re: Lies of P is frankly a FANTASTIC video game and best souls like ever made not by From

I'm 100% against adding difficulty settings to games where the difficulty is one of the intended primary features.

I can guarantee you if Demon Souls and Dark Souls had a bunch of difficulty settings back in the day those games would not have helped shaped the next decade of gaming.

A huge # of people who struggled against an early boss would have inevitably dropped the difficulty and then gone to have a very mid experience with the games. They would have been nothing special.

Why must every game do things the exact same way? It's not enough that 99% of games released have "easy modes"? It has to be exactly 100%? Why can't there exist this relatively small niche of games that are designed to be more difficult than average?

If someone picked up the latest Kirby game and began complaining it was way too easy and they should add a super brutal expert mode everyone would laugh hysterically at them, because that game isn't for him.

It's ok that some games are for some audiences and not for others. In fact, that's healthy.

The vast majority of games provide difficulty settings. If you aren't a particularly skilled gamer I don't think it's the biggest tragedy in the world you miss out on like maybe 2 games each generation that don't offer modes which would bastardize them.

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It's ok that some games are for some audiences and not for others.

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This was discussed a bit in another thread, but I think part of the issue these days is that development costs have skyrocketed and I feel like a lot of studios are trying to make their games as inclusive as possible to maximize profits in order to offset the dev costs. As such, one approach, especially with niche genres like Soulslikes (which I guess isn't so niche since Elden Ring), is to add difficulty settings.

Of course, that doesn't necessarily guarantee the game will make a profit. Neople recently said that sales of Khazan fell below their expectations and that's a really good game that also has difficulty settings

It's clear some of you are not in favor of difficulty settings, but how do you feel about accessibility options, like auto-QTEs?

God of War Ragnarok and Horizon Forbidden West are good recent examples of when the over the top "accessibility" mentality bleeds over into polluting the actual normal game.

The characters literally tell you the solution to every single puzzle instantly. Sometimes they are spoiling the puzzle before you even see it. They are so terrified someone might get stuck for more than 2 seconds they put this shite into the game, making the lowest common denominator experience the standard experience for everyone.

They also screech out the exact same "hints" during all the fights, as though you've forgotten the core mechanics 30 hours into the game.

Good accessibility are things like providing a color blind toggle in the menu, bad "accessibility" is the no retard left behind mentality and designing the game around it.