I totally disagree. There are other ways to reduce difficulty and give the player options. The game can still be fun at lower difficulty levels. It has higher difficulty levels as NG+ and you still enjoyed it the first time around on easy mode! Some people don't care for boss battles, let them skip them or turn the difficulty down temporarily. Some people just want to explore the world without getting killed all the time, let them. Some people don't care about grinding for upgrades. I skipped most of the story mission segments in RDR2 and enjoyed the game my way. Had it forced me to keep replaying the same corridor shoot out sequences over and over I would not have enjoyed it as much.

The use of assists is always a discussion point in racing games. From purists that want to lock everyone in cockpit view without any assists to those that simply want to have fun with a controller. GT Sport manages to have it all work very well together, still there are those that want to determine who can use what.

Games are there for your enjoyment. They are not a skill test. There is no prize at the end. You do not graduate game school. Let people enjoy games the way they want. I finished God of War on easy, which was damn hard for me against the final Valkyrie boss. Game of the year for me. Freely changing difficulty on the fly reduced any frustration and kept the game fun from beginning to end.

Totally agree OP. Since I dont have time for dying and restarting levels, thats no fun to me. And the single thing keeping me away from Souls is an easy mode. I would actually play it if it ever got the feature.

There is literally no excuse of them not putting an easy mode in.

And without the difficulty options I simply logged out of PSN every time I saw signs of an impending invasion. The game should have had an option to disable that while keeping the hints and ghosts and optional co-op. Instead I simply ignored the PSN message abuse every time I declined the dumb invasion mechanic. (The game saves when you log out of psn, then you can log back in and continue right where you left off, without annoying interruptions)

I'm open to other examples, I just threw in the first few I could think of that stuck in my memory; NSMB first of all cos back when that was announced, bloody hell, you'd have thought they'd announced the Super Guide was compulsory the way people flipped out. "New Mario game plays itself" was a headline on just about every big game site.

I have to be honest Curl and say that I find it somewhat annoying that you made a thread championing the differences in people and the different options people may want or believe in - only to be so firm in one belief and not consider any other. At least what I'm arguing is that the example of Souls games is bad, not that every game should have them or that every game shouldn't have them. I don't really see much of a point in discussing something if the opposing stance is always going to stick to such an opinion, especially one as one-dimensional as this. It's the same thing that happened in the resolution thread - I brought up multiple arguments and what I essentially got as a counter-argument was you believe what you believe. Ok ... 

As an example, saying that there's "objectively no downside" is just odd, because that does not take into account that the attachment one has to video games - including the developers themselves, is very subjective. Would there be no objective downside if Shadow of the Colossus became a first person shooter? Sony would make more money and Japan Studio would undoubtedly have their first big hit on their hands. Well in that case, there might not be an "objective downside", but there would definitely be a subjective one for anyone who liked it. And unfortunately what people don't realize is that various aspects of a game can matter as much as any other defining factor, including difficulty. 

I'm not going to say that difficulty modes shouldn't be in the Souls games. It would be my preference but I'm not going to say it. What I will say is that I don't think a difficulty select is right for every game - and that's based on a much more nuanced opinion than just everything is for everyone, or every niche game should only be for one niche crowd. 

The Shadow of the Colossus example is not analogous because in that case it's not optional.

Some elitists are dumb and think that will devaluate their pride and pleasure on the game. I platined GoW on Give me God of War but to people that want to experience for the first time and not sure about having much hassle I suggest they start on easy so they can please themselves.

Some people just don't understand that not everything is made for them, or has to be made for them.  That being said, I wish there was an option to shut these things off completely.  Whenever Rosalina would show up in Mario Galaxy 2 I would feel like I was being mocked.

If it took next to no time to develop, could be ignored completely if desired, and in no way changed the core experience, then there would be no objective downside to making an FPS mode to Shadow of the Colossus.  But, obviously that isn't possible here.  There are obvious downsides in this scenario.

To use NSMB as an example, what downside does the super block feature have (Luigi comes and does the levels for you but skipping any secrets)?

Dark Souls is not difficult to begin with. What happens? Worst case, you die. And then. You start over from the fire and lose nothing except the last souls, which you eventually can get back. Seems like a non-problem. Also the game just asks for different virtues. Many games are about fast reactions. Souls-games are about patience. In a Souls game you should move carefully, look for traps and enemies, study enemy movements and act only after careful consideration. If you storm into things careless you die - which is exactly the point, you shall be patient. If you are, things get pretty easy fast. So if you talk about easy mode, what you really want is to storm in without a thought and kill everything in sight. Well I have no problem if the devs build in an mode with say - easy progression bought with souls. You can with low souls cost extend your abilities including HP and fighting strength. The game should become ridiculous easy afterwards. And boring, but that isn't a problem for the people demanding it, as they will never play it in the first place. For storming in and killing action are already a lot of games around. They will stick with them.

Something being "optional" is not an excuse for it to be non-critiqueable. There are so many games this generation that have the ability to turn something off and yet the game is so centered around the mechanic being turned off that they just don't work even when people try to tailor the experience to their preference. You see this in open world games a lot where the developers handhold the player, the player doesn't want to have their hand held, but when they turn off the options the game is nearly unplayable because there's no way to know where you're going or what you're supposed to do.