Why do people get upset by OPTIONAL difficult assists?

[DonFerrari]

HoloDust said:

Hiku said:

It's very possible that an easy mode could affect a hard mode negatively. Though could you give me some examples of elements that have had this effect? Because I can't think of any at this moment (though probably if I think on it mote), though I can give you examples of where the easy mode/assist hasn't had a negative impact on the other modes.

For example, Tekken 7. Imagine balancing the game they intended to do. Then add an assist mode that lets characters perform special moves, or specific combos, with the press of a simple button combination, or mashing one button. And as someone who plays the game normally, that feature doesn't change the way I play.

And here's a hypothetical example. Imagine a Fire Emblem game, where they design the game the way they intended. Then they add an Easy mode, where the only difference is that you dead party members don't die permanently, and you can chose to Continue after dying. In this scenario, that Easy mode would not affect the harder mode's experience.

Another example is, just slash all the enemies HP by 50%, increase your own power by 15%, and call it Easy mode.

Etc.

One of my main concerns with games is if they end up being too easy, after experiencing some really bad easy modes that scarred me for life, such as Resident Evil 4's that locked out entire sections of the game. Though I haven't really considered Easy modes making the Normal/Hard modes worse. Possibly because I don't recall seeing or noticing a concrete example of this occurring.But if you could share some with me, that would be interesting, and another reason for why I'm worried about games being too easy.

You suggest 50% enemy HP...that would be what I call wide scaling. Do that to Souls and I'd say at that point the whole feel of the game changes significantly. Souls is stamina managment game. It just might work with narrow scaling of stamina depletion rate: Novice - 0.8x; Adept - 1.0x; Expert - 1.2x. This would usually give you one more swing with the weapon as Novice or one less as Expert compared to Adept...but maybe even that is too wide of a range.

As for Fire emblem, I can't imagine it, i've never played Fire Emblem. ;)

But let's go with your example. They do just what you suggested. Then, for various reasons, game (and genre) becomes very popular and goes mass market, attracting lot of audience outside of its core audience. Then the next game does not get designed around original idea from the past, but around easy mode, to attract even more audience (and thus sales), and "hard" mode is slapped afterwards for core fans. It's success, attracting even more mass market audience and then eventually the next game does not have anything resembling original mechanisms.

This is what has been happing in the industry for so long that most AAA games these days are being designed and balanced for easy mode (labeled as normal), and then you have artificially hardened other modes. It is completely silly to expect that any dev will balance game for 4-5 different diificulties and preserve the same experience - they just don't want to waste money on such thing when probably 90%+ of their audience will play it on mode that they initially designed the game for (or one bellow that), and they will keep designing it as easy (aka "normal") since people not finishing games is one of major concerns for every AAA publisher.

This is what happened to WRPGs as a genre, not only in difficulty, but in complexity as well, to the point that these days you have pseudo action-RPGs like Horizon and AC: Odyssey (or even to some extent Witcher 3, though that's borderline case between pseudo action-RPG and acton-RPG to be argued further) being labeled as RPGs. AC: Oddyssey is particularly shining example of game made to be easy and "accessible" and then artificially slapped with (after success of BotW) so called "exploration mode" that should make it harder and more interesting - which doesn't work at all, since, among other things, you still have that bird activating annoying popup about target location you can't disable everytime you are near your target. Witcher 3 suffers from similar problem, rellying on quest markers and not having properly done quest directions to play completely without markers.

As someone noticed, nobody asks for as easy mode in Zelda (it's already too easy IMO) - there is one vision to game and game offers you ways to make it easier for yourself, if you have problems with its difficulty. But that's ingame, not some artificiall slider in the options. Souls does that as well. Gothics do that as well. So many other great games do that. In my honest opinion, difficulty options are mostly just devs not having knowedge or will to make proper difficulty designs inside of the actual game and publishers wanting more sales.

As I said, I'm not completely against it, if it's fairly narrow scaling (some of my all time favorites, like Fallout 1/2 have it) - that way core mechanisms and design of the game will not be affected, and people who want just slightly easier or harder difficulty can enjoy that. But go wild, like AAA devs do, and inevitably, the whole game design suffers. Then again, I find most AAA games to be quite mediocre anyway, to be polite, so who am I to say anything about it.

Sorry but Give me God of War (and even more variety on NG+), Crushing on Uncharted, Merciless on Persona, Grounded on The Last of Us, Special modes on Resident Evil and several other games that had dedication to create a very specific very hard mode show you are talking BS. There is incentive and there are plenty of devs showing that they work on creating and balancing modes for the <1% public. That is because they love what they do.

And from what you and some others have said you don't even play mainstream games so you are just being judgmental to justify a holier-than-thou attitude on "I'm not elitist, but doing this could potentially damage the game I love even if it is just based on my own imagination".