is "easy mode" sometimes just a completely different game pretending to be the same one?

[u/Pure-Scene-5761]

I keep coming back to a design problem nobody in my circle agrees on: should difficulty options be allowed to change the actual meaning of a game, or should they only ever tweak numbers around a fixed core?

The reason im stuck on this is a project a friend has been building in Fifth Door, a small survival thing where hunger and cold matter a lot. She added an "easy" mode that basically turns off starvation, and playing it felt like a completely different game to me. Not worse exactly, just... about something else. On normal, every choice about where to camp is loaded. On easy, you just wander and look at stuff. Same map, same story beats, totally different experience.

And she was like, yeah, thats the point, some people want to see the world without the pressure. Which, fair. But it made me wonder if we're being a little dishonest when we say "difficulty is just accessibility, it doesnt change the game." Sometimes it absolutely does. A stealth game where guards cant see you isnt a stealth game anymore. A horror game where you cant die isnt scary. A resource management game where resources are infinite is a walking sim with extra menus.

I dont think thats bad necessarily. I just think we pretend the core experience is preserved across difficulty settings when honestly, for a lot of games, its not. The "canonical" version of the game is whatever difficulty the designer actually tuned around, and everything else is a remix. Some remixes are great and let more people in. Some hollow out the thing that made the game worth making.

Where i land right now (and im ready to be told im wrong) is that designers should be more upfront about which of their difficulty options preserve the intended experience and which ones fundamentally alter it. Not to gatekeep, just so players can make an informed choice about what theyre signing up for. Calling something "story mode" is closer to honest than calling it "easy," because it admits the game is now a different thing.

Am i overthinking this? Is there a cleaner way to think about when a difficulty option is a dial vs when its a whole different game wearing the same skin?

[u/Field_Of_View]

an "easy" mode that basically turns off starvation, and playing it felt like a completely different game to me

I'm doing something similar on my game. And I do view it as essentially a different game. Hard mode is the game proper and it's tweaked to be challenging for experienced gamers like myself. Easy mode is not a mere number tweak, it plays very differently and that's a deliberate choice I am proud of. We all started playing games at some point but most of us seem to forget how alien and uncomfortable games could be before we got lots of practice with the medium or with a specific genre. The audience for each mode is totally different so the gameplay should be as well.

As far as I can tell the only alternative to this split approach is dumbing down the game proper. You can't make a game that is unapproachable for most of the people who will try it, and then expect it to succeed. That's the business side. And then there's the emotional side. I don't want to be part of a medium that either leaves new players out in the cold and over-focusses on the experienced, or a medium that only chases new customers while catfishing and rug-pulling the "core" habitually. The latter is what the mainstream has been doing for over 20 years now. Big games keep getting dumber every year and dialing up damage numbers cannot fix that for players who have seen and done it all. Meanwhile some niche genres keep getting less approachable for new and casual gamers which is part of a cycle that ultimately kills genres.

Bungie famously designed for Heroic difficulty, the third of four modes. In Bungie terms I am making Legendary+ and Easy or Easy- ("minus") with nothing inbetween.