Let's talk (again) about the difficulty in video games - editorial
The first time happened with Sekiro, when hordes of (potential) fans of the title rose in chorus to request the inclusion of a difficulty selector that would allow anyone to enjoy the experience, also pointing the finger at an alleged poor accessibility. A criticism which also LimitlessQuad, a quadriplegic player who shared all his experience on the From Software title, stating that it was one of the best of his life.
The second chance happened when the mother of the Vlambeer founder Rami Ismail had a "quarrel" with several groups of gamers while defending the inclusion of lower difficulty levels within video games. A solution, the one hoped for by the lady, who also received a green thumb from Cory Barlog of God of War and JP Kellams of Bayonetta, but which has absolutely not convinced the fans of some titles brought up in the examination, such as those of Miyazaki video games.
Stat increases or decreases are unlikely to affect a Sekiro Shadows Die Twice match. And now here we are, for the third time in three years, returning to the subject after God of War dad David Jaffe lashed out heavily at Nintendo's Metroid Dread, Housemarque's Returnal, and Ember Lab's Kena: Bridge of Spirits. , widely criticizing the game design but above all the "exaggerated" difficulty level through particularly strong words: "Everyone goes in the direction of too difficult games. Maybe the NES generation is coming back ... but I hate this shit".
Now, regardless of Jaffe's opinion, we want to play a bit at being sophists and start by saying that there is no difficulty in video games. The difficulty actually exists only in video games in which there is a selector, because it is an intrinsically perceived quality and absolutely not proper to the experience in question.
There are no easy or difficult games, at least there can be video games more or less challenging, or "challenging" to abuse an English language. In this subtle difference there is a chasm, because a good challenging video game is not challenging for fashion, to lengthen the stock, or to promote gatekeeping. A good challenging videogame sees in the element of the challenge or in the learning curve a pillar which, failing, would make the whole building set up by the authors collapse.
You know Madonna's song Like a Virgin? In that song, the pop star recounts an experience that makes her feel like she is a virgin. If you're wondering what Like a Virgin has to do with difficulty in video games well, it does, because Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice is the equivalent of Madonna's single made by Hidetaka Miyazaki in the confines of the medium.
In Metroid Dread , Jaffe particularly criticized the hidden walls and the difficulty in finding the path. The extraordinary longevity that characterized the Dark Souls series brought with it an unexpected side effect: anyone who had climbed the steep learning curve from the first chapter would never again be able to experience the unique flavor of the challenge and the scent of self again. improvement that were the secret ingredients at the base of Lordran's exquisite recipe, seeing an essential element of the playful mosaic detach itself forever from subsequent productions.
But the impossible does not exist in Miyazaki's vocabulary, and here is Sekiro managed to make the entire fanbase "virgin" again by giving it again that path of self-empowerment that she was convinced she would never be able to live again, and doing it through a challenging technical mat that, if removed, would make the whole package fall apart like a volatile house of cards .
The question asked by most fans sounds more or less like this: "But sorry, but what does it matter to you if I too can enjoy a facilitated experience? It would not affect your perception in any way. "Maybe so. Leaving aside the fact that the technical production of a studio like From Software cannot be folded even if you want to face the demand for an easy mode, because even imagining a Sekiro in which you they deal double damage and if they receive half of it the challenge level would not drop by an ounce, the main problem is with the perception we have of the difficulty levels.
The truth is that no developer in forty years of history has still managed to integrate a "real" difficulty selector, much less an artificial intelligence capable of becoming more or less "intelligent" when needed. What is done in today's video games is to increase or decrease the parameters relating to points life, to the damage inflicted and suffered, to the reaction times, to the combat routines, actually creating artificial variants that fail to satisfy any extreme of the spectrum of enthusiasts.
How would you go up or down in a game like Crash Bandicoot? The question becomes even more complex when one takes into consideration those challenging video games that are naturally devoid of the difficulty selector. How can, for example, decrease and in some cases even increase the challenge level in products such as Super Mario, Crash Bandicoot, Outer Wilds or Monster Hunter? Just like in From Software's soulslike, these are titles in which raising or lowering bare parameters would be useless: to bring about a real change we would have to upset the postulates that support the entire game design architecture.
And this perhaps represents the epicenter of the problem: the lack of perception of the soul of the criticized video game that often leads to the aberration of the learning curve, seen as a surplus and not as an irreplaceable vertebra in the backbone of the project. The challenging, tortuous, long path that serves for example to master a single weapon on the shores of Monster Hunter in order to become an expert hunter is itself Monster Hunter, it is what constitutes the raison d'être of the video game.
This concept has recently even been concretized and exposed within the plot of the video games in question, which happened in Returnal, a title in which the endless deaths of the protagonist Selene Vassos are fundamental pieces of the narrative mosaic. In the case of Housemarque's work, a possible lowering of the difficulty level would not only lead to the distortion of the gameplay, but would give rise to an enormous dissonance between the played and the story.
It is physiological that to raise the controversy both a portion of the public that those works would like to experience them but have not yet experienced them, because if they knew their nature in an intimate way, it would probably be clear to them the inadequacy of the claim of a lowering of the level of challenge, as well as the reaction, often inadequate and undoubtedly deplorable, of the communities of elitists who have already made the journey.
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That said, David Jaffe's strong words conceal a sad truth that is characterizing some segments of modern industry, namely the pursuit of the difficulty as such. Far from the mastery and philosophy of the greats, some developers mistakenly see in the challenge the secret of success - and not a single ingredient in a very complex recipe - therefore they raise the sheer difficulty in an artificial way in order to captivate the "gatekeepers".
If each force corresponds to another equal and opposite one, in recent times we have seen some studies aiming at options aimed at simplifying experiences without altering them; Eidos Montreal did it for example with Shadow of the Tomb Raider, making the interaction points for the resolution of the famous tombs clearly visible on the screen. Solutions of this kind are more than welcome, but it is evident that they are not applicable to the entirety of the medium.
And it is precisely speaking of the entirety of the medium that we want to close such a delicate examination. A medium now vast, indeed, very vast, capable of satisfying those looking for challenging experiences, great stories, competitions, simulators and relaxing works. A medium open to all who, however, in certain cases, asks the player to sign a contract with the author in order to obtain something potentially extraordinary in exchange.
