Story Mode Difficulty

There's a prevalent movement in games these days to make things more 'accessible', and that's a pretty nice thing when it's properly implemented. Colorblindness settings, different control schemes, UI scaling, what have you. What 'accessibility' is not is letting the player turn on god mode and run past every single obstacle without taking a single scratch.

The realization that people were actually doing this came to me when I was playing The Cult of the Lamb, some game where you dungeon crawl and raise an army of devout followers. In the settings, under 'accessibility' there's three settings that effectively turn off game mechanics. One turns off damage, so you have god mode. One turns off faith decay, so your cultists will always be 100% loyal to you even if you mistreat and forget to take care of them. One turns off time progression in dungeons, meaning that as you're playing in the dungeons faith will not decay and turn followers against you.

Now, who am I to judge the intention of the game designers in designing their own game, but to me this effectively makes CotL an entirely different experience. This is not making the game 'accessible', this is making it entirely inaccessible and implanting an entirely different game in its path. Putting a lengthy analysis on a game I didn't even like short, all of these mechanics are core to CotL and the removal of them effectively nullifies the ruleset.

These 'accessibility features', and a lot of others like them, get added for the supposed reason that some players simply wish to focus on the narrative. As much as it's mentioned, I rarely see the reason for these features getting added being some vague illnesses that lead to increased reaction times or incapability to properly execute inputs.

We'll call this 'Story Mode Difficulty (SMD)', a nice neutral term that I think gets the idea across. Under this umbrella will include primarily difficulty settings that are designed to remove all challenge to a game, but I'll also be talking about the addition of supposed 'easy modes' for games that don't have them and games that try to overwrite player improvement.

I have nothing against easy mode, I've played and enjoyed a lot of games that were very easy even by newbie standards. I have nothing against difficulty settings or properly implemented dynamic difficulty. However, it's one thing to lessen a burden and another to remove it entirely.

The whole argument for implementing universal SMD is based on the argument that there is a story to be properly enjoyed in-game entirely divorced from the gameplay itself. It's this strange idea that there is no link between gameplay, written narrative, and other such elements so if one element were to be removed then it wouldn't have serious ramifications on the experience. In other words, SMD is legit because SMD players and regular players get the same story overall.

This is completely ridiculous and antithetical to the entire medium, if your game somehow manages to work like this then you have made an utterly abhorrent game or an utterly abhorrent written narrative. The reality is that the game we play just as much tells a story as the cutscenes we watch, and that's at the bare minimum. The reality is that the gameplay overwhelmingly carries a story. It's why a written narrative can be sparse or less than interesting and the game can still be enjoyable.

It's a matter of player inputs and choices, and a matter of that player's progress. The regrettable thing about that progress is that unlike in the romanticized depictions of heroes always conquering evil, the reality is that a player isn't surely going to reach the end. Such a thing is entirely up to the player in question. 'Do they want to?' is the first question you ask, but that's not up for debate there. The next thing asked is 'Are they capable of it?'

There's a lot of reasons something can be a notable achievement, but one thing they all have in common is that not everyone can do them and that's a big part of what gives them their meaning. No one's going to give you gold stars for breathing but inventing things or discovering concepts tends to elevate people.

I won't say that videogames are the most important thing ever, but this is part of what gives a game meaning. If everyone can do it, can you really even call something a challenge? And if it's not challenging me, then why am I doing it? So that I can click a button and watch pixels flash on the screen? This is the sort of attitude that makes people utterly fucking exhausted with games. It's the sort of attitude that made me exhausted with games once.

It's the reason games have challenge, if there's not a challenge then it's meaningless and if it's meaningless then you're not engaged.

We come back to SMD. SMD removes all the challenge. It removes all the meaning. It removes all the story. How is this supposed to help anyone enjoy anything? At this point you might as well just watch the game on Youtube. Is the crappy 10 seconds of dialogue in something like CotL really worth it? That fucking garbage where everyone you talks to says a single sentence and then goes to do their NPC bullshit? HOW THRILLING!

But no, I'm being harsh. Those cripples of indeterminate ability need to get their fix somehow. That's why when they play chess we should give them 20 more queens. That way, every time they play they can enjoy it. When they play puzzle games, let's give them the solution to everything. That'll make em like it! When they play RPGs, just hand them lvl 99 from the start. Everyone loves that!

But no, this is about action games that require strict reaction times isn't it? Nobody brings up SMD when it comes to games trying to jostle the noggin'. You could probably equate a real life action game to something like a sport then.

How's a guy gonna run if he has no legs? I don't know. You could bring up the paralympics, the wheelchair races and whatnot, and those are nice but they're also inherently different. You can't run the 100m dash if you can't run, and that's the sad reality of it all.

But videogames aren't reality, right? We can just make them into a dull grey soup thats playable to everyone and enjoyable to no one. Or, well, maybe we could.

People often bring up Hades as an example of SMD done right. Hades's SMD is known as God Mode (hardy har), and it's designed specifically to be based around player deaths because the narrative of Hades itself is based around player deaths. You're intended to die a lot, and have new things happen every time you do, and the story dynamically responds to this.

God Mode gives you damage resistance up to 80%. Even if you never played the game, do the math on that and you'll get across that this is very generous and essentially makes the game a complete cakewalk. It starts at 20% increases by 2% every time you die...

Blah blah blah, point is, what if some goober just can't make it anyways? He dies so many times he gets the 80%, but still keeps dying anyways. What the fuck do you do then? The game now has what is apparently a fundamental accessibility issue, and this is ignoring the fact that similarly to CotL this bastardizes the story instead of expanding it.

You can make the game as EASY as you please for the sake of accessibility, and that doesn't mean there still won't be someone stonewalled by it. The only way you can 'fix' this 'problem' is by either removing it all or drinking a nice, big dose of fukitall and cutting your losses on it.

There really is no winning with SMD. No matter how many advantages you give to someone with no arms, he's still not going to be able to beat the game. Videogames are the farthest thing from being an accessible medium.

Of course, I talk about cripples a lot in this, let's be honest with ourselves and say that people with disabilities are not the issue here. I've seen a guy whose body is half paralyzed speedrun the fucking Platinum Transformers game before. Those who aren't rendered completely incapable of playing games are just as willing to tackle challenges as any able bodied invidivual is and would likely be offended at the suggestion that they should play an 'easier' mode because they are 'less able'.

Videogames are a fucking fantasy. Telling the disabled to play on an easier difficulty because they just can't hack it is like telling them to always play a disabled character in some tabletop RPG. God damn it if there's not a single group that would love for nothing more than to go beyond their limitations, and SMD is just that, a limitation.

These people aren't children. Do you think they're going to be happy getting rolled up to bat with everyone over-enthusiastically cheering to avoid hurting their feelings? "Wow, you really beat Hades with God Mode on! Everyone clap for my brave little soldier here!"

No, the reason SMD is so often suggested is because of idiots who don't want to play and want to have everything spoonfed to them instead. Usually games journalists, though I'm starting to think there's quite a few redditors that fall under this umbrella as well. SMD is a way for their boring asses to check games off of a list like it's a job instead of actually getting engaged with said games.

Fromsoft games in particular get the brunt of the SMD dialogue because Fromsoft games are some of the few AAA games that will straight up tell a player 'no' if they can't do a certain section properly, and no amount of stat manipulation or item foraging can entirely remove the mechanical element necessary to get past certain sections.

Would SMD improve these games? Make them nice and tender so anyone can slip in and beat them? Wouldn't that be exciting? Struggles? What struggles? I just walked in and the boss looked at how awesome I was and committed seppuku in response. What a great story. Every story should be like this, that's what makes stories exciting, having no tension, development, or conflict.

If games were considered an artform proper it'd be undignified for them to modify themselves to chase after the appeal of these groups. Furthermore, it'd be mortifying to do such under the guise that you're trying to make the game more playable for people who can already play it, never asked for it, and would be offended at the idea of such a thing.

They're not though so I guess go ahead and add SMD to all of your games. Turn on cheat engine while you're at it too. The videogame equivalent of putting every single thing you watch on 20x speed, or reading the Cliff's Notes in exchange for having actually sat down and read a novel.

Let's just get real for a second, the main point of what I'm saying is that SMD should never be added to games designed around challenges because those challenges are core to the message of the game, whatever they may be. If they were not, then they wouldn't have been there to begin with. No matter how much SMD is dolled up under terms you're not allowed to argue against you shouldn't let it take hold like a parasite.

The secondary point of what I'm saying is that this entire discourse has abso-fucking-loutely nothing to do with accessibility and has everything to do with bland, boring oatmeal people. SMD is not accessibility, it entirely makes a game inaccessible. You're not playing the fucking game if the game always lets you win at every opportunity, and similarly if you add in an easy mode for the sake of narrative reasons then you're completely missing the point.

If you want a game to be easy, make it easy from the get-go and then add in Cactus Urethra Mode later. The standard of the game is your standard, and what you balance it around. Difficulty isn't just this thing you turn off so people can enjoy the story, everything is fundamentally different when the game can just be made easier. It undermines standard players, creates a horribly shallow experience. If you consider this the story, then clearly it's the oversimplified pre-K version meant for tiny babies who can barely read.

It doesn't matter how hard your game is, what matters is that the story there is kept in tact. If the player can't win the first time through, do you think he's just going to stop? Players of all kinds are far more resilient than you give them credit for. That pushback is what they come here for, it's why they play the game. The people who don't want to experience that simply never wanted to play your game to begin with. They want to take the golden road to the finish lines.

Tell these people to fuck off and take their Trojan horse attempt at shorehorning their bullshit and throw it in the garbage. Your game is your game and it doesn't need to conform to their TV watching asses.