"Easy" Modes in Games

[Wolf Kanno]

Eh, I am aware of the context and I phrased it as such because it is inclusive of many things. The Invinciblity Leaf in Mario games, for example, would be something akin to an "easy" mode as far as Mario would allow. In an RPG, something inbuilt that allows you to be max level and get through battles quickly is for all intents and purposes an "easy" mode.

And I don't think equating this to competitive, team-based sports is the right way to go. Obviously in that situation it's not right - but if someone is just wanting to play a game by themselves then I don't know why it should be frowned on that they play it the way that makes it most fun for them.

You missed my point though but brought up a better way to put this. Finding exploits in an RPG system is not a cheat, even if the exploit was unintended, it';s still the player learning to work the system for them. The Invincibility Leaf on the other hand is not a good design idea, it's basically a built in cheat for people who can't be bothered to put the time in to master the skills the game asks of it. Even worse, it can quickly become a crutch item as the item will always help the player complete the stages with ease, but each use basically denies the player the chance to actually master the skills needed to finish certain obstacles, meaning they'll have to resort to it when it comes again or harder obstacles present themselves.

It's like seeing a child in elementary suffer in a subject they don't like, yeah the teacher can give them a pass, and that may boost their confidence temporarily but it will hurt them in the long run as they never mastered the fundamentals of the subject. Likewise, I feel the item just hurts the players ability to get good at the game or learn to appreciate it.

I'd rather have an easy mode that may deny the player some things to spurn them on to try a higher difficulty and become better; than an item that just let's you win because a person can't learn the patience to put in the time to be better at something they say they love. I'm not against easy modes, but I don't like easy games.

I don't exactly know what cheats you're talking about, but if the creator of a game didn't want cheats usable then they wouldn't put them into the game. You can't speak for the creators intention if they have offered you things like a "god mode" "infinite ammo" "spawn *X* vehicle" etc.

If it's something modded into a game that the author didn't create then I guess you can make a case for it being detrimental to the intended product, but that is the trade off you have to make to get amazing mods for games like Skyrim, which in a lot of ways enhance games above and beyond what the original intention was.

To be fair, many of the cheats and codes of games from the old days were never intended to be used. They existed in the code as shortcuts for the designers and play testers to skip around and check quality control. They caught on, and many games in the future added them in since the kids who grew up playing those games and exploiting the codes thought it was fun, but I feel there is a strong difference between mods that balance and add a few fun things to games as opposed to adding an ability that just lets the player win. I don't imagine Skyrim would be a fun to play if you could enter god mode where all your attacks are one-hit-kills, you can't lose health and you succeed at every attempt at theft and persuasion with no risk of screwing up. Might be fun the first time you try it to dick around, but I doubt most players would ever finish the game like that.

Mods in my mind is a different beast, if you want to play a mod that adds in an easy mode that's fine and can be great for people who only want to enjoy the story of the game, but I feel that cheats that rob the player from learning the game mechanics or acquiring the skills needed to be a better player hurt you more in the long run.

[Shauna]

I don't think comparing video games to school is fair either. Videos games are entertainment. Fun. It would be great if school was also those things, but that's not its primary function. I am not saying that everything has to be super easy and people should get passes on every walk of life regardless of skill/effort.

A lot of people seem to approach this subject with "I wouldn't find X fun, so I don't know why anyone else would either". By saying this, you are dictating what people should find fun based on your own opinions. If that person feels an appreciation for a game, you can't say that they didn't appreciate it because they played it in a certain way. You may think that in some cases they are cheating themselves out of a "better experience", but that's up to them to make those choices based on what they want. Their experience doesn't affect yours, and if they got everything they wanted out of their experience, then good for them.



I suppose we can go back and forth over the finer details, but it really comes down to this: You say yourself that you don't like easy games. That is completely fine. You do you. You are not wrong in not liking them. But not everyone is you. Let them do them. They are not wrong if they do like easy games.

All I'm getting at is let people play their single player games however they heck they want. It makes no odds to anyone else.

[FFNut]

I hope nobody got me misunderstood. I don't mind an easy mode either, I just don't want people to call me an idiot when I ask for advise beating a hard boss in a boss fight on hard because they beat him on easy and tell me to just use easy mode. If you are going for a challenge it defeats the gaming experience.

[Skyblade]

I hope nobody got me misunderstood. I don't mind an easy mode either, I just don't want people to call me an idiot when I ask for advise beating a hard boss in a boss fight on hard because they beat him on easy and tell me to just use easy mode. If you are going for a challenge it defeats the gaming experience.

I don't think anyone disagrees with you there. If someone refuses to play on the more challenging settings, I'm not going to listen to them complain about the lack of challenge.

[Pumpkin]

I play on easy mode but I don't complain about lack of challenge. I might comment on "It was easy even for me" when playing a game without a difficulty setting but it's not complaining. I prefer it that way

[Wolf Kanno]

I don't think comparing video games to school is fair either. Videos games are entertainment. Fun. It would be great if school was also those things, but that's not its primary function. I am not saying that everything has to be super easy and people should get passes on every walk of life regardless of skill/effort.

A lot of people seem to approach this subject with "I wouldn't find X fun, so I don't know why anyone else would either". By saying this, you are dictating what people should find fun based on your own opinions. If that person feels an appreciation for a game, you can't say that they didn't appreciate it because they played it in a certain way. You may think that in some cases they are cheating themselves out of a "better experience", but that's up to them to make those choices based on what they want. Their experience doesn't affect yours, and if they got everything they wanted out of their experience, then good for them.

The problem I have here is that you're doing the same thing you're accusing some gamers are doing, which is creating a value statement of what a game should be and arguing that people who see it differently are somehow wrong about it because it's less inclusive to your ideals. I'm simply arguing that games can be more than mindless entertainment and can have value beyond the play period. I simply point out that by relegating all of the medium to this ideal of mindless fun subverts the medium's potential to be something more. I'm not arguing about inclusiveness, I'm arguing that games have the potential to make us into better people and that by reducing it to mindless fun is not the answer, because some people don't want games to be anything more than mindless fun. My question is that how is reducing everything to the order of people who play purely for "mindless fun" any better of a solution than people who argue games should be "balls hard difficult"? Either way you're still faced with the dilemma of reducing the entire medium to favor one kind of player over another. Adding difficulty modes is obviously the best solution and I feel everyone is pretty much in favor of that as a solution.

Now if you're angry cause people may judge you for playing games a particular way then I would argue that his is simply human nature. One should understand that people are by nature cliquey and view reality from a contrasting filter, so it really shouldn't be surprise you'll find people who may act all high and mighty one way or the other based on views. That's just our nature, it's not the system that's the problem it's the people who are running it. It's our nature to judge the world around us as an "us vs. them" filter, it's how we discover who we are and build our identities. The fact we can't leave it at that but instead try to enforce our own feeble and pathetic attempts of placing objectivity on a chaotic subjective existence is simply the fault of our own meager evolution as a species. You'll be judged by assholes, just realize they're assholes and move on knowing their ideal world is not the same as yours.

[Shauna]

I don't think I've said at any point that games should only ever be mindless entertainment. Just that the option should be there if people want that in their games. People want to overcome the challenges? Fine. People want an easy ride? Fine. Not at all saying that challenge is bad, merely that challenge does not hold the same entertainment value for everyone. Not saying that only one side can be catered to because as you say, it just leaves the opposite problem.

Also this isn't about me. My views on what make video games enjoyable actually align very closely with yours. I just appreciate that my views are not universal. :3

[Fynn]

This kind of plays into that feeling I've been having recently. There's much talk on the Internet of what games should and shouldn't be, and can't we just have a variety of games that will be different from each other, so that a large variety of tastes can be catered to? Your most despised game can be an abomination to you, but it can also be someone's favorite and that's okay. SO you dislike JRPG tropes, but there's a bunch of people who just live for that stuff. And I've seen essay after essay about how X genre is ruining gaming and only genre Y knows what's up and all games should have the spiffy Z factor that genre Y has.

And it's all so pointless and dumb.

[Shauna]

Yeah. Pretty much. xD

[Skyblade]

This kind of plays into that feeling I've been having recently. There's much talk on the Internet of what games should and shouldn't be, and can't we just have a variety of games that will be different from each other, so that a large variety of tastes can be catered to? Your most despised game can be an abomination to you, but it can also be someone's favorite and that's okay. SO you dislike JRPG tropes, but there's a bunch of people who just live for that stuff. And I've seen essay after essay about how X genre is ruining gaming and only genre Y knows what's up and all games should have the spiffy Z factor that genre Y has.

And it's all so pointless and dumb.

Of course it's pointless and dumb. It's the Internet.

[Pheesh]

I don't think comparing video games to school is fair either. Videos games are entertainment. Fun. It would be great if school was also those things, but that's not its primary function. I am not saying that everything has to be super easy and people should get passes on every walk of life regardless of skill/effort.

A lot of people seem to approach this subject with "I wouldn't find X fun, so I don't know why anyone else would either". By saying this, you are dictating what people should find fun based on your own opinions. If that person feels an appreciation for a game, you can't say that they didn't appreciate it because they played it in a certain way. You may think that in some cases they are cheating themselves out of a "better experience", but that's up to them to make those choices based on what they want. Their experience doesn't affect yours, and if they got everything they wanted out of their experience, then good for them.

The problem I have here is that you're doing the same thing you're accusing some gamers are doing, which is creating a value statement of what a game should be and arguing that people who see it differently are somehow wrong about it because it's less inclusive to your ideals. I'm simply arguing that games can be more than mindless entertainment and can have value beyond the play period. I simply point out that by relegating all of the medium to this ideal of mindless fun subverts the medium's potential to be something more. I'm not arguing about inclusiveness, I'm arguing that games have the potential to make us into better people and that by reducing it to mindless fun is not the answer, because some people don't want games to be anything more than mindless fun. My question is that how is reducing everything to the order of people who play purely for "mindless fun" any better of a solution than people who argue games should be "balls hard difficult"? Either way you're still faced with the dilemma of reducing the entire medium to favor one kind of player over another. Adding difficulty modes is obviously the best solution and I feel everyone is pretty much in favor of that as a solution.

I don't understand how you correlate difficulty with a game's ability to transcend the genre or excel. The game that immediately springs to mind when I think of gaming carrying over from "beyond the play period" is The Last of Us. It's not my all time favourite game, but after I was done with it I could take a step back and say "that is an example of what games can accomplish at their best." It has the emotion and storytelling of a great book or film, coupled with the long, "your struggle is my struggle" investment that games provide better than any medium. Those things combined make that game what it is and changing the difficulty setting doesn't diminish either one. Some people simply prefer to get through the game without breaking a sweat and others want an extremely challenging experience. This is another reason why gaming is a potentially superior medium; it allows itself to be catered to a wide ranging audience.

Chances are that a lot of people also have a different viewpoint to me on what constitutes an influential experience from a game. That guy who played Dark Souls with a guitar hero controller probably had a similar feeling of unforgettable accomplishment as the grown adult who beat The Last of Us on easy, and both are equally valid and can't be diminished by other people.

Games are meant to be fun. Mindless fun, thought provoking fun, stressful, relaxing, emotional, shared, all of those and more depending on the game played and who played it. What I find stressful other people may find easy, and what I find emotional other people may find boring. It's not up to any one person to dictate how a game should be received by everyone (not even the developer), which I feel like is the ground you've been treading very close to. Honestly, who cares if people cheat their way through a game? You enjoyed it, if they didn't and you feel they could have then simply feel sorry for them and move on.

Also, in regards to ffnut's point about asking for help and being told to lower the difficulty; it takes less than one second to ignore bad advice. The internet is full of it and it's probably not worth giving everything you read on it credence.

[Ayen]

I have nothing against easy mode because the majority of the games I play are on easy when I have the choice. I think the only game I ever upped the difficulty on was Evil Zone because I was legit that good. I don't like when a game penalizes you for playing on easy to where you don't even get to play the whole game (I'm looking at you, Castlevania 64), or when they lock you out of the other modes after you choose it (Hello, Devil May Cry), but luckily those instances are rare.