And then there's Electronic Arts, who instead opts for technical difficulties.

You don't know how hard you're selling me on this game.

Oh you tried to mess with my saves? This isn't a battle you want to start, out come the VMs.

I don't know if that was the intention, but this is great marketing for Pathologic 2. In fact, I'll look into this game later today.

Well now I want to play it

And your game difficulty is RNG.

Ah, may I introduce you to No Man's Sky permadeath mode?

If you've never gotten it yet, get "Shattered Pixel Dungeon" on your phone. Completely free game. Most of what you speak of, and you'll feel like you've really pulled some shit off after you beat it the first time.

If you beat it the first time.

My first win was around attempt number 45.

And some people STILL can't beat it without parries.

Granted, I'm in Act 2 (Expert), and I think the ludicrous level factor into damage is to blame. The fact every other (mini)boss you fight is overlevelled, and just a few levels seem to be a 2-3x damage difference, is so stupid, I imagine someone running into 3 in a row and just giving up.

If you're an actress and your previous game was Elden Ring, I can see the appeal of trying to put a story mode into your contract.

Preach. Problems of my childhood became like wallpaper when I got adulthood problems. I used to stress out when I couldn't get past a video game mission.

Like Mario Maker level design rules.

Oftentimes, devs are practically the only person who can. Especially small hobbyist devs. They'll spend hundreds, if not thousands, of hours playing their own game as they build it and forget they have to then circle back and tune it for people who haven't.

That's weird, I don't remember that game being very hard, at least on the normal difficulty

I love ULTRAKILL for many reasons, but this is one of them. I would never have completed the Prime Sanctums if I had to wait longer than 1 frame to reset to the checkpoint.

One can think of it just like about a fastfood joint. Two lines of coordinates: food and service, or user experience and mechanics. We do play clunky old games for their plot or shallow timekillers for their gameplay. Striking the right balance that is fitting your core audience is the goal. There, Kodjima thinks about better service, toning down mechanics so that everyone can eat their burger, while Miyadzaki serves artisan sets knowing their inaccessibility is a part of the deal for their niche audience.

This is the entire problem with modern gaming meta though. There basically is an assumption that people will look up the walkthrough, so you need to scale difficulty with that in mind.

I am like you, and this is a big part of why I've almost entirely stopped gaming. Either the game is too hard, or it has like 20 minutes of cir scenes per hour, or it requires an hour of supply grinding any time you pick it back up.

Something a lot of people forget is that looking stuff up is not something normalised recently, older games tended to have a freaking manual that explained most bosses and areas, it even gave hints!

I get that you would prefer that, lucky there's plenty games for both of us.

Respectfully disagree with your stance (which is fine, as fushuan said, there's games enough for all of us.) When I was younger and played more games, I would frequently look up how to get through them on GameFAQ. The joy wasn't in figuring out puzzles, it was in getting to see the story unfolding.

Kojima is talking about Death Stranding. Miyazaki is talking about one of the Dark Souls games. Itagaki is known for the early 2000s Ninja Gaidens and Dead or Alive, so I'm pretty sure this would have been in reference to Ninja Gaiden.

There is a secret level in Doom II described in the biography Masters of Doom by David Kushner. It was made as a prank, where the boss had the face of one of the Johns and moved at 200% faster speed than the player. I’m not sure if this made it into the retail or shareware versions they shipped.

I tried Dark Souls, got my ass kicked, tried again, got my ass kicked again, went "huh, guess it's not for me" and moved on with my life. I truly don't get this mentality where people think they're entitled to play a game that was clearly not designed for them.

Games, like movies, are easily consumed but difficult to create. As a result, everyone and their grandma can critique them and publish on the Internet which only further self-selects for the highly opinionated to do so.

But not all opinions are equal. You can be well studied in your field and generally intelligent, but if you don't have a relevant background in the humanities and the sciences, you can have complex reasoning but without having the depth, the breadth, and the relevance in the analysis.

Case in point the first replier. The analogy is fine and the deductive reasoning is self-consistent, but they didn't show the relevance to game design. (Ie. Why must the author make the text size bigger for people who can't enjoy smaller text, and why must the same apply to games.)

That's why gamers seem to be notorious for having takes that miss the trees for the forest.

(I am aware that I'm very much at risk of committing this very error with my post.)

Try Nier Automata

You can install chips in your brain that automates gameplay features. Like getting your turret to shoot automatically, making you melee attack automatically when you are in range, dodge automatically, ...

You can really customize your difficulty to the point that the game basically plays itself.

The only downside is that you miss out on using other cooler chip abilities.

Halo CE legendary was 100% an afterthought that Bungie threw a couple of multipliers in at the end because it makes like more than half of your potential loadout worthless lol.

It was still fun, but god damn was it borderline annoying like you're playing a really unfair zombie survival game.

And then theres LASO lol

So edgy I cut my eyes from reading.

That's just having actual accessibility and difficulty settings, but with extra steps.

I appreciate the ability to mod games, but decent difficulty options really should be first-class citizens that the developers have put some thought into. Accessibility is important.

Let them have their own philosophies, one of the many wonders of life and humankind.

Stick a god mode in it and don't record my scores in any competitive rankings. One of my favorite things to do is run MAME in cheat mode and just mindlessly blow shit up.

Apparently it's in reference to Ninja Gaiden:

https://games.kikizo.com/features/itagaki_interview.asp

I also didn't want to try typing the name, search suggestion helped me. I played a couple of his games and they weren't particularly difficult, so I assume it's referring to his later games: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tomonobu_Itagaki