New Video Game Difficulty Video Just Dropped
Razbuten has a lot to say here, and kind of comes to the "idk man there's no perfect answer" conclusion, entirely fair imo. I've never really bought into the "just add difficulty settings to Dark Souls" idea because like, cool, now you have 3 games to balance, that'll be fun to make.
I think it's fine and also good for some games to require more from the player than they initially want to give, and I also think it's fine for players to bounce off of that. "Not everything should be made for everyone" is a bit trite, but if games are on any level an artistic expression it should be acceptable to design them in a way that repels some portion of its potential audience.
What I really want to get into though is the way this always centres around real-time combat mechanics as difficulty - that makes sense, it's the most obvious thing that will stop a player continuing with a game they otherwise enjoy - but there are other barriers to entry that don't get the same kind of attention.
My brother is on his 3rd playthrough of Disco Elysium. I cannot play that game. I know it's a masterpiece, I love the aesthetic, and the writing is frankly delicious. But each of the 4 times I've tried to get into it, I've got an hour in and my brain is melting from all the text. There's just so much writing. And you have to read all of it or you're not really playing Disco Elysium. I'm enjoying what's written, but after a couple thousands words of text-on-screen I have a near-medical need to do something purely mechanical like play Rocket League before I'll even consider going back to read some more, and that could take days to recover.
This isn't a dyslexia thing, it's maybe something of an attention disorder thing, but it is nonetheless a barrier to entry that I could only overcome by playing the game in a way that's either not fun or antithetical to the design.
I wouldn't change a thing about Disco Elysium.
I'm glad you all enjoy it.