This easy mode gate keeping idea needs to die. Git gud needs to go with it. I’m glad that there are games that give a challenge to those that want it but there should be a happy medium between “Mash attack until victory” and “memorize every attack pattern and still get stomped.” Or at least a setting that most games have that let’s you experience the story while playing.

If the intense and strategic combat is the gameplay a person dislikes then what’s the difference between you playing the game for the story or watching a play through?

Lies of p has a difficulty slider that decreases damage from the enemies and increases the party window. That really doesn’t do much. You still need to “memorize” the moves no amount of button mashing saves you even on easy.

The only way to really give an easy mode while not throwing combat out the window would be to heavily slow attacks, lower complexity, and decrease damage while changing enemy placement and consistancy. Sure, a game could do that no problems with that, but that’s a lot of dev time to build something against the games ethos. Every map has two or more varients. Every boss two or more movesets. If this is a devs vision fuck yeah but that’s a lot to put in when the issue is people don’t like the core concept

Do we argue horror games should have options for low horror so we can enjoy it without the horror? puzzle games should have a second set of easier puzzles for those who find them too hard? Story centric games should have low-story varients for those who still want to play? That dating sims should have aromantic varients for those who just like the comedy? Sure, if a dev wants that, good on them. Current games don’t need to change though.

The intense strategic combat where numbers change little and skill changes everything is the point. That’s what these games are built around it’s their fundamental concept. If you don’t want to engage with this and still want the story do what I do with the Warcraft series. Watch playthroughs, or story breakdowns. I hate their gameplay but will never argue they need to spend dev hours catering to me by making something antithetical to their core MMORPG concept.

Edit: with lies of p people complained that the difficulty slider didn’t do much as they still had considerable difficulty. They were right and this displays my point. To make an easy mode work there needs to be considerable effort put in. Otherwise it doesn’t fix the core issue. The entire point of the system is that numbers mean little to difficulty but skill, rhythm, and practice mean a lot. Changing the numbers will thus not have much effect. New movesets, enemy placement, and quantity must be adjusted for each level of difficulty. This is a large task with little benefit

Slowing the game down and reducing the damage done by bosses isn’t rocket science. It’s like ten lines of code, which have been written so many times an AI can probably provide them.

Different people have different capacities to engage with a game. The world is a better place with some simple accessibility concessions.

We don’t need to make excuses for game developers who don’t even do the minimum, unless it’s their first game.

Aight I see aim not getting through to you. Let’s try though.

No, lowering damage and slowing attacks is not all I proposed nor would that fix the issue. Complexity in move-set must also be decreased. Also in the game world enemy placement and quantity must be adjusted to lower dificulty. Otherwise it’ll be, mostly, just as hard

No, properly slowing attacks is not easy to do. You are not programmer or an animator. No, AI can’t magic this up for you either a month ago I saw an app hobbled together with AI that had three whole stacks in it with three seperate apps because somebody tried to add a new view with statistics on it with AI tooling.

Once more, for accessibility, should we have low to no horror settings in horror games? Low to no puzzle options in puzzle games? Etc.

You call these people lazy but don’t have any clue what they actually do. No. It’s not lazyness. They could make shitty difficulty settings that don’t fix peoples problems or they could spend many hours doing it right.

Edit: To respond to their edit, I think the just add a difficulty slider argument fundamentally doesn’t understand why people play these types of games