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at the moment a couple of cat toys

You can make a game easier by giving more health, giving enemies less health, adjusting the AI some, etc. You have to put effort into it of course but it can be done without compromising the normal difficulty. They shouldn't cater to people though if it's going to compromise the main game. I just don't think that, if they give a shit, it will do that.

metaaaa

YEA! Welcome back!

90% of games I play, I will play purely for the story or some aesthetic that has nothing to do with gameplay. There's nothing wrong with having lower difficulties to give more people the option of that experience. There are ways to do it that isn't just "you basically can't die" and maintain some form of challenge without completely alienating people. Despite my preferences for games, I have no problems with challenging myself. I also have a fondness for going for trophies/achievements in games, and playing on higher difficulties for that purpose (otherwise I've always been a "default setting and done" type of person with most games). However, I have never gone anywhere near a 'Souls' purely because of what I hear about them from literally everyone. Have even got a couple for free through PS+ and never touched them because I ligitimately don't want the headache no matter how much I am interested in some of the story elements and things like that. If there was a difficulty option I might actually consider it and then push into the higher difficulty based on how I felt from there. It's entertainment software. There are (at least) dozens of different ways and reasons people enjoy this medium. It's stupid to limit the audience for something purely because of a "git gud scrub" mentality. Also, thinking about this topic reminds me of the video series Jim Sterling did where he would read elitist gamer comments as an 18th century french nobleman or whatever it was:

I saw Frankie Boyle with Lucy in Aberdeen and he was spectacular. Then Stewart Lee with Hornet, which was the best thing I've ever seen aside from Pussy Riot Then Dylan Moran which was good but not as good as Monster

Even the singleplayer experience benefits from the Lisa Simpson "Challenge you can do" effect tho w/r/t adapting controllers, accommodating colour blindness. Nah, you're right, games accommodating easy difficulty is good in some sense, but Winning feels best when it was Hard to get there. I say this as someone who is not good at videogames lmao Except sometimes. Idk. I think everyone deserves the "Omg I can't believe I actually managed to do that!" feelie.

This is probably my most wanted game right now... feels like the first huge improvement in gameplay and physics interactions in gaming since HL2 probably. Can't wait for June!

The tricky thing about video games is that not everyone will play the same game for the same reason, and forcing the player to play the game how you specifically want it to be played narrows down how many people are going to keep playing it. If I'm into a game's story, then being stopped by gameplay is the most aggravating and least fun thing the game can do, because story to me is not the reward for good gameplay and that's what high difficulty turns it into. I want to see what happens next, stop getting my way etc If I'm into the gameplay or even feel like I accomplish something in the game, then higher difficulty is fine (ex: I don't think I ever had fun playing the Last of Us even when I beat it on hard mode, but it felt do-able after beating it on easy and I wanted my trophy statistics to look better than beating it on Easy looked). I did beat Dark Souls and did experience the "OHFUCKOHFUCKOHFUCKOHFUCK." I killed the giant wolf a lot earlier than I should've due to learning the pattern and executing, shit was heart-pounding, but when I look back at it (Ddrat, da-da-da-um-da), all the hours of stress didn't feel worth the 30ish minutes of feeling accomplished at the end of it because dying in an open world like that was so punishing (I probably "quit" at least 20 times not counting Ornstein and Smough).

Lock Screen: Home Screen: This has been my set up for literally like 4 months because I'm so excited for the Fruits Basket reboot lol