That’s a fair argument then, but… this is literally what accessibility means, whether or not you can “access” the thing.
If someone isn’t willing to invest the time or frustration into Souls, then fair enough, but that’s a matter of priorities/convenience, not a matter of accessibility.
Also, frankly, the difficulty of Souls for regular people is insanely overblown. Stuff like “Prepare to Die” is just a marketing gimmick, and the games have become substantially easier and more flexible over time. Like in Elden Ring, where you can leave bosses for later, and can frequently just bypass them entirely, experiment with an insane variety of builds, use effective ways to grind ridiculous amounts of souls, and just generally become ridiculously powerful. They’ve done essentially everything but creating an explicit “easy mode” to make the game playable for as many people as possible. If you want an easy mode, basically every souls game has builds or guides that function as that easy mode.
Difficulty counts as an access barrier. You always have to consider that there are people who, for whatever reason, have a skill capacity that is lower than required for the game in question. And for those people the game will be inaccessible.
Time is also an accessibility factor. If a person with a disability or lower skill has to grind and extend the playtime for 3-4x what a normal player would have, that’s not inaccessible but it’s less accessible comparatively. Especially if that kills the fun.
That being said obviously these things can be tweaked within reason and the problem can’t be solved for every player unfortunately. And they don’t need to be. Some games can just be too hard for some players.
The ultimate point for me just seems to be that the community needs to be listened to. You shouldn’t ever be in the positions as a dev where you are telling disabled or low skill gamers to get good or no dice. If a large portion of people are saying “I’d love to enjoy the art you’ve made, but I can’t. My disability/inability is stopping me” then I’d change my approach.
I think there is a balance that can be struck, grinding is one of the balances and you’re right there are ways to make those games easier that way. But the other people are also right, the games need to be hard sometimes. I just want people to stop being dismissive of people who want to enjoy the same entertainment and art but can’t just because of difficulty.
Apologies in advance for the essay lol, Souls is one of my favourite franchises, and I’ve spent a lot of time thinking and talking about these games.
You always have to consider that there are people who, for whatever reason, have a skill capacity that is lower than required for the game in question.
I don’t think Souls requires any amount of skill beyond just… basic understanding of how to control a 3D character. They even tutorialize that, actually. Everyone starts somewhere, I personally got thrashed immediately after the tutorial in Dark Souls 1, and it took me hours to beat the first proper boss, with many deaths to regular enemies. Like any good video game, Souls teaches you the skills you need progressively, and gets gradually harder and asks more of the player over time. It’s not like just starting Guitar Hero on the highest difficulty, the game is balanced for anyone.
Time is also an accessibility factor.
I don’t actually think these games require an excessive time investment. Howlongtobeat puts Dark Souls Remastered’s Main Story at 30 hours. Even if you’re somehow spending 4x that time, that still only puts it at 120 hours, which isn’t unreasonable, lots of games have runtimes around that length.
I also take issue with the idea that you can consistently take 3-4x longer than most. In reality, you only get seriously walled a handful of times learning the game, and surpassing those tough challenges teaches you how to play. For example, in Sekiro, I got walled for hours on one of the games earliest minibosses, but once I got a solid enough grasp on the game to beat him, I wasn’t seriously walled like that again for several hours of gameplay. Getting stuck just means there are lessons you’re learning, and you tend to remember what you struggled hard to learn.
The ultimate point for me just seems to be that the community needs to be listened to.
A key part of developing anything for millions of people is that you have to learn what feedback to take and how to implement it properly. From Soft absolutely has listened to their community. First of all, there’s a vocal community that doesn’t want difficulties, which is what this whole post is joking about. I’d argue From Soft have done a phenomenal job of listening to their audience, and catering to the niche of people that want a tough, unyielding experience is how they’ve slowly built themselves into the multi-GotY juggernaut they are now.
But second of all, they’ve put a ton of effort into introducing ways to make the game easier. In Sekiro, if you’re hard stuck on a boss, tough luck, that game is mostly linear, and has key story moments that leave you no alternatives but to “git gud”. In Elden Ring, you can go elsewhere to learn the game more against a different boss, level up, and come back. In most cases, you don’t even need to come back. You can also explore different builds, respec your character, try a different weapon or spell or summon, summon a friend in multiplayer, go find more equipment, anything.
And personally, I really preferred Sekiro, it’s my favourite game they’ve ever made. I got stuck for hours on every key boss, and that game absolutely wiped the floor with me. It has barely any buildcraft, you truly do just have to “git gud”. And the purity of that experience really speaks to me and what I want out of a game. There’s no “questioning if I’m doing it wrong”, I just need to get in there and learn the required skills head on.
Ultimately, I’m really just tired of being villainized (not that your comment is doing that, to be clear) for wanting some games to pursue a single well-crafted and balanced hard experience that challenges me to push myself, when basically everything else on the market is pursuing the widest audience possible, with aggressive hints telling you how to do puzzles before you can even think, and several difficulty options that make things incredibly easy, at the cost of the harder difficulties usually being poorly balanced and uneven. I’m not going around saying every Mario game needs to be a Kaizo, with no way to tone it down, but it feels like many are coming to my favourite games and telling me they’re bad for being what I love.
Especially when I feel like From Soft is hitting that balance you’re talking about, and giving the player lots of options, but some people will seemingly just never be satisfied until they can choose “Easy” from the start screen. I don’t feel like me or From Soft is being dismissive when there are an abundance of accommodations and options to make things easier, you just need to actually engage with the game to use them.
Accessibility also includes time constraints. You say yourself, it took you hours to get to a point where you could get through the game, let alone the hours it takes to just pass through the game with that aside. I personally missed out on a lot of Fromsoft’s stuff because, at the time, I was working 70+ hours a week, with 3 hours of commuting. I would have loved to spent some of the little free time I had putzing around in those games, an experience their art. However, I never had the time to spend double digit hours honing skills, just to get through the game in a reasonable time frame. Sure, now that I don’t work like that, I prefer games with high difficulty, doesn’t mean that when I play those games, now that I have time, I still don’t wish I had that access back then. If you can access a broader audience by offering a selected difficulty, why not? Many games with the highest skill ceilings have, traditionally, had difficulty modes, no on talks shit on all the boomer shooters for having easy/hard/harder/nightmare modes.
Mmm, I feel like under heavy time constraints like that, there are worse barriers than difficulty to a game’s experience. For example, it’s hard to appreciate a narrative and big reveals when you’re spreading your play out so much that it’s hard to remember who characters are. It’s also hard to enjoy exploring a large space, and feeling like you’ve covered it well.
Elden Ring, for example, is a massive game. I soared through Elden Ring, as I played the whole franchise (besides what’s locked to PlayStation) first, and happened to stumble into an extremely powerful build. The game still took me 140 hours, including the DLC.
I also still don’t think it’s an accessibility constraint. I’d totally understand why you don’t want to commit to a 150hr experience when you’re playing less than 3hrs a week, you’d be stuck on it for a whole year. But learning over time in little pieces is totally viable. Stuff like muscle memory and skill sticks with you, I could put down Souls for the next few years and when I came back I’d still be much better at it than when I first sat down.
Also, I actually find small time slots one of the best ways to conquer a tough challenge. When I get hard stuck, like I did on the final boss of the ER DLC, I chose to play like, 20 minutes of attempts a night, and then go to bed and sleep on it. We know from academia that studying something right before you sleep helps, since your brain can lock that fresh experience into memory better. You’re also starting each attempt “fresh”, in that you aren’t already frustrated and annoyed by the boss. And this worked great, it took a boss that I couldn’t beat with a whole free evening, and I beat it after only a few days. It’s a technique I’ve used repeatedly.
All that to say, I don’t think difficulty is the best reason to not play a Souls game while working 70+ hour weeks. And I don’t think it’s exclusive to Souls, I’d also avoid story-heavy JRPGs, and massive open worlds in general. Not that you couldn’t sacrifice the time to play any of those things, but frankly, I’d recommend a game that’s better consumed in bits and pieces, such as GotY nominee Balatro, a competitive multiplayer game with constrained matches, or a roguelike experience such as Hades. And that’s not that odd, I also wouldn’t recommend reading an epic novel like Dune, or trying to binge Game of Thrones or something.
My honest take on your story, is that I’m really glad Souls didn’t have an easy mode for you at that time. As you say, you prefer games with high difficulty now. I would hate for you to have played a compromised version of what From Software carefully designed here, when the intended experience ultimately really worked for you. It’s the same reason I avoid trailers for games I know I want to play, that is, if you would’ve even came back to replay a game you’d already “beaten”.
In other comments, I’ve already talked about my friend who only played games on easy before playing Souls, which made him realize how much he enjoyed hard games and the rest of beating a tough challenge. He fell in love with the experience From Software set out to make. If DS1 had had an easy mode at that time, I’m not sure he would’ve ever learned that about himself, because he would’ve played it on easy. He might’ve enjoyed the art, and the visual design of the creatures, but it’s only because From Software had the confidence to assert their intended vision that it’s his favourite game and franchise ever made.