Dark Souls, accessibility and easy mode

I‘ve tried Dark Souls, I tried Bloodbourne and I gave up. Why you ask? Cause I’m not good enough? Nah bruh, not the reason. IMHO games that challenge you are good, after all I want some sense of accomplishment for my money & time. However… there is a line between accomplishment and rage, something so difficult it is no longer fun or entertaining.

Repeating the same thing isn’t fun, I get no sense of glory out of repeated fights, or missions or sections of a game. That’s not why I spend $60, $70 on a title. So this whole OMG NO EASY MODE, just git gud in relation to Dark Souls III (or any DS game honestly) is more gate-keeping IMHO.

Look if that’s your thing, go you! Me and others who find the game too much to do, or irritatingly difficult aren’t lesser gamers for it. If making a game more accessible to a wider audience isn’t appealing to you as a designer, consider the why of that. Nothing is diminished when you offer difficulty sliders, nothing. People can scale up or down to their ability & wham more people play; which means more revenue, which means more incentive for a series to continue, be rebooted, what have you.

But it means more players & isn’t that what we want? For people to enjoy games in the long run? Not be kept out because it’s some rite of passage to defeat a DS game? It’s …I’m struggling for the words on how saying allowing more accessibility would not work with the games design. That it can’t withstand some kind of mechanic shift to let others play & enjoy the game. Key word for me is enjoyment. But again, YMMV.

So yeah, tl;dr, adding accessible changes to game mechanics does not erode the quality of the game for anyone else, the end.

PS: Lookit that, I critiqued something without calling the author names, or gate-keeping. Who would have thought it possible?

PPS: Me being terrible at Dark Souls I https://youtu.be/-Rbw7_5Hxxo

and Bloodborne: https://youtu.be/uiUHmg5tzrk