Gunstar Green wrote:I want to clarify I'm not against including easy modes or producing general audience games in any way. I think you can design good easy modes and I think you can have bad easy modes just like any other aspect of game design.
My only contention is the idea that all games should require one. I think it should be left up to the developer to decide what experience they want to provide and at what level (there are games with "easy" difficulty settings that are still plenty hard). We have reviews to help us make informed decisions on what games we spend our time with. I'm sure everyone has that genre or that mechanic or that graphical style or that difficulty or even lack of difficulty that they avoid in gaming.
I agree with this completely. What I don't agree with is the idea that an easy mode hurts those who accomplish hard "normal" modes. That's a very exclusionary view.
If normal mode is pretty hard and you beat it, you still did all that work. You still acquired all those skills. That the game had an easier mode doesn't in any way detract from your accomplishment or your experience. You should be proud of the work you put in and the accomplishment you achieved. Nobody can take that away from you, and someone knocking the difficulty down doesn't change that. I mean, there was the mention that when someone goes on-line and says they beat a game, how are you to know they didn't beat it on easy? But how do you know they beat the game at all? Anyone can make any claim on-line. Modern games offer badges and achievements and whatnot. Have different ones for beating the games on different difficulties. If you beat it on easy, don't give them any badges or achievements. Developers can handle this how they want.
As I have maintained, developers have no obligation to offer easier modes of play, and I would certainly rather they don't than do it badly. But other than some additional investment of time and money to make sure the easier play mode is still somewhat balanced, I see no good reason for most developers not to consider it. If I turn the difficulty down all the way on Doom and beat the game, I still beat the game. And I beat the game on the "I'm too young to die" setting. And that accomplishment is not the same as someone who beats the game on Hurt Me Plenty or on Nightmare.
So I think most of this confusion would be eliminated by us thinking of beating a game as the endpoint. Games used to loop endlessly, just giving you a score (at least until the game locked up or became logically impossible). Even in the arcade you can beat a game, even a really hard game, by pumping in quarters, but your score will reflect it. Those arcade games dealt with the idea of quarter-pumping by keeping high score lists. If you have the highest score you didn't just beat the game, you did it in a way that was more difficult and more skillful and more knowledgeable of the game's various systems and mechanics. I really think we need to get back to that way of thinking about games.
How you celebrate your accomplishments is up to you. If you choose to let how someone else decides to tackle something, either via an easy mode or an aim-bot (assuming single-player, here) or some other assistive accommodation, that's your problem, not theirs. If I beat Contra with the 30-lives code and don't specify I used it when I share that I beat Contra, that should have no bearing on the accomplishment of anyone else beating Contra. As soon as you start measuring the value of your own accomplishments against what other people claim as their accomplishments, that's when I think it wanders into unhealthy egotism territory (edited for politeness). If it's a high score competition or on-line play it's essential that everyone is following the same rules or guidelines, because then it's a formal competition. But when we're talking single-player stuff where beating the game is largely the end goal, there are fewer competitive metrics. And if you intend to make it competitive anyway, then the onus is on you to specify your accomplishment. "I beat this game on default difficulty in this time using this character class" or whatever. Because if the game gives you build or customization options, already you're playing a difference experience from someone else, so already your accomplishment isn't apples-to-apples comparable.
People who go to climb tall mountains are usually there to challenge themselves, not to challenge others, and if someone else takes an easy ride to the top, the person who did it knows they did it the easy way, and the person who did it the hard way knows they did it the hard way. And when they share those experiences with others in conversation the details are gonna come up and it's going to be obvious who did things how. But hey, in the end they both did something they wanted to do. They both got the really nice view from the summit. They both had an experience they're unlikely to forget. And it really shouldn't matter to one how the other did it. If it does, maybe they should put their dicks back in their pants and remember what's important in life: To crush your enemies, to see them driven before you, and to hear the lamentations of their women.