Nah.

The problem is that strategist is a title anyone can give themselves. It doesn’t mean anything.

“Its just not true that the choice being there does not affect people who choose not to use it.”

That’s called playing the game. If you’re gonna call those difficulty options then literally everything is and words have no meaning. 

“I would prefer an experience custom built by the game’s director.”

it’s a fucking mode though.  turn it on, or keep it off.  why the fuck shouldn’t that be included?  it’s there for whomever wishes to use it.  play the game at whatever difficulty you want.  what’s the beef with having an optional mode that you’ll never need select on a game?  

Personally I think all games should give you the option to alter the difficulty of the game. It in no way affects the developers artistic intent, but makes games more accessible to more people. And in theory it should be REALLY easy to add one, simply take the base stats for a player, say health is 100 and damage is…

I have no problem with difficulty but I like to see a note on the way the developers intended the game to be played. I generally assume that is normal mode but its not always the case. I especially hate when game companies think its funny to give the difficulty modes silly unclear names.

I suspect its going to be something around playing a certain build is easy mode or some such

More accessibility/difficulty options in a game is always a good thing. There’s no reason I can see (other than an appeal to the tryhards) that a “director’s vision” experience cannot coexist with options, sliders, and whatnot that make the game’s content available to the vast majority of your customer base.

People thinking Souls’s’ss’ games are some immutable, unchangeable work of perfection seem to neglect the fact that Elden Ring has taken a baseball bat to its original design about seven times now like Abby going golfing. My disc version I can install offline is a wildly, *wildly* different experience than current…

I’ve played and finished every FromSoft game, and I would love to hear an explanation of the difficulty options.

And conversely I ignore any game that forces difficulty onto me. From Software will never see my dollars until they put an easy mode into their games - which keeps them to being a niche (albeit successful one) genre developer.

It baffled me while playing Bloodborne, how a game that people kept telling me was designed around the need to “get good” was so unfriendly about letting you get back into the boss fight right away to keep practicing. Instead, a boss could kill you in a few moves, then you had to trek all the way back to try and learn…

Sure, you could play those games with 200% health and 50% more defense, but then the game will be boring. (especially because the story of those games is not important)

And we saw how many of the Elden Ring “rEsPeCt ThE aRtIsTiC iNtEgRiTy” people responded when FromSoft “nerfed” Melania after accidentally super buffing her. They lost their shit because for a moment they thought FromSoft “caved to journalists snowflakes that are bad at video games”. This discussion is and always HAS…

“I don’t like games having difficulty options” are saying they don’t want the choice to be there. The choice being there does NOTHING if they chose not to engage it. The choice NOT being there affects everyone else who would have engaged with said options... so its gatekeeping. Who the hell are YOU to dictate whether…

Having an option does not make a game worse.  That’s gatekeeping.  You’re saying that if someone can’t keep up with the difficulty YOU are comfortable with, they shouldn’t be allowed to play the game.  Other people having the choice to lower or raise difficulty has no effect what so ever on the difficulty you play on.

Cue 160 500 hundred word screeds that tldr to fit gud scrub/casuals ruin a game

I don’t know what’s happening right in the comments, but y’alls historical revisionism of Ministrel Shows as some type of “niche entertainment” really needs to fucking stop. Sure it didn’t reach the same height it had during abolitionist days as a counter culture movement but it absolutely persisted through the 1900s…