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.

Souls was more of a weapon management / magic management game for me. It makes a huge difference how many hits it requires to take down an enemy. And that's built right into the game. The game can easily scale depending on your weapon stats, instead the difference between grinding for a powerful weapon and using a standard weapon is enormous. You might say upgrading the right equipment is the right way to play, yet not everyone has the time to go min maxing every time.

I don't know if the game was balanced on a certain dps output for each section, yet it could scale based on that. That way it won't become to frustrating for those not being efficient in min maxing, and not too easy for those grinding or grabbing the best equipment early on. I used magic a lot in Dark souls, so much easier to soften them up first and finish off with one or two hits. Then I got to a boss where magic wasn't very helpful and got stuck. Co-op to the rescue.

There is a difference between easy and accessible. Dark Souls could have done a lot more to explain its systems when choosing an easier difficulty. Games should of course also have an option to turn that off. Stop it with the endless tutorials of basic stuff. It goes both ways.

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".

Yeah, somehow I was quite sure you will chime in. I've played Uncharted 1 and 2 and TLOU. Oh dear...I really like Sony for trying to make their offerings so diverse, but oh boy, do I find their heavy hitters being such a mediocre games...

I do actually play some mainstream games from time to time, especially if they are C/W/RPGs. Been doing so for last 30 years. But at this point, it's exactly pandering to masses and publishers race for higher sales that made the genre so diluted that if you want to play proper C/W/RPG you need to go to A/AA studios or indies. Luckily, Cyberpunk seems somewhat of a step back (in a good way) toward old RPGs, that's probaly about only AAA WRPG that could actually be called RPG that is coming out (Outer Worlds as well, though that's more of AA), so at least there are some devs who are somewhat aware of current situation and opportunity that it creates.

No problem you not liking their offers.

So your point about AAA pandering and being destroyed by mainstream is really about RPG genres then? And people have asked for evidence of what changes were made that destroyed these games. And sorry, but giving a label of RPG to HZD doesn't destroy the genre.

Horizon is just a byproduct of RPG genre that got to slightly more exposure at one point in late 90s/early 00s than being niche going into creative decline and massive dumbing down for the mainstream market. That started much earlier, but Skyrim and later Witcher 3 were final nails in WRPG coffin. Eventually you get to the point where people are considering something like Horizon and AC:OD to be RPGs cause big publishers are pushing that narrative, both comparing it (falsely) to Witcher 3 (which, as I said, many RPG fans don't even consider to be RPG, personally I think it's borderline case) - and I guess for AAA audience those are RPGs. Luckily, it seems that at least some devs see their chance in using current situation to fill that void.

This happened with FPS games as well, though much earlier...from games that had wide level designs, we got to CoD and completely linear designs to make them more "accessible" cause God forbid you actually explore a bit any level, and only in recent years we get to see some throwbacks to old school designs.

Now, different strokes for different folks and all that, I'm glad people enjoy their AAA games, just please stop asking for indie/A/AA games to be like them.

I certainly don't consider HZD RPG, for me it is action game with RPG elements (as almost all games have some of it nowadays). Witcher 3 I really didn't like the game itself so I won't put it related to the difficult, pandering or not being RPG =p

FPS I can certainly agree that the lack of KB+M on consoles have certainly affected FPS and may have made the genre bad for PC gamers. Can't evaluate much besides that because I don't like FPS much.

I don't want games to be all equal (but difficult option on the other genres or tiers don't make these games equal to AAA). And I certainly am sad that you have to feel there are few games for you enjoy due to companies to increase sales going in a direction that displeases you. At least we have about 30 years of backlog to dig and find gems. It could have been much worse if the bad changes in your POV happened during gen 4.

Witcher 3 is solid game, I have it at around 7.5-8/10 (though lot of thing for me in it go to 6/10 while others for to even 9.5/10), it's the RPG mechanisms that are very weak and disappointing, especially since open-world action-RPG genre was in steady decline regarding core mechanisms for quite some time and this was the game to save it (or many hoped so, given what devs were saying about their influences during development). Unfortunately, it did mostly opposite - while it still (arguably) can be called action-RPG (well, barely), it paved golden road to current trend of open-world pseudo action-RPGs (in essence, action-adventures with few RPG elements) - nothing wrong with them pre se, it's just that publishers are marketing them as RPGs and mass market are accepting them as that.

But as I said, CDPR is making Cyberpunk, which from everything shown so far, seems like proper action-RPG with stats, attributes and core RPG mechanisms, Obsidian is about to release The Outer Worlds, that is made by some of original creators of Fallout and, apart from the setting, seems to follow same design principles, so it's not all bad.

There is always plenty of good games to be played, even back in 80s, though I had NES (and later Mega Drive), I mostly played on C64 (and later Amiga), cause that's were most of the games in genres that I like were. It's been like that later with PCs and  it's only when genres that I like get watered downed and hijacked buy mass market that I take it to heart.

That's one of the reasons I liked Souls so much, it was not so much breath of fresh air for me (Severance: Blade of Darkness on PC from 2001 had quite similar feel to it regarding level design, and much better combat IMO) as much at it was something that is really good and went against most things that AAA industry pushed at the time, and luckily there were enough people to recognize it for its qualities to make it so wide known that it became one of those IPs that can influence industry in opposite direction than what major publishers were pushing for so long.

I have no doubt Witcher 3 is solid to potentialy great, it just isn't my cup of tea.

AngryLittleAlchemist is right, though. The creators never have tried to put a mode like this despite 5 games in the SoulsBorne series. They made the game a specific way, because its their interpretation of what the game should be and how it should be played. Adding a easy mode would not only dilute the experience that they put so much work into perfecting, it'd essentially suck the soul right out of the series for the gamers who only played that mode, because they'd essentially be playing a different game. I very much doubt From Software would want that despite there being a chance to cater to a broader audience.

Like AngryLittleAlchemist said, not every game is for everyone. This is the only major entertainment medium where consumers believe they are entitled to having the content creator cater to them. People reading a horror novel don't expect the author to make it less scary or the words shorter so that they can get through the book easier. People looking at a painting don't say "well, this should have yellow in it, because it's my favorite color and everyone else has their color in the painting. Giving the painting a broader appeal by including my favorite color shouldn't harm the integrity of the artist's vision."

If we don't like a movie, we don't by tickets. Same with books, and same with games. We show what we like by supporting the devs/publishers with our money. So if you don't like a game the way it's developer intended it to be, the answer is not to change the game. The answer is for you to move on and support the games you like.

On the other hand, if it's already in the game and the devs intended for it to be used in order to appeal to a mass audience. That's fine. But it's not the devs responsibility to make a game YOU enjoy.