 game for PS2 over a decade ago.
It's known for being one of the hardest PS2 games ever in its original release, and as a kid, I did not know this.
I still remember playing the first level about 3-4 times, rage quitting and NEVER touching it again.
That game has been sitting on my shelf for like 14 years.
Guys, there’s already an easy mode in Dark Souls.
It’s called pyromancy
Miracles*
It’s called choosing a sorcerer class at the start and using the binoculars to snipe enemies with magic from a safe distance.
@@rahrouth not on 3
I thought it was going for a knight/sourcerer/miracle/dexterity/co-op build?
And/or abusing co-op...
"How dare you not liking games in the same way as we do!" *Shakes fist angerly in the air like Abe Simpson*
How dare one forces their ideology on others?... Oh wait, "Easy Mode".
Absol StoryofFiction Is someone holding you at gun point to play games on easy settings? If so you should be trying to get help!
Difficulty debate brought the aristocrat back; hence, totally worth it!
I wish more people watched his Aristocrat videos. I really enjoyed them.
Broken English...
Everyone thank Mr Skellington for bringing back our Duke!
*brought
asdfj thanks, thumps up.
The heart of the matter is this: "I want to have what I like, but I don't want you to have what you like."
This is what makes people say "There shouldn't be an easy mode". They want to have something to lord over others, i.e. "I can play through this game. You can't. That makes me better than you." ...When what they really should be doing is building up some sense of self-worth that's not anchored to something as ephemeral as relative skill at certain video games.^^
The Martial Lord of Loyalty They are not entitled to buy the game. If they buy the game, they'll have to respect what the game is trying to achieve and what type of audience it appeals to. Not every game has to be made for everyone.
This
@The Martial Lord of Loyalty That's a very lame analogy. Does buying musical instruments guarantees the owners to play notes that require skill?? No. They have to learn and put the time and effort.
@The Martial Lord of Loyalty Yes, it would be pretty daft to buy musical instruments without any intention to learn it, just like it'll be daft to buy FromSoft games without any intention of putting work into it. Easy Mode requires quite some amount of time as the developers will have to reshuffle game mechanics from scratch since difficulty is part of the game design and every thing that's in the game is revolved around that level of difficulty.
@The Martial Lord of Loyalty Sekiro will have to change alot of elements. First of all HP in Sekiro doesn't matter that much as depletion of posture leads to one shots. Making attacks slower would certainly matter but it could be for more or less. Slower attack animations can disturb the rythm of swordplay, so parrying would become more trickier. Only way to lower difficulty would be to change and adjust enemy A.I which takes quite a lot of time.
Nothing is risked and nothing is gained.
Literally why I like games.
Imagine asking Eminem to do an 'easy tour', where he doesn't do swear words so you can take the whole family along and have a picnic.
Imagine wanting to watch Alien, but you don't like horror. So you view the edited version which is about 6 minutes long, at your easy cinema.
@@grubbybum3614 Okay, that's a good one.
Unless you play Iron man, then you realize you don't want to play iron man anymore.
Finally, imagine not being good at a certain game, and feeling so entitled that you want to disregard the entire reason that game was created in the first place - to overcome challenges. But fuck the Devs ayy, because triple aaaaAaaaa gaming.
Challenge in videogames is like spiciness in food, it comes down to taste. If you underestimate how much you can handle, you might be missing out. And if you're only eating the hottest peppers or completing the most difficult games to show others how tough you are, you're probably at risk at getting yourself an ulcer.
I eat hot shit because i just like it tbh
Actually a pretty decent analogy ngl
Similarly, there are some foods that just don't work without a certain degree of spice. It's part of the recipe, and the chef specifically cooked it to go well with this level of heat. But just as well there are a lot of foods that could easily be made blander for people with milder pallets without compromising the integrity of the dish, and the fact the guy next to you doesn't have as much spice as you do shouldn't impact your own enjoyment.
I can wholeheartedly agree with your analogy.
It would probably get Jim Sterling’s approval too.
@@raymondthrone7197 Taking it even further, going for something way spicier than you can handle means that you won't be able to taste it at all through the heat and thus won't really be able to appreciate the finer details. There shouldn't be any shame in going for the two pepper rating instead of three.
That...... hmm. That's... a very holistic analogy. Thanks for making it.
If people don’t like challenges that’s okay. If they do that’s okay as well. but neither of them can attack the other for not being like them. this is common sense, we leaned this in the fourth grade.
Yes and many people in the community and the media lacks common sense.
But Peter took my Lego and it was my turn!!!
Common sense is a myth. It does not exist.
Given the state of everything nowadays, I think "people aren't exactly like me and that's okay" is a class too many people skipped.
The entire point of these pissing contests is to salve people's egos with the power of nosiness. People usually never learn that lesson, which is easy to observe by looking at the average homeowner's association.
Gamer Justice Warriors are notoriously hypocritical. They will argue that the artistic integrity of a game should be supported when censorship issues arise but will also complain that games should not have political statements in them when they disagree with the politics in a game thus challenging a game's artistic integrity. They'll pick whatever philosophy fits what they want at a particular moment and then drop it for another when they want something else.
Wrong!
@David Comito THIS 10000% THIS!!!
You can apply that to just about anything, I remember this one feminist I ran into saying how games are all about the Male fantasy like skyrim because it's a power fantasy, yet when I mentioned games like dark souls which are emasculating, they want an easy mode, fucking pick one, but that's the futility in trying to please everyone, your not going to, so you might as well not
This is a really great comment.
This argument literally works in the inverse as well. The same people who defend controversial (i.e. leftist) politics in games on the basis of artistic expression will turn around and feel entitled to be able to finish games that weren't made for them.
Bring back cheats! Any game was easy mode with the choice to use cheats
IDDQD IDKFA
@@WhySoSerious55 oh man what a legend
@@WhySoSerious55 Talking of cheats. I think IDDQD was the first cheat code on PC that I've ever used. The Konami Code (maybe Contra NES) was probably the first cheat I ever experienced. Anyway my opinion now is that do what ever makes the game more fun. Never cheat in multiplayer games though. That's just bullshit.
Cheats were fun. I felt like I haven't seen an extensive, built in cheat system in a game since the ps2 days.
Nowadays they sell cheat codes :/ look at Capcom
Finally, the Duke returns. It's been too long.
all hail the Duke
Royston! rub my niplays
And with a tweaked costume!
THOU HAST CHEATED NOT ONLY AT THE DUEL
BUT THOU HAST CHEATED AT THY OWN SOUL
To your endcap, Jim: I play games for the escapism. If there's a challenge. Cool. If there isn't? Awesome. I like games where I can lose myself. Because the world is shit, it's filled with things that make me anxious and depressed to a debilitating level.
Games can be an important escape that let me forget that. That's fucking magical.
Hell, personally speaking I liked Dark Souls but not for the difficulty. Once I got past its deliberately opaque interface I found it as hard as your typical Castlevania, albeit with much less interesting minions. What appealed to me about Dark Souls was the world itself. Castlevania was a huge inspiration on the Soulsborne games and the world of Dark Souls felt like if Dracula had won at the end of a Castlevania game, ruled in darkness, and then committed suicide out of apathy and boredom. It's such a unique world in gaming where it has a very unique vision of nihilism, purpose, and dread thag invites the player to think, or dare I even say it, *challenge* themselves in philosophically. Gazing upon the dying world and pondering on the idea of fate and meaning was way more interesting to me than an singular encounter.
You don't represent everybody.
@@anothergerloffs9319
And you do?
DaVeganZombie same for me, I could care less about the difficulty I just want a world to fall into and enjoy. Games like Skyrim where there are many different difficulty’s, I never touched the difficulty and just played at default because I enjoyed the world
My thoughs exactly. Fun from escapism always comes first.
I recently had my literal 3 year old niece try playing some old Nintendo games and honestly, a zero difficulty "toddler mode" actually sounds brilliant for those scenarios. I can't see why that would be controversial.
It's up to the devs... Forcing them to choose... Politics have done better and more.
In the end... Not everyone lives and some people die. It is a lesson to learn. Just as those who wine when they never even bought or played the game in the first place.
"Life isn't fair... And some humans cannot handle grim realities..."
"Royston! Royston! The casuals are making games accessible again!"
"Casual" ..Now that's a term I hadn't heard in a while.
Maybe a sign that things are getting better? One can hope.
"I won't stand for it, I tell you! they need to get gud, or fall down a bottomless pit for all eternity!"
“Get the hounds!”
If you cant handle running into a wall for hours until you master trivial gameplay patterns are you really a gamer?
Casuals is why we are getting these online games.
That aristocrat shit made me cry and my side hurts.
Me too omg
You should see Commentocracy. It's filled with nothing but that.
My sides are in orbit OMG XDDDD
Least we forgot it was a mod that made Dark Souls 1 playable on PC
Well that was because they made a shit job with porting the game to PC.
@@98Dreadboy It was a design choice by the creators of the game.
dont you respect their art descision bro? Getting dsfix goes against their vision. You're not only cheating the game but you're chrywgabdhdvss
@@98Dreadboy The terrible port added to the feeling of adversity and challenge, which was a crucial part of the game.
Ergo, terrible ports are good.
Playable? Sounds like easy mode to me. If i'm not fighting my PC to keep the game above 20 fps what's even the point?
I'm only at 8:25 of the video, but so far it seems to me the arguments against easy modes is that it encroaches on the self-esteem of people who define their identity through video games. Who's only source of achievements is beating games, who game, not to have fun, but to substitute for actual meaningful life experiences.
Anyone who plays "casually" (though 100% completing Witcher 3 even on easy mode isn't exactly a casual commitment) thus takes the honour that is meant for the good players and devalues their achievements.
I suck at games. All of them. No matter how much I play them I never get better than "mediocre". Thus I can only play games that either have an easy mode or where my boyfriend can help me beat the Kayran so that I can finally save Temeria (he also beat the Draug for me). I play Path of Exile on easy mode by having a pure phys skeleton necromancer. I don't mind that I suck at the games because exactly 0% of my personal value depends on how well I play games. (I do, however, take pride in my ability to write item filters. Despite not being the programmer in the relationship I write the filters for us.)
And I'll teach my 2 - 6 children that it doesn't matter if you suck, all that matters is that you're capable of playing the game with your friends and get to experience enough of it to be fun.
That's exactly the point.
I mean I have over 500 hours on dark souls 3, but I still much prefer playing it with friends and co op, and thorouhgly feel invasions as a major annoyance, and thus I don't feel bad for having summons etc.
sadly I often get so much flak for the idea, as "invasions are punishment for playing with phantoms", like it playing the game like I want needs to be punished
@@HoneyDoll894 SO many game communities have this sickness where, if you think one aspect of the game is stupid, they immediately tell you to play something else and that this game obviously isn't for you.
It's the same with Final Fantasy XIV. I complained that 144€ a year are way too much money for a regular MMO, no matter how good the support is. But immediately I was accused of not even liking the game and wanting the programmers to starve. I actually am very open to paying the developers, I am not open to paying the CEO's tenth Porsche. Oh and that time I complained that the fight mechanics were super boring and repetitive (it's essentially the same two buttons over and over at level 15), obviously the same reaction. Until one sane soul eventually told me that the combat mechanics get interesting at roughly lvl 80 and that they suck at low levels now because they kept changing the game balance over the years in order to serve the endgame.
@@notpointed Here's my suggestion: Games should have Dark Souls difficulty. Hide OP loot somewhere on the map, like the Drake Sword. Normal players would not see it as an insult to their intelligence, and people who are having a hard time can google it or find it accidentally. That way, the bosses don't become easier for easy mode, but you become stronger in a way that makes sense in the game. Like Castlevania SotN, where you could crouch in a corner behind a hidden wall for 10 seconds, and it would give you weapons that do 2x the damage you do at that point in the game. This is the ideal way to handle difficulty, and is why Dark Souls can be completed by even the most casual of players as long as they have the courage to play the game in its entirety.
@@gu3z185 Why would an easy mode insult anyone's intelligence? And even with the drake sword Dark Souls is too hard for me so I can never play it. Which has nothing to do with my intelligence, so no idea why people feel that's at stake here.
Ego plays a role in literally every single human accomplishment, whether it be running a marathon, or having a high-status career, or sleeping with lots of people. People always look for ways to differentiate themselves from others
Ah Duke du H'ardcore. Your Grace, you have been missed.
It's _my Lord_ . "Your Grace" is for addressing kings.
#ThingsAPedanticASOIAFFanboySays xD
@@SidheKnight I thought so too. So I checked. Grace is correct. en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Forms_of_address_in_the_United_Kingdom
@@SidheKnight thats your royal highness or your majesty, I think your grace might work but it also works for any high ranking nobility
I’m being called out I modded that “Thanks Obama” into my Dark Souls so fast to make death more bearable
That's the only mod you need ;)
See you in another 3 years to talk about the same thing again Jim!
Either its BLOODBORNE 2, DARK SOULS 4 or Sekiro 2 lol
Angelshadow3593 Sekiro shadows die thrice
@Jason Voorhees he does his job which is running his jimquisition show on RUclips and voices his own opinions on the gaming industry. If you don’t like what he’s doing then why are you here then?
@@elktreeproductions OMG NO WAY!! lol
You say that, but the fact that so few of these games exist and only come out every few years only highlights how entitled those complaining about difficulty are. They have SO many other games they could be playing.
So who's here in 2022 when Elden Ring comes out, waiting for the new old debate?
Generally speaking I play games on hard mode, I enjoy the challenge, learning from my mistakes and all that. That's also why I love fighting games. Some people don't, they want a nice cruise through the game while enjoying its many fun qualities without painful deaths. That's fine, that doesn't affect me in any way, do what you want it's your life, there's no reason for me to care.
I like not running through...enjoying my game for longer. That, and the reward of it all.
I'm pro-challenge but also pro-easy mode, and accessibility options are a must.
My only concern is the design of an easy mode somehow compromising the hard mode. (It shouldn't, but it's possible that they fundamentally design the entire game in a simplified way. I think it's perfectly possible to cater to both crowds and make both happy.)
I'd also encourage people to try pushing themselves as far as they can go. It's all up to you and sometimes we just wanna relax, but I never thought I'd be a challenge seaker until I tried Doom 2016 on "Ultra-Violence" mode. Now I'm hooked on that high.
It's a great conversation all around! I want more people to play more games :)
@@RacingSnails64 yeah a lot of difficulty settings are just lazily slapped on out of obligation, rather than implemented in a way that improves the game. you know the type: hard is +50% enemy health, easy is -50% health.
sure, it technically makes the game more difficult, but they're usually balance where you have the choice between the game being pathetically easy or just turning it into a bullet spongy slog.
difficulty options can be good, but designers have an obligation to adapt their game to the best way possible instead of just making it an afterthought.
That outro was probably the best bit of video you've done this year. Well said.
The Intro: DEMONS!!! (Or at least, for me it was. lol)
Spoiler alert.
It’s such a good point.
Omg I miss commentocracy. Pls bring it back xD
Yes plox!
I bought the shirt can't miss him
7:27 YES! You brought it back :D yeah! I've been on aristocrat withdrawal ever since.
Dude same lol
He did most of them in 2017 but he did release another only last September about Shenmue.
If a Dev wants to add an easy mode into THEIR GAME then let them.
If a Dev does not want to add an easy mode into their game then THEY DONT HAVE TO!!!!!!!
Exactly! I remember (and liked) the old days where you could play the game on Easy, but then the game would end before the final levels, and/or instead of the ending, you got a message that says "Now beat the game on a higher difficulty setting!"
You say that because you dont care for it. As soon as a Dev adds (or doesnt) something you dislike, you'll be whining too.
Totally. If people want an easy mode, they can ask for it and make an argument for why they should have it.
That's exactly what Jim said... good to see you watched the video
The Fapologist no I want beacuse I’m not a kid I just won’t buy that game that’s not for me not everything has to be for me I’m not a self entitled little shit that’s needs everting to be made for me
This argument just boils down to gatekeeping makes people feel good.
No not at all, it's maintaining the artistic intent of the game developer
Raven Whiteduck But I bet you won’t use that argument when their artistic integrity goes against your belief.
More accurately gatekeeping is essential to the ego of people who have no other meaningful achievements to feel accomplished
@@Cabbage-gt2su so what? Game developers can't make what they please? Not every game has difficulty sliders you know?
Imagine being so entitled that you accuse developers of being problematic for not catering to your specific skill level. It would be like chastising an author for using SAT words you're unfamiliar with. It's insane. Not every game has to be for you.
I don't want (hard) games in general to become easier but I'm not against an easy mode or people using mods to make the experience easier, whatever makes that person have the most enjoyment.
That's a good way to put it.
Dank Johnson exactly. Those people have paid for their copy of that game, they can play it however they want and find entertainment in what they want. We all want single player games, so we can have our own experiences , yet arguments about other peoples playthroughs are had. It is stupid.
What's easy for one person could be hard for another, so having an easy mode won't detract from the experience for anybody. People shouldn't have to go out of their way to mod a game to make it accessible and enjoyable.
@Orga777 Then you missed the point entirely, because they are also people with opinions. That's what reviewing is.
@Orga777 When game journalists can't even get past a tutorial level, I agree. Beyond that though, I feel they can be not that good at video games and it is still OK. Besides, it might just be they aren't good at a particular type of game, like I've died on 1-1 in Mario, yet load up Ace Combat or Midnight Club and I'll beat the game on hard with the starting vehicle!
My two favourite games of all time are Ecco the Dolphin and Ecco: The Tides of Time. They're notorious for being piss-hard, and there's even a funny tweet from series creator Ed Annunziata admiting that, yeah, they made it hard because rentals were a thing and they didn't want people beating the games in a weekend.
But them being hard isn't why I remember them. Not the main reason.
The main reason is that they're timeless, unique, strange stories that look into what it might be like to be a dolphin, expressed through the medium of a 2D Genesis game and steadily going off the rails into bizarre sci fi stuff. The music is haunting and beautiful, the writing is poetic, the first game starts out as 'dolphin loses family in a storm' and progresses to 'dolphin goes back in time to be given superpowers by a psychic DNA strand so he can fight the aliens who stole his family' in the first one and all the way through 'your time travel in the first game broke the timestream, now fix it' in the second one. I remember them for sparking a lifelong appreciation of cetaceans.
And yeah, I'm proud of myself for beating the first game without cheats or savestates, but that's just it. I'm proud of MYSELF. And this was years, YEAAAAAARS after I first got into the series.
I always turned on godmode when I played as a kid and enjoyed zooming around the levels and experiencing the story. Anyone who comes to Ecco that way, or through watching a Let's Play? Please come on down and be in the fandom! We're lonely!
Being more into the fandom side of games - like, write fanfic, draw fanart, come up with meta - has always been a kind of weird experience, because that kind of creativity is so looked down on by the Get Gud types. Like if more people enjoy the game, more people are gonna make beautiful things based on it. Isn't that a net positive?
tl;dr I very agree with that outro, and play more Ecco the Dolphin please
I still don't think I've beaten the Astorite without cheats. =\ Also, the Ecco series is sublime =)
Royston: "Shall I feed you the red or the white grapes, m'lord?" *sighs and speaks to himself* "The young master just experienced a hollow victory of his own, methinks..."
"I don't like your game, so change it for me to enjoy.", that is the very definition of Elitism. lol (Granted, there is nuance but this is pathetic.)
pin this
@@absolstoryoffiction6615 More like "There are options and game modes in this game that I don't like or want to play, DELETE THEM YOU ****** ********** **** ****** **** **!", because critique of a game is one thing, Anthem comes readily to mind, and inane demands that the company change their game to fit you and only you is something else.
This was interesting. I thought he was talking to me most the time but I realized like 3 mins in I just like hard games. I would never be upset there was an easy mode tho, these people exist? I guess everyone will get upset about something.
His comment section when he was originally talking about that Starfox game was just pure hazardous waste. I didn't agree with fellow Dark Souls/hardcore gamers then, and I still don't now. I grew up with videogames, and hard as shit videogames, Devil May Cry is the one that always reminds me of this argument. Real quick summary to anyone not familar, Devil May Cry had a game mode called easy automatic that was offered if you died 3 or more times in the first level, and it basically made combos easier, made you fire faster and all the enemies were generally easier, the didn't do certain moves, etc. That was the only way I could play DMC at the time, but because that mode was there I was able to sink my teeth into it and enjoy every minute of it and have been a ravenous fan ever since.
I came back to the game last year with the remaster, and honestly the Phantom boss was just merciless, even with Dark Souls under my belt and a full decade+ more experience at gaming, that fight was hard as hell.
Also, to the gitgud crowd, DSP beat every single one of those games and Sekiro, and he's legit the worst "hardcore" gamer I've ever seen. You can blunt force trauma your way through all of those games, they just won't be fun. We should be fighting gross monetization, not difficulty settings.
Just like people exist who are upset that the game doesnt have an easy mode and that "Sekiro is disrespecting them". Not sure why Jim posted comments from RANDOM trolls on the internet rather than the article that started this whole conversation in the first place. The problem is on both sides and I agree with Jim on the matter but just show both sides.
Take it from me. I'm shit at SoulsBorne, my motor impairments are pretty valid reasons for my playing Souls and Sekiro on PC with trainers - there's a bar I just can't clear, purely physically - but I've met elitist knobs who outright insulted me for playing privately on my own damn consoles.
I've said it before and I'll say it again: people who get upset over difficulty tiers in games strike me as under-achievers. When you're dissatisfied with your life and find solace in demanding games, anyone confronting the same challenge with various degrees of assistance will strike you as a personal slight. It is, after all, the one thing that brings you a sense of completion.
I don't give a shit, personally. I play games to have fun. If getting my groove in Sekiro means I use a trainer to Godmode my way through Ashina on my first playthrough because I just can't time my parries right, then that's what it means. If I could and if the skill ceiling were something I could break through, I wouldn't use it. Again - disabled gamer, here.
@@McSquiddington But but but.....what about my hArDCoRe gaMER feewings? You hurt them now.
:(
Now I can never overcompensate for my lack of personality and general toxic character traits again by telling random people online they are horrible human beings for playing a game that they bought the way they choose to.
@@RedFloyd469 Yeah, no shit. I always roll my eyes at shit like this. I'd maybe understand if SoulsBorne games operated on shared instances and trainer users blew past content right in front of Vanilla players, but these are all fundamentally asynchronous games. It's all just useless ego bruising and a waste of energy on the part of the Git Gud crowd.
Like, seriously. If my evening out the difficulty curve makes me a casual, hand me the fucking meme t-shirt and get it over with. I'll wear it the same way Nolan North and Troy Baker wear Filthy Casual tees - and that's an actual clothing brand.
I like Supergiants approach, you add difficulty modifiers to the game to make it harder but you also get better rewards
Wuvlycuddles That’s a good idea but it wouldn’t work in these games as there isn’t much actual loot.
Sekiro does have modifies in it to make it even harder and I think there's even some boss fights tied to the harder difficulty that you wouldn't encounter without it. I don't know how far they go with rewarding you for that as I haven't tried them myself but I think most gamers that play From Software games would agree that learning how to defeat the game's challenges is its own reward.
In brief: those who demand that games do not include an easy mode would dread that a random person could achieve the same recompense than them, being able to say that they finished the game, with much less effort than they did in the first place, as if their toil (and the worth they gained through it) became a waste of time just by the fact that an easier route existed...
This is what Achievements should be for. You ONLY get that special gold stamp if you've beaten the game properly. Other games (Terraria) should immediately turn off achievements for multiplayer, because kids cheat on MP, and use item glitches and other cheaty things hunting for achievements they did not earn. Having cake AND eating it...what an idea
I don't think many people are arguing that games should not have difficulty modes. I think people are annoyed at difficulty modes because it devolves the gameplay experience if you're gonna be lazy with it. Here's what I mean by that:
Dark Souls 1 had poise. You could face-tank a boss with Havel's and beat it easily, no timing, no dodging, nothing. Obviously people will be pissed, because the bosses of a game SHOULD BE HARD, it's what sets them apart from other enemies. Hollow Knight had this problem when there was Quickslash 1.0 in the game. You could mash X on any boss, and basically instakill them with the right charm layouts. People hated it because it ruined good bosses. When you use the same strategy for Gwyn as you used on Artorias that you used on Kalameet, the bosses blend and become indistinguishable. THIS IS FINE. Have this in games! Make it so that IF YOU WANT, you can go to some secret spot in the game, pick up Gigachad armor 10000, and instakill bosses. Helps the easy players out, it has never affected the normal players. This is how difficulty should be done.
The game should make you feel smart for finding the Gigachad armor, and the game should make you feel stoic for not using it. It's a win win. That's my story. Thanks.
Member when people complained about Mario Kart being playable by more people I Member
Moo Moo Farm remembers
Yes, that whole debacle about driving assist. All the tryhards insisting that it would allow you to win races without even touching the controllar, and then Jim posted a video showing it couldn't even handle a race on _easy mode._
Member when people liked souls type games because they were designed that way? I Member!
I just hated that the option was on by default (and never told you it was on so I had to notice it in a race to actually play the game I wanted to play) and the only way to turn it off was to press start during a race and press a button for a somewhat vague icon representing it.
I really needed to hear that meme voiced by aristocrat voice this week.
This just in: 13 Reasons Jim Sterling demands an 'Easy Mode' for Dark Souls. Number 8 will amaze you!
*D E M A N D S*
*_D E M A N D S_*
@@jacksonelh I'm a mobile mortal. Only you can attain such power. I know you'll do great things with it.
The teenagers and young adults i do support work for, who all have disabilities such as Cerebral Palsy, sure love the "journalists want to destroy gaming by including a subgroup that doesn't deserve consideration" rhetoric.
Bemusingly, over time CheatEngine has proven a core part of my support worker skillset.
I was always annoyed by the video that came out of the disabled gamer beating Sekiro. Yes, it's great that he wasn't affected by his disability, but to use him, solely him, as a single unit sample 'group' to prove that accessibility isn't necessary, always bugged me.
I know I’m late to the conversation but I’m not against more accessibility or customisation I just think that some games don’t need to have a easy mode
Games don't need an easy mode if you're unwilling to invest time. There's plenty of mobile games for casual gaming. I don't get the whining.
@@DantesInferno96 People who are working full-time and have a family might not _be able to_ invest more than a handful of hours every weekend. And hey, if you don't want those people playing your games, that's fine, but then don't complain when developers instead make games that those people _do_ play, because they're easier to pick up.
@@rolfs2165 that is fine, then. You can play Minecraft and other low effort, easy to play games. Candy Crush is a popular choice amongst middle aged people.
I don't mind an easy mode. I just don't like how they describe the lack of an easy mode as "disrespectful"
That's just a click baity article, though. The article written merely to stoke outrage and rile people up in order to garner attention for itself is a separate matter. Frankly, it's funny how easily manipulated the fun-police are.
Easy mode is fine. Or no easy mode and a game that lets you approach things in different ways or gives you other ways to customise the experience for yourself.
I think that the biggest issue is still in how the From games are marketed. Yeah, they can be hard, but mostly they're really no harder or easier than a lot of other games. Usually they only portray themselves as "hard" by having a somewhat oppressive atmosphere or (in some past games) needlessly omitting certain longstanding gaming conveniences like pause. If the games hadn't been marketed as hard, I don't think there'd be any real talk about the difficulty. Maybe some of the obtuse storytelling (for better or worse) or the visuals and level design. But difficulty? Kind of a minor thing, overall that gives a lot of people the wrong impression. _Truly_ difficult games can be a total pain in the ass and usually aren't worth playing unless you hate your free time. But From games that claim to be difficult are usually just a bit time consuming _at certain choke points._
This.
I will give you that one.
But you don’t go to a KKK member for racial equality.
Some people make terrible representatives for an arguement.
If this video had been the article published, the “easy mode” discussion would be much more constructive than it currently is.
@Via yeah I say they as a collective for Forbes. I probably couldve just said Forbes but eh
In my opinion? If a game doesn't have an easy mode, then that means its standard difficulty is how it is meant to be played. If a game has an easy mode, it's like how Bayonetta handles it. To experience the story more or less uninterrupted.
That said, using a cheat? I'd be a hypocrite if I said that's scummy, considering how I play Final Fantasy IX.
Yeah, I'm very into the story, moreso than the game. Main reason I've never bothered with too many From games.
"how it is meant to be played"
Yeah but that doesn't matter. The devs have an experience in mind. But they can't replicate that experience with everybody because some people are too good and some people are not good enough (there's also a frustration threshold to take into account), so the normal mode is not "how it's intended to be played" it's "how it will work the best for the majority of the audience" But the simple fact that they added a hard mode prove that being able to customize your difficulty will in fact help getting the optimal experience for people with different skill level:
In the case of the various hard modes (and there are plenty), they're here to get people with high skill the same experience as people with average skill. Exactly in the same way, there should be an easy mode for people with low skill to get that similar experience too. Similar difficulty =/= similar experience because people are not the same.
Truth is, everyone has different tastes. Games should be able to be tailored to your own specific ability.
nope, you are walling of options to games. why would you limit what games can do? because you like one more then the other?
I still think the best option is a clearly labeled *_Assist Mode_* like in games such as Celeste, with a clear, firm disclaimer saying what it is _("This is not the way it's meant to be played, it's only meant for people who otherwise really don't enjoy the game or can't play it properly.")._
Run away from anyone who identifies as a "gamer" over anything else.
What about people identifying as an "apache helicopter"? /s
EDIT: Can't believe i have to spell it out... Captain Obvious, everyone who does is being sarcastic... Just like i was when writing that statement
i think you should wait until you hear what they have to say, even if it's bullshit and you don't agree... not like they'll change your mind if you don't want to.
Why? Assholes aren't exclusive to gaming in the slightest neither are elitist dick bags
@@TheBEstAltair Run away from those people too, in case they have a knife.
Or just because I know exactly what they're going to say, and i'm not wasting my time on them.
@@Healermain15 100%. If someone doesnt know what those types of folks are going to talk about, they haven't been paying attention.
@@TheBEstAltair Except literally no one in real life actually identifies as an attack helicopter.
I tried playing Sekiro for a week. It harmed me, gave me stress. Literally a year later a friend told me about the easy mod. I'm now playing and having fun doing so. I'm working on a master's degree, that's plenty difficult. I don't want that on my video games too
How the hell did this become an issue in the first place?
A gaming journalist couldn't get good and so he whined about the take being too hard, instead of reviewing the game like they should have, except they can't review what they can't play.
@@Jdeadevil
And once again my opinion on humanity drops a little more... If I didn't love the things I do about the Internet I would have stopped using it years ago and gone back to the library.
Anyway thanks for the answers and best of luck you.
@@nofriendzjustaname9337
And once again my opinion on humanity drops a little more... If I didn't love the things I do about the Internet I would have stopped using it years ago and gone back to the library.
Anyway thanks for the answers and best of luck you.
SJW trash... In the end. lol
@@SeasoningTheObese
What a waste... That people defend them. Just like SJWs.
"Every Game should have an Easy Mode." = "Every game should have DIVERSITY of characters from women to wamen."
Jim, you could totally (some how) cosplay hedonism bot
I am a firm believer that we wouldn't be having this conversation if it weren't for click baiting writers grandstanding in their headlines about what a company "needs" to do, or how they self-righteously cheat in a game.
Nobody really believes modding a game is morally wrong or that the color blind need to be punished for their disability.
But the headline isn't "Let's make accessibility features an industry standard so everyone can git gud!" or "Let's all integrate full mod support for a fun individualised experience!".
Let's not blame the hormone-addled teens and socially impaired hardcore fans for their anger and hyperbole at calculated provocations. Let's blame the muck rakers who choose to stand in the way of a meaningful conversation for a quick buck.
Basically. No body cares if someone has to cheat to beat a game, but boasting about it as if it's an achievement is obviously not going to impress anyone with their head on right.
prdalien0 I believe you’re both wrong. People do care. Remember the latest Mario Kart having an easy mode? Some people were absolutely furious. While headlines telling devs what to do are certainly not helping, it’s hardly the only issue.
@@LordAJ12345 I don't remember but there's clearly a difference between a game like mario kart and sekiro.
MK is a party game, it's intended to be casual from the ground up.
And I don't mean casual in a bad way, but the devs want anyone playing mario kart to just pick up a controller and be able to play.
From want their games to be learnt.
This Here, The true discussion should be about accessibility features in games not game difficulty, Keymapping, mod support and colourblind modes should be the minimum for games
this is a discussion born and fueled by the marketing and content created around the games that are in the discussion
saying "i cheated sekiro to beat it because i couldn't beat it normally (there are many reasons that one might not beat a game other than skill)/ because it was pretty fun" is okay
but the people who actively demand (like that ludicrous article by forbes saying that sekiro "disrespects it's players" by not having an easy mode") stuff like that are just shit-stirring for the sake of getting hate-views
then there's also the marketing as jim said, is dark souls hard? i mean yeah i guess you can say it's hard though that's very subjective, but the marketing for dark souls was basically "sadism simulator 2011", which is both inaccurate and also shit-stirring
I just had a chill when I imagined the AAA publishers selling games with hard-coded difficulty level and selling different difficulty levels separately or as DLC. Brrrrrrrr!
Its ridiculous how blown up this subject gets. One person I kept up with that was discussing it only mentioned Sekiro as it was a recently released game.
Their entire point was about games that have little to no accessibility options (like controller support, remapping buttons, etc) and how to get developers more on board with adding such features, and it was instantly warped into: "get gud, scrub. Dis game isn't supposed ta be ez. Da gams vision would be ruined!"
The conversation had nothing to do with difficulty (even though multiple difficulty settings can make a game more *accessible*), again, that's just what people warped it into.
Yeah, I'm sure that really happened.
I have a different take on this subject. This desire to exclude the 'casuals' is actually a reflection of the 'hardcore' gamers' own fear of exclusion. Before Dark Souls, the obsession with appealing to everyone meant that games became easier and more approachable, and those who wanted hard games weren't actually marketed to as much as after Dark Souls. I think that this 'get gud casul' attitude is actually rooted in a fear of returning to a market that ignores niche gamers entirely. The rise of EA and Activision and all of the other AAA giants has corresponded with a general exclusion of niche markets, and it's easy to draw an 'us or them' mentality from that.
My own opinion on the subject is that the ultimate arbiter of an easy mode or not should fall to devs, the only ones capable of really knowing if it meshes with their design vision.
Some games just literally can't get an easy mode either, like online games - an example being how arena shooters are notoriously hard for beginners and that's mainly why they're barely played by anyone today.
I think you just summed up all of my fears regarding easy mode.
It always begins like this, when a great series becomes mainstream. It could mean that future games would be made with the casual mass market in mind, and the niche hardcore gamer be just an afterthought.
And seems like From doesn't like the idea. End of conversation. This doesn't need to happen every time they release a game.
good point
It's also worth noting that when a huge crowd is asking for easy modes, there are no hardcore gamer groups coming for casual games and demanding a "hard mode" to make specific games more enjoyable for them.
Without the likes of Dark Souls these people might easily run out of challenging stuff to play - and nobody else seems to really care about them as customers. No wonder they want to keep some of their bastions intact.
Yes Jim, WH Smith is still a thing. Woolworths and it's glorious pick and mix section...unfortunately is not.
RIP in pepperoni you glorious choose your own diabetes section
Didn't Woolworths come back in an "online only" form though?
And it still has a vast library of magazines, ideal for browsing while you're other half shops for clothes. Huzzah!
Wikos has a pick and mix section that always makes me think of Woolys! It's not bad.
Pick N Mix : One of the immemorial glories of our fleeting civilization!
Very good video! One thing I want to touch on is the idea that you don't care if an easy mode exists or not: you did an excellent job tying it to being like an accessibility issue so that certain other people can enjoy the game as well as anyone else, and if that's the case, then not caring about whether or not those people can enjoy the game is, I think quite literally, sociopathic.
I think the best response is to want very much for difficulty settings to exist for those who need them, even if you don't. And because we should care about those people, we should encourage developers to do what they can to be as inclusive as possible whenever possible. Because we should care about and empathize with people, even in the abstract. An indifferent, uncaring stance on the presence of options that allow people to have as much fun with a game as anyone else is clearly amoral, at best.
On a much smaller scale, this happened with the newer Fire Emblems. They added the option of Casual mode where if a non-critical unit is defeated during battle, they retreat to tend their wounds for the rest of that map. Afterwords, they'll be available again. Nintendo did this because they wanted to reintroduce the series to a wider audience and reinvigorate the franchise. And I'm glad they did! More people playing a game I like means it's more likely to receive continual development! Back when I had way more time on my hands, I didn't use casual mode. The game that introduced it, Awakening, has your character in the position of a tactician and in the game they laud you on how well you've done so far. I wanted to feel like "the genius tactician" so I played again and again until I could get through the game without using a unit and with as few resets as possible. But now that I'm playing through the game again, I'm so glad for casual mode. I just want to re-experience the story and the characters and having perma-death off lets me enjoy the game without min/maxing nearly so much.
Later on, the franchise received a third mode, Phoenix mode, where if a unit was defeated in battle, another unit would need to go assist them and give them a pick-me-up and they would resume the battle right then and there. (And to me, it sounds exactly like when in RPGs we use the equivalents of Phoenix Downs or Resurrection Scrolls, etc.). Twice, I've had a friend who didn't want to play the game because they felt bad when they let a unit die by accident. Phoenix Mode let them enjoy the game a lot more than they would have, if they even played at all. Plus, it's easy to justify in my mind that this would be acceptable in game as well since it's all about armies of bonafide heroes running around being heroic. Of course they'd have their universe's equivalent of Resurrect on hand en masse.
This also got touched on in another game series I love called X-Com. In the re-imaginings of the old games, you can enable a mode called Ironman Mode to make it so you can't save scum and any death/injury is permanent. And that's cool that it's an option. Hell, there's even a Bronze man mode now where if something happened that you didn't expect, you restart the mission instead either save scumming or having to accept what happened. (And in games as full of bugs as the re-imagined X-Coms, this is definitely a good idea).
ADDING MORE CHOICES, MORE VARIETY, AND MORE ACCESSIBILITY TO GAMES YOU ENJOY IS A GOOD THING! IT LETS MORE PEOPLE PLAY AND MORE PEOPLE PLAYING AND GETTING INVESTED IN A GAME YOU LOVE MEANS YOU'RE MUCH MORE LIKELY TO SEE MORE OF THAT GAME AND FRANCHISE.
Why is something like that so frickin' hard to understand?
Huh, turns out I was always playing on Bronzeman Mode just by self-enforcing the rules.
...and by self-enforcing the rules, I mean... I've played Enemy Unknown/Within a _lot_ and I somehow never even realised you _could_ savescum during a mission in the default mode.
Also, yeah, a fine choice as a game to love - once you know the basics but before you've learned all the tricks, I've never played another game that's close to as good as the Strategic layer of that game at constantly making you feel like you're one more urgent matter away from being overwhelmed (as I say, as long as you've got the basics down)... but you've almost always put out one fire just before the next one ignites. It's a _phenomenal_ piece of game balance to pull off. As for the Tactical layer - what is there to say about it beyond, "don't try to use your Heavies' or MEC Troopers' primary weapons - it's a recipe for being driven mad by the RNG. Heavies do Suppressing Fire and, in a pinch, blow things to bits with their rocket launchers, MEC Troopers are great at a lot of things but, if you want them to do damage, their optional punch attack does a really solid amount and _can't miss -_ the sweetest two and a third words in the English language."
You learn those things, you stop being driven mad by misses because the game is good at onboarding you to play-styles for Snipers and Assaults that give you 100% chances to hit (and if your Support hits something during a turn in which they had nothing better to do but shoot something, that's just gravy), the combat becomes fun beyond believe.
Also thanks for the nod to the speed runners of dark souls who "walk above the level" (death plain glitch)
My thought on the matter are complicated, because it's a complex issue. Now, obviously greater accessibility is always a good thing. Also obviously, no game *needs* to include an easy mode. These are two truths essential to preface and frame the rest of the discussion. The question which arises from them thus is: "in what scenario would (or could) the presence of an easy mode do enough damage to overcome the benefit of greater accessibility?" And that's a non-trivial question. The knee-jerk reaction of "there is no such scenario because you don't have to play on easy" isn't actually sufficient.
For one: a poorly telegraphed easy mode. The more options a game gives you for what game you're going to be playing, the more obscured the developer's intended vision becomes. If the game doesn't clearly state "this is the way we intended the game to be played. Use other options only if you think you need to" then people can end up giving themselves a sub-par experience without realizing it. *I* might end up giving myself a sub-par experience, since I rarely play on the hardest difficulty on a first run because I assume it's not the intended difficulty. Celeste, paragon of game design that it is, provides a perfect example of signposting with its assist mode.
Now, that's all well and good, but that's assuming some degree of incompetence on the developer's part. Why can't we just say "all games should have an easy mode, just properly signpost"? Well, implementing an easy mode takes time. The more time is spend creating and properly balancing an easier difficulty, the less time is spent on the intended difficulty. Creating a good experience for everybody isn't a bad thing, but it's not strictly better than creating a great experience for some people. The less time is spent on the easy mode, the more important signposting becomes and the less people using the easy mode will enjoy it.
Still, these two on their own probably aren't worth the removal of an easy mode entirely. The remaining two points are rather specific to Fromsoft games, and are what tip the scales for me on those counts.
First: if the point of the game is high difficulty, allowing an easy way out can be detrimental to the atmosphere. When I was playing through Dark Souls 1 the only reason I was able to get past the hardest bosses was because I knew there was no other way. Artorias especially, since there are no npc summons for that fight and by the time I was playing no players were putting their signs in that area. That oppressive atmosphere would have been notably diminished if I knew that I had the option of an easy mode, even if it would mean starting a new character. If that's never happened to Jim then hey, good for Jim. Maybe it never happened to anybody else in the world, in which case good for everybody else in the world. But it happened to me. My experience would have been worse. This isn't as much of a thing in Sekiro though, since the difficulty isn't really part of the narrative there and the atmosphere is overall way less oppressive.
Second: it creates inconsistencies in the community. Fromsoft games have always benefited greatly from the community that forms around them. Much of that is thanks to the shared struggle, which wouldn't necessarily be diminished by an easy mode because those using it would probably be doing so to achieve equivalent struggle, but a strong backbone of that is that everybody knows that everybody else faced the exact same challenges. They didn't all have the same amount of difficulty with each one, but any discussion of those difficulties is within the framework that they fought the exact same boss that did the exact same damage and had the exact same health. Creating multiple versions of the game that could be people's first experience diminishes that. It's actually one of the reasons why Dark Souls 2 discourse isn't as interesting to me: Scholar of the First Sin completely re-worked enemy placements, so discussions between people who played different versions have a lot less common ground. And also if anyone is going to say "wouldn't the game being accessible make the community better because so many more people could take part?" No. A larger community is not inherently a better one. It's not inherently worse either, I'm not claiming that "the casuals would ruin our perfect walled garden," but if a larger community comes at the expense of something that made the community so appealing in the first place then it's probably better off as it is.
These are also why mods that make games easier don't really come into play. They're obviously not part of the intended experience, didn't take any developer time to create, and it's exceedingly rare for people to use mods their first time through a game.
And it's not like any of these are reasons the games would be *ruined* by an easy mode. They wouldn't be. They would still be phenomenal games. But they would be worse games, at least for myself and people like me, who I assume exist.
I've seen games with Easy Modes... It died.
Thank you oh so very much for this mini-essay. It is exactly the kind of thing I want to hear about in this discussion that is too often boiled down to one side or the other of 'games should all have easy modes' or 'games don't need to cater to everyone'. I personally lean more towards the importance of developer intent when it comes to difficulty, but I can also appreciate the importance of the player's experience of that difficulty and how they deal with it. Like you said, it is a complicated topic, one that could be fascinating to discuss, if people would just calm the hell down and stop taking the other side's arguments as personal attacks. Oh, and certain people _stop with the personal attacks_ as well. That shit solves nothing and only makes discourse more difficult.
fuck accessibility. it's no different than difficulty. if the dev doesn't want to make their game accessible, then gamers need to get over it.
Thomas Jenkins I disagree about accessibility. A lot of the time it’s just a matter of supporting alternate button mapping and custom controllers. From Software is actually fantastic about accessibility. A man beat Sekiro with only his breath because he is quadriplegic.
@@deriznohappehquite and that's fine. however, not every game should do it if they don't want to.
Wow, that another 3 years bit really was prophetic good lord
Right?
I think this attitude is a symptom of our hellish modern culture. Young people are given fewer opportunities to get a real education, a real career, a real avenue of growth as an individual with their own actual real world skillsets. They're expected to participate in an unfulfilling service industry job or some kind of "gig economy" pseudo-contractor bullshit that offers no prospects for the future either in career advancement or growth as a human being. Even if you get a decent education and somehow aren't crushed under debt, you'll probably wind up working a bullshit job because bullshit jobs are just about all the labor market is offering anyone anymore. As such, we've got a large population of young men whose only outlet to express their self improvement and growth is through getting good at videogames. Anything that can be perceived as devaluing the sole achievement they're allowed to have in life is viewed as a personal attack.
"Loosers" if to be short.
I think I know what it's going to be, from the tags, as a disabled person, I'm intrigued (not that I wouldn't eat up the Jimquisition every week)
EDIT after watching: Oh, cool, he DID mention disabled people being used as props in the argument (this goes both ways btw) but yeah I basically agree with everything else too
Anyone else find it funny "hardcore gamers" calling others neckbeards?
It's almost like "neckbeards" doesn't actually describe real people and it's just a generic insult that can be applied to anyone, while girls, who don't have beards on their necks, can also be hardcore gamers.
@@AusSP This completely ignores the point that there are way more *actual* neckbeards there though. You can yell idiot at any crowd but if you yell it at a group of mentally disabled people it's quite a different story from using it to insult just anyone
Yeah, I thought "neckbeards" have generally been the shut-in nerds that are often hardcore gamers? They're trying to use it the opposite way now it seems like.
Everyone here is trying so fucking hard to suck the fun out of a funny comment
To this day I don't know what neckbeard means other than the literal meaning of course. It's also a stupid thing to call people as an insult where arsehole is perfectly fine. So I will never go out of my way to learn it's filthy casual meaning.
I can only explain this as people applying PvP logic to PvE games. Easy, medium and hard aren't levels you have to climb to get to the top, but modes of engagement.
It's like being strong: if you need to piss on weaker people, you're missing the point.
"being stronger" is a shit attitude, "being strong" is above that shit.
@@Gokuderakun agreed, I suck at sekiro right now but it's all about the learning curve, once you get it it's like riding a bike... sort of
WH Smith is still a thing, Woolworths is dead though :(
I have to order my pick'n'mix off of amazon now, and it's just soul-crushing.
Mate some larger Wilko have pick'n'mix.
@@gnomocidal It's just the not the same :*(
Can someone make a Jimquisition mod that cheats in that aristocrat mode for all his videos?
There's absolutely nothing wrong with developers adding an easy mode or whatever, there is however something wrong about people claiming it's disrespectful of the developers not to add it.
he said "see you again in 3 years" and here we are, theee years later with a new fromsoft game comming out
I thank wholeheartedly that duke amiel du 'ardcore is back
Jim, Sterling needs a finishing move. Boglin Stunner.
Put a boglin on and shove it in someone's mouth like Mankind.
Wear a Boglin on each fist and deliver a Jojo style Boglin Beatdown!
Joel Rodriguez MR BOGGO!!!!!
What if he made a rope with boglins and used them like a flail
Ever notice how the cyclical nature of easy mode debate happens with the same duration as US middle school?
I did now
OH SO YOU'RE SAYING YOU WANT AN EASY MODE IN DARK SOULDS I KNEW IT
THIS IS PROOF OF CUCKOLDRY
It's called Pyromancy.
Edit: Not even to be flippant! Pyromancy was good enough for one of my Cerebral Palsy service users to get through DS1.
Ben Richards I don't know, I tried pyromancy and I feel like magic is more powerful (but I play as a sorcerer so maybe that's normal, I guess pyromancy is better if you don't want to base your character around it...).
But yeah, Dark Souls already has several "easy modes" that make the game more fun.
Kutlu Mızrak I like Dark Souls and I want to finish it, but I’m such a huge coward that I don’t dare entering new areas because I know I’ll be ambushed by freaky monsters...
I had to listen to happy music in my phone just to break the terrifying atmosphere of the New Londo ruins. It was hillarious to explore a dark cave full of ghosts while Elvis was playing in the background.
@MrPicas - Oh, you'll want to use a few of those cursed bones or whatever if you're going to New Londo. They let you hit the ghosts, and you can get a few of 'em from a corpse in a large pot near the bridge leading into that whole area. None of which, of course, is the least bit obvious until you get Stockholm Syndrome and start thinking like the game designers.
Why do we play games? That's an interesting question...
I play games for a lot of different reasons, but the games I enjoy the most are the ones that let me create my own characters and stories. It's why I love RPGs and MMORPGs, but also games like The Sims and the LEGO videogames...
Basically I'm sold to a game with a good character creator.
People's love for character creators in some games has always been interesting to me. I've seen people dismiss Sekiro because it doesn't have a character creator like in Bloodborne or Dark Souls. It's just weird to me since you pretty much immediately cover your character with armor and never see their face again (of course some helmets show the face). In games like Monster Hunter you can choose to hide your helmet so you can always see the face and hair etc. so it does make more sense. Though I can see the complaint of not having armor customizability in Sekiro since that's something you actually see all the time. Not having those options doesn't personally bother me at all. It's cool to have them but on the other hand playing a dedicated character like Sekiro or Geralt in the Witcher series makes the story much more interesting to me.
@@zemrood I don't understand how people could completely dismiss a game because there's no character creator. It happened with Nioh too, probably many games. I can understand wanting to create your own character, but, like you say, games that have a story almost always benefit so much more from a dedicated character. I hate silent protagonists that just stand there and occasionally you have to pick a dialogue option or nothing at all. The immersion is completely gone at that point.
MrPicas Well a games main purpose is to entertain players right. And players can find entertainment in any game if they want to. But the player can also decide whether they are entertained or not. For me story is a huge deal, that is where I find my entertainment in games. At the end of the day, YOU are buying the game and YOU are playing, it is useless to argue about how someone else is playing it, especially if that game is a single player game.
The main reason sekiro was disappointing: I can't be a titty ninja instead of just some dude. His name is "the wolf" FFS, why does he have to be a static character?
Also no dressup, what the fuck
@@PurpletridentYou find immersion in playing a dedicated character while I personally feel off when I've got a Commander Shepard and I see that his story is not my own, neither are his choices and in no way is he an avatar of myself. I feel way more immersed when it's my own character and my own silent dialogue options that I can voice in my head. I'd rather have no voice at all then a voice that isn't my own or the one I wouldn't imagine being on my character.
In Fallout 4 it was quite a bummer for me since Fallout games have always been about the silent immersion and while FO4 let me create my own character it didn't let me change the voice and that really pissed me off, I didn't want to hear the guy or pick the streamlined 4 pretty much the same dialogue options ever. Fortunately, I modded the Voice out and changed the dialogue wheel to a bar to make it more like the previous games for my own fitting. And yet again, this is just how I enjoy my video games, if somebody likes FO4, whatever. I just don't and I would like the game much less if I didn't have the option with mods.
There’s a very distinct difference between people wanting an easy mode and people wanting accessibility options. I understand the argument of authorial intent, but I genuinely feel adding accessibility options for those who may need them wouldn’t affect the core game for players that choose not to tweak them.
How would difficulty options affect the core game for players that choose not to tweak them?
very often they are the same.
@@greifenherz They wouldn't. That's what I'm saying.
@@vinx.909 Not always, though. And the wording of wanting an easy mode I think skews the argument into a different conversation. It's assuming people just want the game to be easy, rather than _easier_ in certain aspects. Tweaking the window of opportunity on parries, for example, is a different way to tweak overall difficulty than making the player just flat out deal more damage and take less, which is what a lot of 'easy' difficulty options tend to do.
@@thegameneededme5
what you are describing isn't really a difference between accessibility and difficulty but instead between different forms of difficulty. many games just install a damage modifier to the players damage input and output which works but also very lazy and doesn't affect the games difficulty but instead just how forgiving it is. other games allow you to actually tweak stuff which is a way nicer and better form of difficulty that allows a much wider range of people to get an experience much more like they want it.
These comments are going to be absolute hell.
boglin
Sounds like you're the first.
How big is Geralt?
They're actually not so bad
Check out twitter later in the week for the true pinnacle of gamers to come crawling out of their basements for this one haha
“Git Gud at dealing with different difficulty modes” lmao 😂 that’s probably the best thing I have ever heard and I really relate to that thing where the games offer to turn down the difficulty I’m like no game I don’t need your pity I will figure it out lol
I buy games for pure enjoyment, not competition! I have a full time job and children so I obviously don't want to spend my time grinding through every game I buy.
Yeah, I think that's totally valid. There's just a contingent of people who believe the universe revolves around them and their need for validation through "difficult video games", and any loss of their privilege is an affront to their elitist world view and a shock to their apparently fragile egos.
Having to _select_ Hard Mode from the main menu is just too much for their delicate constitutions to bear. It's... too difficult for them.
Right? I love that there are both easy games and hard games. I get to choose what to play depending on my mood and people who only like one or the other have something to play, no matter who they are... Everyone should be happy but no where there are humans there are idiots.
I am in the same position as you Ohknock, but I have the opposite problem. I can't stand games that have low challenge to them. I get bored of them quickly. So the only games I do buy I do want to be challenging so that I don't get bored with them. I don't do it for validation or achievements, or anything like that, I just want to be challenged.
@@Caitlin_TheGreatAnd to the argument of just select hard mode, that is not valid in 95% of games. The vast majority of the time hard modes are just more HP sponge, or you take more damage. I can't think of a game in the last decade where hard mode did something fundamentally different to the games play.
The souls games are difficult in the design of them. Unlike games from way back that were coin crunchers or such, which were difficult as a method of making them longer.
Now don't get me wrong. I'm perfectly ok with Sekiro and souls games in general having an easy mode, I just don't see why they are required. If they had them, thats great! I genuinely want people to play these games and have fun! But very few games have this style of difficulty. Where difficulty is baked into the design process itself.
@@DomSithe your point is kinda contradict, sir. You see, challenges in game would make you fail at some try, the failure will incite you to try and retry to overcome errors, retrying means you have to spend more dedication which has same concept as addiction (to do better). But you don't have all the time right?
what im saying is; it is okay to give up on hard games, it is not a shame to say the fuckin game is too hard. Gamers have a blockheaded pride when it came to a genre of "hey i can do that part easily while you struggle". In the end you have a tendency to sacrifice enjoyment for pride.
"if it's not fun, why bother?" -Reggie
@@Caitlin_TheGreat Aren't the people demanding sekiro be changed because it didn't suit them, the entitled babies who think the universe revolves around them?
I mean, if it's too hard for you, just play a different game. You're not entitled to has be every game cater to you after all right?
Gaming: the only hobby that is counter-intuitively slathered in the toxic, misplaced hostility over something that's supposed to be fun.
Sport and Motorsport is the same. Anything based on competition turns some into monsters.
LOLOLOL you clearly have NEVER been on a photography forum like DPReview.
@@oldm9228 true, even something like model building has its small share of gatekeepers, with "snap builders" being decried as not being "real modelers." It's really annoying for anyone trying to get into new hobbies to be constantly reminded that these activities "aren't for them."
You don't have a lot of hobbies, I take it?
It is almost like you haven't met a Star Wars fan.
2:50 Jim, I love how you used a still from "The Return of Optimus Prime, Part 2", where Rodimus Prime is frothing at the mouth at Optimus Prime.
unrelated but I love your profile pic, Celeste is amazing
I typically play a game once for the fun, then if I really liked it, again for the challenge. I don’t have the patience to play a game for the challenge the first time through
After I finish a game for the first time, I would either play new game + or play around with cheats, just to feel that I've completed the game