Why do people get upset by OPTIONAL difficult assists?

[DonFerrari]

deltazero said:

Speaking from 1st hand experience, its an elitism/experience thing.

Most of the times optional difficulty selects do not bother me, for example playing DMC3 back in the day and being told to try an easier mode for dying meant I could just ignore it, but it meant plenty of people who would have never gotten past the first boss could enjoy the game with me and went on to play more games in the franchaise as well as replay the game at a higher difficulty.

Now on the other hand, a more recent experience with this is fire emblem awakening. I lent the game to a work collegaue and while FE is known for making hard decisions which could cost you units you have built up and learnt their backstories/grown attached to. He chose to play on the easiest mode where there is no permadeath and when I found out and questioned why he mentioned I prefer being able to "one shot everything without stress"

Now, while I didn't say anything afterwards I had two problems.

1. My elitism/ego or whatever was agitated since they were enjoying the game without effort or something stupid like that

2. I couldn't share the experience of that game since gameplay wise we were now playing two different games. The game he was now playing could have been found elsewhere and in a way had lost what made the fire emblem series special in the first place.
Changes in difficulty if done incorrectly can completely take away from the vision the developer had if done incorrectly. Fire Emblem turns from a turn based strategy to a turn based hack and slash.

Imagine if the Dark Knight (my favourite film) had a optional version you could watch which told a completely different story for example. I think this is the gripe people have with Dark Souls, the difficulty is the core of the game, making enemies easier to kill will change Dark Souls to a dynasty warriors game if done incorrectly

I will admit, both these reasons are fairly stupid and that I still would agree that optional difficulties would be best but they do have to be done right, games are an art in a way and the art can be lost if certain aspects are removed.

tl;dr I'm okay with optional difficulty, but apart from elitism, if difficulty is not done right it can take away from what made the game the game in the first place

That friend that played it on a different way if there was no such way he would drop the game very early and tell you he didn't like so you would have 0 conversation with him. The way he played at least you can talk about different experiences and common points, plus he may have liked the game enough to try it on a harder difficult.