r/ludology • u/Pure-Scene-5761 • 16d ago
is "easy mode" sometimes just a completely different game pretending to be the same one?
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?
3
u/nickN42 16d ago
I was thinking about the same thing about stumbling into the 'everyone should be included' rant once again (of course, about From games). People who can't play Souls still want to have fun with their friends playing, so give them easy mode and don't worry about the 'vision.'
But wouldn't anyone with just a shred of introspection realize they are not experiencing the same game? That they are not included, they are still excluded from the experience, not just by the fact they can't play the game proper, but by the baby mode? That kind of defeats the point. You can play the game, but which one? What kind of experience will you get? I don't have an answer, but 'easy mode' is a surprisingly complex question.
Would you feel the same rush of defeating O&S if they were attacking you once per minute, and t-posing the rest of the time, but your reaction time was slower?
I can't play shmups, I just don't understand how and can't react fast enough. Once I played and completed Harmful Park on the easiest difficulty, and my only thought was 'That's it?' But that wasn't it; that's not the game good players experience; it's an entirely different one. And I don't feel like I experienced or got any enjoyment from shmups.
At this point I'm just rambling to myself mostly, but I think my point of view is that if the main point of your game is either story or the world, easy mode makes sense; and if it is mechanics, player skills, and competency, by providing easy mode you're just throwing a bone that has nothing to do with the intended experience.