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Game Maker's Toolkit - Should Dark Souls have an Easy Mode? (Patreon)

Published:
2016-04-25 12:49:49
Imported:
2020-07

Content

It's the question that comes up every time FromSoftware releases a new action RPG - should Dark Souls come with an easy mode? To answer this question (sort of), we must first figure out why these games are so hard, and whether there are better ways to provide difficulty settings than a choice at the start of the game.

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Game Makers Toolkit - Should Dark Souls have an Easy Mode?

It's the question that comes up every time FromSoftware releases a new action RPG - should Dark Souls come with an easy mode? To answer this question (sort of), we must first figure out why these games are so hard, and whether there are better ways to provide difficulty settings than a choice at the start of the game.

Comments

Ben C

The other thing that bothers me in the Souls games, besides their difficulty, is the lack of explanation of basic mechanics. I really need to go back and revisit them but it often feels like you can't really play them without doing a fair amount of online research about how weapon degradation works, what being "hollowed" means, etc.

Anonymous

Hey Mark, I think there are some good points here - for example, I certainly agree that allowing players to choose their difficulty in a more granular and diegetic way through gameplay is often better than simply picking between Easy, Medium, and Hard before even starting the game. But there's a lot I take issue with, and I feel like it mostly stems from a question of who Easy mode is for. You spoke of the satisfaction of overcoming tremendous odds by fully engaging with a game's systems. But "tremendous odds" varies a lot from player to player. Personally, I'm a fairly experienced gamer but I don't spend a lot of time with RTS games - so if I pick one up and get extraordinarily lucky and find that the first mission presents tremendous odds that I can just barely overcome by engaging fully, that mission is probably just a warm-up for a genre veteran. And it's probably much harder for someone unfamiliar with games in general, and completely impossible for someone less physically capable due to age, disability, etc. The Sunset Overdrive example is a solid instance of a game's design encouraging a particular experience, but I don't think it's a fair comparison - in that case, they're steering the player's play style: the choices the player makes in interacting with the game world. The effect is very different than encouraging a particular experience by enforcing a specific level of challenge. You cautioned against devaluing challenge, and I strongly agree. A proper challenge is perhaps the best experiences a skill-based game can offer. The problem is that what constitutes a proper challenge isn't the same for everyone. Enforcing a set challenge level does create the intended experience in a subset of the audience, but completely prevents other huge segments of the possible audience from having anything resembling that experience. If, say, my reactions are significantly slower than average due to any number of physical reasons, Dark Souls won't give me the intended experience of overcoming tremendous odds. It'll instead give me the experience of being completely shut out. You can't use game design to steer someone toward playing a game in a way they are not capable of playing. The partial solution of RELUCTANTLY making easier modes available (such as by hiding them, indicating that they are not the intended way the game should be played, making some content only available on harder modes, or mocking players by putting party hats on everything) is just plain rude. You wouldn't make fun of someone who uses the wheelchair ramp, or tell them the stairs are the REAL way to get into this building, would you? Then why do that for Easy mode? I get that if a game prominently displays an Easy mode when starting out, some number of players who would have more fun on Hard will instead pick Easy. But the problem isn't the availability of an Easy mode - it's that forcing players to choose a difficulty mode up front with no context is a broken system. Surely the solution isn't to protect the incremental enjoyment of those hypothetical players by sacrificing the enjoyment of the people who need Easy mode? At least not if you want to have a large, inclusive audience for your game. This is a topic I feel very strongly about, and I've written about it on my own blog. If you want to see more of my perspective, feel free to check out my post on this exact subject at <a href="http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/11/in-praise-of-easy-lowering-barrier-to.html" rel="nofollow noopener" target="_blank">http://www.pixelpoppers.com/2009/11/in-praise-of-easy-lowering-barrier-to.html</a> Either way, thanks as always for your valuable contributions to the discussion, and as always I look forward to your next video. -docprof

GameMakersToolkit
>>1701751

Hey, thanks for the comment - lots to chew on there and I'll give the article a read. The role of handicapped and disabled gamers is something I feel bad for not focusing on - and is something I hope to come back to one day.

Anonymous

This was a really good video - concise, informative and fun to watch. Good work, G.