Maybe you haven’t been convinced by a good enough argument. Maybe you just don’t want to admit you are wrong. Or maybe the chaos is the objective, but what are you knowingly on the wrong side of?
In my case: I don’t think any games are obliged to offer an easy mode. If developers want to tailor a specific experience, they don’t have to dilute it with easier or harder modes that aren’t actually interesting and/or anything more than poorly done numbers adjustments. BUT I also know that for the people that need and want them, it helps a LOT. But I can’t really accept making the game worse so that some people get to play it. They wouldn’t actually be playing the same game after all…
Veganism. I don’t have any problems with most vegans. Most go through a phase of trying to convert you, but the ones I know and associate with have come out the other side. We all know that these positions would make the world a better place. I don’t think I have the will to do it. Might be wrong though.
As a Vegan, I can honestly say some Vegans are the worst. LOL. And I have found through the online rave review of products that Vegans are liars too. :)
When my wife brings a product home that had great reviews by Vegans, I’m like ah crap, this is going to be shite.
My old man yelling at cloud rant :
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i hate vegan products that try to position themselves as the vegan replacement to a non vegan product. They have their own qualities, and it hurts the product that it is compared to the meat alternative. If someone wants to eat chicken, no amount of marketing and spices will make it taste like chicken and will always be inferior to their meat counterparts for the meat eater.
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Vegan recipes on internet are 95% terrible. They try to put 100 flavors in one meal. Take whatever recipe your normally eat with meat and simply replace the protein for a vegan protein of your choice (pvt, tofu, bean curds, etc). Grill your tofu to your heart content, make that bean curd extra delicious by dunking it in soy sauce and eat with vegetables and rice or make a simple rice and bean with a side of fresh avocado.
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There are so many good vegan products with fucking terrible marketing. Meat eaters will not change their habits because you green wash your marketing. Go balls to the wall with that shit.
Pretty good rant.
If anyone likes pumpkin pie for thanksgiving, but doesn’t want to use milk/eggs…this recipe turns out amazing, and family didn’t notice it was Vegan. https://www.noracooks.com/vegan-pumpkin-pie/
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I disagree on this point. It’s convenient for a vegan, vegetarian or just someone who is trying to eat less meat to be able to make a substitution in a recipe. Tempeh is a great protein, but you have to know how to prepare it and what dishes it will work best in, whereas vegan “chicken” or plant based “beef” can be easily substituted 1:1 in recipes. As you get more comfortable, you can start substituting things like ground tofu, lentils or seitan, but having the culinary shorthand is helpful for lots of people.
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I’ve had the opposite experience. Most of the vegan recipes I’ve found online use clever plant based substitutions that aren’t processed meat alternatives. A good exercise is to take your favorite dish and Google “vegan [that dish]” and see what ingredients are in those recipes. Many of the recipes you find will likely have whole food ingredients!
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I don’t think vegan food brands are trying to change hearts and minds necessarily. I think they’re just providing easily substitutable alternatives for people who have already decided to eat fewer animal products.
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What about not trying to annoy vegans?
I don’t think any games are obliged to offer an easy mode.
That’s a valid stance. It’s ok to make art which is not intended for everyone, or even the majority.
However, if you’re charging people money for it and they are surprised by the difficulty and can’t enjoy it as a result, I think that could be a potential ethical issue. But if you make it clear it’s a difficult, challenging game, then I see no problem.
Good point on the ethics issue. Youngsters these days don’t know what hard games really are. Games used to be diabolically hard, design holdovers from when quarter-munching games moved to home consoles and every game you paid full price for was essentially a gamble on whether or not it was going to be good or even playable, but finishable was almost not a consideration back then because it was pretty rare to actually ckear a game from start to end.
These days to think it’s important and walk a line between challenging and entertaining not just for the sake of capturing a larger market share of players, but also to avoid bad publicity from having a game be too difficult to o complete.
It’s hard for me to know whether or not I’m on the wrong side of an argument. When people turn into bastards and brigade on me whenever I make an opinion on things. It’s hard to tell sometimes because, maybe their asshole-ness just validates what I expressed and I’ actually in the right. Who knows.
OP, you’ve made the classic mistake of putting your opinion in the post instead of as a comment, now everyone is replying to your opinion in top level comments instead of your question.
This is the best practice, especially for AskLemmy but it also applies to news and other media threads. It’s best to put your personal thoughts and opinions in a top-level reply, while keeping the post body to clarifications or summary of the posted question or media.
Opinions change, but sometimes the discussion doesn’t come up a second time. There are more than a few positions I’ve taken that I’ve since changed my mind about, one of which is certifications. While not necessarily a requirement in IT, having one would be immensely helpful right now, and so would having any kind of degree. Not only would it assist with a job search, but I’ve also been looking into moving to another country, and these things are almost always listed as something they look for during approval.
I’ve also been on the wrong side of whether or not to change career paths.
I’m trying to get back into gaming, and one of the things I appreciate most is a true, authentic experience that the developer intended, not something that was trimmed down or made easier for the sake of bringing in the most money or using other gimmicks to increase player count. I used to think it was best to include an easy mode, but after experiencing it, I can see it’s really not the same game, like you said. This was a relatively recent realization, too, one that I didn’t know I was on the wrong side of until I saw it firsthand.
Distro choice is another issue. I didn’t want to admit that I’ve fallen behind on that one, but I’m trying to get into some of the gaming-specific distros now after seeing what’s available.
I’ve been doing a lot of self-reflection, and these are just a few of the things I’ve realized I was wrong about. It’s not that I needed to be convinced of anything; I just couldn’t admit it for whatever reason. I’m trying to work on a lot of things right now.
I don’t know if I’m on the wrong side necessarily, but it’s something I’ll get flamed for, especially here on Lemmy.
I don’t believe all WW2 Nazi’s were “evil”. I understand the historical conditions and arguments of the assertion for “no good Nazis”, but I also know human nature, and how people are ignorant, fight for different reasons, or are otherwise uninterested in ideological bullshit.
I’m anticipating a certain flavour of reply, and I won’t be responding to those comments. Bring on the down votes and claims that I’m also a Nazi.
The last decade has brought a lot of clarity to me on this. People follow the herd and are tribal. If a movement gains enough momentum, most people will go along with it even if it’s “against their principles”. There are very few people that will stand up in front of an advancing hoard and say “Stop! This is wrong.”
I suspect Nazi Germany was the same. Most people will have accepted what was happening as the price of an easy life, and it wasn’t until it was too late that they realised what had happened.
As a Gen Xer, I would agree. When we had games, you had to figure it out. From there, it just got harder and harder until you died. No pretty graphics, no saves, no easy mode.
Now get offa muh lawn!
E: words are hard
Adding an easy or “story” mode to a game doesn’t inherently make it worse. You can still play it with difficulty cranked up to “Dark Souls” or whatever. The fact that there is a separate mode that others can use does not affect you; you need not use it yourself.
“Story mode” is actually an accessibility option in disguise: it can let people who have difficulty with fine motor control, reaction times, or understanding visual and auditory prompts to enjoy the art alongside everyone else. Instead of cheapening the game, it actually expands its influence on the world.
All that being said, no, no game is strictly obligated to be accessible, but why cheapen your art by not making it so?
I don’t particularly find the acessibility argument that compelling. Sure, we must make experiences as acessible as possible, but at a certain point the experience gets degraded by it. You can’t make a blind person see a painting, and if you did, it wouldn’t be a painting.
You can also offer an audible description of the painting, and, just so the analogy makes sense, you can warn the audience that hearing the explaination isn’t the experience the author intended to craft.
CrossCode did that…
Hi! I’ve had two strokes, and my hands don’t work as well as they should! Should I be excluded from the hobby, so you don’t have to look at an extra menu option?
What you’ve got here reeks of elitism.
Disability comes for everyone. Sometimes death gets there first. You aren’t unique.
I’m sorry to hear that, and I certainly dread the day I won’t be able to engage with the hobby the same way. But there are a million games that don’t require fast reaction times and precise lightning fast inputs.
Dude, just let everybody play everything. And if you have to glance at “easy” real fast to make sure you’re not pushing “hard (developer intention)” then that’s fine. Hard is still there.
And thanks for the downvote. I don’t know if you’re interpreting a downvote as “doesn’t add to the discussion,” or “this makes me angry” or “you shouldn’t be disabled, you fucked up”, but it just goes to show what’s up. No one else came along in the last 33 minutes.
The point is just that how can a developer create an experience where you have the satisfaction of succeeding against overwhelming odds when you offer the easy mode where you win by pressing one button? I understand that people play games for a myriad of reasons, but one of those IS to put in effort.
Also it was just a mistake, I don’t really care to upvote or downvote people unless it’s something egregious or great. You really shouldn’t care about it, especially since lemmy doesn’t even keep track of it.
You have your satisfaction by selecting hard. You don’t need to deny an easy difficulty to others.
Or are you the sort that would pick easy if you saw it?
Also this whole conversation is dumb because, until you get off your ass and make a game, you have literally no input whatsoever.
I’m gonna go back to my PS2 Silent Hill play through on beginner difficulty, where I can whack guys once instead of five to nine times. It’s the vibes and the environment.
Using this logic, you would have to accept that people that are very good at a given game from the start have a fundamentally different experience to people that are very bad at a given game. And people that are average have another experience again.
So who’s having the “true” experience? Is the good player having a degraded experience because they feel like they’re playing on easy mode? Is the bad player having a degraded experience because they give up half way in? Is the average player having the “intended” experience of each part of the game feeling earned and hard won?
The reality is it’s impossible to give the “intended” experience to everyone regardless. And if the average player experience is the intended experience, having difficulty settings will actually let the other players experience that, not take away from it. If the very good player and the very bad player can fine tune it so their relative experiences are the same as the average player, hard but not impossible, haven’t you actually given the intended experience to more people rather than degrade it?
The point I’m making is that you need not alter the painting. Adding an option to a game does not alter it for those that do not select it.
You’re arguing for letting perfect be the enemy of good. The fact that a blind person can’t perceive the visual aspect of an experience doesn’t mean that they should be excluded entirely.
perfect be the enemy of good
Even worse, deciding that perfect is the enemy of good on behalf of another person.
Given the person has no access to “the perfect”, this is basically exclusion on ableist grounds.
Adding an option to a game
(or an alternative modality like audio description)
Mona Lisa is not a good example here because it is a single work. Games are mass-producible. If you steal Mona Lisa no-one can experience any more. If you add a story mode to the game, nothing at all is reduced from other modes of the game.
Additionally, if you consider strictly simulation games, their difficulty is just a configuration of different amounts and pacing of things happening in the game. There is no foundation on which number configurations are more correct than others.
By extension, all games simulate a real or imaginary world, and these numbers’ configuration are in the control of the designer. Again, no one of the possible worlds is inherently more privileged than others.
I think one of the really neat things about games as a medium is that “the experience” is inherently a super malleable concept. Gaming blows my mind when I think about how adaptive you need to be to run a tabletop roleplaying game, like Dungeons and Dragons — no matter how elaborate your plans are, players will always find a way to throw a spanner in the works. Video games have the same unpredictability of how players engage with the world you’ve made, but a much smaller ability to respond and adapt to ensure that they’re getting the correct “intended experience”.
In some respects, I agree with you, because when I play games, I care a lot about the intended experience. However, the reality is that I bring too much of myself to any game that I play to be able to think of my experience in that way, and I think that’s probably one of my favourite aspects of games as a medium — a dialogue between gamer and game developers. Especially because sometimes, the intended experience of a game isn’t well executed; there are plenty of times I have gotten lost or confused in games because the game didn’t sufficiently communicate to me (or other players with similar experiences) what it expected us to do. Part of the role of the game designer/developers role is to be guide the players so they get something resembling the intended experience.
Honestly, part of why I am on the pro-accessibility side of this issue is because I’m a bit of a snob — I think that being able to adapt a message or experience to a diverse audience shows a singularity of vision that’s more powerful than experiences that target a much smaller audience.
For example, let’s say that the subjective difficulty level of a game (the “experience”) equals the “objective difficulty level” of a game (the difficulty setting) minus the player’s skill level. For the sake of this example, let’s imagine that 10 arbitrary units is the correct level of the subjective difficulty level, and above/below that, the experience is degraded; also, let’s say that player skill ranges from 1-10, with most people clustering in the 4-6 range. In that world, if a game could only have one difficulty mode, 15 ish would probably be best, because 15 (objective difficulty) - 5 (average player skill level) = 10 (intended subjective difficulty level). I don’t begrudge game Devs for targeting limited audiences if that’s what they feel capable of, but I do massively respect the craftsmanship of being able to build a game that can serve a subjective 10 to a wide range of people, by having a range of difficulty settings.
I think it’s sort of a matter of perspective. You may feel like having an easier mode degrades the experience, but for others it makes the game enjoyable/playable to them.
Do you have the same perspective on people that like the sandbox style of the sims games and so would use cheat codes for infinite money? It certainly alters the experience in a way that is different from the intentions of the devs, and to you may degrade the experience of the game, but for other people it elevates the game, and makes it more interesting or fun for them.
A similar argument could be made about the modding scene. Although it’s community driven rather than done by the actual devs of the games, allowing people to mod the game to customize their experience with quality of life mods, or mods that make the game easier/harder allows people to tweak the game more to their tastes and what they’re looking for in a game.
You might say that if a game isn’t appealing to someone they should just play another game. But if the game is very close to the experience they are looking for, but there are a few hangups that are a deal breaker for them, why force them to look for the perfect unicorn game instead of acknowledging that allowing players to cater the game to their own tastes is better. Having an easy mode does nothing to harm you, or your experience of the game, you can still play at your desired difficulty. And it only opens the game up for other people to enjoy.
You can’t make a blind person see a painting. But you can put a braille placard in front of it with a description of the painting. Or have audio tours that describe the paintings. And to you, that may degrade the art, but for someone who otherwise wouldn’t be able to experience it at all, it allows them to at least share somewhat in the experience that everyone else in the exhibit is having.
Good old klapaucius:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:!:! I wish there was some use to me still remembering that word today.
How does the existence of an option you never use degrade your experience?
For it to work well the developer has to change the game’s design to allow for the easier mode to work. If they don’t, it wouldn’t offer a good experience for neither the easy mode nor hard mode players.
The vast majority of games these days handle difficulty levels by simply tweaking the numbers of how much damage you take and deal. They build the game around a “recommended” difficulty and then add hard/easy modes after the fact by tweaking the stats.
Other games simply turn off the ability to die, or something along those lines.
In both of these cases the game is clearly built around the “normal” mode first. I’d be curious to see a clear cut example of that not being the case.
It would be pretty crappy to never give a description of a painting to a blind person though. Like could you imagine if we never described the Mona Lisa to a blind person and they just to guess what it was a picture of.
That’s pretty much like saying to a person to watch a let’s play of the game rather than play, which is fine but not really the point.
“Story mode” is actually an accessibility option in disguise: it can let people who have difficulty with fine motor control, reaction times, or understanding visual and auditory prompts to enjoy the art alongside everyone else.
This is very insightful.
I mean, if you want your story to reach broad audiences, story mode is good. If you have an artistic vision and can only see your story learned as such, do that. Not supplying story mode is like not supplying condiments at a restaurant. Limiting your client base.
I have an experience relating to game difficulty and accessibility that you would probably appreciate.
I was playing Rimworld for the first time, and because I was aware of how huge disasters that wipe out most of your work (that you can sometimes build back from) is a part of the game, I felt bad about playing the game on the mode that allows you to load earlier saves; I would find losing progress in this way more stressful than fun, so I wanted the ability to reverse poor fortune or choices, even if it felt like I was “dishonouring the intended experience”.
However, a friend (who was the reason I had bought Rimworld in the first place, and who enjoyed the chaos of no-save mode) pointed out that whilst the no-save mode may be presented as the default, the mode with saves enabled is presented as a perfectly valid way to enjoy the game. This made me feel immensely better about it, and I was able to dispel the silly guilt I was feeling. It highlighted to me the power of how we label difficulty settings and other accessibility settings.
Games are a funny medium.
That’s not how I operate. If I know I’m on the wrong side, I change sides.
I am always on the right side of any discussion. Otherwise I wouldn’t be on that side.
Yep. I don’t argue for things I don’t believe are the side I should be on. Sometimes I make tongue-in-cheek arguments (think A Modest Proposal) but that’s not in a discussion. I don’t get into arguments as a sport or to make people angry, so why ever be on a side I think is ‘wrong’?
Same! I have 100% certainty in any topic that I happen to be on, and if i’m not 100% certain then I immediately excuse myself and hold my hands to ears screaming “lalala I have no opinion!” because it would be ignorant of me to even debate a topic I am not a complete expert on, said no one ever.
Come on. Discussions aren’t binary. There are bits of that side you agree with, and bits of the other side you agree with and that weird eclectic mix puts you on uncertain spectrum that mostly leans to one side but oscillates in the middle at times, and that’s completely okay because it’s how you update your priors by being corrected by others whilst understanding that a lot of well informed stances are balancing on a few struts
A lot of people seem to feel this way. Don’t let it become a tautology, however. It’s your opinion because you think it’s correct, NOT it’s correct because it’s your opinion. For example, plenty of folks justify homophobia because gay people make them feel icky and never examine whether or not their intuition is actually correct. You still have a responsibility to examine your conclusions on a topic and readjust as necessary!
It’s your opinion because you think it’s correct, NOT it’s correct because it’s your opinion.
Exactly this.
I’m glad you are like that, but dometimes people want to be convinced of the opposite side but haven’t been able to, yet.
I have been bashed for saying sth similar in response to “you think your opinions are better than other people’s opinions”. Duh, yeah? Otherwise I would hold the other opinion.
I think TTRPGs should be unbalanced. Balance is a construct of games, and the fictional worlds the players will interact with are less immersive when everything is predictably tuned and equal. I think the fiction of a rogue being about as good as a fighter at combat is stupid. I think rust monsters and undead creatures that hurt your stats are way better than dire boars and skeletons who just shoot you with bows. I think that when rocks fall, things should die. These all contribute to the fantasy world seeming more dangerous, more ‘real’, like a spectral hand isn’t shielding you from the worst the world has to offer.
I also recognize this is my dark fantasy bias yapping away
You might be interested in GNS theory. TTRPGS try to do three things at once, be a Game, tell a Narrative, and Simulate a world. Different games will prioritize different aspects, some people want a fair challenge where they build a character according to the rules laid out to face a challenge, other people want everything to serve the story, even if it means fudging mechanics or breaking with realism, and then some people just want the simulation to be as realistic as possible.
Like many things with TTRPGs, it’s table dependent and emphasizing any of those elements over the others is totally valid as long as everyone’s having fun.
I’m with you. If a world isn’t dangerous there’s no reason to engage with it critically imho. If you want to grind out tactical combat or explore a power fantasy video games or board games do a better job, what they can’t do is appropriately punish or reward you for being clever. Or handle unexpected interactions.
But I’m a minority. I prefer disreputable thieves slinking through an ancient dungeon spinning lies, setting traps, and brokering deals to “I use ability-5, roll my 2 dice, apply bonus modifiers, and kill the challenge appropriate goblin”.
You know you don’t have to play the easy mode right? You can just change the mode in the settings. Most games default to the standard version anyway.
Yes, but by that same argument if the experience doesn’t work for you as it was intended, perhaps the game isnt for you.
Not that arguing this point is the question here anyway.
Why wouldn’t the developer want as many people as possible to buy the game though?
Games used to be art and done for passion.
Having to include an “easy mode” in your game has powerful knock-on effects that change how normal and hard difficulties play too. Timings and quantities that would normally be finely tuned and hand-crafted suddenly need to be highly-variable and detract from the freedom of developing for just one difficulty.
How can you tell which mode was developed first and which one was tacked on?
In FE: Echoes SoV, for example, I’m pretty sure they developed easy mode first and hard mode got tacked on. But I only played hard mode. Did I play the game “wrong”?
That sounds like an entirely surmountable engineering problem.
It’s not like games are being written in assembly any more.
It goes deeper than just simple engineering though. It affects tone and overarching game design. It is multiple extra dimensions that have to be considered across every aspect of the entire game. If it is done poorly, you get paper dolls on easy mode and damage sponges on hard and nothing of merit to compensate for these facts. The difficulty of the game goes from being genuine to artificial.
That’s why you design for accessibility, and don’t try to cram it in at the last moment. It’s not actually difficult, it just requires engineering discipline.
There are also plenty of Dark Souls clones for people like you who demand nothing but punishment.
I don’t need a game to be hard, I need it to be consistent and well thought-out. Animal Well for example is a rather easy game, but because it only has one difficulty, the developer was able to keep a very tight focus on the world and puzzle design. Everything is layered there, because they don’t have to be containerized and sliced into pieces to account for adjustable difficulty settings.
From a purely financial view, they don’t. There’s a reason why games have become as handholdy as possible. And one of the reasons why the Souls series stood out was because it went in a different direction.
Why wouldn’t the developer want as many people as possible to buy the game though?
I’ve never made art (incl. games) with the intention of having as many people view it as possible. Many developers make games as a hobby rather than for mere profit, and some try to draw a compromise in the middle.
I know this doesn’t apply as much to major well-known games created by professional game development companies, but there are other incentives guiding development beyond maximizing purchases.
And how many boutique niche Indy games made solely for their artistic merit have you played that actually had an easy mode?
But the developers put a story/easy mode in the game. That seems intentional to me. Maybe those games just aren’t for you if the mere option of difficulty settings bothers you so much.
Is the word “wrong” spelled “wrong” or “rongue”?
You are rong
The right way to comment on this post is not to answer OPs question, but rather offer your take on their take.
I did all the things at once!
There isn’t really a “right” side to that one. If developers want to disappoint some potential customers and leave money on the table by not creating an easy mode, that’s their prerogative.
Maybe? I feel like the developers have the prerogative to decide to include it or not, but with the way the discourse has gone it certainly feels like I’m in the wrong here.
Point 1: If adding an easy mode legitimately degrades the “hard core” game, that’s one thing. But unless you were on the development team, how would you know if it had?
Point 2: I don’t think it’s wrong, but I do think it’s… let’s say unskillful in the Buddhist sense. Not immoral so much as clumsy.
People who self-identify as gamers and tie their sense of pride/self-worth to their gaming prowess are cringe. It’s cringey to not want there to be easy modes when nobody’s forcing you to play them.
