i am sorry about the daredevil hallway bit, i am dumb thank you

this video smacks. the series X/S controller slander is HERESY but i’ll allow it just this once

The DAREDEVIL hallway scene???? Sir...

I hope you keep making this kind of video. This is quality content. Thank you for this. I also hope the "easy mode" conversation evolves a bit. I fell into a trance the other day and accidentally wrote a 20 page essay about "easy mode" in fromsoft games and when I discussed it with people who are afraid of easy modes, I realized your exact point about how they think it's stamping on the designer's face or whatever, but also that a lot of people think that "easy mode" means just inserting the easy/normal/veteran/nightmare mode that was so common in older shooters, where the only lever which was adjusted was enemy damage and health. I think Celeste's assist mode is a game changer for what "easy modes" should be. A relatively complex series of nuanced sliders which players can tinker with to approach the "ideal game difficulty nirvana" for them. Cool vid, keep it up

You apologised for making the video, so I'll apologise for my comment. I think that speedrunning and challenge runs are good, but are often so different from the original game that it's basically creating a new game out of the old one. I generally really do value the intended experience much more highly. When it comes to Melee, there's a GDC talk I really like called 'Cursed Problems in Game Design' and I believe that what melee does is it lets players pick how to deal with the curse. Melee on its face is a competitive party game, a cursed idea if ever there was one, and I believe the designers know this, which is why the options are so modifiable to let players tune between silly fun and hardcore competition. For Melee, the 'intended experience' was set as a range, not as a point, and the majority of players are still within that intended experience to this day.

My issue isn't about naming it the daredevil fight scene, but the fact that it should of been named the Oldboy fight scene, because it's more choregraphed and photographed in that angle.

Elden Ring bosses do the whole wait on windup thing on purpose, though. It's to psyche you out and punishes you for panic rolling. The animation isn't bad. Good video otherwise.

this was a great video, actually contributing to the difficulty discourse (or honestly any gamer discourse) in a way that ISN'T paranoid rambling about the hypothetical version of what people who disagree with you MIGHT be saying if you'd bothered to listen to them, what a treat.

I think Sifu's hallway fight scene draws more from Oldboy than Daredevil (I'd also argue the Daredevil scene is very reminiscent of Oldboy to the point where it feels like the latter inspired the former). The camera angle and hallway layout match more with Oldboy.

Only a TRUE member of the capital G Gamer know that that control design peaked with the OG Xbox's Mad Catz controller.

sifu is designed in a way the dificulty adjust to the player. It starts at the harder dificulty and every time you lose it says "well, then should be a litle bit easier". The secret is they made the dificulty auto-adjustament part of the history of the game

Yes! Accessibility options are much more important than difficulty options, but people seem to think about making easy modes more than about making accessibility modes.

Elden Ring is the most 7/10 game I've ever played and I'm glad u had the courage to say it

My take away here is that I should play Sifu. That was really fun to watch

The intended experience argument only really applies to the first experience. Once a player knows everything that happens in a game, then all bets are off. Nobody speedruns their first playthrough, nobody plays super smash bros competitively the first time. But players can and do play through (certain) games on easy the first time and rob themselves of a potentially more meaningful first experience. The same can be said of a hard mode, some players let ego get the best of them and play on a higher difficulty then is fun for them and let that decision color their opinion on that game forever. Basically I think difficulty options are bad, especially when they're just numerical adjustments, or especially when they don't tell you what they change about the gameplay and you have to pick them right at the start of the game with no knowledge of how that decision will affect the rest of the experience.

Came for the rant about difficulty in games, stayed for the absolutely justified rant about bad XBox controllers.

Loved the video, great stuff, subscribed. Now that we got the good stuff out of the way we need to have a word LMAO Xbox Controllers, even the current generation, are GREAT. Playstation controllers on the other hand (hand. heh.) , do unspeakable damage to my hands. I had to completely relearn how to grip a PS controller to be able to play anything on a playstation. The PS5 controllers are a step in the right direction but lemme tell you, playing through all of Persona5 on the PS4 gave me a one way ticket to a doctor, while doing the same with P4 Golden on PC on an Xbox controller left me utterly unfazed. That's it. That's all I had to say. Once again, great video! Looking forward to more :3

It's nice having more people talking about this, this video feels almost like a sidequel to this one I did on difficulty a while ago touching on some of the same things and some different things too kzfaq.info/get/bejne/isiiqsylmqnFfX0.html

Comparing an easy mode to ways of playing games like speedrunning or locational challanges is a really good analogy. I think the average player would hate to speedrun a game at a high level and i think most players would hate runescape if it was just that one dangerous area. I trust speedrunners to choose thier own way of playing because it's obvious that they know what they like. But if they had an option at the start of runescape that said "easier, more condensed mode" and wouldn't let you out of lumbridge, the game would be a heck of a lot worse for it, even if that's what some people want to do as a silly challange. If darksouls had an easy mode, i wouldn't trust my past self to choose the origional diffculty and i know i wouldn't have had such a great time of it if i hadn't.

This is tangentially related. I really like difficult puzzle games, but I hate it when the "difficulty" comes from e.g. having to click on every pixel to find the mechanic that you're supposed to be using (*cough Myst). What do you think?

I completed some levels of Celeste in slow motion mode. Used it a lot. I regret it now, I wish I newer knew that option existed.

Sifu should have WON a games Award, Yoiu Genshin Impact high on juice fetishizers,s eriousslky do nit ununderstand Videogsame difficulty and the essence of Impactful FUN

I've never had trouble with using a controller but when it comes to drawing with a pencil my hand starts to hurt after ~10 seconds or so.

personally I like having difficulty modes in the games I play because it generally takes a special game for me to want to make it harder (the most recent game to do that being the RE4 REmake (henceforth referred to as REm4ke) I'm currently on my 5th run and first on Hardcore) as usually I play games to explore the worlds and settings they take place in through the eyes of someone who is a special instance of the rules not really applying to them for whatever reason, the only game that I actually found to be too easy on my first run was Ninja Gaiden 3 (the 3D era of NG) it's why I argue that every game should have at least an Intended mode and a Story/Exploration mode because it's difficulty is what has prevented me from actually diving into the quite interesting settings of the Souls games

I enjoyed this video.

Haha loved this. Honestly those 360 controller bumpers also really destroy my hands The most shocking thing though is... You haven't seen the Matrix?

*There is a balance between accessibility and specialization.* On the one hand: Like movies, it's good for media to specialize. A one shoe fits all usually is actually just 1 size fits none. I'd rather watch an action movie that is dedicated to being the best of its nitch - rather than one that also wants to appeal to teenage girl romance drama. If you only like casual games, you just aren't going to like Dead Cells. It would ruin Deal Cells to make it a casual On the other hand: is it good to have an exceptionally narrow vision? Imagine that car manufacturers decided to weld the seats into a single position, no forward or back sliding, no tilt, no headrest adjustments. "it's the perfect car for a 6'2" man with a 34" inseam and weighing 220lbs. Why would we deviate from that perfection?" Yes, but it could be _the perfect car for a whole bunch of people_ - even if some of them will set their seat up _wrong_ and suffer for that misunderstanding. I have a family member who didn't understand her Subaru Outback's 3-way toggle for the heated seats. She spend an entire summer suffering with her "broken" heated seats stuck on, because she had it on low instead of off. Should Subaru scrap the idea of heated seats because someone might not have the optimal experience - by having the option? Should a car company refuse to have heated steering wheels - because some people have great hand circulation and don't need it? There a many platformer or side-scrolling shooter games that lack any accessibility options. If you don't have the time to sink into them to "get gud," they aren't fun. But a few option sliders would have changed that entire experience. Similarly, a lot of crafting & survival games have great ideas and great worlds... but excessive grind that makes them inaccessible to anyone who can't sink their entire life into 1 game for the next multiple months. Ark Survival won me early simply because it had sliders to customize those aspects to a huge degree. And it even let you decide where to start, so you could choose a very easy or a very brutal location, depending on the experience you wanted. Having been a gaming enthusiast all my life, I have learned how life circumstances change what I play and how I play them. If I sprained my wrist, I'm not going to play anything I'd prefer to use a mouse for. If I'm tired, I'm not going to play a high stress game. If I really want to sink into a deep gaming experience, I'm not going to play a casual game like a cell phone game. Imagine if I became a lead director for game development. Imagine I was prideful and stuck in my own mental mode without allowing external feedback from my team and from playtesters/customers. It would be easy to pigeonhole development into an extremely narrow target customer - and leave everyone else hating the game experience. That's exactly what happened to Starfield. Whether you like the game or not - it failed its customer base hardcore. So severely, it's actually diminished trust of their other up and coming game that also seemed like a shoe-in for success. In contrast to that, steam recently massively improved their controller support. I just recently tried a game that with mouse and keyboard controls felt horribly janky. But it felt very right to play with a controller. That game was saved from customer experience = terrible simply by steam offering more options for how you want to play. We are all familiar with the normal vs inverted debate. Imagine developers decided whichever way you like is wrong and they just refuse to cater to you "not playing it like it was intended." Stupid right? From back in the day, I have a PS2 controller that has a switch to invert the right analog stick, because so many games of that era didn't include that option.

Something about the whole difficulty discussion that drives me up a wall is when people equate difficulty and accessibility. The two can overlap, but there’s so much more to both categories that the overlap isn’t particularly big. For example, let’s look at two separate difficult games, Dark Souls 1 and Celeste. Celeste is a precision platformer with infinite lives that expects precision, but only in short bursts. Unless you’re going for the optional challenge of the golden strawberries, there’s only a couple of sections that expect a particularly long chain of precision as the checkpoints are extremely generous and the punishment is minimal. Dark Souls 1 is almost the opposite, as there’s not much that requires all that much precision and the game has some pretty heavy input buffering. Instead, its difficulty comes from being really punishing, where a mistake can wipe a ton of progress and leave you much weaker than before. A large chunk of the difficulty comes in the form of knowledge checks and endurance runs. If you get stuck in Celeste, you can keep trying, look up how someone else beat the segment, or use Assist Mode. There isn’t much else you can do, and those input chains can get pretty brutal. Meanwhile, if you get stuck in Dark Souls, you can keep trying, grind, summon help, or look up information. And looking up information is extremely powerful in Dark Souls, as it opens up tons of avenues. Weaknesses in enemy movesets, stronger build options, good items you can find, and in DS1’s case, cheese for a ton of bosses. On the accessibility front, Celeste basically has everything it needs. The game is approached in one way and it has answers for different issues people might face. Dark Souls is more complicated, as it has difficulties where the answer is basically look it up. The game was designed with discussion in mind, so looking things up is a legit answer to getting unstuck. However, then there’s stuff like weird dialogue choices (lack of a dialogue log with non-repeating text), unclear text, weird animation and lighting in some places, and so on that could use some accessibility options. Also a pause button for offline play… Adding an easy mode would only hit a tiny part of the accessibility stuff while ignoring more glaring accessibility problems. Like a pause button. But a really common argument is that an easy mode is good for disabled people who want to play the game, ignoring most of actual accessibility design and using disabled people as a rhetorical gotcha. It poisons the well when it comes to discussions about difficulty, especially since difficulty itself is a pretty complex topic.

I know this is a very old video, but I do think that one part that often gets overlooked in the difficulty debate is how not having difficulty options can be a *feature* for players who want a difficult experience but have trouble with the willpower associated with sticking to it. For instance, I *know* that I enjoy CRPGs more when I don't save-scum, but when I make a catastrophic dialogue decision or roll, I find it incredibly difficult if not impossible to keep myself from save-scumming and ruining the experience for myself. The same issue is the reason I find Nuzlockes in Pokemon almost impossible to complete. I know that Pokemon is too easy, and I can feel for myself that the tension of a Nuzlocke improves my experience. But when my favorite Pokemon gets knocked out to a random crit, I can almost never summon the willpower to actually box it like I'm supposed to. That being said, I think there are ways to incorporate accessibility options while providing accessibility options that the strawman "Gamers" ignore. I think Etrian Odyssey Nexus' "Heroic" difficulty option is a great example. It is the highest difficulty but also the intended difficulty. The difficulty "below" it (Expert) is literally identical. The only difference between the two is that Heroic a) marks your save as Heroic and b) you can switch off of Heroic at any time but you can never switch *to* Heroic after starting your save file. That might seem stupid, but even that amount of friction is enough to make a system that discourages impulsive difficulty changes. That's why I personally also like when difficulty-related accessibility options can only be changed in the main menu, especially in games with permissive saving. I understand that it is a level of friction, but it is also a level of friction which prevents impulsively lowering the game speed when it isn't really about accessibility but impatience.

My perception is that developers focus on the hard-core gamers who do speed runs and practice for hours. More casual gamers are locked out of some games.

Are you fighting Little Mac at 5:45 lol Very good point about the intended experience vs competitive smash bros. Clearly Nintendo agree if they would sooner put in assist options like an invincibility leaf, than support official tournaments.

You're absolutely right on the xbox controller. I also dislike whichever one I have (xbox one? It has USB C so must be recent) as the triggers have a thin flat surface and high resistance compared to the steam deck or stadia controller. When games want you to hold that trigger for hours (racing, running) it causes me pain.

Games use to carry some what of a prestige, knowing that kid who had actually finished x game or unlocked something and wishing to be that good one day is what made me become a gamer, if I had the option to make every game accessible at my entry level skill I would never have developed any gaming skills or though processes that can be applied to real life. Way I see it what happens when you unlock everything in a old gta game, you might run round and do some stuff but you will soo get bored vs had you played through the experience and been drip fed the rewards you would appreciate and enjoy them much more

Ok, first I wouldn't be making this comment unless I already liked the video (which I do, just subbed) BUT! My inner film nerd is screaming at the comment about the "Daredevil Hallway Fight Scene as a Video Game" That scene from Daredevil as an homage to a brutal and intense revenge movie called "Oldboy" (THE KOREAN ONE). Given that Sifu deals with topics of revenge, makes sense as to why this scene specifically is referenced. Oldboy is an incredible movie, and this elements of this game seems to have really good callbacks to it. Anyway, I love your channel, and cant wait to binge the rest of it! Scene in question: kzfaq.info/get/bejne/ndyBar1nv6nchJc.html

some takes i disagree with but a great video nonetheless

I've been gaming since the 90s... I don't play difficult games I play fun games with the goal of relaxing. If a game starts to get me frustrated I step away. Life is hard enough without worrying about some boss fight and it's really hard to explain why I'm so mad to my newbie gamer GF

I think ppl often confuse difficulty with accessibility options. Arguably the main gameplay of a souls game is to get smacked and die a lot. Pretty accessible IMO, but I get it.

genuinely, the bumpers are my favorite change they made to the Series X/S controller because the Xbone’s were infinitely worse. And yeah the grip that left bumper parrying on an Xbox controller puts your hand in sucks. need to play sekiro for example with a PS style stick layout too

Hacve yiy seen the Game Awards Sifu and Sonic got robbed off the Player Chouce Award, you know what I meant.

I think SIFU already has an easy mode, if I'm not mistaken. When you die you come back stronger, right? It seems to me that it still tried to solve the accessibility issue, just maybe not in the way you wanted. I wanted to type a longer response but every time I wrote it I couldn't help but think about what you said. It really does come down to trusting the player or not. But now I'm just really curious why do I keep getting the knee jerk reaction to say "no easy mode in muh videogame"? Ultimately it is up to the individual if they choose to play things in a harder manner or an easier one. I think the reason is because when you change a game on such a fundamental level, the sense of achievement is completely lost. The point of a game rule is that they're not meant to be broken, otherwise with enough change it's a completely different game/experience. But is that really so bad? It's more like I personally would feel incredibly dissatisfied knowing that I played a game on easy mode, feeling like I robbed myself from the achievement. If players are trusted to learn for themselves that it's not rewarding to do that, then it's only ever beneficial to include assist options. I can't think of any reason that adding such a thing could ever be detrimental to the intended experience. It just feels so wrong, for example, to play a rhythm game and turn on an assist option that removes the requirement for hitting on the beat, because that's THE WHOLE POINT of the game. It almost feels stupid to have an option like that. But all that means is that I personally have no reason to use that option. This way I can still keep muh gamer elitism for making fun of people for using it while simultaneously advocating for more assist options LOL

Sadly not every controller can be the original GCN controller.

I love this video. I think what resonated the most with me is the point about why you play difficult games and why you make Sifu more difficult for yourself. It's helped me reconcile with my distaste for Elden Ring. The bosses of Souls games have never resonated with me, its the environments and level design. I think that's why I would rather go for yet another playthrough of Dark Souls because I already understand it and can make short work of the parts I don't like, allowing me to appreciate what I do play the game for.

I'm sorry I'm watching this video. Or am I?

Just make a cheat menu like the old days.

You haven't seen THE MATRIX?

This is a good video on this topic! I played for a long time in Celeste and accumulated what I remember to be something like 6,000 deaths. Sometimes I think about going back to finish it, but every time I do, I get distracted by philosophizing to myself about what difficulty in video games even means. "I might die here so I need to be careful" is an exciting sensation. It's motivating! "I have already died here, but I'm going to keep repeating this same section unless I do it correctly I guess," is unpleasant to the point of being mind-numbing. "I don't remember what this game is meant to be about, but I think it's where I start playing, face this exact same challenge again and die, and this has happened more times a day than I can count, every day for the last month," is ... well ... it feels like I must have died in real life after doing something horrible, and this game is my eternal punishment. I feel like maybe video games are like breakfast cereal. Some people want something rich in nutrients, some people want a colorful sugary cereal that is only technically not candy, and some people want to be able to say they eat a bowl full of rusty nails every morning without any milk.

The Daredevil hallway scene? This one hurts really bad. I'm not sure if it was a joke, but I want to recommend you, to watch the original Old Boy. Someone who makes such comparisons should be sure of their own media literacy.

I dislike the implication that my opinions against universal easy/assist modes are unreasonable. I like uncompromisingly hard games because they force me to, as they say, git gud. I know from experience that when a game offers me an easy way out of a challenge (save scumming, easy/assist modes, meta strats, overpowered items), I tend to take it even though it ultimately makes me enjoy the game less. Nowadays I'm better at exercising self-control and not taking the easy way out, but if uncompromisingly hard games like Wings of Vi, Getting Over It and Dark Souls hadn't taught me that I love banging my head against brick walls until they break, I don't think I would have ever realized it. I wouldn't have learned that lesson about myself and my own tastes if they had provided a wooden wall right next to the brick one. Of course I'm not saying no game should have variable difficulty, I'm just saying there ought to be a niche for uncompromising games too, because plenty of people are like me. Also what I've said doesn't apply to things like colorblind modes, subtitling, controller rebinding, QTE assists and the like, which _should_ be in every game.

5:55 what is this clip from ?

I just finished Celeste (only the bare chapters), and here is my experience: I Hated it 60-70%, and in the remaining time I wished it end as soon as possible. After i uninstalled it i kinda promised myself that I Never ever play it again. Yeah it's a 10/10 game for many many players and critics, so why I had this experience? I suck in video games big time? Nope, I'm a seasoned souls / metroidvania, roguelike player and born is 88 so belive me I played much more difficult games back them than Celeste. So let me explain why i kinda hated Celeste. Not all the time, but many times, the main story chapters are poorly balanced from the challenge perspective. Its a weird topic because I agree that difficulty is not a constanat, its a relationship, because everybody's skills are different. So "poorly balanced" is basically a subjective statement right? Actually... its not. As a product designer / game designer i encountered this many times that people think that things that are kinda subjective cannot be balanced to be approached, accesible by a wider audience. And here we are! Accessibility, assist, easy mode etc. A this is where good difficulty balancing counts. A game that is balaced on the difficulty side, do not need assist, easy mode or any accessibility, and do not need to say that "my game is meant for hard core gamers". For sure, target audiences matter, vision matter, but as i said a game can be accessible for many, without any of the features mentioned before. How so? Celeste's main chapters are not challenging, they are frustrating, because certain chapters has random challenge spikes. Like you are in a really nice flow for 2-3 screens than suck big time for like 30-60 minutes on a single one, then after you suffer through, you faceroll 3-4 screens again. Then when you kinda feel like the chapter would end, they drop another 5 screen on you, and an extra long extra challenging one at the end. Almost every chapter I left with frustration, anger, and hate, and not catharsis. (Believe me i know catharsis from beating NG+ dark souls bosses, or getting rare achivements.) So chapters are way too long, and poorly balanced, and the game expect players to go to a menu, and bring down their own difficulty. This is bad, and lazy design. Look... Celeste is an amazing game from many perspectives. The story, the UI, the visual coherence, the mechanics, platformer creativity, and so on. And i understand that it wants to represent somwhat the battle against mental problems, but its still, unbalanced. How Celeste can be better balaced (and work without assist mode)? Cut back the story chapters, or bring down the challenge a bit on certain parts, and deliver the real challenge on B, C sides and extra chapter + extra challenges. If you look at the game, basically this is what it does, but again the sotry chapters are unbalaced. An experience, which would be accessible for a wider audience, would look like a kinda constant challenge scaling on the story chapters, which trains you to the harder challenges, with containing some harder collection challenges. So difficult games are strictly delivered visions or just unbalanced games, and I believe if Celest's difficulty is a vision, the devs did not include an assist mode. Difficulty balancing is not rocket science, it's trial and error, playtesting.

" if you dont trust the player, give it an easy mode". i disagree here, i think its the opposite. If you dont trust the player to get an experience on a set paramater, then give them new paramaters.

The mountain motif from Bayo2, Celeste, & GOI is a metaphor *for* difficulty. If you want to climb a mountain you have to climb the mountain. It's Earth Bending. No different angle, no clever solution, no trickity tricks. The reason people get so offended at the suggestion of easy modes is because they feel robbed of their victory when one can win without actually improving themselves. Everest isn't impressive via elevator. I agree on accessibility features. Rebinding makes future proofing simple. Changing parry times is not allowing differently abled people to participate; it's pulling punches. That's easy mode. The mountain won't pull punches on a one armed man. If the goal is to self improvement, stick before carrot, or a story of perseverance; I'd argue that even leveling the field for the differently abled wouldn't send the right message. *TL;DR* - Difficulty = Learning - Name It Normal Mode - DeBug & Training Modes > Pulling Punches - And of course... Git Good. 💚

You can't pause souls games because they're always online and you can't pause online games. They could've enabled it for offline mode but then there will be a huge advantage to playing offline and the online player pool would be hugely diminished. Spread the word

Ps4 controller is best one :)

Heh, Sifud looks very badly, also if a game don't have any story going on for the player, maybe you shouldn't make so constipated serious, it's very boring, too boring for me buy it for 1 dollar. If anyone feel the same way but really really want to play a difficult game where you beat people up, but has a sense of humour about it, then get God Hand on an emulator, and play on Normal difficulty. good luck on normal lol. So yeah, aside the style Sifu looks like a fun game, bur leans too heavy into mono brow sirious game for serious Men ? Women ? Dogs ?