I see a lot of conversations about making games easier or putting easy modes in difficult games (mostly they are about souls but this applies a to kind of everything) and I think most of these conversations miss the point entirely.
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Aside from the fact that games are not supposed to be easy, advocacy for easy modes in games doesn’t take into account that the biggest and most important part of a game is not the cutscenes or the graphics or the artwork or the QoL: it’s the gameplay.
You could play Mario with a dot jumping on a line and it would be the same game. Mario saying Woohoo and Mamma Mia is not the game, Mario jumping with that precise amount of pixels, momentum, control, IS the game. So when you’re advocating for easy modes, you’re advocating to CHANGE the games
And that’s problematic for 2 main reasons: first of all, dedicated communities of people that love a game, well, they love the game in that state, and you want to change it for them because YOU can’t enjoy it in that form. Reason n2 is that companies listen to this kind of feedback
Capitalism means that more sales are always better, even if you have to change what you’re selling. And a dedicated fan will still buy the game, even if it’s worse than it used to be, because as long as they don’t fuck it up TOO MUCH fans can take a lot of mistreatment
And companies know this, so they will push changes even if they know it’s gonna compromise the standard they held until that point, just so that they can access a new playerbase. There’s countless examples of this:
Final Fantasy XIV dumbed down every mechanic in the game, made new game modes to make sure less proficient players could get to see the cutscenes and get the glamours, and overall stopped pushing for more. The game is now overrun by people that use it as second life and just go clubbing
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