“Because accessibility touches so many components and what constitutes a challenge is highly debatable depending on who you’re talking to, making a game accessible shouldn’t make you automatically think ‘It will make the game easier.’ In my opinion, that’s a faulty assumption,” she said. Slapping an easier difficulty on an experience that tunes a few damage or health counts doesn’t necessarily facilitate a more accessible experience - and is precisely not what is often being advocated for when debates around tough games pop up. There is no industry-wide agreement on what modes should be included, what they mean and how they’re made.”Ĭhiasson’s example demonstrates how levels of difficulty are, at their best, integrated early in development and considered within the wider development. allowing players to customize their experience), they were not the same set of settings. While the mindset was similar for both approaches (i.e. “A few years ago, we also had layered difficulty settings in Shadow of the Tomb Raider. It was a decision everyone stood by and worked into their plans,” Chiasson said. “Offering a set of customizations for difficulty settings was something our Eidos-Montréal team always had in mind while making Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy. (Disclosure: the author of the story is credited in Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy as an Accessibility Speaker.) Chiasson notes the standardization of difficulty modes is impractical, especially since difficulty is relative to the player and the studio. Speaking with IGN, Accessibility Lead for Square Enix West Améliane F. Yet, because each game features its own objectives, a generalized ‘Easy Mode’ is not something the industry can, or frankly should, adopt. And when challenging events in games do occur, social media platforms like Twitter are often filled with posts advocating for easier modes. A boss may have increased health or an attack that immediately defeats the player, a level may include numerous platformer obstacles that require precise timing to jump over, and people may need to hunt down and collect certain items before they can progress. Most games are inherently designed to offer a challenge that gives players a sense of accomplishment after overcoming it. A wholesale approach to accessible game design should be taken to better let players of all disabilities and skill levels more easily play games, and it can be done without preventing players who want that challenge from experiencing any given game as they wish. But the reduction of the accessibility discussion to ‘Easy Mode’ obscures what many are actually advocating for, which is much much broader than just adding a single, easier difficulty setting. Conversely, many believe more options, which are often boiled down in online discourse to the addition of an ‘Easy Mode,’ will open games to a wider audience, allowing disabled people to effectively play and enjoy challenging games. One side argues against the inclusion of varying difficulty modes in games like From Software’s Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice or Sloclap’s Sifu, often citing artistic direction and developer’s goal to create a punishing experience, in which adding other difficulty modes would “ruin”. The discussion around difficulty and accessibility in games is often reduced to two opposing ideals.
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