Sekiro and Difficult Games

I was gonna make a twitter comment about this when I saw a Kotaku article about how an easy mode have never ruined a game but after noticing that a twitter post wouldn't be enough to properly express my take I decided to put down my thoughts in a blog post. To be clear I've never been a fan of super difficult games like the Dark Souls series and I have no intention to buy Sekiro due to the difficulty, but I still wanna defend games that don't include an easy mode. 

I suppose that the heart of the debate whether or not games should have an easy mode boils down to if you consider yourself a casual or hardcore gamer. It's really kind of a childish argument at face value but after giving it some thought I don't think you can really boil it down to just saying that the game is meant to be challenging or that an easy mode wouldn't be hard to implement and would just help casuals to play the game. That a game is hard doesn't say much, you really need to look at what makes a game hard to really start thinking about if different difficulty modes make sense.

As an example I see a lot of people talking about how gaming was so much better back in the days because they were so challenging and getting through them was a real accomplishment. To that I say, yes and no. Nostalgia is big these days and since I don't find a lot of modern gaming in the form of "games as a service" all that attractive I've spent some time going back to older games and you know what I've noticed? They sure are hard, not because they offer some brilliant challenge that only the best can handle, no, most of the time they're hard because they're just poorly designed. That might be the wrong way to put it, like they were hard because movement didn't feel good, aiming wasn't as smooth, AI wasn't as complex and so on. Like of course games are going to feel easier today when you're not struggling with movement and the camera/aiming and AI are allowed to vary in behavior. I played one of the old Medal of Honor games and it was difficult because movement was sluggish, aiming was even worse and the enemies came at me in hordes and were always aware of where I was and had pinpoint accuracy from the other side of the map to name an example. That's not difficult because of a well balanced and thought out challenge. Take a more modern example, The Last of Us which I'm currently playing you have enemies that don't operate like a hive mind, movement is smooth enough and aiming is actually made difficult on purpose because you're not meant to have that but that also reflects in the enemies. I mean to me it still feels good and it is satisfying to hit a headshot but they've made it sluggish so you don't run and gun like in Uncharted. See, the difficulty these days are much easier to base on deliberate choices, not just technological shortcomings.

I'm ranting a bit here but like if we mention Uncharted a bit more, there the difficulty scaling comes from the amount of enemies, how much damage they take and how much you can take before you go down. It's a pretty simple game and scaling that difficulty isn't hard, or I imagine it's not. Here's the point that I'm trying to make here, games aren't all like Uncharted, games like Dark Souls don't rely on just turning enemies into bullet sponges or giving you less health to make it hard. Games like that rely on very specific gameplay mechanics about precise movement and attacks and the whole point of those games are to be tough but fair. It's hard to put that type of challenge into words, especially for someone who don't have any real experience with those games, but like to balance that challenge out in a way you have to do way more than just up the damage and health stats. It's not impossible, of course not, but really if a developer have a very specific vision in mind and want to spend their time on balancing out that experience as well as possible who have the right to tell them they need to split up their time to also make sure there are easier and harder modes that offer the same type of balance that the game is based on? Like again, games today are able to have more depth in terms of moment to moment gameplay that if a game comes along that tries to take advantage of that no one should stand there and say you also need to make this accessible for people from other walks of life. Just consider the vast amount of factors that go into this, frame rate, visual clues, precise input, a plethora of moves, so much that a simple difficulty scaling system is just not viable. I mean in the same way hardcore gamers shouldn't go around demanding tough combat out of something designed to be a walking simulator.

I know this blog post was pretty much an incoherent rant that I'm not really qualified to give any real takes on and was most about my distaste for people with nostalgia goggles on praising the difficulty of older games because they were fighting the mechanics as much as the games. If someone did read this I hope my point came across on some level. I'm not interested in Sekiro, and I'm ok with that, I'm not exactly a casual player but I'm not really a hardcore player either. I'm just a gamer who knows not every game is made for me personally.