So when it is not filler, should you be disallowed from skipping it? Who is to say what the benefit is? Does the design intent matter?

Why should you? Why should the player be disallowed from doing anything? They bought the game. They should be allowed to do whatever to the point of unreasonable hardship for the developer. Like if a dev has to go out of their way, fair enough, but if its like, they're just not exposing the ability to change a setting, thats ridiculous.

Did you ever read the book House of Leaves? It’s great. Unreliable narrators, unconventional layout and use of form. Several friends of mine bounced right off of it. “Can’t read this”, they said. I wouldn’t say they were gatekept. I wouldn’t say the author is ableist because they didn’t also provide a linear narrative, without all the footnotes. I accept that not everyone is going to finish that book. Even if they paid money for it.

These aren't comparable situations. That one person almost certainly would have had to actually make significant effort, probably exceeding the effort of making the book to make it accessible. Video games aren't that. More than that, the changes we are talking about are minor and relatively (compared to the scale of a game) easy to add. to add to that, people can still be into the majority of a game and not like one particular element, and there is no reason they shouldn't be able to remove the bug bear. It is for entertainment after all.

That’s what a lot of these discussions feel like. Someone made something interesting and challenging, and people want it changed. If you take all the footnotes out of house of leaves, you get a very different, much reduced, result.

The question, as before, is, if the people who want that original experience can still just choose that, why are they up in arms at the idea of allowing people to experience things differently that don't affect them?

Outside of completely made up arguments that this is not possible, no one has had an answer for this, just anger, as if they are mad at the idea of people not having to go through the "struggle" they feel they went to. Not having to have the "skills they built up".

I've had countless people say the most toxic things I've seen on lemmy in this very thread over that idea, and I think thats the core of it. That behind all the bullshit excuses people have come up with, they feel like their achievements would somehow be worth less if other people could play the game differently to how they played. Like their other way of playing isn't "official" enough and shouldn't be supported at all.

I've had someone really iron in that this is the true intent when they revealed that they would prefer someone cheat in the game rather than the developer simply exposing those same things as options.

Well, earlier I said something about tuning difficulty down to the point of triviality, and you said that was a straw man.

It was. My point initially wasn't about that, but when asked specifically, I think yea, why not, who cares. Why are other people caring so much about how others enjoy their media product.

But look, I’m not against options in games (assuming everyone playing gives informed consent. Unilaterally cheating is not okay).

I mean this conversation, I think, has pretty clearly morphed into a bunch of people vehemently angry about the prospect of souls like games having any difficulty changes, harder or less hard.

I don't think anyone has been thinking about multiplayer.

I just think the framing of it as accessibility in the same way that subtitles or changing controller inputs is dicey. “I think this would be more fun” is a fine, subjective, argument. “This game is ableist” is much shakier.

I'm not sure I've used that as the core of my argument or my argument at all actually. Not sure though as, like you've probably seen, there are a shit ton of comments on this tree.

I think some forms of media will inherently be somewhat inaccessible, but there is no reason to go out of your way to support things being less accessible, even if accessible means to people who simply don't like a thing one way vs the other.

Well, with the footnote that I do believe some people would ruin their own fun by turning the difficulty too high or low, but that’s not my business

See thats the thing. Everyone else in this thread has been violently angry at the idea that other people could have fun differently to them.

Ill give you one example. I liked Cyberpunk. It was a decent game, and I've played through it a few times.

The first time I played it, I played without any mods, very hard, just because (I'm honestly only including this to stop bs arguments, though you haven't seemed supremely disengenous like many others on this thread so far, and feel I shouldnt need to, to make my point), and then every time after that I played with mods, and I wish I just played with the mods from the start.

What did I change? I completely removed the breach protocol minigame (I generally feel all minigames suck, add no fun, and are just literally wasting my time, easy or difficulty), I used teleportation to avoid needing to do lengthy backtracking or worrying too much about missing items, I added a multiplier to xp to reduce grind and I used mods to remove useless mods (in game term) from guns and skip the randomized store inventories in the game. These were all downsides to the game that some people swear up and down add to the game. They absolutely do not to me.

With much experience now, I can confidently say that had I been presented with the options to simply tune things in that way, it would have massively improved my experience with the game.

Cyberpunk luckily, is relatively open for a game in that mods like this are plentiful and easy to come by, and the code fairly accessible. Many games are not. In many games, you just have to deal with the shitty minigame, or random loot or whatever.

Its not that I would necessarily hate those games or that they "aren't made for me" as many assholes in this thread have tried to imply must be the logic behind every critique, its that those elements were just generally subtractive to the experience, and I have yet to see anyone explain why I should be forced to play with them.

To many people, dying over and over isn't fun, and in Cyberpunk if that was a problem for me, I probably wouldn't find it all that fun either. Given this game has so many ways to solve every problem, and the combat I found pretty easy, I played with very hard, but if I was getting annoyed by having to repeat the same thing for hours on end, I would have no problem changing difficulties for this.

Cyberpunk is no worse for wear for having these options available to people. People who don't know modding exists and who like the game as it is, aren't affected by this.

I think its a great example of how this mentality of "made to be played this way" is all elitist gatekeeping in gaming. People don't know fuck all about development. Their opinions aren't coming from some deep love of a genre. They're coming from feeling like a part of their identity will die if the game they feel they are "good at" is more accessible, and thats it really. This isn't a job or for money, so that idea is just absurd.