nanoUFOHelldivers 2 director weighs in on Elden Ring: Shadow of the Erdtree's difficulty: 'A game for everyone is a game for no one'
slstThis is such a terrible take. You can have difficulty accessibility options in difficult games (eg. Celeste, Furi) and it doesnt make the game worse. This is just gatekeeping bs
KühlschrankHonestly how is this gatekeeping? That word gets slinged around a lot and it using it here seems like it diminishes the real situations where the word is useful. So they’re limiting access to the game from people who what? It’s hard for everyone, they’re not being selective about the difficulty somehow.
Except some people have disabilities that prevent them from enjoying difficulty in a game. Some people just want the ambiance and story. Some people have reflexes that are not as sharp as they used to be. They should be able to also enjoy this art form as much as others
Eh I’m sorry but I still don’t buy it. Making it a game about ambiance and story makes it a different game, doesn’t it? Every game has a target audience right? Why does it seem like it’s just games like this that get this sort of outrage thrown at it? FPS games have a similar level of entry yet no one is out there demanding they make Counter Strike less twitchy.
Counter strike is a multiplayer game, I’m talking about solo game (and even mp games can have difficulty accessibility options, like Tekken 8 does).
About your target audience thing, I’d love to play dark souls and elden ring for the exploration, awesome music and ambiance but the difficulty and slow paced gameplay always put me off. Or to take the other example of Celeste, some people play it because of the difficulty and fun platforming, but I played it for the story and music and I loved it. Giving accessibility options will help people enjoy their game how they want with close to 0 additional development time cost.
I should say that I appreciate the candid discussion, nice to have a civilized chat on the internet. Also - in the end it wouldn’t really bother me if Fromsoft did implement a simple difficulty slider. I think it’d be a bit more difficult than you are assuming however since it is also a multiplayer game. I guess they could limit the difficulty options to offline players only.
But as a very long time fan, I’d be remiss if I didn’t point out that they have actually gone a long way to addressing the difficulty complaints of their games. ER is their most accessible game and there are a lot of in-game opportunities to customize the amount of difficulty one faces. I could go on and on about it but I’ll leave it at that for now.
BlxterI believe a difficulty slider in a game specifically Elden Ring would destroy the game design. Biggest example is my own experience after walking out the starting area seeing and having that horse fella as the first thing I saw and tried to kill for longer than I would like to admit (before going to Google) if there was just a slider to slide down so I could kill that guy I would have never learned how to play the game and explore and kill bosses to level up. Not saying sliders don’t work in ANY game but I just think it would ruin the experience of elden ring.
Oh yeah I 100% agree with you! I always try to make sure to point out all the other options available to people if they’re frustrated with difficulty. I think people don’t understand that a lot of the ‘options’ in Fromsoft games are not in menus - they’re baked into the gameplay itself with in-world/lore reasons for doing them. Like how co-op uses a sign instead of a multiplayer interface ‘room’ like most other games.
It is the best thing about Fromsoft games IMO, that everything is a vessel to help tell the story and create more immersion, and a difficulty slider is game-y and creates less immersion (as well as what you said - would ruin the opportunities the difficulty affords in directing pleayers).
All that being said, if they added a slider that would only affect others, the only way it affects me is that I’d be bummed that they didn’t get the great experience that I love about the game. I mean the other person mentioned Celeste which I also really enjoyed and I wasn’t even aware that it had difficulty sliders. So that’s how much they’d affect my enjoyment of the game.
I mean you could just not use the difficulty slider. I’ve never turned down the difficulty in any game even if I could have, but I don’t begrudge people that do if they’re struggling.