Learning to play the guitar or code also doesn’t have a difficulty slider, but people of all abled-ness manage it anyways.

Games are about entertainment. They’re not a career. Nobody is paying me to play a Fromsoft game. More importantly, nobody is gatekeeping the entertainment, immersion, and story of music or coding behind me being able to “Git Gud”.

And let’s look at music and coding. Since I can speak a bit to both. For music, OF COURSE there are difficulty sliders. When I took recorder back in school, they had 2 different versions of many songs. When I first learned Christmas music on piano, I learned special “simplified” tracks for the songs. I never “Got Gud” at music, but I still got to the end of the book.

And coding. Coding is the opposite of a Fromsoft game. You’re surrounded by mountains of tools that try to make it easier. When I bring in a junior developer, I’m not giving them some unforgiving code challenge to power through. Maybe they’ll never be good enough to design a specialized cache or optimize queries. So I give them the things they CAN do, and hold their hand so they always succeed. Junior devs don’t ever fail, not because they “git gud” but because I set them up to succeed by this little difficulty slider called “how hard is this ticket to do and how much help do they need from me?”

I hear what you’re saying, but to be fair, younger players don’t start out with those reflexes either. It’s probably harder for older players, but I’m not convinced it’s that much more of a challenge that it’s not worth trying

It’s not about the reflexes, though. It’s that they have opted to take actions that make the game unenjoyable for a significant number of gamers despite it having no positive benefit for ANY gamer.

And much of my Letsplay complaints weren’t about Elden Ring. I mod that. I don’t have the tools to mod Bloodborne, a game I otherwise would like more than Elden Ring because of its storyline.

It is a great apple to apple comparison.

This is the “nuh uh” answer. You never quantified anything. it’s sorta a “fuck you, I know you showed my argument was a fallacy, but I’m better than you so I’m doubling down”. I spend too much time in places where that shit gets laughed at. I’m going back to those places. Enjoy your shit game.

They made a piece of art. You chose to buy it knowing what it was. Git gud

No. I chose to buy Bloodborne because people convinced me that wasn’t the case. Git blocked.

You have so many options to make it easier.

Like the third-party Easy Mode mod.

You bought a game that you knew would be full of “difficult” bosses

I bought a game that I knew had a working Easy Mode mod. I would not have bought it if it hadn’t. Because the designers are assholes, but assholes who can write a decent story.

And now you sit and complain about there not being an official “difficulty slider”.

Yes, I do. And you sit and complain about another human being having an opinion despite the fact you could just NOT complain about other human beings having an opinion. Funny how people “sit and” do things.

Do you also go to a vegan restaurant and complain they’re not inclusive because you can’t order meat?

No, but that’s not an apple-to-apple comparison, making that a False Analogy fallacy. For two reasons. First, whether I agree with it or not, veganism is an ethical position and they’re refusing to serve any meat on the menu because they think it’s morally wrong to. Do you think Fromsoft thinks they’re “going to hell” if they put in a difficulty slider? Second, vegan restaurants are ABOUT veganism. There’s no reason to choose to eat at a vegan restaurant unless you or someone in your party is looking to have a meal without meat in it for some reason. There’s plenty of reasons to play Fromsoft games but at lower difficulty. Most people don’t like Bloodborne or Elden Ring “because it’s difficult/unforgiving”. They like it because of the story. Anyone who would opt out of playing those games because someone else could play them on easier has serious issues.

Soooo a game, which is not paid for nor developed by the community, and is rather purchased with the knowledge that it is a difficult game which will require ample skill to surpass its many challenges, should put in difficulty sliders despite them fundamentally going against the very nature of the game itself?

Fucking YES it should. I didn’t buy ER until I was 100% certain it had an easymode mod. So I got what I wanted out of it despite them shoving both their middles fingers at me and telling me I’m not worthy to buy their product because they’re intentionally hiding the good part (the story) behind gameplay I didn’t want. I’m still pissed that I wasted my money buying Bloodborne. You want me to get over that, cut me a check.

As I said to the other hater, what is with the ER-fanboys turning the chat into full-on-reddit level bitchfest defending it? Why don’t you just let me have my valid opinions? I know, heaven forbid there exists someone who has an opinion that doesn’t match yours.

I found it. It’s in Nexusmods instead of in the game.

If you don’t like spicy food. Don’t buy spicy food

I don’t know about you, but every spicy restaurant I know has a little “difficulty slider” where you get to ask them not to pour a gallon of ghost pepper into it. It’s about making the customer happy.

If you don’t want to “git gud”. You can use summoned spirits. NPCs, other players

Or I can fucking mod the piece of shit and complain about it on forums because it’s fucking stupid. But I want BURN Bloodborne because I can’t mod it.

There already is a difficulty slider. It’s one you set for yourself.

Yeah. I’m getting really good at archery. Think I’ll cut my eye out. Natural difficulty slider

Why is it every time I express a valid criticism about an otherwise story-heavy game with a stupid difficulty-related gimmic the cringe-posse comes out and tries to convince me the game is perfect and no human being would find my opinion valid. Like seriously what I tell my little nieces and nephews, if you don’t have anything nice to say, move along.

In other news, I DO respect the Viva La Dirt League reference.

I think it’d be a bit more difficult than you are assuming however since it is also a multiplayer game. I guess they could limit the difficulty options to offline players only.

For online play, you can just match people who are using the same difficulty, and perhaps disable PVP entirely for Easy difficulty. For everything but PVP, it’s not that big a deal. Seamless Co-Op Mod works with the Easy Mode mod. If modders can make a coherent experience, I’m sure From could. If they wanted to. Which they don’t.

Making it a game about ambiance and story makes it a different game, doesn’t it?

Not really. The experience with the Easy Mode mod in place is pretty much the same. I saw more “You Died” screens on easymode than the typical player sees on regular mode. The only difference is that I didn’t waste my money on Elden Ring by having to give up less than 10% into the game like I did on Bloodborne after 50 hours or so.

Some of us, especially older gamers, just don’t have the reflexes for that type of game. Unfortunately for us, Fromsoft writes GREAT stories and Let’sPlays are still kinda boring.

Honestly how is this gatekeeping?

“Gatekeeping: the activity of controlling, and usually limiting, general access to something.”

The lack of difficulty sliders make the game inaccessible to people who have no ability or desire for the unforgiving experience, nor any ability/desire to “Git Gud Scrubs”. It’s intentionally left out to exclude those people. That makes it “gatekeeping” by the definition for the word.

This is substantiated by the fact that a mode to make the game easier and a mode to make the game harder are in the top 10 downloaded mods for Elden Ring. If you leave out the loaders and modutils, those same mods are top-5. This is basically unheard of in most games.

You can argue that you approve of this gatekeeping, but it’s silly to die on the “it’s not really gatekeeping” hill.

The article I had found on the topic suggested linux users provided higher quality bug reports, in addition to more bug reports.

The real issue is that some game companies don’t want bug reports because they don’t want to fix bugs.

Actually, I think they don’t want linux gamers, with their higher technical savvy. Some game dev companies love how 90% of their bug reports come from 10% of their users (and even brag about it). Other companies would rather just not get those 90% of bug reports.

If I had to guess, each graphics cycle is a little less dominant than the last. The iterations on graphics are becoming lesser and lesser. A game from 10 years ago is far improved from a game 20 years ago, but not that much worse than a game from last month.

There are moments of awe (imo, especially in VR when a game “nails it”), but we’re pretty desensitized to high-graphics video games of late.

Ah yes, belittle your interlocutor when you can’t respond to them. Thank you for justifying this block

Yeah, not the same thing. I’m not saying microtransactions can’t be stopped. I’m saying it won’t happen through US-based legislation.

And this iPhone monopoly suit is apples-and-oranges to a microtransaction litigation. They’re being charged with being in breach of an 1890s law that has held strong, but that has nothing to do with microtransactions. In fact, no relevant law exists except some flimsy gambling statutes that simply do not work. Most importantly, there is no legislative piece to it. Apple broke a big law and has been doing so with virtually no consequences for decades. Nobody’s passing new laws against Apple. They’re just finally facing the justice that they should’ve faced a long time gone.

There’s a difference between fatalism and realism. I’m not saying the problem isn’t solvable. I’m saying it won’t happen that way.

Say it with me: nobody is ever going to legislate this in the US.

Yeah. It seems to me while there’s a lot of ways to take “capitalism”, the moment you point out that people are taking paycuts to do gamedev there’s no way capitalism applies to their motivations anymore.

I mean, other than that one song the music was pretty unmemorable.

There have been some incredible OSS games. Take away IP concerns and they have more access to assets. Take away needing to work to live, and people passionate about gamedev would have no obstacles in creating video games with their time.

Capitalism makes some core assumptions that, right or wrong, generally do not apply in the dev world - assumptions of laziness and selfishness. Smith tried to build a framework around “people will never be altruistic or work because of their pride”. It was intended both to standardize and limit those selfish behaviors (modern capitalists threw out the “limit” part). You can make your own conclusions about capitalism and most of the business world, but I don’t know a developer who would rather sit and watch The Price is Right than be on their computer coding something other people would love.