Galeigh

First: people have been using outside sources for video games since the dawn of video games. (first it was magazines, then official/unofficial guides, then FAQs, and now YT). Difficulty be damned for this one. Easy and hard games have em and players have used em for both. Second: I flat out said it's not something everyone was going to have, and that it was ok not to. Third: Tuning for difficulty is not just tweaking health and damage in hard games. It's a total rework in spawns, difficulty curve, and enemy abilities. This stuff take up a lot of time and since most hard focused games are done by small teams it's not viable even if they wanted to. Fourth: Gaming IS a recreation activity like movies or books. You don't see people who don't like horror movies demanding that they be made less scary so they can experience it do you? No. Because it's stupid. A lot of games can have multiple difficulties. And that's great. Like the recent God of War had a fantastically designed difficulty variations. It was also a heavily story based game, so you could glide through on normal or easy for the story or grind that hard mode (I played second highest difficulty to beat it for context) if you want. It was never designed to focus on that hard mode so it needed those difficulty variations and benefited from having them. The closest a souls game ever had to an easy mode was DS2. They stripped out the labrynthian level design for a linear experience, game fast travel immediately, introduced a heal over time item that could be used functionally limitlessly, and pulled back on the traps and ambushes. The game suffered (in comparison to the others) as a result. All these features to promote more people to play turned off the core fanbase. The whole "but you dont have to use the stones" is a fallacy (people will always choose the quickest and easiest route in gaming, it's a fact) and was only one part of the problem. DS3 took out the healing stones, brought back the labyrinthian level designed, upped the traps and ambushes, but kept the fast travel (the only feature everyone agreed was worth keeping) and the game shined as a result. The point is, a game designed from the ground up to be hard suffers when an attempt to add an easy mode or tweaked for more accessibility. It's ok not to like hard games, but that doesn't mean it's ok to demand they change for you. I like Digital Extremes (warframe devs) design philosophy: They understand and accept that the type of game they make isn't for everyone, but instead of trying to appeal to people who won't like their genre, they doubled down on what made people like their game instead. As a result they have a solid, stable user base. They would have failed if they had tried to make those appeals because then they wouldn't have such a committed group of players keeping the game going.

Interesting note so far, 1990 IT and The shining are tied for most viewed.

So, season 2 was greenlit. We will actually get a conclusion to the cliffhanger ending!

Hey look, BLs has finally caught up to other loot games!

That's not what I am saying. If you don't like hard games then don't buy them, but if you want to then there are massive communities that give real and solid advice on how to approach the game from every skill level. Example: I was originally really against Dark Souls due to its rep for difficulty and as someone who, at the time, didn't care for that sort of thing gave it a hard pass. My curiosity got the better of me though after the pc version was on a steam sale for 5 bucks. I tried it, got my ass beat then went to YT for tips. I found a video that could be summed up like this "Yo, you new to this thing? Can't deal enough damage? Ok, go here and get these items then run back to start and easily over power the early game stuff to get used to the mechanics" and then it clicked. I followed the vid and tried again and felt like a god sweeping through the beginning and as the game got harder going in I slowly adapted to the dodging, parrying, and backstab mechanics. That was my "Hard games ARE fun" moment. Not everyone will have that though, and it's ok not to, but to call it gatekeeping is insincere to the community who WANT more people to experience the games they love as they are. It's nothing like implementing color blind modes (which all games 100% need).

I take nothing back. I am still trying to scrub that experience from my brain.

Abstract and metaphorical can be fun as long as they don't dip into pretentious

I wanna contribute here but I don't really have a stake in this fight. Only Metal Gear game I ever played was the first NES title.

I just don't think games should have to cater to everyone mostly. Don't like hard games? Dont buy em. Wanna see the story in said game though? Youtube. That's your option.

Depends on the game to be Honest. When the difficulty is one of the games appeals then absolutely not. Ex: Any Fromsoft game. The reason is that those type of games are so finely tuned for their difficulty that they cannot be simply "tweaked" for easy modes, you'd have to break the whole design of the game for them. Just look at Dark Souls 2 with those fucking healing stones, broke the whole balance to make it "more accessible" Outside of that though, sure why not, as long as you leave the harder difficulty in and dont sacrifice the quality of the gameplay to accomodate the easier difficulty.

67 was setting it up so he didn't get the good number reference again

65 is disappointed you failed to make a nintendo 64 reference

63

that one just makes me cringe

59 will catch 58 one day

I need to see the new IT. Hard to find the time cause Desi HATES horror movies.

This is you now Stinkfist:

they walked away before he got to the part about it being a dude

Never said what they are doing isn't shitty, but it's their ONLY option if they wanna succeed

52 was the worst idea DC ever had.

To each their own. I love a runny yolk egg

no, I am saying every attempt at live action anime has been garbage.

50

Wow, never seen anyone in the middle road when it comes to eggs before. It's usually a love or hate thing.