Yet, wouldn't it be a shame when your reaction times get slower as you age, that you are excluded from being able to enjoy these games any longer?

Dark souls for me was never about overcoming challenge either, for me it was the immersive world, and dying a lot (causing repetition) did help with permanently etching the map layout in my mind. Luckily there was multiplayer to get passed the annoying challenge parts.

Now it's 8 years later and I know my timing sucks, thus I'll skip Sekerio.

Bolded:Not really,my selfish consumerism would look for something else and i would still appreciate devs for putting out games in their own vision.

Second bolded:How old are you? You can always improve your timing while playing the game,i always suck at the start of a souls game and suck a bit less at the end :p

It looks like these games have challenge as its core and everything else is build around that,if that core is changed then the impact/immersiveness also changes but it might have been nice that a multiplayer was also added to Sekiro yes.

I'm 45 currently, yet timing has never been my thing. I haven't been able to successfully parry in at least a decade. My wife can't stop laughing when I try a timed sequence in DKC on the mini snes. If that didn't have rewind I would have given up. Rewind doesn't make the game any easier, just less frustrating when you get stuck at a specific point. Which is also one of the issues I had with Dark Souls. I could not do Ornstein and Smough by myself, completely stuck there. (Getting past those archers was a nightmare as well, I suck at timing. And those swinging blades in the castle before ugh) To enlist the help of others you were vulnerable to getting invaded. Since it was a popular spot to gank people, it took over 20 tries to even get to the boss I was stuck on... I almost quit the game there. It didn't enhance the game in any way, didn't feel any better for finally getting past, just felt like a colossal waste of time. Luckily there was still plenty good game after that to compensate. However that memory will always be there when I think of Dark Souls.

Another thing people don't realize when they say that adding an easy mode doesn't hurt the game is that development time is a resource.

From Software dedicated a lot of time and effort to refine the feel of the game, so adding a different difficulty level isn't as simple as changing some values to make enemies hit softer or your character hit harder. Some people are happy with this and maybe more items or a rewind mechanism, but that probably wouldn't be the answer for the devs.

To keep they quality level up, the team would have to rebalance the game and test everything. Speaking as a a software developer, even though a lot of code is reused, the rebalancing and retesting isn't trivial.

Time invested in a difficulty the devs likely don't want in their game unless it provides the same type of quality the base game does means less time spent on the main game. Or if they add it after like some people think they should do, it means less time on the next game. Development doesn't just magically happen and developers have to put in time and get paid for their efforts. So it actually can inevitably affect the main game for the original fanbase.

Games done by Rockstar and Nintendo can include it all, because they don't have to limit budget time. Their games typically have a broader appeal and sell in the 10s of millions of copies.

But action games don't sell like that. Even DMC 5, a lauded game by both critics and fans, will be lucky to hit 5 million units over its lifetime. And even though it has the option of difficulty built in, the base game takes a third to half the time to beat as one would beat Sekiro or Bloodborne. Probably less for Dark Souls.

When it comes to options, graphics, whatever is in a game, if it exists someone has to build it. That means time put into that takes time away from something else unless a studio has a blank check (which most don't since smaller studios live and die by the next game).

Honestly I don't care if a game has an easy mode; in fact, I'm generally happy for those with certain disabilities that they get to experience the game when it would otherwise have required ten very dexterous, functioning fingers.

To me, all I really care about is that the default be set at whatever they were aiming for and designed the game with in mind (if they wanted it to be tough, make sure that's the default) and that the achievements are centered around that difficulty. "Easy mode" has zero affect on you otherwise, so I've never understood this bizarre whining about including such things in games for those who couldn't otherwise play them from people; games have had varying difficulties since the days of the Atari.

I don't know why this topic keeps coming up, as far as I'm concerned there are a few simple, sensible points to state.

• A game should not be forced to have an easy mode
• People shouldn't be upset if developers do include an easy mode
• Nobody should care how other people enjoy playing a game
• In competitive online games players should be filtered by the settings they choose, so somebody using easy mode and having 10X the health, aim assist, steering assist, special DLC advantages etc shouldn't be competing against others who don't have that advantage, unless they want to do so.

That's all it should be, if a Souls game has an easy mode, that should be fine as long as it's an option. I won't ever buy a From Software game, I've tried a few but they are just too annoying to bother with, if they had some super easy mode, I might play them in order to see the world and then maybe gain an appreciation for the game on harder difficulties. But until that day, I'll just play games that already interest me.