For those curious, the opening clip is from a terrible film called Tourist Trap that I watched this weekend. Weird moaning mannequins was like a big part of it. It's rubbish don't watch it.

The only time I have issues with 'easy mode' is when the only way to enable it is with money.

I think if I made a video game, there would be a "Comically easy mode" where the enemies just shoot each other

Here's my "easy mode": When I played WoW, the only way for me to play a healer was with an add-on. Some people don't like it because it didn't make me a "true healer" and others understood why I did it. It helped me actually see the party's health because the bars were bigger and clearer to see, and I wasn't staring at a quarter of my screen the entire time. That, and people not knowing their defensives or how to do mechanics meant me having an add-on saved their butts too many times to count. *It was a play style choice to make my game experience fun for me instead of more frustrating, because games are meant to be fun.*

I'm looking forward to the 2022 edition of this video.

Challenge in videogames is like spiciness in food, it comes down to taste. If you underestimate how much you can handle, you might be missing out. And if you're only eating the hottest peppers or completing the most difficult games to show others how tough you are, you're probably at risk at getting yourself an ulcer.

The last five minutes of this video perfectly crystallized (in a way I've never been quite able to articulate) the reason I play video games even though I have never considered myself to be particularly any "gud" at them. Challenge for its own sake has never been fulfilling for me. I play games because of the experience -- the combination of music, art and world design that makes me feel like I have left my living room and entered a world of monsters, soldiers, dragons, or even an alternate version of myself. For me, video games can be transformative in a way that others art forms cannot. I have mentally beaten myself up or years because I cannot memorize boss patterns or seem to land a jump in Super Mario brothers. Hearing Jim describe his own reasons for playing clicked for me in a way that I've never even considered. Thanks for this, Jim. It was definitely my aha! moment as a gaymer.

...Star Fox being playable by children is...a bad thing?

being good at dark souls isn't a personality.

But Jim, surely you understand that some people consider the way strangers enjoy their leisure time to be of absolutely life-altering importance.

I've been playing Shin Megami Tensei IV recently. The game gives you the option to turn the game to an easier setting at any point after you've died twice. And being a Shin Megami Tensei game, you're lucky if you reach the first boss before dying twice. And I haven't touched it. I don't want to, because I tend to find the series has a good balance of difficulty versus frustration, with the random encounters being able to wipe the floor with you if you don't know what you're doing to be a key part of the series. But at the same time, I get why people play the games on easier difficulties. The game can be brutal, and not everybody has the time and patience to fuse the exact right team to get through a battle. At the same time I have a tendency to play hack and slash games on the easiest difficulty available, it just makes it easier for me with my clumsy hands.

Someone taking the elevator doesn't diminish me taking the stairs. My taking the ski lift doesn't diminish those who make the climb. In the end we all want the same thing from a game, to have fun with it.

Someone should make a series of mods just named "gud" which provides a customized way to adjust the difficulty for notoriously difficult games. Then whenever people say "Get gud" to people that are struggling with a game, they'll be providing useful advice.

This is what happens when including cheat codes stop being the norm.

"I'm angry because someone is enjoying this single player game in a way I disagree with despite it having no effect on my own experience!" Also shoutouts from the Fire Emblem fandom!

Never understood the Dark Souls argument … the game literally has an easy mode … I beat Ornstein and Smough by summoning someone better than me and letting them do all the work

A guy i grew up with played more games than anyone i know. He was a gatekeeping type of guy too. One day, out of the blue in his late twenties, he had a stroke. Had to relearn how to move his body. Still can't feel half of it. Games accessibility suddenly became very important. The tune can change quite suddenly for any of us -- including those who scream and cry about the sanctity of gaming and they heresy of sharing games with filthy casuals. And even if you aren't met with sudden tragedy like the guy i mentioned, you WILL get old. Your health will decline in a multitude of ways. That elitism inevitably fucks over everyone. It's pointless. it's cruel. it makes no sense.

Viewers might want to mute the first four seconds.

So who's here in 2022 when Elden Ring comes out, waiting for the new old debate?

I like how you mentioned celeste, because celeste is a game that you can become invincible at anytime, and the game doesn’t bar you from getting anything with assist mode on. You can collect everything in the game and the game doesn’t care if you are or are not invincible. And it literally doesn’t detract from the experience at all.

"True hardcore gamers" *Uses a picture of Cylons* Honestly, quite fitting

"sekiro doesn't need an easy mode... sekiro doesn't not need an easy mode either". this is probably the fastest I've liked a jimquisition.

I recently had my literal 3 year old niece try playing some old Nintendo games and honestly, a zero difficulty "toddler mode" actually sounds brilliant for those scenarios. I can't see why that would be controversial.

I must say, the answer seems pretty clear to me: insecurity. People insecure in themselves latch on to "good at video games" as an identity trait, and that prestige doesn't mean as much if the game doesn't force others to struggle. Being good means nothing if there aren't people to lord it over.

So it turns out that challenge & fun are experiences that overlap on occasion but are not inextricably linked.

Personally I love the challenge of overcoming hard games, I feel proud when I beat something seemingly impossible, but unless you're a gatekeeper why should it matter? If including an easy mode doesn't affect your prefered, 'authentic' experience of a game, and let's more people enjoy, then all the better. Divinity Original Sin 2, and even the Mass Effect series had options to make the combat a breeze if I remember.

Wow, that another 3 years bit really was prophetic good lord

7:27 YES! You brought it back :D yeah! I've been on aristocrat withdrawal ever since.

Slight tangent: I wish more developers of games with combat systems understood that difficulty can be more than just raising the enemies' health/lowering your health. The variable combat and puzzle difficulty in silent hill mentioned in the video is a good example of this, but I don't see this being done often enough imo.

I think the easy mode discussion might be another side effect of the increasing trend toward pop culture fandom as tribal identity. More and more people seem to be treating the entertainment that they enjoy as some sort of self defining personality trait. So if you find you enjoyed Dark Souls et al. and fancy yourself a "true" From Software fan, it's entirely possible that you've absorbed the narrative of the FS difficulty and baked it into your sense of self identity since you 'got gud" or whatever. If your sense of self identity is tied to that narrative, then I can see why you might find the idea of changing that narrative threatening. If it's possible to play the game on easy mode, then simply being a From Software gamer isn't the same sort of badge of honor or whatever. The problem with all this really lies in using a piece of pop culture triviality as a foundation to build your sense of self around. But as long as we are going to live in a society which encourages us to buy the latest bit of distraction and obsess over it rather than actually talking to each other about how miserable and dead we feel inside, I think this kind of thing is only going to continue.

I'm only at 8:25 of the video, but so far it seems to me the arguments against easy modes is that it encroaches on the self-esteem of people who define their identity through video games. Who's only source of achievements is beating games, who game, not to have fun, but to substitute for actual meaningful life experiences. Anyone who plays "casually" (though 100% completing Witcher 3 even on easy mode isn't exactly a casual commitment) thus takes the honour that is meant for the good players and devalues their achievements. I suck at games. All of them. No matter how much I play them I never get better than "mediocre". Thus I can only play games that either have an easy mode or where my boyfriend can help me beat the Kayran so that I can finally save Temeria (he also beat the Draug for me). I play Path of Exile on easy mode by having a pure phys skeleton necromancer. I don't mind that I suck at the games because exactly 0% of my personal value depends on how well I play games. (I do, however, take pride in my ability to write item filters. Despite not being the programmer in the relationship I write the filters for us.) And I'll teach my 2 - 6 children that it doesn't matter if you suck, all that matters is that you're capable of playing the game with your friends and get to experience enough of it to be fun.

I just had a chill when I imagined the AAA publishers selling games with hard-coded difficulty level and selling different difficulty levels separately or as DLC. Brrrrrrrr!

I absolutely love the aristocratic Jim Sterling bit, I really liked your videos that were just him reading comments and I miss them!

"Royston! Royston! The casuals are making games accessible again!"

This argument just boils down to gatekeeping makes people feel good.

Generally speaking I play games on hard mode, I enjoy the challenge, learning from my mistakes and all that. That's also why I love fighting games. Some people don't, they want a nice cruise through the game while enjoying its many fun qualities without painful deaths. That's fine, that doesn't affect me in any way, do what you want it's your life, there's no reason for me to care.

Finally, the Duke returns. It's been too long.

I’m being called out I modded that “Thanks Obama” into my Dark Souls so fast to make death more bearable

Bring back cheats! Any game was easy mode with the choice to use cheats

he said "see you again in 3 years" and here we are, theee years later with a new fromsoft game comming out

Least we forgot it was a mod that made Dark Souls 1 playable on PC

Alright, let me just as this, immeasurably important question. Where the hell did FucKonami go?

My two favourite games of all time are Ecco the Dolphin and Ecco: The Tides of Time. They're notorious for being piss-hard, and there's even a funny tweet from series creator Ed Annunziata admiting that, yeah, they made it hard because rentals were a thing and they didn't want people beating the games in a weekend. But them being hard isn't why I remember them. Not the main reason. The main reason is that they're timeless, unique, strange stories that look into what it might be like to be a dolphin, expressed through the medium of a 2D Genesis game and steadily going off the rails into bizarre sci fi stuff. The music is haunting and beautiful, the writing is poetic, the first game starts out as 'dolphin loses family in a storm' and progresses to 'dolphin goes back in time to be given superpowers by a psychic DNA strand so he can fight the aliens who stole his family' in the first one and all the way through 'your time travel in the first game broke the timestream, now fix it' in the second one. I remember them for sparking a lifelong appreciation of cetaceans. And yeah, I'm proud of myself for beating the first game without cheats or savestates, but that's just it. I'm proud of MYSELF. And this was years, YEAAAAAARS after I first got into the series. I always turned on godmode when I played as a kid and enjoyed zooming around the levels and experiencing the story. Anyone who comes to Ecco that way, or through watching a Let's Play? Please come on down and be in the fandom! We're lonely! Being more into the fandom side of games - like, write fanfic, draw fanart, come up with meta - has always been a kind of weird experience, because that kind of creativity is so looked down on by the Get Gud types. Like if more people enjoy the game, more people are gonna make beautiful things based on it. Isn't that a net positive? tl;dr I very agree with that outro, and play more Ecco the Dolphin please

The heart of the matter is this: "I want to have what I like, but I don't want you to have what you like." This is what makes people say "There shouldn't be an easy mode". They want to have something to lord over others, i.e. "I can play through this game. You can't. That makes me better than you." ...When what they really should be doing is building up some sense of self-worth that's not anchored to something as ephemeral as relative skill at certain video games.^^

"How dare you not liking games in the same way as we do!" *Shakes fist angerly in the air like Abe Simpson*

That aristocrat shit made me cry and my side hurts.

And it's begun again. Elden Ring is still ages away and people are whining about a "possible" easy mode.

On a much smaller scale, this happened with the newer Fire Emblems. They added the option of Casual mode where if a non-critical unit is defeated during battle, they retreat to tend their wounds for the rest of that map. Afterwords, they'll be available again. Nintendo did this because they wanted to reintroduce the series to a wider audience and reinvigorate the franchise. And I'm glad they did! More people playing a game I like means it's more likely to receive continual development! Back when I had way more time on my hands, I didn't use casual mode. The game that introduced it, Awakening, has your character in the position of a tactician and in the game they laud you on how well you've done so far. I wanted to feel like "the genius tactician" so I played again and again until I could get through the game without using a unit and with as few resets as possible. But now that I'm playing through the game again, I'm so glad for casual mode. I just want to re-experience the story and the characters and having perma-death off lets me enjoy the game without min/maxing nearly so much. Later on, the franchise received a third mode, Phoenix mode, where if a unit was defeated in battle, another unit would need to go assist them and give them a pick-me-up and they would resume the battle right then and there. (And to me, it sounds exactly like when in RPGs we use the equivalents of Phoenix Downs or Resurrection Scrolls, etc.). Twice, I've had a friend who didn't want to play the game because they felt bad when they let a unit die by accident. Phoenix Mode let them enjoy the game a lot more than they would have, if they even played at all. Plus, it's easy to justify in my mind that this would be acceptable in game as well since it's all about armies of bonafide heroes running around being heroic. Of course they'd have their universe's equivalent of Resurrect on hand en masse. This also got touched on in another game series I love called X-Com. In the re-imaginings of the old games, you can enable a mode called Ironman Mode to make it so you can't save scum and any death/injury is permanent. And that's cool that it's an option. Hell, there's even a Bronze man mode now where if something happened that you didn't expect, you restart the mission instead either save scumming or having to accept what happened. (And in games as full of bugs as the re-imagined X-Coms, this is definitely a good idea). ADDING MORE CHOICES, MORE VARIETY, AND MORE ACCESSIBILITY TO GAMES YOU ENJOY IS A GOOD THING! IT LETS MORE PEOPLE PLAY AND MORE PEOPLE PLAYING AND GETTING INVESTED IN A GAME YOU LOVE MEANS YOU'RE MUCH MORE LIKELY TO SEE MORE OF THAT GAME AND FRANCHISE. Why is something like that so frickin' hard to understand?

Ah Duke du H'ardcore. Your Grace, you have been missed.

Difficulty debate brought the aristocrat back; hence, totally worth it!

“Git Gud at dealing with different difficulty modes” lmao 😂 that’s probably the best thing I have ever heard and I really relate to that thing where the games offer to turn down the difficulty I’m like no game I don’t need your pity I will figure it out lol

In brief: those who demand that games do not include an easy mode would dread that a random person could achieve the same recompense than them, being able to say that they finished the game, with much less effort than they did in the first place, as if their toil (and the worth they gained through it) became a waste of time just by the fact that an easier route existed...

"you risked nothing and gained nothing." we're still talking about video games, right?

THOU HAST CHEATED NOT ONLY AT THE DUEL BUT THOU HAST CHEATED AT THY OWN SOUL

i cannot believe they were right on the money when they said they'd be back in three years

Its ridiculous how blown up this subject gets. One person I kept up with that was discussing it only mentioned Sekiro as it was a recently released game. Their entire point was about games that have little to no accessibility options (like controller support, remapping buttons, etc) and how to get developers more on board with adding such features, and it was instantly warped into: "get gud, scrub. Dis game isn't supposed ta be ez. Da gams vision would be ruined!" The conversation had nothing to do with difficulty (even though multiple difficulty settings can make a game more *accessible*), again, that's just what people warped it into.

If people don’t like challenges that’s okay. If they do that’s okay as well. but neither of them can attack the other for not being like them. this is common sense, we leaned this in the fourth grade.

Nothing is risked and nothing is gained. Literally why I like games.

I tried playing Sekiro for a week. It harmed me, gave me stress. Literally a year later a friend told me about the easy mod. I'm now playing and having fun doing so. I'm working on a master's degree, that's plenty difficult. I don't want that on my video games too

Very good video! One thing I want to touch on is the idea that you don't care if an easy mode exists or not: you did an excellent job tying it to being like an accessibility issue so that certain other people can enjoy the game as well as anyone else, and if that's the case, then not caring about whether or not those people can enjoy the game is, I think quite literally, sociopathic. I think the best response is to want very much for difficulty settings to exist for those who need them, even if you don't. And because we should care about those people, we should encourage developers to do what they can to be as inclusive as possible whenever possible. Because we should care about and empathize with people, even in the abstract. An indifferent, uncaring stance on the presence of options that allow people to have as much fun with a game as anyone else is clearly amoral, at best.

That outro was probably the best bit of video you've done this year. Well said.

Jim, you could totally (some how) cosplay hedonism bot

omg, the duke! I missed him.

I typically play a game once for the fun, then if I really liked it, again for the challenge. I don’t have the patience to play a game for the challenge the first time through

Guys, there’s already an easy mode in Dark Souls. It’s called pyromancy

Omg I miss commentocracy. Pls bring it back xD

i knew a girl that played the first two worlds of super mario ( i cant remember if it was 3 or world ) over and over, because the rest of the game was to hard for her, the fact the she never got bored is impressive

OH SO YOU'RE SAYING YOU WANT AN EASY MODE IN DARK SOULDS I KNEW IT

Can someone make a Jimquisition mod that cheats in that aristocrat mode for all his videos?

To your endcap, Jim: I play games for the escapism. If there's a challenge. Cool. If there isn't? Awesome. I like games where I can lose myself. Because the world is shit, it's filled with things that make me anxious and depressed to a debilitating level. Games can be an important escape that let me forget that. That's fucking magical.

It honestly disturbing to me how much someone puts their self worth into how "hardcore of a gamer" they are

Bit late to the party here, but it's a bit ironic; hardcore gamers screech and cry about "babies" wanting easy modes. Well, last time I checked, babies also screech, and scream and cry...so....y'know... Edit: Also, freaking love the Smaug reference; totally accurate, lmao.

Member when people complained about Mario Kart being playable by more people I Member

Royston: "Shall I feed you the red or the white grapes, m'lord?" *sighs and speaks to himself* "The young master just experienced a hollow victory of his own, methinks..."

'Hard Core Gamers': GIT GUD. Sane people: Get therapy!

I've nearly finished my first playthrough of Sekiro in it's only difficulty setting, and I almost certainly wouldn't have used an easy mode for my first run if one were included, but an easy mode would have been great to try out crazy challenge runs in. It may have even made certain types of challenge runs possible that can't be done in normal mode, such as an "only stand still and deflect, no skills or stat upgrades" run (assuming sweeps and grabs behave differently in such a mode).

I really needed to hear that meme voiced by aristocrat voice this week.

Gamer Justice Warriors are notoriously hypocritical. They will argue that the artistic integrity of a game should be supported when censorship issues arise but will also complain that games should not have political statements in them when they disagree with the politics in a game thus challenging a game's artistic integrity. They'll pick whatever philosophy fits what they want at a particular moment and then drop it for another when they want something else.

Make a nightmare hardcore difficulty level that replaces all in-game dialogue with gravelly-voiced 'Git-Gud" and everyone has black anime hair.

I realise this is a late comment, but thank you for mentioning the assist mode in Celeste. I somehow missed that when I first played, and struggled so much that I never went back to it, even though I really wanted to experience the story. Now I feel like I can try it again. : )

I think I know what it's going to be, from the tags, as a disabled person, I'm intrigued (not that I wouldn't eat up the Jimquisition every week) EDIT after watching: Oh, cool, he DID mention disabled people being used as props in the argument (this goes both ways btw) but yeah I basically agree with everything else too

I thank wholeheartedly that duke amiel du 'ardcore is back

I can only explain this as people applying PvP logic to PvE games. Easy, medium and hard aren't levels you have to climb to get to the top, but modes of engagement. It's like being strong: if you need to piss on weaker people, you're missing the point. "being stronger" is a shit attitude, "being strong" is above that shit.

Two things: First, game purchases are not mandatory. If the publisher wants my money, they will offer me something I am willing to buy. If not, no harm, no foul, I will buy something else. Second, to folks who say that playing a hard game teaches people 'the meaning of hard work'... As a retiree, I can say with absolute certainty that those people have never really had to work hard. (I spent most of my life working hard at an actual job. Now I play games for fun...)

I like Supergiants approach, you add difficulty modifiers to the game to make it harder but you also get better rewards

Jim, Sterling needs a finishing move. Boglin Stunner.

The teenagers and young adults i do support work for, who all have disabilities such as Cerebral Palsy, sure love the "journalists want to destroy gaming by including a subgroup that doesn't deserve consideration" rhetoric. Bemusingly, over time CheatEngine has proven a core part of my support worker skillset.

Heres my hot take. Im a dyed in the wool hardcore souls-borne player. Those games ALL have some of the best stories in fiction i have ever seen in anything including books, movies, etc. If adding an easy mode would allow more people to experience said stories, i am not going to be the one to deny someone of that.

Chopsticks are the main way to eat at a japanese restaurant. I still appreciate it when they let me eat with western utensils.

Also thanks for the nod to the speed runners of dark souls who "walk above the level" (death plain glitch)

I will never understand why basement bois get so damned upset when other people want to enjoy the things that they're currently enjoying....

Easy mode widens the customer base, essentially subsidizing the games for hardcore gamers. Selling to more people means games can (at least in theory) have a cheaper price tag. So we all ought be happy when everyone can play a game the way they like

In my opinion? If a game doesn't have an easy mode, then that means its standard difficulty is how it is meant to be played. If a game has an easy mode, it's like how Bayonetta handles it. To experience the story more or less uninterrupted. That said, using a cheat? I'd be a hypocrite if I said that's scummy, considering how I play Final Fantasy IX.

Yes Jim, WH Smith is still a thing. Woolworths and it's glorious pick and mix section...unfortunately is not.

When I played Command and Conquer, I always was convinced that I was a bad player and beat myself up over only being able to to defeat the AI on easy mode and not even attempt to play online since I would be immediately stomped. But then I watched some Online Games and saw how they just spammed Hotkeys and swirled their cursors around in fast motion, placing building left and right, with concern how it would look, only concerned with speed. Now, don't get me wrong. What these people do is quite impressive. But I realized that I was never going to get on that level. Because I simply don't want to. I want to enjoy the game. Have a good time. Build my base to some visual aesthetic. Have fun while crushing my enemies. All those things, I couldn't do with that fast playstyle. It would suck the fun out of the game. At least for me. For whoever is capable of playing this game so fast and have fun while doing it, I salute you. But its not for me. So I was satisfied with playing Command and Conquer with the level of difficulty, I wanted to. A level that I would have fun with. And while I do sometimes try to improve myself and try harder levels, I play all my games with the intent of having fun. Meaning that I will set the difficulty to where it will challenge me, without making it a chore.

LOL, the next discussion for this happened nearly 3 years to the date later.

If a Dev wants to add an easy mode into THEIR GAME then let them. If a Dev does not want to add an easy mode into their game then THEY DONT HAVE TO!!!!!!!

This was interesting. I thought he was talking to me most the time but I realized like 3 mins in I just like hard games. I would never be upset there was an easy mode tho, these people exist? I guess everyone will get upset about something.

Was VERY pleasantly surprised to hear Shadow Hearts BGM during the closing statement. Honestly brightened up my day. :)

It makes me smile to seen the Duke make a return. Really tickles my fancy to see cringe countered with cringe for some reason.