Maybe you haven’t been convinced by a good enough argument. Maybe you just don’t want to admit you are wrong. Or maybe the chaos is the objective, but what are you knowingly on the wrong side of?
In my case: I don’t think any games are obliged to offer an easy mode. If developers want to tailor a specific experience, they don’t have to dilute it with easier or harder modes that aren’t actually interesting and/or anything more than poorly done numbers adjustments. BUT I also know that for the people that need and want them, it helps a LOT. But I can’t really accept making the game worse so that some people get to play it. They wouldn’t actually be playing the same game after all…
Adding an easy or “story” mode to a game doesn’t inherently make it worse. You can still play it with difficulty cranked up to “Dark Souls” or whatever. The fact that there is a separate mode that others can use does not affect you; you need not use it yourself.
“Story mode” is actually an accessibility option in disguise: it can let people who have difficulty with fine motor control, reaction times, or understanding visual and auditory prompts to enjoy the art alongside everyone else. Instead of cheapening the game, it actually expands its influence on the world.
All that being said, no, no game is strictly obligated to be accessible, but why cheapen your art by not making it so?
I mean, if you want your story to reach broad audiences, story mode is good. If you have an artistic vision and can only see your story learned as such, do that. Not supplying story mode is like not supplying condiments at a restaurant. Limiting your client base.
I don’t particularly find the acessibility argument that compelling. Sure, we must make experiences as acessible as possible, but at a certain point the experience gets degraded by it. You can’t make a blind person see a painting, and if you did, it wouldn’t be a painting.
Using this logic, you would have to accept that people that are very good at a given game from the start have a fundamentally different experience to people that are very bad at a given game. And people that are average have another experience again.
So who’s having the “true” experience? Is the good player having a degraded experience because they feel like they’re playing on easy mode? Is the bad player having a degraded experience because they give up half way in? Is the average player having the “intended” experience of each part of the game feeling earned and hard won?
The reality is it’s impossible to give the “intended” experience to everyone regardless. And if the average player experience is the intended experience, having difficulty settings will actually let the other players experience that, not take away from it. If the very good player and the very bad player can fine tune it so their relative experiences are the same as the average player, hard but not impossible, haven’t you actually given the intended experience to more people rather than degrade it?
Hi! I’ve had two strokes, and my hands don’t work as well as they should! Should I be excluded from the hobby, so you don’t have to look at an extra menu option?
What you’ve got here reeks of elitism.
Disability comes for everyone. Sometimes death gets there first. You aren’t unique.
I’m sorry to hear that, and I certainly dread the day I won’t be able to engage with the hobby the same way. But there are a million games that don’t require fast reaction times and precise lightning fast inputs.
Dude, just let everybody play everything. And if you have to glance at “easy” real fast to make sure you’re not pushing “hard (developer intention)” then that’s fine. Hard is still there.
And thanks for the downvote. I don’t know if you’re interpreting a downvote as “doesn’t add to the discussion,” or “this makes me angry” or “you shouldn’t be disabled, you fucked up”, but it just goes to show what’s up. No one else came along in the last 33 minutes.
The point is just that how can a developer create an experience where you have the satisfaction of succeeding against overwhelming odds when you offer the easy mode where you win by pressing one button? I understand that people play games for a myriad of reasons, but one of those IS to put in effort.
Also it was just a mistake, I don’t really care to upvote or downvote people unless it’s something egregious or great. You really shouldn’t care about it, especially since lemmy doesn’t even keep track of it.
You have your satisfaction by selecting hard. You don’t need to deny an easy difficulty to others.
Or are you the sort that would pick easy if you saw it?
Also this whole conversation is dumb because, until you get off your ass and make a game, you have literally no input whatsoever.
I’m gonna go back to my PS2 Silent Hill play through on beginner difficulty, where I can whack guys once instead of five to nine times. It’s the vibes and the environment.
The point I’m making is that you need not alter the painting. Adding an option to a game does not alter it for those that do not select it.
You’re arguing for letting perfect be the enemy of good. The fact that a blind person can’t perceive the visual aspect of an experience doesn’t mean that they should be excluded entirely.
How does the existence of an option you never use degrade your experience?
For it to work well the developer has to change the game’s design to allow for the easier mode to work. If they don’t, it wouldn’t offer a good experience for neither the easy mode nor hard mode players.
The vast majority of games these days handle difficulty levels by simply tweaking the numbers of how much damage you take and deal. They build the game around a “recommended” difficulty and then add hard/easy modes after the fact by tweaking the stats.
Other games simply turn off the ability to die, or something along those lines.
In both of these cases the game is clearly built around the “normal” mode first. I’d be curious to see a clear cut example of that not being the case.
It would be pretty crappy to never give a description of a painting to a blind person though. Like could you imagine if we never described the Mona Lisa to a blind person and they just to guess what it was a picture of.
That’s pretty much like saying to a person to watch a let’s play of the game rather than play, which is fine but not really the point.