I’d actually love it if the kind of dynamic difficulty that some retro games had would be brought back. There were sometimes areas exclusive to higher difficulty settings, and in some instances, there were certain types of enemies that were exclusive to higher difficulties as well. If nothing else, a number of games just had more enemies as the difficulty increased. The same area in a game could feel quite different depending on whether you’re playing on easy, hard, very hard, etc.

I want fun and challenging, but not frustrating. When I start getting to the point that I'm swearing over and over, or quickly getting frustrated because some new way to get through a section, then I think it's too hard or poorly designed. I dont play into this theory that it's a badge of honor to beat a particularly difficult game and that's the way the dev intended it to be played, because as the player I want to have fun. A dev can choose to try and support my demands or not, and I won't hold it against them, but I also won't support them if they dont have what I want.

The developer can decide if they want to give the option for those who don't want to get into the more skilled modes. The consumer can decide if what the dev offers works for them.

It is what it is.

I thought Jedi: Fallen Order also did a pretty decent job at normal and the next step up. They were going for that Souls kind of skill, although failed a bit at it. The hard setting was just cheap and stupid, and the easy mode was stupidly easy. I had a bit of trouble at normal mode until I figured out that parrying was a big part of the game play. For the clean up of trophies I just set it to easy though, because I didn't find the combat too engaging either way.

Yes. Game journalists are the ones that conflated accessibility options and difficulty in 2019 in order to try make the high difficulty in FromSoftware games some sort of moral issue. "Do you not want disabled people to be able to play these games? Disgusting!!!" The [contrived] misunderstanding is on them.

Journalists shouldn't use people with impairments as a shield for their op-eds. I have tendonitis in my hands so I really appreciate being able to remap buttons to make games more manageable/comfortable - but I also prefer challenging games. Sometimes games like Hotline Miami and the Souls games are designed around a concept that doesn't scale well to lower difficulties.

Games being too difficulty is an almost non-existent issue anyway. The far bigger issue is that AAA games are being dumbed down across the board. I find myself less interested in games than I used to be because of this. I'm just about in my mid-twenties so I'm not exactly a retro gamer either. If you're invested in a medium, you should be rewarded for that investment, not punished.

So many games introduce fun concepts but don't do enough with them because they're afraid to challenge players and as a result, games often lack depth that they could have easily had. A large amount of gamers complain about puzzles so that crowd is often catered to to the detriment of those who appreciate them. The puzzles/tombs were almost removed entirely from Tomb Raider 2013 (a franchise constructed around puzzles and platforming in tombs) to make the game more "accessible" and then they were brought back in Rise but made optional. And the thing is, almost no one who dislikes puzzles is too mentally impaired to perform them. It's not about accessibility. It's about taste and preferences.

Some motor skill disabilities may prevent people with them from being good at the Soul's type games. The accessibility controllers make things easier to control, but don't necessarily allow for more precision movements, just easier to press buttons for those who don't have fine motor control.

I don't believe games have to be designed to accomidate everyone though, and while I'm always for getting anyone that wants to play games into gaming, the percentages are low to think that every game has to support those with disabilities. Some things would be more common, like vision disabilities so the user can adjust the screen displays to see them easier. Stuff like that doesn't affect game play, and is just a quality of life thing, or make a game playable for those affected by vision. Borderlands 3 I find unplayable on the consoles since they don't allow you to adjust the UI or font settings except for subtitles. The game relies heavily on reading the stats of loot, and if I have to stop all the time to read that tiny text, it does ruin the experience. I don't have a problem seeing the screen in game play, but some of the color decisions do make it harder to play in some games, where too much photorealism makes it hard to see what may be firing at you.

There are all sorts of potential reasons why one may have trouble playing a game, and not all of them are considered disabilities. But not all disabilities can be accommodated in all games.