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Comment by makeitdouble | Hacker News Reader

To note, there are many other mechanisms to adjust the playing experience than a difficulty slider or an explicit "easy" mode.

I think a lot of us prefer a more natural and "legit" integration of different paths into the gameplay. It requires more effort and creativity on the developer side, but it also allows players to move from laid back/easier playing to more demanding play in a seamless way.

To put it in your terms, I prefer games where the player chooses _in game_ what they are and what they aren't capable of, instead of dealing with settings and weird modes where you don't even know what they effectively mean and how well they would fit you.

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> To put it in your terms, I prefer games where the player chooses _in game_ what they are and what they aren't capable of

What are some examples of games that do this? I haven't played many recent titles, so the only examples of this I can think of are some games like skyrim that let you max out everything so you can play as any class you like and move between them at will or Final Fantasy/Pokemon where you can grind your way to victory if you're willing to spend the hours.

I'm pretty sure I've played a title or two that tried to automatically adjust the difficulty according to how well I'm playing, but I always resented it. It feels like punishing success and it's too easy to game by intentionally holding yourself back.

I think options/settings still have their place. There have been several times when I (as a relatively non-disabled person) would have loved an option to disable a time limit or lower the difficultly level of a boss fight and there are games I've started but never finished because I couldn't. Cheat codes have really fallen out of favor, but they had their place too.

> What are some examples of games that do this?

The Souls games, and Elden Ring. There are places you can go in-game to find powerful weapons and easily level up. If a boss is too hard you can go explore surrounding areas and come back when your character is more powerful. Or you can choose to persist and master the boss’s mechanics to beat it at your current strength. Each area in these games works like a puzzle with multiple solutions.

Dark souls has been on my list of games to try for some time. Sounds like they went the route of the grind which I'm fine with as a compromise (in some games I even prefer to be over-leveled). I'm still trying to decide between playing on PC or console though. I know the PC port had issues, but there have been plenty of times when a mod or simple console command would have saved me from bugs if I were on PC instead of a console.

Grinding is certainly an option, but wasn’t what I was trying to communicate. The games tend to have dense worlds that reward thorough exploration. It’s in the course of this exploration that player characters have the opportunity to become more powerful by finding valuable items tucked away off the main path.

Of course, if the player doesn’t know what to do with the things they find then the extra exploration won’t help. A common mistake is failure to engage with the weapon upgrade system. Encounters seem a lot harder when your attacks do half the damage they ought to.

While you can grind to an extent in Dark Souls games, I would say the route they've taken is to let you explore. So very often if you're stuck on a particular boss or area you could grind lower level enemies for souls to level although this is generally inefficient, or you could try looking around a different area you've not explored and potentially find an item that lets you upgrade your weapon, or a spell that greatly helps with the boss fight. This is subtly taught early on in the game when after leaving the tutorial zone there are multiple routes you can take, but you quickly come to realise that one is a lot easier than the others.

Note that this isn't as true with Sekiro, which has a lot more sections where you are forced to just learn a particular encounter. That's not necessarily a bad thing and in fact is part of the reason why many people find the combat a lot more satisfying once it clicks, but it's worth keeping in mind that it's a different kind of game and it probably shouldn't be approached with the same mindset.

As for the Dark Souls PC port, the original release (Prepare to die edition) was locked to 30fps. There was a mod that let you run it at 60fps, but it caused some slight gameplay issues (I believe you would go half the horizontal distance when jumping). That version is not available anymore - you can only purchase Remastered edition now, which runs at 60fps.

Celeste, another famously hard game (that incidentally I used to speedrun and am wearing a tshirt of right now) has "Assist Mode." (which I now see was mentioned downthread) When you select it from the menu, it states:

> “Assist Mode allows you to modify the game’s rules to reduce its difficulty. This includes options such as slowing the game speed, granting yourself invincibility or infinite stamina, and skipping chapters entirely. Celeste was designed to be a challenging but accessible game. We believe that its difficulty is essential to the experience. We recommend playing without Assist Mode your first time. However, we understand that every player is different. If Celeste is inaccessible to you due to its difficulty, we hope that Assist Mode will allow you to still enjoy it.”

Well, more properly, that's what the initial version said. There was a lot of discussion in accessibility circles about this; it was clear that they had their hearts in the right place, but it was still a little ... condescending is too strong, but a little too judgy, maybe.

When they released Chapter 9, it was updated to instead say:

> “Assist Mode allows you to modify the game’s rules to fit your specific needs. This includes options such as slowing the game speed, granting yourself invincibility or infinite stamina, and skipping chapters entirely. Celeste is intended to be a challenging and rewarding experience. If the default game proves inaccessible to you, we hope that you can still find that experience with Assist Mode.”

This is still an options/settings style solution to this problem, but the way it's framed is significantly different, and the options are fairly granular, so you can tune things as you wish.

Incidentally, Maddy, the game director and one of the devs for Celeste, had a Twitter thread about what she would imagine an Assist Mode for Sekiro might look like: https://twitter.com/MaddyThorson/status/1113534763564826624

Dark Souls is mentionned elsewhere, I think Zelda BTOW also works roughly the same way: there is a base level of skill that you will need to beat the bosses, even with the strongest weapons, but on top of that bare minimum you get to choose how hard you want to play.

I’ve watched 8~9 yo olds play, and they heavily rely on the infinite remote bombs, always looked for field items (iron containers, powder kegs etc.) to ease encounters, maxed their cooked items, avoided the stronger monsters and bought special arrows as much as they could.

Of course it doesn’t mean they can explore explore everything in the game, and they also move slower, but they get to see most of it, finish the story and see the ending.

Oh yeah, you can make lots of choices on how to integrate them or what features to offer! Celeste assist mode lets you control the game engine's speed, modify how many jumps you have, etc. Hades gives you a mode where you get a permanent 2% health buff every time you die that allows the game to meet you where your capabilities lie instead of of forcing you to guess.

I think you touch on why a singular difficulty level can be good when you mention meeting where your capabilities lie instead of forcing you to guess. When I encounter something difficult in a game, I'm always tempted to turn the difficulty down and often do. With Souls games I explicitly know if something is too hard and take it as a sign I need to do something different; whether that's my mechanical technique or the need to explore more. An increasing buff or other difficulty helpers would mean I could eventually brute force my way through without considering other options. Maybe I would prefer that, but it would just be a guess unless I did it the other way.

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