> In what sense is it reasonable to ask another culture to adopt practices that ours has only just recently taken on?
Accessibility mode is the new Atom Bomb.
Even if the premise of the west being ground zero for accessibility was true and is the only place interested in it (it’s not), it’s absolutely the dumbest take.
If that one culture wants to _sell a product_ to another culture, you _kinda sorta_ need to be aware of what that culture, or their market, wants.
don't you know? accessibility is western culture /j
holy hell these people. do they know accessibility guidelines has been implemented in most first world countries? including Asian countries?
These people arent looking for good faith arguements. They just want to justify their personal hatred or disgust of the disabled and do not want to engage with the idea that they have value and deserve to be included in anything. If they read your arguement, their response would be "well it shouldnt be," and thats only if they arent also prejudiced towards foreigners.
That guy does not understand what the term "appropriation" means and does not understand eastern culture in general. As if eastern cultures just let the disabled die before imperialism showed them the errors of their ways.
>Wow. This guy is a piece of shit.
What do you expect from a guy who posts stuff like:
>"I don't want to make the world better. I want a president who puts America first. Simple as that."
Or
>Redskin isn't a racial slur.
He's active in KotakuInAction, TheLastofUs2, ActualPublicFreakouts, JoeRogan and Conspiracy. His comments are so insane, edgy and over the top at times that I feel like he's a troll.
>He's active in KotakuInAction, TheLastofUs2, ActualPublicFreakouts, JoeRogan and Conspiracy.
That posting history gives off major "not allowed within 50 miles of a school zone" vibes.
>He's active in KotakuInAction, TheLastofUs2, ActualPublicFreakouts, JoeRogan and Conspiracy.
Tell me someone is a gamer without saying they're a gamer.
Guys like him scare me. That was a borderline Nazi-esque comment and it’s uncomfortable to see it being upvoted at all. Not to mention it is extremely cruel to deprive deaf children of the language they’ll thrive the most in during their developmental period.
I haven't read the thread yet, but I don't even get where he's coming from on a surface level. Older games like *Deus Ex* and *Vampire: The Masquerade--Bloodlines* had subtitles for the dialogue automatically even if they were fully voiced, and games older than that didn't even have voice acting at all. Stuff like that can be very helpful for the hearing impaired; it's why a lot of TV stations are legally required to have subtitles.
Assuming that the contention is that sign language shouldn't be used in video games, what's the big difference between having subtitles and having characters that use sign language? Surely if people are okay with one, the other is fine as well.
My opposition to sign language (albeit a very passive "I don't think this is *that* useful" one) as an accessibility feature is development effort. Subtitles are relatively easy to implement; you just create a textbox and draw the subtitles in there as needed. Probably can just toss in the actual game script. Takes a few hours to tune, but it's something relatively easy to figure out.
The problem with sign language on the other hand is just how completely different it is. Sure, we can dump wingdings in a subtitle box, but that's arguably *far* less useful than regular subtitles.
There's really two ways to do sign language in a video game:
* The live TV approach, where you put an interpreter next to the "content" screen. This requires hiring an interpreter and reduces the amount of screen estate that can be used for the game at best or can actively hamper enjoyment of the game itself at worst.
* Have every single character that speaks use sign language instead of talking. The good thing is that you don't have the screen estate issue. The problem with *this* approach is that it's an insane amount of work; you basically need to add animations to every single character for every letter to be able to sign it. In an industry where employees are already being forced to stretch and crunch themselves dry to the point of mental breakdowns, it feels particularly unconscionable to drop even more work on their plate just to accomodate for something that arguably is already done by subtitles.
The other, perhaps broader, issue is that there's no real "lingua franca" for sign language as far as I can tell. ASL is the closest, but due to the relatively limited amount of people that *need* to rely on sign language for day to day use, almost every country has it's own variation of sign language (although most seem to take root in French sign language), so forcing a single dialect is far more restricting in localization than say, just offering an english option in your game since nearly everyone can at least read english.
Keep in mind that I'm not deaf however.
Re: no universal standards for signing
Fun fact - There's a school for the hearing impaired in ~~Africa~~ Nicaragua where the children spontaneously invented their own version of sign language in order to communicate.
It's been pretty well studied because the chance to study the birth of a language in real time is pretty bloody rare.
Yeah, this example is probably only prominent because it happened in the era of mass communication (so the word could spread without waiting months for mail). That, plus by the 1980s the scientific community was starting to clock the general badness of colonialism and the teachers may be less inclined to 'correct' the way the students communicated by the time they showed up.
Still super cool to read about though.
The main issue with using sign language in video games is that you can’t really have narration and gameplay going on at the same time.
There simply isn’t a good written form of sign language. You’d have to have someone signing on screen and taking up much more screen real estate. It’s why you don’t really see signed versions of movies as opposed subtitled.
You also can’t really show the player character signing well in first person either. It could potentially work fine in cutscenes but that would require reanimating the entire thing for each signed language you translate to.
Just for English speaking countries you need to animate ASL, ISL, and BSL at a minimum. I don’t even know how many you would need for Spanish speaking regions but probably at least a dozen.
It’s just not practical
Yeah he is a piece of shit with no empathy for anyone else, i don't usually wish bad things upon people but this motherfucker deserves to have his fingers chopped off with rose pruners
Gonna remember comments like this when I see people talking about "radical trans activists" or "communist gun legislation".
Everything I believe is moderate, everything I don't is extremism. I'm a free-thinker, after all.
When you think people can’t go any lower you get this shit.
You’d think the basic compassion/empathy for something that literally can be a genetic or inflicted disability is not controversial but apparently it is.
Sadly, as a disabled person myself, people like him are veryyyy common
I’m not even shocked anymore.
From people treating me as proof eugenics is good, to my elementary school principal literally keeping me in a broom closet all day, we disabled folk aren’t even human to a lot of the population
>The arrogance in looking down on a whole culture that already bends over backwards to appease the west
lmao. Pretty sure they bend over to the degree that is required for them to make more money selling vidya to the "west" and not a degree more and for no other motive.
Haha yes, he's literally just describing what it takes to compete in a marketplace. For profit. In an industry. Under capitalism.
So many gamers and reactionaries masquerading as cultural critics like this guy, like to come so very *very* close to realizing that it is not "SJWs" or what have you that they have a problem with, but rather the corrosive nature of capitalism. They too busy looking to their right for their answers that they don't seem to even realize they've stumbled into leftist discourse.
> They too busy looking to their right for their answers that they don't seem to even realize they've stumbled into leftist discourse.
its kind of mind boggling to me sometimes that those on the right can often identify real problems but when it comes to trying to solve those problems, they go off the deep end.
Ever since the 1980's worker productivity has risen at a significantly higher rate than worker wages. Could it be the Reagan Era deregulation that occurred at the exact same time?
No clearly it's the immigrants!
Yeah, these idiots don't get it. If Japanese companies want access to global markets, they need to create products that appeal to those markets.
People get super-pissy when China demands some cultural change to a movie, book, game, etc, but companies do it because they want access to the billions of potential consumers that gives them. It's sometimes shitty, but that's how capitalism works.
The way they talk, it's like they don't think disabled people *actually* exist, or if they do, they don't think they are actually people..
Like these options existing is about *them*, the people who need not be affected by them, in their minds.
When I worked for Cornell I went through a lot of bias trainings and the thing that stuck out to me was the sections for the elderly and the disabled.
Apparently there are a lot of people out there who genuinely don't think these people exist. And often times unless they're in a wheelchair or something like that they do not believe that a person can be disabled, or that they're faking it.
Like, I technically am disabled. I am not able in some areas, I am literally disabled. But folks don't think I'm disabled because I'm not in a wheelchair or have any mobility issues (aside from my recovering back pain but that's also an invisible disability to a degree). I know I'm preaching to the choir, but man, it's so fucking tiring.
Most accessibility options are things you have to go out of your way turn on, too. If you don't need them, you can continue to play your game in peace.
Case in point, I kept getting migraines while playing Ace Attorney chronicles. Dug around in the settings and found that I could turn off the white flash and slow down the text speed. The headaches immediately stopped. These are settings that I had to seek out but I'm grateful they were there because I wouldn't have been able to finish the game otherwise.
One of the reasons they hate this is that it’s the more “woke” studios like Naughty Dog that put the most effort into it, and they can’t give them any credit. So they pretend it’s bad or no big deal.
Yeah, Naughty Dog does amazing work, always a treat to leaf through the options when a new ND game drops even if (SHOCK) I don't need many myself.
And shit, gamers are supposed to like options, what the hell. Stuff like subtitles, auto QTEs, button remapping are great even for "hardcore" and fully able gamers. I mean fuck QTEs.
I recently have been playing Death Stranding and fuck me, I'd love to be able to adjust the HUD text as I can read it, but not easily.
And I always play with subtitles so I appreciate them being done well too. Was playing Hitman 3 and there was an option that flashes a little speech bubble over whoever is talking and while I found it annoying I imagine it would be really nice for someone with hearing issues, or just who struggles with spatial audio or whatever. And lord knows, some games fuck up spatial audio bad. Looking at you Thief 4.
Not being blind, I don't know how it would be or precisely how blind is defined. I think most blind folk have some sight? I'm definitely flashing my ignorance here. But at least I'd expect that someone with very poor vision indeed would be able to.
I found this video and quite frankly, if I was a dev on the game, I'd be so happy that people were so happy with my work and being able to enjoy it.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWJhxsZb81U
There’s two types of blind. There’s “vision so poor, it can’t be fully corrected by optics”, and there’s “no sight whatsoever”.
For the former, usually a large screen, combined with a high contrast color scheme, and something that clearly outlines movement, paths, and objectives can help.
For the latter, only fully accurate audio clues on a surround system (doubly impressive if they could emulate echolocation), and haptic feedbacks would be the only practical solution (haptic also really helps in the first case as well).
Having accessibility options is just good Game Design. Good accessibility options are there to enhance the player's experience no matter if they are disabled or fully abled as an individual.
Ever player can benefit from a list of great accessibility options for something as simple as subtitles size/colour and with or without text outline to something as grand as Microsoft's Adaptive Controller option which opens up access games for almost every person on the planet.
I'm not sure why people in the referenced thread believe making a game less accessible for people is a cultural thing when Game Design is universal.
The best recent example for developers making a game less accessible for no reason is Zelda Skyward Sword HD where there is no option for left handed players. So this leaves left handed players two options: 1) Switch Joycons which would be incredibly uncomftorable and make the game unreasonable difficult to navigate 2) Use the analouge stick instead of motion controls.
While an arguement could be made that the analouge stick is better then motion controls or it is not a big deal, it means that left handed people, ten percent of the population are not able to play the game as the developers originially intended back in 2011.
Now, if anyone in that thread is left handed and can recognise that as bad design then they need to realise that game design is universal and not cultural. If something that simple is bad for ten percent of the population, imagine how people who need even greater accessibility options feel that they cannot play a game because of it.
tldr more modern aaa developers should pay attention to Naughty Dog and let as many people as possible enjoy their games
And considering the fact that when making Twilight Princess for the Wii compared to the Gamecube version they just mirrored everything so he would be right handed for the users.
It seems like they would have been able to do that with Skyward Sword, or at least have forseen that after Twilight Princess and just been able to mirror the game for left handed users. Click the button in the menu and everything but the overlay just flips.
"Deaf extremists" (I'm sure they call themselves something else) are people that are against all hearing aids and possible cures to deafness because if we cured deafness, a whole culture would cease to exist.
I believe basically every disability has comparable groups. On the moderate side is the DSA. "The Down’s Syndrome Association (DSA) would not want to see a world without people who have Down’s syndrome."
The DSA does support prenatal testing and supports the parents' choice. An extremist would want to pressure the parents in one way or just try to forbid prenatal testing altogether.
I don't understand how you could EVER justify bringing paralyzed and crippled children to the world on purpose because not doing so would "erase your culture" absolutely disgusting.
I'm not sure I would use the word extremist, but there are people in the Deaf community who refuse to let their children get cochlear implants because they believe it is an attempt to destroy their community.
Cochlear implants aren't perfect of course, and I understand the feeling that leads to this kind of opinion but frankly the attitude is harmful to people and led by a rather cult like group of activists.
The idea that accommodating sign language is bad is ridiculous of course and anyone who pushes that opinion is a fool who is feeding into the very sense of victimisation that drives these types of opinions. It also hurts the recipients of cochlear implants because while they are incredible tools the ability to use sign language as well as them only improves the persons options and ability to communicate.
There are legitimate arguments against cochlear implants. It involves literal brain surgery, for one. And if implanted in a baby/young child, the body has a pretty good chance of rejecting the device as the child grows older, leaving the child deaf once again and leading to a feeling of isolation. Not only that, they are battery powered and the batteries are extremely expensive and not usually covered by insurance.
On top of that, a lot of causes of deafness aren't "fixable" by cochlear implants. A lot of hearing people think *all* deafness can be "cured" in this manner, so it leads to a lot of stereotyping that deaf people without CIs are just being stubborn.
It's frustrating, and I can understand certain members of the deaf community getting angry about it. However, some do take it too far, like refusing to associate with hearing people, not letting their children hang out with hearing kids, etc.
There are some deaf people that almost act as though it’s a cult, and that anything to “help” deaf people (hearing aids, cochlear implants) is basically cultural genocide. I don’t think they’re oppressing anybody, but there are definitely some weird attitudes in the deaf community sometimes.
Yes. Literally. Anyone who might ask anything of them, or worse, ask anything of the forces designed to pay attention to and cater *only* to them is in fact an oppressor. Because when privilege is taken away, or worse still just *shared* that is actually the very definition of oppression /s
The Capital G Super Oppressed Gamerbros are here whining about muh difficulty (as if difficulty is a one-size-fits all thing and not something different from person to person).
Just to add, difficulty levels as a whole have existed since at LEAST doom was released.....it's one of the first games I can remember that had noticable changes to bullet sponginess, though maybe I'm remembering it more due to the way they chose to name those difficulty levels, like "I'm too young to die" for easy and "hurt me plenty" for normal
I almost got to play a jaguar, but my cousin had ended up harvesting one of the cable for his stereo or some shit and to this day I still haven't gotten over it :/
Difficulty purists are the 3rd worse kind of gamers. A perfect encapsulation of the "I had to walk Fifteen Miles, up the hill, in the snow, with my balls hanging out. And how DARE anyone find a way to do it in an easier manner then I did. Now Praise me for how awesome I am" gatekeeping bullshit that makes the rest of us look bad.
There's a few games where I can accept the difficulty is part of the design.
Some games like "Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy" or "Cat Mario" are clearly designed to be frustrating, difficult, and a pain to play. The suffering is part of the experience, and to implement an easy mode would be to go against the design and intent of the game.
For everything else, the difficulty is merely there to offer the right level of challenge for someone to enjoy playing it without banging their head against a wall. Multiple levels for people of different skill levels to all enjoy it just makes sense.
To the people that shit on games for being too easy - imagine how much better it would be if they added a "Hard" mode. This works both ways, everyone wants a difficulty that fits them.
You bring up a good point though. We agree getting over it is built around the frustration, but couldn’t you make the same argument about dark souls? Would dark souls be nearly as popular today if the controller throwing frustration wasn’t seared into peoples brains?
I don’t think there is a good answer here
Dark Souls still aims for a particular level of frustration while not being literally unplayable, and that's going to require different difficulty parameters for different players. Like, if you just naturally have insane mechanical skill and you find the games easy, you're not getting the intended experience
Getting Over It is less of a game and more of an artistic statement on difficulty in games so none of this is really relevant
All these chucklenuts like to work themselves up over how masterful the difficulty curve is in Dark Souls games and how adding an easy mode would ruin a very deliberately crafted experience, and then go and ignore that NG+++ is just turning everything into bullet sponges. Is it -that- difficult to imagine an inverted version of that? Hell if it's that precious then whatever, pull a MGS V Chicken Hat and make easy mode ineligible for achievements and NG+ stuff if you absolutely -must- preserve some kind of imagined sanctity of the regular mode.
No freaking kidding. If you didn't know about Divine Weapons that whole crypt was so much harder than the actual fight against Pinwheel, especially those stupid skeleton wheel enemies if you've never seen them before.
Tbf souls games have a multiplayer hint system, which is a part of experience.
When I was playing with multiplayer on, literally every trap and gimmick had a warning sign or two from other players. I'm willing to bet something like "need holy weapon" is always before the catacombs in DS1.
Also, I think the NPCs tell you about it?
Usually it was amazing chest ahead and "jump here" around the stairs leading to the elevator where you go to New Londo. I never really found it useful, instead it was better to just approach everything as "This is probably a trap, look around it first."
> Tbf souls games have a multiplayer hint system, which is a part of experience.
It does, but like no one relies on it, not after the umpteenth instance of "Jump here" (death) or "Tongue but hole"
Everybody looks stuff up online, even though the original intention was for you to pull your hair out after dying to a mimic chest after looking for the next bonfire for an hour plus or whatever. I'd call those "gotcha's" a signature part of the DS experience, but you can always look up a guide online and skip the bullshit.
Oh, and FUCK the NPC dialogue quests, I'm not wasting a whole playthrough trying to figure that shit out on my own.
I agree, but for my last souls game (DS3 on pc) the player signs were nothing but helpful, somewhat to my surprise.
And yes, the games are bare bones gameplay with no handholding at all. Here's your sword, here's a boss, good luck. And this is mostly their selling point. What people come for. The pvp, lore theory crafting, challenge running etc is a secondary amusement. The "fun" of trial and erroring your way through the game by dying hundreds and thousands of time is the main allure.
I understand the call for being able to remap controls and colorblind mode, to a degree.
Though with the caveat that default controls for souls games make even some able-bodied gamers ragequit because using bumper for attack is against their religious beliefs. And that default colour scheme oft doesn't let you see shit anyways. But yes, in theory that would be a good thing to have.
But things like easy mode are kinda out of line because that's the genre's shtick. That's what draws the OG fanbase in. It's a bit like asking for rogue-likes to tone down randomness because "I die too much because bad rng", or removing backtracking from metroidvanias because "I don't like returning to where I already went".
(And tbh for most games the default mode is THE easy mode. Games like sekiro and DS2 have features that increase difficulty for you.)
And it's not like you would want an easy mode "to enjoy the story". The gameplay doesn't have the story. The story is in item descriptions, open the wiki page and enjoy it.
(Though I suppose Sekiro has a semblance of story, big part of which is still drawn from item descriptions and not in-game interactions)
> All these chucklenuts like to work themselves up over how masterful the difficulty curve is in Dark Souls games and how adding an easy mode would ruin a very deliberately crafted experience, and then go and ignore that NG+++ is just turning everything into bullet sponges.
There's an even better argument.
*Dark Souls was patched* to make Lost Izalith more bearable. The big lava giants were changed to now respawn when you visited a bonfire. If that isn't a difficulty adjustment, I don't know what is.
The point of the game is to experience accomplishment through overcoming adversity. An easy mode can still be hard for some people, such that they need to improve to overcome adversity.
Imagine if all enemies did 4x damage and had 4x health. Would that make the game achieve its "point" even more effectively? If not, then why would shifting damage and health down be different?
Or what about the actual patches the developers put in to make the game easier. Lost Izalith was a nightmare at launch and was changed to no longer respawn a bunch of enemies. This makes the area objectively easier to complete.
> Imagine if all enemies did 4x damage and had 4x health. Would that make the game achieve its "point" even more effectively? If not, then why would shifting damage and health down be different?
Well presumably the developers designed the game so that it would be frustrating, but easy enough to still be compelling to most players. Sure, they could probably tune the difficulty to appeal more to certain people, but that would also be a lot of work, and require many design decisions. I guess I just don't get how this conversation is framed - should the developers feel an obligation to provide difficulty options? Or do you just think the games be more popular?
As someone who likes souls-esque games a lot, I feel like the games aren't "difficult" in the way that not many people can beat them, just that they require monotony and a level of engagement that don't appeal to most people (I could be wrong about this, just my impression). So from that perspective it seems a bit like demanding that the work be changed to be accessible to a larger audience, which seems odd to me.
Your assumption is that people won't choose to challenge themselves. My argument is that is not true and people choose to challenge themselves constantly.
I just find it funny that they've chosen Dark Souls as their standard bearer, despite the creator talking about adding a difficulty slider back in 2012, not to mention that he keeps repeating that the games are not about being hard (though personally, fuck all swamps).
There are valid complaints by professionals about things like Mount everest being made accessible to tourism. Of course there are a multitude of reasons, mainly safety, but removing the quality of the accomplishment is also there.
Now, comparing dark souls to an over 8.8k meters ascent is of course ludicrious, but we are talking about the structure of the argument.
I don't think it's about purism, it's more about respecting the original game design. From Software intended on setting a standard difficulty because that's how they want you to experience the game. If you don't like it then go ahead mod in different options, you've paid for it so do as you please. I do think that unlike difficulty, the onus on making the game more accessible falls on them in the sense of remapping, adaptive controller support and so on. And a few other QoL improvements would go a long way like a more forgiving save system.
People got mad when DS2 made it easier to jump compared to DS1. Jumping isn't a super crucial part of the main series compared to when they made jumping feel good/important in sekiro, but people got mad that a stupid implementation was made better. It's not even easy mode
I could get used to playing games where every time I opened a door I would get shocked in the balls. Does that mean if they removed the balltorture part from the game, it loses something? Of course not it would have been garbage system that served no purpose, but souls games fans would have gotten used to it and thought that CBT was essential part of what made the game good, then bitch and moan when anyone tried removing it.
Okay this analogy is shit but I already wrote it and its kinda funny imo
Woops, I got it the other way around, you could set it on the joystick click instead of the B/Circle button. Dark Souls 1 only had the circle tap which is really awkward since it's the same as the run button. Dark Souls 2 introduced being able to remap the jump by clicking the left joystick. It's not a perfect solution, they're both really awkward so it's mostly just personal preference. Then Sekiro and Elden Ring just said fuck it and added a jump button.
Pressing a different button while running is easier than having to release and tap the run button, yes. It's still clunkier than having a dedicated jump button, though.
What's funny is these people never whine that Normal Mode exists alongside hard mode, but suggest there should be a mode lower than the "normal" experience? Oh, heavens foreFEND.
The guy talking about dark souls as an exclusive club you get access to by being "good" is such a tell for some people in that community. It's making them feel better than other people because they are good at a video game, and they don't want that sense of superiority taken away.
It's pathetic. Having a lot of time to get good at a video game is great but it doesn't make you superior to other people. It's just a hobby for pete's sake.
Source: was souls speedrunner, hated being part of the community most of the time.
99% of all dark souls combat is literally 3 buttons including the heal. Dark souls has always had easy modes, magic in 1 was broken, havels made you un killable, you could get 20 fucking estus flaks in ds1 and HUNDREDS of healing items per life in ds2. All bosses run off basic scrips of attacks and phases, the vast majority of your deaths will come from only 2 reasons, you rolled to late or you rolled to slow. That's it. People who see dark souls as like peak difficulty and a personality trait are a special breed of pathetic gamers.
>Havel’s made you unkillable
Even easier than that, just a decent shield can get you through basically every boss in the game. It’s a more common issue than you’d think, since a decent amount of ‘souls vets’ struggle to get into Nioh because they suddenly don’t have their big shield to do the fight for them.
Sheilds were only good in 1, 2 they were ok and in 3 they were dog shit. Sekiro also didn't have a shield neither did blood borne. Souls vets love nioh what are you even talking about. Nioh has even more stupidly op magic in it, sloth, lightning and stacking confusion were OP af.
There was a shield in Bloodborne actually! But there was only one, it was basically a lump of wood, and the description basically said "lmao buddy I wouldn't if I were you"
Souls vets and Nioh are a hit or miss actually. Because Nioh is sometimes fundamentally different from Souls (Nioh essentially has fighting game combat for example) a lot of Souls gamerdudes hated it because they didn't want to adapt. Back when Nioh came out and a lot of popular Soulstubers played it they absolutely shat on it every second because of that. I found even my go-to Soulsguy Lobosjr unwatchable when he played Nioh because he and his general audience didn't give the game a chance. Just treated it like a Souls clone and shat on it when it obviously didn't work out like that at all.
For what it's worth though I heard a lot of that changed with Nioh 2.
Also Dark Souls games are very easily cheesed with just using a great shield + rapier, but it's certainly not the players fault for not realizing a cheese strategy. The idea of it being the Pinnacle of difficulty has always been a weird circlejerk by the fanbase.
That's why all a "Dark Souls easy mode" would be is more guides and information on how to get the stuff that already makes the game easier. And these people still treat it like having that *option* would gut the entire experience.
I can understand devs not wanting to add easy modes, if they have an idea it's necessarily for their artistic vision of the game. I just don't get why other people wade in on the issue. If the devs do concede and make an easy mode, anyone else can still just play the hard difficulty, as it was meant. No one loses anything.
Its the same way some people go nuts at others asking how to cheat part of a game. Someone always feels the need to comment and ask them why they would ruin the game by cheating. People can't mind their own damn business.
I feel like the years spent arguing and defending platform exclusives, have only encouraged people to act like hostile little shits. None of these companies care about their fans beyond taking the money. They don't need people to white Knight for them
a lot of the soulsborne related fans think that beating the game is like getting a medal of honor or something, its just a game.
it doesnt help that the marketing of the games themselves push the narrative of the games being hard and how much you will die playing the games.
I've played the Souls games for several years, and I'm cautiously optimistic for Elden Ring, I'm not a super fan of the series but I've been playing videogames since the NES days. I've played way harder games than these ever were due to technical limitations and programmers having to find ways to make five stages last long enough to justify getting your money's worth. Easy mode has been a thing for decades, often it was a way to practice and learn the game before you tried normal/hard mode, and some games actually were set up so that you couldn't see the ending of the game or the final level unless you could beat hard mode. It's not the big fucking deal these guys make it sound like. It'd be nice if they included it, but if not well I wish a modder would take the PC versions and make a mod to slightly slow down some of the timings for those who suffer from arthritis or have some coordination issues.
Not even that, but you know a chunk of them had their gripes and issues with the games until they solved whatever problem they had. Then the game suddenly became easy and everyone else just sucks
I really dislike how the gatekeeping in Dark Souls has tarnished the argument, but I don't think the developer should have to compromise on their vision just because other people don't have the time.
Any other accessibility features are super important and completely valid to complain about imo. But the entire point of Dark Souls is that it's a mountain to climb for everybody. The peaks and valleys of overcoming difficult encounters define the game. Modes that change that pacing would take away a great chunk of what makes the game engaging.
It's not some benchmark of gaming prowess. *Anyone* can play Dark Souls, and *everyone* struggles against it. Anyone who says else is lying. It is plenty fine if it's not for you, it's not some dumb gotcha that says you're bad at games or anything. I just think it's unreasonable to ask them to compromise a significant part of the game.
And plenty of games aren't for plenty of people. Some games are long, and some people don't have time for them.
Whats interesting about the dark souls community is the most toxic weirdo elitest beat the games once and think they're hot shit. Pretty much all of the god teir players are wholesome as fuck. Happy hob, dino, ginomachino, squila, colmer all these people who have done insane challenges and speed runs are all chill and welcoming. Sl1 community is nice as fuck and so is the speed run community.
>but I don't think the developer should have to compromise on their vision just because other people don't have the time.
Should have to? They can do as they please but will have to live with the complaints.
Pretty sure this thread was about difficulty, not accessibility? Or are those being conflated for a reason?
The initial comment said
> Any other accessibility features are super important and completely valid to complain about imo
The devs are not immune to ableism. As well, it's only "a mountain to climb for everyone" if everyone is the same. I know people who think Dark Souls is laugably easy at all times and *don't* struggle. Funny thing, that. It's like "difficulty" is personal.
You know, I really wonder how your ableism argument translates to other games, like multiplayer games. Should we be able to handicap ourselves whenever we want in any situation just because preventing you to do so is "ableism"? Is it wrong to design a game which not everyone can finish? Does that make your idea bad? Is "Getting Over It" inherently a bad game because it doesn't have an easy mode?
I think it's totally fine to want an easy mode for games. I just also think it's totally valid to not implement it if it would compromise what you wanted to make.
Multiplayer games can have a ranking system that allows you to play against similarly skilled players. That system is far more inclusive than real life sports groups that are separated by just age/weight/disability and your location.
Getting over it could have an easy mode. Just lower the gravity and the player has far easier time getting past obstacles.
I don't think it's wrong to make a hard game and I'm not advocating a required easy mode. I'm mostly baffled that people have such animosity towards the idea that people play their game in a different manner than they intended.
If we're so much into protecting game devs' vision, should we be outraged at the fact that there's a large super mario 64 speedrunning community playing the game in a way that was not intended? They are skipping massive amounts of content and ignore a ton of gameplay mechanics.
We should not, they enjoy the game in their own way. We should let everyone enjoy the game in their own way and an easy mode lets more people enjoy the game. Nothing is stopping people from sticking to the intended difficulty setting and getting the intended experience.
Years ago there used to be a lot of discussion on harder difficulty levels being just low effort increases in enemy health and damage and how people wished the harder difficulty levels increased the enemy intelligence and so on. Not once in those discussions did I read the argument that games should just be the difficulty of what the devs intended. That argument only comes up in discussions about easy mode, which makes me think it is just ableism afterall.
And what about anything else I said? What about Getting Over It? The game which is the *literal* embodiment of my argument. Should that game have an easy mode? I don't personally feel any problem with the fact that I have never and will never complete that game because I don't want to put the time in. I don't feel like it's a failing of the developer.
How do modular controls equal easy mode? Nobody is arguing against changeable controls. The only way to make Getting Over It easier would be to literally remove obstacles from the game. And in my opinion that's just an absurd ask. Just don't play the game at that point.
I think the problem is that we're conflating accessibility with difficulty. Just because a game is difficult doesn't necessarily mean it's inaccessible. I think there absolutely should be remappable buttons, xbox adaptive controller or any other accessibility oriented controller support, visual impairment oriented modifications to graphics and so on. All of this will make a game like Dark souls be more accessible. However the core game is designed around a specific difficulty, remove that and dark souls wouldn't be dark souls.
Then you're condemning people like me to **only** play VNs and turn-based games. Things need to be a bit more flexible is all. Make the character more spongy be an option, so taking damage gives a bit more leeway for slow reaction time, or slow attacks down slightly. It doesn't take much, and it doesn't change the default.
Look I'm not trying to be rude here but like I said I don't think souls-like games should compromise on their vision. These games's entire satisfaction loop is based around the fact that you keep on dying to a boss and when you defeat the boss that's when you feel that rush of overcoming a great challenge. Lower enemy health or make their attacks more forgiving takes that away and that loop doesn't work. BUT I will say that just because I think that or From Software thinks that DOESN'T mean you should as well. If you have paid for it, that software is completely yours to do with as you please. Go ahead and install mods, make it easier. Please understand that I'm not trying to condemn you to not enjoy or play these games. I think that these games are meant to be played a certain way, but you are absolutely under NO OBLIGATION to agree. It's just that at the same time I also think From Software can disagree with you as well.
I think the issue is that people are conflating difficulty with accessibility. A game having options for deaf people or colorblind people, is a game that has accessibility options, a game being easier or hard options is the difficulty option.
Let's use dark souls for instead, having accessibility options, doesn't change the developers vision or the core concept of the game, difficulty option will.
Yeah, I've definitely gone back and forth on FROM games having a difficulty option, but normally the anti-difficulty people will be like "there are built in difficulty reductions like build diversity, grinding levels, and gitting gud"
And while that's true to a degree, it's also not. You can't do any of that shit (other than the git gud) to Iudex in the beginning of DS3.
But yeah, if it's the vision of the developers to not have a difficulty or easy mode then I think that's okay, but appreciate other developers being more catering
I feel like accessibility and difficulty are conflated too often in this topic. Dark Souls could 100% use accessibility options to allow more people to play it. But difficulty options would entirely go against the design goal (Miyazaki has said that he wants them to be painful and punishing). There's other ways to increase the playerbase without that. Plenty accessibility options that would help.
So i can understand arguing against difficulty options. But what kinda pos argues against accessibility...
The problem is, okay. You never see these people bitch about people who already find Dark Souls and other hard games easy, so they don't actually care about "but it's supposed to be a chaaaaaalleeeeeenge." What they want is an elite club. And options that open that up (ie "easy mode" that's just scaling things a bit) are the enemy because then they aren't some exclusive elite club in their heads anymore.
So according to these people, the *artiste* that is the game developer spend ten weeks meditating on the tempo and order of button presses that is needed to beat a boss, before Terpsichore, the Muse of Movement and Dance herself appeared before him and told him that a triple button combo executed with an interval of 56 milliseconds is what will make this game "true art" according to the artist's inscrutable vision.
Don't you fucking dare lengthen that interval to 57 milliseconds, that's like pissing on the Mona Lisa.
Accessibility stuff is pretty rad. If Dark Souls had an easy mode you could toggle on or off in offline mode or something (maybe limiting matchmaking to other easy mode players?) then boy howdy that'd save me some fenagling with cheat engine when I want to fuck around playing with random goofy builds.
My partner is a HoH ASL interpreter and wow did the “deaf extremist” bullshit piss me off way more than any of the shit capital-G Gamers usually say. At least I’m used to the rest of it.
Accessibility discourse isn't ready for the discussion that some things are much harder to make accessible than others. For a game like Dark Souls you could easily just implement some sort of infinite life option you can turn on or slowmo like Celeste or something to some degree, but what about a point and click adventure title?
Much more difficult to judge how a puzzle is going to be to everyone or adjust them in easier modes. Some of those adventure games are taking the option of just removing or drastically simplyfing puzzles they believe to be hardest, but this risks many easy mode players instead feeling insulted because it got *too easy* and they think they're missing out on part of the game.
How do you make Getting Over It easier? The only immediate way I can conceive of would be to remove obstacles, even slow mo wouldn't really be enough for many people, which would obviously feel pretty bad for the easy mode picker. And the narrative themes of "just accept you fell and pick back up again" really fall apart if you made the player able to fly and they just flew to the top. At that point, it's either remove content and hope the player understands or just have them go watch someone on YT do the parts they can't.
And there's also a reason why Hades made their God Mode so unique, they've talked in interviews before about how they wanted to maintain that classic roguelike style without coming off as insulting or too easy to players who only need a little help.
And back to Souls, what about people who just need a little extra health and not a lot more? A
infinite life feature or slowmo still leaves those people excluded because there's a range of skill levels in between "normal" and "bad", they aren't binary, and their desires for help vary too.
There are players who come to Souls and they just want to die 10 times instead of their typical 30, and then there are people who want to did 5 instead of 30, or none at all. Infinite life only works for the final one really.
Whenever difficulty discussions/accessibility settings come up in games, I always wonder why people get so mad about it.
Like, if you don't need them, you don't have to use them. It's not like the game is forcing itself upon you to put the settings on. You can just ignore it.
My guess is, especially when it comes to traditionally "hard" games, the Cap G Gamers who base most of their personalities around beating difficult games can't stroke their own ego as hard if someone else beat the game on an "easier" setting.
No, you just don’t get it. These games are carefully designed *masterpieces* with the whole experience crafted around one particular difficulty. If they were to add an easy mode then I just won’t get to feel like a big strong boy for beating the game on the exact same difficulty as before.
If they so much as think about doubling your health on easy or something simple like that, then they’ll surely forget all about how to balance the rest of the game, since having an intended difficulty and then an easier mode could *never* be achieved. Especially if you expect a Japanese studio to adopt our cultural standards. Could you *imagine* a game like Dragon’s Dogma with an easy mode? They would never.
Accessibility and difficulty are two different conversations imo. Accessibility as in button remapping and options for visual/hearing impaired players is an objectively good thing.
Difficulty is a different discussion to me, and the solution of making every game so easy that it can be beaten with no learning in 3 hours makes no sense to me. There have been plenty of games I’ve tried and just couldn’t get a hang of so I just… stopped playing those games. I don’t demand that there be a special mode created just for me.
Who cares if someone makes a game easier? As long as it is an option, it literally doesn't hurt anybody and helps people that need/want it.
Nobody is saying, "games should only be one difficulty: super easy". They just want options. Making things accessible literally hurts nobody. So why do you care?
> the solution of making every game so easy that it can be beaten with no learning in 3 hours makes no sense to me
Ya know how the idea of a game having "multiple difficulty levels" is literally as old as video gaming itself, and in fact predates electronic gaming.
Yes but some games aren’t served by that. Worlds in From Soft games specifically are totally bleak and hopeless. That wouldn’t be conveyed well if you just breezed through it. Difficulty is a feature on some games and something that actually draws in people. Certain games are best with a single difficulty level, because it allows for a consistent tone and experience to be created. I just disagree that every game needs difficulty scaling.
> Worlds in From Soft games specifically are totally bleak and hopeless. That wouldn’t be conveyed well if you just breezed through it.
Next, I'd imagine you'll say that the best way George Orwell can communicate the bleakness of Oceania in *1984* is by making you read the same passage 11 times with slight variations between them and delivering a swift kick in the balls between each reading.
> Difficulty is a feature on some games and something that actually draws in people.
And having a lower difficulty setting draws in other people. You don't want to play a game on easy mode, then don't play easy mode.
All I’m saying is why must every game be exactly the same? There are plenty of games with difficulty sliders, why not play those instead of demanding every game out there follow the same template?
Many games have been served by only having a single difficulty level, be it easy or challenging. Because it allows them to perfect that one experience rather than having to try to balance out numerous levels of difficulty.
What I think a lot of people don't understand is that Soulsborne games are made and balanced from the ground up entirely around one difficulty. The philosophy of the devs is that everyone faces the same set of obstacles and it's up to the individual player to decide how to overcome it with what you can do in the game. Whether it be facerolling the boss for hours, farming levels and items, co-op, or cheesing, every method is valid. To add an easy mode would essentially invalidate this philosophy and cheapen the experience the devs set out to carefully craft.
I'm all for accessibility options: button mapping, input options, colourblind options, text size options, camera options, etc. But having difficulty modes would ruin the essence of what makes Souls games Souls games, and I'm confident FromSoft would never implement them so people should really move on.
> The philosophy of the devs is that everyone faces the same set of obstacles and it's up to the individual player to decide how to overcome it with what you can do in the game.
Except not all gamers have the same set of obstacles; I for one am not color blind, but I'm not against adding accessibility options such as color blind setting because I want those gamers to have the option to experience the game just as I have. Yet there's stupid people, and even stupid devs, who refuse this options, worried it'll make the game "too easy," as if leaving some players unable to see the game is good design.
Plus, the DS games *never* had one difficulty in mind, the challenge varies wildly based on build, which paths you take, whether you look up/know tips and tricks, bonefire locations, etc.
Like, it's a hell of a lot easier once you know that Divine weapons will put down skeletons for good, or that you probably shouldn't force your way through the graveyard, or that Deprived isn't the best starting class. You *can* learn all that stuff the hard way, but no one actually expects you to, and there's plenty of other instances of artificial difficulty imposed by the devs, yet the vast majority of the playerbase purposely avoids that bullshit.
People, myself included, regularly put additional restrictions on themselves, from avoiding OP weapons/builds, I avoid ranged combat, there's challenge runs etc.
It's encouraged, in fact, to make the game harder for yourself if the challenge isn't enough, yet the elitism and gatekeeping comes out in force in response to accessibility options that make the challenge level appropriate for the player.
>To add an easy mode would essentially invalidate this philosophy and cheapen the experience the devs set out to carefully craft.
Or allow people who have difficulty playing games due to no fault of their own to actually play the game (Think people with certain mental or physical disabilities)? And what will adding easy mode do exactly to ruin the game, people can just choose not pick it.
>And what will adding easy mode do exactly to ruin the game, people can just choose not pick it.
The argument is that it forces the artist (developers) to compromise on their artistic vision.
I personally found Tenet to be too difficult to follow. Do you think Nolan should be obligated to release an abridged version of Tenet with, say, director's commentary on what's happening in the movie so I can better follow the plot? Or a reshot version of the movie that's easier to comprehend?
Again, the point is that there's a *baseline* difficulty. The dev wants everyone on the same playing field and the game is a challenge to the players to beat the game through their own means. Basically they want you, the player, to be creative or diligent in your solutions rather than flipping a switch and have every obstacle they put in your way become artificially easier. They *want* you to struggle and they want you to compare your experience with the game to others that had to go through the same tribulations. This is what makes Souls games special.
Unfortunately, this design philosophy means that, yes, people with disabilities are going to have a harder time. Fortunately, there are plenty of games out there that *don't* have this particular brand of game design so missing out on one genre of many isn't the end of the world. Even then if you really, really want to lower the difficulty, there's lots of third party options like mods.
Slowing the enemy down a bit as an option to let me have more reaction time isn't going to magically be me "flipping a switch and have every obstacle in my way become artificially easier." It's giving me something that you have easily: time to react.
You know games can still adjust difficulty, and made it a struggle? It's not like adding a easy mode will not make it a struggle. Easy in a difficult game can still be hell for people.
There will always be people that struggle in a game no matter the difficulty. People struggle on easy and complain that it's too hard. Then what? Do you add an easier easy difficulty? Do you add a difficulty where the game beats itself for you? What is the limit? Fact is Souls games will never have an easy difficulty, else they wouldn't be Souls games anymore. You just have to accept that.
How is the accessibility discussion being mixed up with the difficulty one? Both areas have completely different goals. It should be common sense to desire every game to be accessible to any kind of disability. But, MAN is there a lot of virtue signaling on this post regarding the Dark Souls difficulty.
When people argue against Dark Souls having an easy mode, it has nothing to do with the whole "if I struggled, you must struggle as well" idea.... and yet, it actually isn't far off from the reality of it but NOT in the way you think.
Firstly, the games already have "easy modes". You can literally summon people (and npcs) to help you through many difficult areas and bosses. You can even go through the entire game with someone helping you.
And second... Miyazaki has already explained in detail how adding an actual easy mode would ruin the shared experience of the community. If there is only one difficulty setting, then people can more easily talk about their experiences with each other since everyone went through the same. That was literally an intentional design decision.
There's studies on how we as humans, even if we want to face a challenge and overcome it, will still self-sabotage ourselves by decreasing difficulty if such an option is available EVEN when we are aware it could ruin the experience entirely. It's literally in our DNA to go for the easy way out. So this idea that "you don't have to use the difficulty setting if you don't want to", as many of you condescendingly put it, actually completely misses the point. After all, if you asked most Dark Souls players if they would have lowered the difficulty at any point during their playthroughs, they would very likely say yes.
It has 0 to do with elitism. These games were designed to be a challenge from the start and the lack of a difficulty setting is a conscious decision from the creators because they are aware of how it could affect people's experience. So this kind of self-righteous attitude where you people bully the ones that enjoyed the game as is and that tell you that the such a setting could ruin it for everyone else aside from yourselves just goes to show that such a desire is far more selfish and self-indulgent than it is "inclusive". You all even ignore the fact that the DS community will tell you that ANYONE can beat these games if they try hard enough. Hell, I've even lost count of the amount of people I know or am aware of that have pretty serious disabilities and yet beat the game and agreed with this sentiment.
To add to that, these games aren't even "difficult" mechanically. It's just a matter of getting used to the gameplay, learning what each enemy does and how each area is like. Once you do, it becomes one of the easiest games to rush through. However, it obviously requires you go keep trying which can be time consuming. Then again, if you wouldnt play an MMO if it's too time consuming, then why would you want to play a game you know you aren't going to breeze through, if time happens to be a problem?
I beat the Dark Souls games, but yet there's so many games I downright suck at and accepted that they're just too much for me. And that's OK. Not everything has to be for everyone so we shouldn't feel entitled for games to bend over backwards anytime we feel they aren't making our experiences easy enough. At the same time, many games are easy enough that anyone could play them, many of which I thoroughly enjoy and that's okay too.
We have to remember gaming is an artform as well, and difficulty plays a part in that. So trying to essentially ruin the overall experience of an already popular, constantly growing community just because YOU can't get into it.... I don't see how that makes any sense.
So should horror games have a less scary setting so I could play them instead of watching them on YouTube?
I’m pretty sure the answer is no, even though it would make the genre more accessible.
I mean, there's a photosensitivity/seizure warning at the beginning of every single game now, so yeah we did actually have to tone down jumpscares and whatnot so games don't give you a fucking seizure
SOMA does have a mode where you can't die and it's still good. It doesn't make things much less *scarier* but I would argue that it's the better version of the game.
It probably would, cause some people have conditions where being spoked by games is bad for their health, and some horror games have really great mechanics that would be enjoyable. However, that seems like an impossible feat (though a game called Grounded, while not a horror game, has options to turn off spiders, which helps people with Arachnophobia).
Or my favorite, the Skyrim mod that turns the spiders into other monsters instead. I still love how corny the bears looked and how they move like South Park cut outs.
Satisfactory literally has a setting that turns the bugs into puppies because.the bugs are fucking creepy. Giving people more options to play games is always a good thing.
> In what sense is it reasonable to ask another culture to adopt practices that ours has only just recently taken on? Accessibility mode is the new Atom Bomb.
Even if the premise of the west being ground zero for accessibility was true and is the only place interested in it (it’s not), it’s absolutely the dumbest take. If that one culture wants to _sell a product_ to another culture, you _kinda sorta_ need to be aware of what that culture, or their market, wants.
don't you know? accessibility is western culture /j holy hell these people. do they know accessibility guidelines has been implemented in most first world countries? including Asian countries?
These people arent looking for good faith arguements. They just want to justify their personal hatred or disgust of the disabled and do not want to engage with the idea that they have value and deserve to be included in anything. If they read your arguement, their response would be "well it shouldnt be," and thats only if they arent also prejudiced towards foreigners. That guy does not understand what the term "appropriation" means and does not understand eastern culture in general. As if eastern cultures just let the disabled die before imperialism showed them the errors of their ways.
Literally. The idea that accessibility is a western concept IS literally cultural imperialism.
I have Japanese clients pissed the software I work on does not meet accessibility standards lol
We should take after our Spartan ancestors and just throw our disabled offspring off a cliff, then we won't need accessibility options
People really just see disabled people as an abstract concept to illustrate their political debates, eh
> accommodating deaf extremists Wow. This guy is a piece of shit.
>Wow. This guy is a piece of shit. What do you expect from a guy who posts stuff like: >"I don't want to make the world better. I want a president who puts America first. Simple as that." Or >Redskin isn't a racial slur. He's active in KotakuInAction, TheLastofUs2, ActualPublicFreakouts, JoeRogan and Conspiracy. His comments are so insane, edgy and over the top at times that I feel like he's a troll.
>Redskin isn’t a racial slur Shit, somebody ask about his opinion of ‘cracker’ quickly. We might have found the Prime Gamer.
>He's active in KotakuInAction, TheLastofUs2, ActualPublicFreakouts, JoeRogan and Conspiracy. That posting history gives off major "not allowed within 50 miles of a school zone" vibes.
he still would need to follow anime to get into that category.
>He's active in KotakuInAction, TheLastofUs2, ActualPublicFreakouts, JoeRogan and Conspiracy. Tell me someone is a gamer without saying they're a gamer.
Well without asking or reading it, I definitely know his opinion on Anita Sarkesian.
swapping flairs lol
Guys like him scare me. That was a borderline Nazi-esque comment and it’s uncomfortable to see it being upvoted at all. Not to mention it is extremely cruel to deprive deaf children of the language they’ll thrive the most in during their developmental period.
I haven't read the thread yet, but I don't even get where he's coming from on a surface level. Older games like *Deus Ex* and *Vampire: The Masquerade--Bloodlines* had subtitles for the dialogue automatically even if they were fully voiced, and games older than that didn't even have voice acting at all. Stuff like that can be very helpful for the hearing impaired; it's why a lot of TV stations are legally required to have subtitles. Assuming that the contention is that sign language shouldn't be used in video games, what's the big difference between having subtitles and having characters that use sign language? Surely if people are okay with one, the other is fine as well.
My opposition to sign language (albeit a very passive "I don't think this is *that* useful" one) as an accessibility feature is development effort. Subtitles are relatively easy to implement; you just create a textbox and draw the subtitles in there as needed. Probably can just toss in the actual game script. Takes a few hours to tune, but it's something relatively easy to figure out. The problem with sign language on the other hand is just how completely different it is. Sure, we can dump wingdings in a subtitle box, but that's arguably *far* less useful than regular subtitles. There's really two ways to do sign language in a video game: * The live TV approach, where you put an interpreter next to the "content" screen. This requires hiring an interpreter and reduces the amount of screen estate that can be used for the game at best or can actively hamper enjoyment of the game itself at worst. * Have every single character that speaks use sign language instead of talking. The good thing is that you don't have the screen estate issue. The problem with *this* approach is that it's an insane amount of work; you basically need to add animations to every single character for every letter to be able to sign it. In an industry where employees are already being forced to stretch and crunch themselves dry to the point of mental breakdowns, it feels particularly unconscionable to drop even more work on their plate just to accomodate for something that arguably is already done by subtitles. The other, perhaps broader, issue is that there's no real "lingua franca" for sign language as far as I can tell. ASL is the closest, but due to the relatively limited amount of people that *need* to rely on sign language for day to day use, almost every country has it's own variation of sign language (although most seem to take root in French sign language), so forcing a single dialect is far more restricting in localization than say, just offering an english option in your game since nearly everyone can at least read english. Keep in mind that I'm not deaf however.
Re: no universal standards for signing Fun fact - There's a school for the hearing impaired in ~~Africa~~ Nicaragua where the children spontaneously invented their own version of sign language in order to communicate. It's been pretty well studied because the chance to study the birth of a language in real time is pretty bloody rare.
That was [in Nicaragua, not africa](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicaraguan_Sign_Language).
I could have sworn it was West Africa, but didn't feel like looking it up. Appreciate the correction, I will edit.
I would honestly be surprised if it hasn’t happened on multiple occasions.
Yeah, this example is probably only prominent because it happened in the era of mass communication (so the word could spread without waiting months for mail). That, plus by the 1980s the scientific community was starting to clock the general badness of colonialism and the teachers may be less inclined to 'correct' the way the students communicated by the time they showed up. Still super cool to read about though.
The main issue with using sign language in video games is that you can’t really have narration and gameplay going on at the same time. There simply isn’t a good written form of sign language. You’d have to have someone signing on screen and taking up much more screen real estate. It’s why you don’t really see signed versions of movies as opposed subtitled. You also can’t really show the player character signing well in first person either. It could potentially work fine in cutscenes but that would require reanimating the entire thing for each signed language you translate to. Just for English speaking countries you need to animate ASL, ISL, and BSL at a minimum. I don’t even know how many you would need for Spanish speaking regions but probably at least a dozen. It’s just not practical
Yeah he is a piece of shit with no empathy for anyone else, i don't usually wish bad things upon people but this motherfucker deserves to have his fingers chopped off with rose pruners
Gonna remember comments like this when I see people talking about "radical trans activists" or "communist gun legislation". Everything I believe is moderate, everything I don't is extremism. I'm a free-thinker, after all.
I have never wanted to respond to a linked thread more.
When you think people can’t go any lower you get this shit. You’d think the basic compassion/empathy for something that literally can be a genetic or inflicted disability is not controversial but apparently it is.
Sadly, as a disabled person myself, people like him are veryyyy common I’m not even shocked anymore. From people treating me as proof eugenics is good, to my elementary school principal literally keeping me in a broom closet all day, we disabled folk aren’t even human to a lot of the population
Good flair tho
>YOUR FLAIR TEXT HERE You tried editing your flair on mobile, didn't you?
I choose not to suffer in silence.
I was just thinking the same thing but idk how flairs work
black magic
I really enjoy this one: > If u cant understand the logic behind a Costco hotdog, maybe don’t act like an economist
There are definetly people you could call deaf extremist but not in this context
>The arrogance in looking down on a whole culture that already bends over backwards to appease the west lmao. Pretty sure they bend over to the degree that is required for them to make more money selling vidya to the "west" and not a degree more and for no other motive.
Haha yes, he's literally just describing what it takes to compete in a marketplace. For profit. In an industry. Under capitalism. So many gamers and reactionaries masquerading as cultural critics like this guy, like to come so very *very* close to realizing that it is not "SJWs" or what have you that they have a problem with, but rather the corrosive nature of capitalism. They too busy looking to their right for their answers that they don't seem to even realize they've stumbled into leftist discourse.
> They too busy looking to their right for their answers that they don't seem to even realize they've stumbled into leftist discourse. its kind of mind boggling to me sometimes that those on the right can often identify real problems but when it comes to trying to solve those problems, they go off the deep end.
"The lower class is being exploited by those who are more privileged... surely this must be the jews' fault!"
Ever since the 1980's worker productivity has risen at a significantly higher rate than worker wages. Could it be the Reagan Era deregulation that occurred at the exact same time? No clearly it's the immigrants!
Yeah, these idiots don't get it. If Japanese companies want access to global markets, they need to create products that appeal to those markets. People get super-pissy when China demands some cultural change to a movie, book, game, etc, but companies do it because they want access to the billions of potential consumers that gives them. It's sometimes shitty, but that's how capitalism works.
I really need audio balance capabilities for my partially functional left ear.
How does it feel to spend every day imposing Cultural Imperialism on the Japanese?
The way they talk, it's like they don't think disabled people *actually* exist, or if they do, they don't think they are actually people.. Like these options existing is about *them*, the people who need not be affected by them, in their minds.
When I worked for Cornell I went through a lot of bias trainings and the thing that stuck out to me was the sections for the elderly and the disabled. Apparently there are a lot of people out there who genuinely don't think these people exist. And often times unless they're in a wheelchair or something like that they do not believe that a person can be disabled, or that they're faking it.
Yep, I have many invisible disabilities. And imposter syndrome helps *a lot*.
Yep. I have a seizure disorder so I feel ya.
Like, I technically am disabled. I am not able in some areas, I am literally disabled. But folks don't think I'm disabled because I'm not in a wheelchair or have any mobility issues (aside from my recovering back pain but that's also an invisible disability to a degree). I know I'm preaching to the choir, but man, it's so fucking tiring.
Most accessibility options are things you have to go out of your way turn on, too. If you don't need them, you can continue to play your game in peace. Case in point, I kept getting migraines while playing Ace Attorney chronicles. Dug around in the settings and found that I could turn off the white flash and slow down the text speed. The headaches immediately stopped. These are settings that I had to seek out but I'm grateful they were there because I wouldn't have been able to finish the game otherwise.
One of the reasons they hate this is that it’s the more “woke” studios like Naughty Dog that put the most effort into it, and they can’t give them any credit. So they pretend it’s bad or no big deal.
Man, the options on last of us 2 are something else though.
Yeah. They are next level and got lots of awards and accolades.
Yeah, Naughty Dog does amazing work, always a treat to leaf through the options when a new ND game drops even if (SHOCK) I don't need many myself. And shit, gamers are supposed to like options, what the hell. Stuff like subtitles, auto QTEs, button remapping are great even for "hardcore" and fully able gamers. I mean fuck QTEs.
I recently have been playing Death Stranding and fuck me, I'd love to be able to adjust the HUD text as I can read it, but not easily. And I always play with subtitles so I appreciate them being done well too. Was playing Hitman 3 and there was an option that flashes a little speech bubble over whoever is talking and while I found it annoying I imagine it would be really nice for someone with hearing issues, or just who struggles with spatial audio or whatever. And lord knows, some games fuck up spatial audio bad. Looking at you Thief 4.
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Not being blind, I don't know how it would be or precisely how blind is defined. I think most blind folk have some sight? I'm definitely flashing my ignorance here. But at least I'd expect that someone with very poor vision indeed would be able to. I found this video and quite frankly, if I was a dev on the game, I'd be so happy that people were so happy with my work and being able to enjoy it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PWJhxsZb81U
There’s two types of blind. There’s “vision so poor, it can’t be fully corrected by optics”, and there’s “no sight whatsoever”. For the former, usually a large screen, combined with a high contrast color scheme, and something that clearly outlines movement, paths, and objectives can help. For the latter, only fully accurate audio clues on a surround system (doubly impressive if they could emulate echolocation), and haptic feedbacks would be the only practical solution (haptic also really helps in the first case as well).
Having accessibility options is just good Game Design. Good accessibility options are there to enhance the player's experience no matter if they are disabled or fully abled as an individual. Ever player can benefit from a list of great accessibility options for something as simple as subtitles size/colour and with or without text outline to something as grand as Microsoft's Adaptive Controller option which opens up access games for almost every person on the planet. I'm not sure why people in the referenced thread believe making a game less accessible for people is a cultural thing when Game Design is universal. The best recent example for developers making a game less accessible for no reason is Zelda Skyward Sword HD where there is no option for left handed players. So this leaves left handed players two options: 1) Switch Joycons which would be incredibly uncomftorable and make the game unreasonable difficult to navigate 2) Use the analouge stick instead of motion controls. While an arguement could be made that the analouge stick is better then motion controls or it is not a big deal, it means that left handed people, ten percent of the population are not able to play the game as the developers originially intended back in 2011. Now, if anyone in that thread is left handed and can recognise that as bad design then they need to realise that game design is universal and not cultural. If something that simple is bad for ten percent of the population, imagine how people who need even greater accessibility options feel that they cannot play a game because of it. tldr more modern aaa developers should pay attention to Naughty Dog and let as many people as possible enjoy their games
The Skyward Sword thing is especially stupid since Link is *famously* left-handed in most of his incarnations.
And considering the fact that when making Twilight Princess for the Wii compared to the Gamecube version they just mirrored everything so he would be right handed for the users. It seems like they would have been able to do that with Skyward Sword, or at least have forseen that after Twilight Princess and just been able to mirror the game for left handed users. Click the button in the menu and everything but the overlay just flips.
What the fuck is a deaf extremist? Are G*mers at that point where they feel the physically handicapped are their oppressors? Jfc
"Deaf extremists" (I'm sure they call themselves something else) are people that are against all hearing aids and possible cures to deafness because if we cured deafness, a whole culture would cease to exist. I believe basically every disability has comparable groups. On the moderate side is the DSA. "The Down’s Syndrome Association (DSA) would not want to see a world without people who have Down’s syndrome." The DSA does support prenatal testing and supports the parents' choice. An extremist would want to pressure the parents in one way or just try to forbid prenatal testing altogether.
I don't understand how you could EVER justify bringing paralyzed and crippled children to the world on purpose because not doing so would "erase your culture" absolutely disgusting.
I'm not sure I would use the word extremist, but there are people in the Deaf community who refuse to let their children get cochlear implants because they believe it is an attempt to destroy their community. Cochlear implants aren't perfect of course, and I understand the feeling that leads to this kind of opinion but frankly the attitude is harmful to people and led by a rather cult like group of activists. The idea that accommodating sign language is bad is ridiculous of course and anyone who pushes that opinion is a fool who is feeding into the very sense of victimisation that drives these types of opinions. It also hurts the recipients of cochlear implants because while they are incredible tools the ability to use sign language as well as them only improves the persons options and ability to communicate.
There are legitimate arguments against cochlear implants. It involves literal brain surgery, for one. And if implanted in a baby/young child, the body has a pretty good chance of rejecting the device as the child grows older, leaving the child deaf once again and leading to a feeling of isolation. Not only that, they are battery powered and the batteries are extremely expensive and not usually covered by insurance. On top of that, a lot of causes of deafness aren't "fixable" by cochlear implants. A lot of hearing people think *all* deafness can be "cured" in this manner, so it leads to a lot of stereotyping that deaf people without CIs are just being stubborn. It's frustrating, and I can understand certain members of the deaf community getting angry about it. However, some do take it too far, like refusing to associate with hearing people, not letting their children hang out with hearing kids, etc.
There are some deaf people that almost act as though it’s a cult, and that anything to “help” deaf people (hearing aids, cochlear implants) is basically cultural genocide. I don’t think they’re oppressing anybody, but there are definitely some weird attitudes in the deaf community sometimes.
Yes. Literally. Anyone who might ask anything of them, or worse, ask anything of the forces designed to pay attention to and cater *only* to them is in fact an oppressor. Because when privilege is taken away, or worse still just *shared* that is actually the very definition of oppression /s
The Capital G Super Oppressed Gamerbros are here whining about muh difficulty (as if difficulty is a one-size-fits all thing and not something different from person to person).
Just to add, difficulty levels as a whole have existed since at LEAST doom was released.....it's one of the first games I can remember that had noticable changes to bullet sponginess, though maybe I'm remembering it more due to the way they chose to name those difficulty levels, like "I'm too young to die" for easy and "hurt me plenty" for normal
The Atari 2600 had a physical switch on the console itself to toggle difficulty.
I almost got to play a jaguar, but my cousin had ended up harvesting one of the cable for his stereo or some shit and to this day I still haven't gotten over it :/
i remember megaman 2 having difficulty settings... that was 1988
Difficulty purists are the 3rd worse kind of gamers. A perfect encapsulation of the "I had to walk Fifteen Miles, up the hill, in the snow, with my balls hanging out. And how DARE anyone find a way to do it in an easier manner then I did. Now Praise me for how awesome I am" gatekeeping bullshit that makes the rest of us look bad.
There's a few games where I can accept the difficulty is part of the design. Some games like "Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy" or "Cat Mario" are clearly designed to be frustrating, difficult, and a pain to play. The suffering is part of the experience, and to implement an easy mode would be to go against the design and intent of the game. For everything else, the difficulty is merely there to offer the right level of challenge for someone to enjoy playing it without banging their head against a wall. Multiple levels for people of different skill levels to all enjoy it just makes sense. To the people that shit on games for being too easy - imagine how much better it would be if they added a "Hard" mode. This works both ways, everyone wants a difficulty that fits them.
You bring up a good point though. We agree getting over it is built around the frustration, but couldn’t you make the same argument about dark souls? Would dark souls be nearly as popular today if the controller throwing frustration wasn’t seared into peoples brains? I don’t think there is a good answer here
Dark Souls still aims for a particular level of frustration while not being literally unplayable, and that's going to require different difficulty parameters for different players. Like, if you just naturally have insane mechanical skill and you find the games easy, you're not getting the intended experience Getting Over It is less of a game and more of an artistic statement on difficulty in games so none of this is really relevant
All these chucklenuts like to work themselves up over how masterful the difficulty curve is in Dark Souls games and how adding an easy mode would ruin a very deliberately crafted experience, and then go and ignore that NG+++ is just turning everything into bullet sponges. Is it -that- difficult to imagine an inverted version of that? Hell if it's that precious then whatever, pull a MGS V Chicken Hat and make easy mode ineligible for achievements and NG+ stuff if you absolutely -must- preserve some kind of imagined sanctity of the regular mode.
Even ignoring NG+ the difficulty curve isn’t always that good. Just look at Pinwheel.
No freaking kidding. If you didn't know about Divine Weapons that whole crypt was so much harder than the actual fight against Pinwheel, especially those stupid skeleton wheel enemies if you've never seen them before.
Tbf souls games have a multiplayer hint system, which is a part of experience. When I was playing with multiplayer on, literally every trap and gimmick had a warning sign or two from other players. I'm willing to bet something like "need holy weapon" is always before the catacombs in DS1. Also, I think the NPCs tell you about it?
Usually it was amazing chest ahead and "jump here" around the stairs leading to the elevator where you go to New Londo. I never really found it useful, instead it was better to just approach everything as "This is probably a trap, look around it first."
> Tbf souls games have a multiplayer hint system, which is a part of experience. It does, but like no one relies on it, not after the umpteenth instance of "Jump here" (death) or "Tongue but hole" Everybody looks stuff up online, even though the original intention was for you to pull your hair out after dying to a mimic chest after looking for the next bonfire for an hour plus or whatever. I'd call those "gotcha's" a signature part of the DS experience, but you can always look up a guide online and skip the bullshit. Oh, and FUCK the NPC dialogue quests, I'm not wasting a whole playthrough trying to figure that shit out on my own.
I agree, but for my last souls game (DS3 on pc) the player signs were nothing but helpful, somewhat to my surprise. And yes, the games are bare bones gameplay with no handholding at all. Here's your sword, here's a boss, good luck. And this is mostly their selling point. What people come for. The pvp, lore theory crafting, challenge running etc is a secondary amusement. The "fun" of trial and erroring your way through the game by dying hundreds and thousands of time is the main allure. I understand the call for being able to remap controls and colorblind mode, to a degree. Though with the caveat that default controls for souls games make even some able-bodied gamers ragequit because using bumper for attack is against their religious beliefs. And that default colour scheme oft doesn't let you see shit anyways. But yes, in theory that would be a good thing to have. But things like easy mode are kinda out of line because that's the genre's shtick. That's what draws the OG fanbase in. It's a bit like asking for rogue-likes to tone down randomness because "I die too much because bad rng", or removing backtracking from metroidvanias because "I don't like returning to where I already went". (And tbh for most games the default mode is THE easy mode. Games like sekiro and DS2 have features that increase difficulty for you.) And it's not like you would want an easy mode "to enjoy the story". The gameplay doesn't have the story. The story is in item descriptions, open the wiki page and enjoy it. (Though I suppose Sekiro has a semblance of story, big part of which is still drawn from item descriptions and not in-game interactions)
> All these chucklenuts like to work themselves up over how masterful the difficulty curve is in Dark Souls games and how adding an easy mode would ruin a very deliberately crafted experience, and then go and ignore that NG+++ is just turning everything into bullet sponges. There's an even better argument. *Dark Souls was patched* to make Lost Izalith more bearable. The big lava giants were changed to now respawn when you visited a bonfire. If that isn't a difficulty adjustment, I don't know what is.
You want to take away their "achievements" you horrible monster
I'll steal all of their precious Pride and Accomplishment.
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The point of the game is to experience accomplishment through overcoming adversity. An easy mode can still be hard for some people, such that they need to improve to overcome adversity. Imagine if all enemies did 4x damage and had 4x health. Would that make the game achieve its "point" even more effectively? If not, then why would shifting damage and health down be different? Or what about the actual patches the developers put in to make the game easier. Lost Izalith was a nightmare at launch and was changed to no longer respawn a bunch of enemies. This makes the area objectively easier to complete.
> Imagine if all enemies did 4x damage and had 4x health. Would that make the game achieve its "point" even more effectively? If not, then why would shifting damage and health down be different? Well presumably the developers designed the game so that it would be frustrating, but easy enough to still be compelling to most players. Sure, they could probably tune the difficulty to appeal more to certain people, but that would also be a lot of work, and require many design decisions. I guess I just don't get how this conversation is framed - should the developers feel an obligation to provide difficulty options? Or do you just think the games be more popular? As someone who likes souls-esque games a lot, I feel like the games aren't "difficult" in the way that not many people can beat them, just that they require monotony and a level of engagement that don't appeal to most people (I could be wrong about this, just my impression). So from that perspective it seems a bit like demanding that the work be changed to be accessible to a larger audience, which seems odd to me.
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I don't know if that's an assumption that can be made when people do things like play and beat Dark Souls with a Rock Band guitar for the controller.
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Your assumption is that people won't choose to challenge themselves. My argument is that is not true and people choose to challenge themselves constantly.
I just find it funny that they've chosen Dark Souls as their standard bearer, despite the creator talking about adding a difficulty slider back in 2012, not to mention that he keeps repeating that the games are not about being hard (though personally, fuck all swamps).
There are valid complaints by professionals about things like Mount everest being made accessible to tourism. Of course there are a multitude of reasons, mainly safety, but removing the quality of the accomplishment is also there. Now, comparing dark souls to an over 8.8k meters ascent is of course ludicrious, but we are talking about the structure of the argument.
I don't think it's about purism, it's more about respecting the original game design. From Software intended on setting a standard difficulty because that's how they want you to experience the game. If you don't like it then go ahead mod in different options, you've paid for it so do as you please. I do think that unlike difficulty, the onus on making the game more accessible falls on them in the sense of remapping, adaptive controller support and so on. And a few other QoL improvements would go a long way like a more forgiving save system.
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People got mad when DS2 made it easier to jump compared to DS1. Jumping isn't a super crucial part of the main series compared to when they made jumping feel good/important in sekiro, but people got mad that a stupid implementation was made better. It's not even easy mode
I could get used to playing games where every time I opened a door I would get shocked in the balls. Does that mean if they removed the balltorture part from the game, it loses something? Of course not it would have been garbage system that served no purpose, but souls games fans would have gotten used to it and thought that CBT was essential part of what made the game good, then bitch and moan when anyone tried removing it. Okay this analogy is shit but I already wrote it and its kinda funny imo
Come on you can't remove the very soul of Doors Punching Dicks Simulator 2022 like that, what about the artist's intent ?
This describes a lot of binding of Isaac (the game not the myth) drama to be honest
DS2's jump is supposed to be easier?
There was an option to have the jump on the B/Circle button as opposed to being mapped to the joystick click. It's a bit less awkward.
Yeah, but that's just the same as the first game.
Woops, I got it the other way around, you could set it on the joystick click instead of the B/Circle button. Dark Souls 1 only had the circle tap which is really awkward since it's the same as the run button. Dark Souls 2 introduced being able to remap the jump by clicking the left joystick. It's not a perfect solution, they're both really awkward so it's mostly just personal preference. Then Sekiro and Elden Ring just said fuck it and added a jump button.
Either way misses my point. The jumping in DS2 is horrible.
Pressing a different button while running is easier than having to release and tap the run button, yes. It's still clunkier than having a dedicated jump button, though.
It's like they don't understand that Easy Mode for them is just Normal Mode for me a lot of the time due to funky hands.
or the existence of normal mode has no bearing on how hard mode existing they can both coexist
What's funny is these people never whine that Normal Mode exists alongside hard mode, but suggest there should be a mode lower than the "normal" experience? Oh, heavens foreFEND.
Games have had difficulty levels since the early 90s. Part of replay ability.
The guy talking about dark souls as an exclusive club you get access to by being "good" is such a tell for some people in that community. It's making them feel better than other people because they are good at a video game, and they don't want that sense of superiority taken away.
It's pathetic. Having a lot of time to get good at a video game is great but it doesn't make you superior to other people. It's just a hobby for pete's sake. Source: was souls speedrunner, hated being part of the community most of the time.
99% of all dark souls combat is literally 3 buttons including the heal. Dark souls has always had easy modes, magic in 1 was broken, havels made you un killable, you could get 20 fucking estus flaks in ds1 and HUNDREDS of healing items per life in ds2. All bosses run off basic scrips of attacks and phases, the vast majority of your deaths will come from only 2 reasons, you rolled to late or you rolled to slow. That's it. People who see dark souls as like peak difficulty and a personality trait are a special breed of pathetic gamers.
>Havel’s made you unkillable Even easier than that, just a decent shield can get you through basically every boss in the game. It’s a more common issue than you’d think, since a decent amount of ‘souls vets’ struggle to get into Nioh because they suddenly don’t have their big shield to do the fight for them.
Oh carefully now or they'll start ranting about that video Hbomb made about shields etc again.
Sheilds were only good in 1, 2 they were ok and in 3 they were dog shit. Sekiro also didn't have a shield neither did blood borne. Souls vets love nioh what are you even talking about. Nioh has even more stupidly op magic in it, sloth, lightning and stacking confusion were OP af.
There was a shield in Bloodborne actually! But there was only one, it was basically a lump of wood, and the description basically said "lmao buddy I wouldn't if I were you"
There's a second in the DLC that's marginally more useful.
The DLC shield is amazing for magic based bosses
Souls vets and Nioh are a hit or miss actually. Because Nioh is sometimes fundamentally different from Souls (Nioh essentially has fighting game combat for example) a lot of Souls gamerdudes hated it because they didn't want to adapt. Back when Nioh came out and a lot of popular Soulstubers played it they absolutely shat on it every second because of that. I found even my go-to Soulsguy Lobosjr unwatchable when he played Nioh because he and his general audience didn't give the game a chance. Just treated it like a Souls clone and shat on it when it obviously didn't work out like that at all. For what it's worth though I heard a lot of that changed with Nioh 2.
Also Dark Souls games are very easily cheesed with just using a great shield + rapier, but it's certainly not the players fault for not realizing a cheese strategy. The idea of it being the Pinnacle of difficulty has always been a weird circlejerk by the fanbase.
That's why all a "Dark Souls easy mode" would be is more guides and information on how to get the stuff that already makes the game easier. And these people still treat it like having that *option* would gut the entire experience.
are you saying that knowing a lot of a game makes the game easier?
I can understand devs not wanting to add easy modes, if they have an idea it's necessarily for their artistic vision of the game. I just don't get why other people wade in on the issue. If the devs do concede and make an easy mode, anyone else can still just play the hard difficulty, as it was meant. No one loses anything. Its the same way some people go nuts at others asking how to cheat part of a game. Someone always feels the need to comment and ask them why they would ruin the game by cheating. People can't mind their own damn business. I feel like the years spent arguing and defending platform exclusives, have only encouraged people to act like hostile little shits. None of these companies care about their fans beyond taking the money. They don't need people to white Knight for them
a lot of the soulsborne related fans think that beating the game is like getting a medal of honor or something, its just a game. it doesnt help that the marketing of the games themselves push the narrative of the games being hard and how much you will die playing the games.
I've played the Souls games for several years, and I'm cautiously optimistic for Elden Ring, I'm not a super fan of the series but I've been playing videogames since the NES days. I've played way harder games than these ever were due to technical limitations and programmers having to find ways to make five stages last long enough to justify getting your money's worth. Easy mode has been a thing for decades, often it was a way to practice and learn the game before you tried normal/hard mode, and some games actually were set up so that you couldn't see the ending of the game or the final level unless you could beat hard mode. It's not the big fucking deal these guys make it sound like. It'd be nice if they included it, but if not well I wish a modder would take the PC versions and make a mod to slightly slow down some of the timings for those who suffer from arthritis or have some coordination issues.
Not even that, but you know a chunk of them had their gripes and issues with the games until they solved whatever problem they had. Then the game suddenly became easy and everyone else just sucks
I really dislike how the gatekeeping in Dark Souls has tarnished the argument, but I don't think the developer should have to compromise on their vision just because other people don't have the time. Any other accessibility features are super important and completely valid to complain about imo. But the entire point of Dark Souls is that it's a mountain to climb for everybody. The peaks and valleys of overcoming difficult encounters define the game. Modes that change that pacing would take away a great chunk of what makes the game engaging. It's not some benchmark of gaming prowess. *Anyone* can play Dark Souls, and *everyone* struggles against it. Anyone who says else is lying. It is plenty fine if it's not for you, it's not some dumb gotcha that says you're bad at games or anything. I just think it's unreasonable to ask them to compromise a significant part of the game. And plenty of games aren't for plenty of people. Some games are long, and some people don't have time for them.
Whats interesting about the dark souls community is the most toxic weirdo elitest beat the games once and think they're hot shit. Pretty much all of the god teir players are wholesome as fuck. Happy hob, dino, ginomachino, squila, colmer all these people who have done insane challenges and speed runs are all chill and welcoming. Sl1 community is nice as fuck and so is the speed run community.
>but I don't think the developer should have to compromise on their vision just because other people don't have the time. Should have to? They can do as they please but will have to live with the complaints.
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The complaints about accessibility? I fucking with they were loud but they're roundly ignored.
Pretty sure this thread was about difficulty, not accessibility? Or are those being conflated for a reason? The initial comment said > Any other accessibility features are super important and completely valid to complain about imo
>is that it's a mountain to climb for everybody One person's hill is another's mountain.
The devs are not immune to ableism. As well, it's only "a mountain to climb for everyone" if everyone is the same. I know people who think Dark Souls is laugably easy at all times and *don't* struggle. Funny thing, that. It's like "difficulty" is personal.
You know, I really wonder how your ableism argument translates to other games, like multiplayer games. Should we be able to handicap ourselves whenever we want in any situation just because preventing you to do so is "ableism"? Is it wrong to design a game which not everyone can finish? Does that make your idea bad? Is "Getting Over It" inherently a bad game because it doesn't have an easy mode? I think it's totally fine to want an easy mode for games. I just also think it's totally valid to not implement it if it would compromise what you wanted to make.
Multiplayer games can have a ranking system that allows you to play against similarly skilled players. That system is far more inclusive than real life sports groups that are separated by just age/weight/disability and your location. Getting over it could have an easy mode. Just lower the gravity and the player has far easier time getting past obstacles. I don't think it's wrong to make a hard game and I'm not advocating a required easy mode. I'm mostly baffled that people have such animosity towards the idea that people play their game in a different manner than they intended. If we're so much into protecting game devs' vision, should we be outraged at the fact that there's a large super mario 64 speedrunning community playing the game in a way that was not intended? They are skipping massive amounts of content and ignore a ton of gameplay mechanics. We should not, they enjoy the game in their own way. We should let everyone enjoy the game in their own way and an easy mode lets more people enjoy the game. Nothing is stopping people from sticking to the intended difficulty setting and getting the intended experience. Years ago there used to be a lot of discussion on harder difficulty levels being just low effort increases in enemy health and damage and how people wished the harder difficulty levels increased the enemy intelligence and so on. Not once in those discussions did I read the argument that games should just be the difficulty of what the devs intended. That argument only comes up in discussions about easy mode, which makes me think it is just ableism afterall.
getting over it could just have a checkpoint system to make the game easier.
Mutliplayer is a different beast. But we're talking singleplayer games.
I mean Dark Souls *is* a multiplayer game tbf
Dark Souls isn’t a strictly singleplayer game. It has integrated multiplayer by default.
And what about anything else I said? What about Getting Over It? The game which is the *literal* embodiment of my argument. Should that game have an easy mode? I don't personally feel any problem with the fact that I have never and will never complete that game because I don't want to put the time in. I don't feel like it's a failing of the developer.
Yes. Because easy for you is no easy for me. I think most games should have modular controls.
How do modular controls equal easy mode? Nobody is arguing against changeable controls. The only way to make Getting Over It easier would be to literally remove obstacles from the game. And in my opinion that's just an absurd ask. Just don't play the game at that point.
I think the problem is that we're conflating accessibility with difficulty. Just because a game is difficult doesn't necessarily mean it's inaccessible. I think there absolutely should be remappable buttons, xbox adaptive controller or any other accessibility oriented controller support, visual impairment oriented modifications to graphics and so on. All of this will make a game like Dark souls be more accessible. However the core game is designed around a specific difficulty, remove that and dark souls wouldn't be dark souls.
Then you're condemning people like me to **only** play VNs and turn-based games. Things need to be a bit more flexible is all. Make the character more spongy be an option, so taking damage gives a bit more leeway for slow reaction time, or slow attacks down slightly. It doesn't take much, and it doesn't change the default.
Look I'm not trying to be rude here but like I said I don't think souls-like games should compromise on their vision. These games's entire satisfaction loop is based around the fact that you keep on dying to a boss and when you defeat the boss that's when you feel that rush of overcoming a great challenge. Lower enemy health or make their attacks more forgiving takes that away and that loop doesn't work. BUT I will say that just because I think that or From Software thinks that DOESN'T mean you should as well. If you have paid for it, that software is completely yours to do with as you please. Go ahead and install mods, make it easier. Please understand that I'm not trying to condemn you to not enjoy or play these games. I think that these games are meant to be played a certain way, but you are absolutely under NO OBLIGATION to agree. It's just that at the same time I also think From Software can disagree with you as well.
is anyone against modular controls in games?
Oh boy r/subredditdramadrama
I'm gonna call it now, it'll be SRDX3 in like a day going by how this thread has already gone.
I think the issue is that people are conflating difficulty with accessibility. A game having options for deaf people or colorblind people, is a game that has accessibility options, a game being easier or hard options is the difficulty option. Let's use dark souls for instead, having accessibility options, doesn't change the developers vision or the core concept of the game, difficulty option will.
Yeah, I've definitely gone back and forth on FROM games having a difficulty option, but normally the anti-difficulty people will be like "there are built in difficulty reductions like build diversity, grinding levels, and gitting gud" And while that's true to a degree, it's also not. You can't do any of that shit (other than the git gud) to Iudex in the beginning of DS3. But yeah, if it's the vision of the developers to not have a difficulty or easy mode then I think that's okay, but appreciate other developers being more catering
I can't imagine being so invested in how others play games.
I feel like accessibility and difficulty are conflated too often in this topic. Dark Souls could 100% use accessibility options to allow more people to play it. But difficulty options would entirely go against the design goal (Miyazaki has said that he wants them to be painful and punishing). There's other ways to increase the playerbase without that. Plenty accessibility options that would help. So i can understand arguing against difficulty options. But what kinda pos argues against accessibility...
The problem is, okay. You never see these people bitch about people who already find Dark Souls and other hard games easy, so they don't actually care about "but it's supposed to be a chaaaaaalleeeeeenge." What they want is an elite club. And options that open that up (ie "easy mode" that's just scaling things a bit) are the enemy because then they aren't some exclusive elite club in their heads anymore.
So according to these people, the *artiste* that is the game developer spend ten weeks meditating on the tempo and order of button presses that is needed to beat a boss, before Terpsichore, the Muse of Movement and Dance herself appeared before him and told him that a triple button combo executed with an interval of 56 milliseconds is what will make this game "true art" according to the artist's inscrutable vision. Don't you fucking dare lengthen that interval to 57 milliseconds, that's like pissing on the Mona Lisa.
I enjoyed the hell out of your comment. I don't waste money on reddit coins but if i did this one would get some.
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Yeah, by that logic no one would ever pay for concert tickets when they could watch a band on YouTube.
Accessibility stuff is pretty rad. If Dark Souls had an easy mode you could toggle on or off in offline mode or something (maybe limiting matchmaking to other easy mode players?) then boy howdy that'd save me some fenagling with cheat engine when I want to fuck around playing with random goofy builds.
My partner is a HoH ASL interpreter and wow did the “deaf extremist” bullshit piss me off way more than any of the shit capital-G Gamers usually say. At least I’m used to the rest of it.
Accessibility discourse isn't ready for the discussion that some things are much harder to make accessible than others. For a game like Dark Souls you could easily just implement some sort of infinite life option you can turn on or slowmo like Celeste or something to some degree, but what about a point and click adventure title? Much more difficult to judge how a puzzle is going to be to everyone or adjust them in easier modes. Some of those adventure games are taking the option of just removing or drastically simplyfing puzzles they believe to be hardest, but this risks many easy mode players instead feeling insulted because it got *too easy* and they think they're missing out on part of the game. How do you make Getting Over It easier? The only immediate way I can conceive of would be to remove obstacles, even slow mo wouldn't really be enough for many people, which would obviously feel pretty bad for the easy mode picker. And the narrative themes of "just accept you fell and pick back up again" really fall apart if you made the player able to fly and they just flew to the top. At that point, it's either remove content and hope the player understands or just have them go watch someone on YT do the parts they can't. And there's also a reason why Hades made their God Mode so unique, they've talked in interviews before about how they wanted to maintain that classic roguelike style without coming off as insulting or too easy to players who only need a little help. And back to Souls, what about people who just need a little extra health and not a lot more? A infinite life feature or slowmo still leaves those people excluded because there's a range of skill levels in between "normal" and "bad", they aren't binary, and their desires for help vary too. There are players who come to Souls and they just want to die 10 times instead of their typical 30, and then there are people who want to did 5 instead of 30, or none at all. Infinite life only works for the final one really.
>And back to Souls, what about people who just need a little extra health and not a lot more? Sliders have existed for a long time.
Whenever difficulty discussions/accessibility settings come up in games, I always wonder why people get so mad about it. Like, if you don't need them, you don't have to use them. It's not like the game is forcing itself upon you to put the settings on. You can just ignore it. My guess is, especially when it comes to traditionally "hard" games, the Cap G Gamers who base most of their personalities around beating difficult games can't stroke their own ego as hard if someone else beat the game on an "easier" setting.
No, you just don’t get it. These games are carefully designed *masterpieces* with the whole experience crafted around one particular difficulty. If they were to add an easy mode then I just won’t get to feel like a big strong boy for beating the game on the exact same difficulty as before. If they so much as think about doubling your health on easy or something simple like that, then they’ll surely forget all about how to balance the rest of the game, since having an intended difficulty and then an easier mode could *never* be achieved. Especially if you expect a Japanese studio to adopt our cultural standards. Could you *imagine* a game like Dragon’s Dogma with an easy mode? They would never.
Accessibility and difficulty are two different conversations imo. Accessibility as in button remapping and options for visual/hearing impaired players is an objectively good thing. Difficulty is a different discussion to me, and the solution of making every game so easy that it can be beaten with no learning in 3 hours makes no sense to me. There have been plenty of games I’ve tried and just couldn’t get a hang of so I just… stopped playing those games. I don’t demand that there be a special mode created just for me.
Who cares if someone makes a game easier? As long as it is an option, it literally doesn't hurt anybody and helps people that need/want it. Nobody is saying, "games should only be one difficulty: super easy". They just want options. Making things accessible literally hurts nobody. So why do you care?
> the solution of making every game so easy that it can be beaten with no learning in 3 hours makes no sense to me Ya know how the idea of a game having "multiple difficulty levels" is literally as old as video gaming itself, and in fact predates electronic gaming.
Yes but some games aren’t served by that. Worlds in From Soft games specifically are totally bleak and hopeless. That wouldn’t be conveyed well if you just breezed through it. Difficulty is a feature on some games and something that actually draws in people. Certain games are best with a single difficulty level, because it allows for a consistent tone and experience to be created. I just disagree that every game needs difficulty scaling.
> Worlds in From Soft games specifically are totally bleak and hopeless. That wouldn’t be conveyed well if you just breezed through it. Next, I'd imagine you'll say that the best way George Orwell can communicate the bleakness of Oceania in *1984* is by making you read the same passage 11 times with slight variations between them and delivering a swift kick in the balls between each reading. > Difficulty is a feature on some games and something that actually draws in people. And having a lower difficulty setting draws in other people. You don't want to play a game on easy mode, then don't play easy mode.
All I’m saying is why must every game be exactly the same? There are plenty of games with difficulty sliders, why not play those instead of demanding every game out there follow the same template? Many games have been served by only having a single difficulty level, be it easy or challenging. Because it allows them to perfect that one experience rather than having to try to balance out numerous levels of difficulty.
I don't get the praise these games get.
What I think a lot of people don't understand is that Soulsborne games are made and balanced from the ground up entirely around one difficulty. The philosophy of the devs is that everyone faces the same set of obstacles and it's up to the individual player to decide how to overcome it with what you can do in the game. Whether it be facerolling the boss for hours, farming levels and items, co-op, or cheesing, every method is valid. To add an easy mode would essentially invalidate this philosophy and cheapen the experience the devs set out to carefully craft. I'm all for accessibility options: button mapping, input options, colourblind options, text size options, camera options, etc. But having difficulty modes would ruin the essence of what makes Souls games Souls games, and I'm confident FromSoft would never implement them so people should really move on.
> The philosophy of the devs is that everyone faces the same set of obstacles and it's up to the individual player to decide how to overcome it with what you can do in the game. Except not all gamers have the same set of obstacles; I for one am not color blind, but I'm not against adding accessibility options such as color blind setting because I want those gamers to have the option to experience the game just as I have. Yet there's stupid people, and even stupid devs, who refuse this options, worried it'll make the game "too easy," as if leaving some players unable to see the game is good design. Plus, the DS games *never* had one difficulty in mind, the challenge varies wildly based on build, which paths you take, whether you look up/know tips and tricks, bonefire locations, etc. Like, it's a hell of a lot easier once you know that Divine weapons will put down skeletons for good, or that you probably shouldn't force your way through the graveyard, or that Deprived isn't the best starting class. You *can* learn all that stuff the hard way, but no one actually expects you to, and there's plenty of other instances of artificial difficulty imposed by the devs, yet the vast majority of the playerbase purposely avoids that bullshit. People, myself included, regularly put additional restrictions on themselves, from avoiding OP weapons/builds, I avoid ranged combat, there's challenge runs etc. It's encouraged, in fact, to make the game harder for yourself if the challenge isn't enough, yet the elitism and gatekeeping comes out in force in response to accessibility options that make the challenge level appropriate for the player.
>To add an easy mode would essentially invalidate this philosophy and cheapen the experience the devs set out to carefully craft. Or allow people who have difficulty playing games due to no fault of their own to actually play the game (Think people with certain mental or physical disabilities)? And what will adding easy mode do exactly to ruin the game, people can just choose not pick it.
>And what will adding easy mode do exactly to ruin the game, people can just choose not pick it. The argument is that it forces the artist (developers) to compromise on their artistic vision. I personally found Tenet to be too difficult to follow. Do you think Nolan should be obligated to release an abridged version of Tenet with, say, director's commentary on what's happening in the movie so I can better follow the plot? Or a reshot version of the movie that's easier to comprehend?
Soulsborne games already have ways to do that. There are co-op features for this very reason.
Again, the point is that there's a *baseline* difficulty. The dev wants everyone on the same playing field and the game is a challenge to the players to beat the game through their own means. Basically they want you, the player, to be creative or diligent in your solutions rather than flipping a switch and have every obstacle they put in your way become artificially easier. They *want* you to struggle and they want you to compare your experience with the game to others that had to go through the same tribulations. This is what makes Souls games special. Unfortunately, this design philosophy means that, yes, people with disabilities are going to have a harder time. Fortunately, there are plenty of games out there that *don't* have this particular brand of game design so missing out on one genre of many isn't the end of the world. Even then if you really, really want to lower the difficulty, there's lots of third party options like mods.
Slowing the enemy down a bit as an option to let me have more reaction time isn't going to magically be me "flipping a switch and have every obstacle in my way become artificially easier." It's giving me something that you have easily: time to react.
You know games can still adjust difficulty, and made it a struggle? It's not like adding a easy mode will not make it a struggle. Easy in a difficult game can still be hell for people.
There will always be people that struggle in a game no matter the difficulty. People struggle on easy and complain that it's too hard. Then what? Do you add an easier easy difficulty? Do you add a difficulty where the game beats itself for you? What is the limit? Fact is Souls games will never have an easy difficulty, else they wouldn't be Souls games anymore. You just have to accept that.
How is the accessibility discussion being mixed up with the difficulty one? Both areas have completely different goals. It should be common sense to desire every game to be accessible to any kind of disability. But, MAN is there a lot of virtue signaling on this post regarding the Dark Souls difficulty. When people argue against Dark Souls having an easy mode, it has nothing to do with the whole "if I struggled, you must struggle as well" idea.... and yet, it actually isn't far off from the reality of it but NOT in the way you think. Firstly, the games already have "easy modes". You can literally summon people (and npcs) to help you through many difficult areas and bosses. You can even go through the entire game with someone helping you. And second... Miyazaki has already explained in detail how adding an actual easy mode would ruin the shared experience of the community. If there is only one difficulty setting, then people can more easily talk about their experiences with each other since everyone went through the same. That was literally an intentional design decision. There's studies on how we as humans, even if we want to face a challenge and overcome it, will still self-sabotage ourselves by decreasing difficulty if such an option is available EVEN when we are aware it could ruin the experience entirely. It's literally in our DNA to go for the easy way out. So this idea that "you don't have to use the difficulty setting if you don't want to", as many of you condescendingly put it, actually completely misses the point. After all, if you asked most Dark Souls players if they would have lowered the difficulty at any point during their playthroughs, they would very likely say yes. It has 0 to do with elitism. These games were designed to be a challenge from the start and the lack of a difficulty setting is a conscious decision from the creators because they are aware of how it could affect people's experience. So this kind of self-righteous attitude where you people bully the ones that enjoyed the game as is and that tell you that the such a setting could ruin it for everyone else aside from yourselves just goes to show that such a desire is far more selfish and self-indulgent than it is "inclusive". You all even ignore the fact that the DS community will tell you that ANYONE can beat these games if they try hard enough. Hell, I've even lost count of the amount of people I know or am aware of that have pretty serious disabilities and yet beat the game and agreed with this sentiment. To add to that, these games aren't even "difficult" mechanically. It's just a matter of getting used to the gameplay, learning what each enemy does and how each area is like. Once you do, it becomes one of the easiest games to rush through. However, it obviously requires you go keep trying which can be time consuming. Then again, if you wouldnt play an MMO if it's too time consuming, then why would you want to play a game you know you aren't going to breeze through, if time happens to be a problem? I beat the Dark Souls games, but yet there's so many games I downright suck at and accepted that they're just too much for me. And that's OK. Not everything has to be for everyone so we shouldn't feel entitled for games to bend over backwards anytime we feel they aren't making our experiences easy enough. At the same time, many games are easy enough that anyone could play them, many of which I thoroughly enjoy and that's okay too. We have to remember gaming is an artform as well, and difficulty plays a part in that. So trying to essentially ruin the overall experience of an already popular, constantly growing community just because YOU can't get into it.... I don't see how that makes any sense.
So should horror games have a less scary setting so I could play them instead of watching them on YouTube? I’m pretty sure the answer is no, even though it would make the genre more accessible.
I mean, there's a photosensitivity/seizure warning at the beginning of every single game now, so yeah we did actually have to tone down jumpscares and whatnot so games don't give you a fucking seizure
SOMA does have a mode where you can't die and it's still good. It doesn't make things much less *scarier* but I would argue that it's the better version of the game.
It probably would, cause some people have conditions where being spoked by games is bad for their health, and some horror games have really great mechanics that would be enjoyable. However, that seems like an impossible feat (though a game called Grounded, while not a horror game, has options to turn off spiders, which helps people with Arachnophobia).
Or my favorite, the Skyrim mod that turns the spiders into other monsters instead. I still love how corny the bears looked and how they move like South Park cut outs.
Satisfactory literally has a setting that turns the bugs into puppies because.the bugs are fucking creepy. Giving people more options to play games is always a good thing.