Quick Disclaimer: I talk a bit about accessibility and accounting for disabled players. I’m super not an expert on this topic! If I made any missteps in discussing this issue, please let me know.
Last week saw the release of Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice, the new game from Dark Souls developer From Software. As is typically the case when they release a game, there has been a lot of discussion about video game difficulty. It’s also the first From Software title to release since I’ve become a fan of their games. The Dark Souls series transformed my taste in games and taught me that I can enjoy hard games, and that’s been a genuinely positive impact on my life. But as the difficulty discourse circulates, and with the personal experience I have with the friends who have very diverse gaming tastes, I’ve realized that I have a lot of complicated thoughts on this topic.
To summarize: I don’t think From Software is obligated to provide an “easy mode”, but I think that Sekiro would be a better game if it had one. Moreover, I think Sekiro would be even better yet if it had a smart and flexible approach to difficulty options, likely something more complex than “easy mode”.
It would be better because it would prove that the soul of a FromSoft game is not its particular level of difficulty, but the way it builds a world around exploring and struggling, around discovering and overcoming challenges. The folks at From use precise level design and careful difficulty tuning to achieve that end goal, but in my opinion, they’re only delivering that experience to a narrow subset of players. Whether we admit it or not, From Software games are geared towards a relatively specific kind of gamer.
Difficulty vs. Accesibility
It’s important to me that I talk about this in a way that’s agnostic about disability. While it’s obvious that accessibility options make games easier for some folks, disability and difficulty intersect in complicated ways. Implying that something is “too hard for disabled players” is, well, incredibly shitty. Disability is a factor that should be addressed with accessibility settings, and is only tangentially related to the idea of having options for tweaking the mechanical difficulty of the game. Moreover, I think my points about difficulty can be made without implying that specifically disabled players are the ones in need of an “easy mode”. Because many of them aren’t, and many able players are.
Regardless, From Software games are only playable by folks with a particular set of video game skills. There are barriers to entry in terms of coordination, reaction times, observational efficiency, patience, free time, and so on. Sekiro and its peers have a fairly narrow audience.
Essentially, I imagine an alternate-reality version of myself who is just a little bit less coordinated, or a little bit slower to learn patterns, or a little bit slower to interpret attack windups (this is already hard for me). This version of me might have the same enthusiasm going in, but would be desperately annoyed by this game. Alternate Me would want, I don’t know, just one more resurrection. Or maybe just a little bit bigger timing window for deflecting attacks. And if Alternate Me had an option he could toggle, or even an in-game ability that enabled those things, he’d pull through. Maybe that’s all he needs.
But wait, you say, “I have a counterargument!” Well I bet you do! I’ve heard many of them, the majority of which are easy to agree with on some level but are fundamental oversimplifications. So I’d like to get out ahead of those and discuss some of the most common arguments I’ve seen for why Sekiro should have one and only one difficulty level.
“Not every game has to be for everyone”
Well, yeah, absolutely! Everyone has different tastes and that’s totally okay. But here’s what bothers me: what factors should make a game “not for you”? Is it that the game doesn’t appeal to my interests? Or is it that the game outright excludes me by simply being too difficult to complete? To use another medium as an example: should we translate books into other languages, or simply demand that folks put an inordinate amount of time and effort into learning the necessary skills to read them? We should probably just translate them! It’s okay to not have the skills needed to get the original experience.
Would I have played and beaten the new Wolfenstein games if they’d only offered the toughest difficulty option? Honestly, no. Because I’m not that great at shooters. But I did get to play them, because they offered a difficulty I could get through without frustration. If they hadn’t offered “normal” and easier modes, then I wouldn’t have played them; not because of my disinterest, but because of their exclusivity.
So if you, for example, don’t like visual novels, no problem! That’s fine! But if visual novels exclude you directly in some way, then that fucking sucks! And I don’t think that kind of exclusivity is something that devs should want people to experience. In practice, some games won’t be for everyone. But ideally, you should be choosing to pass on big AAA experiences because they don’t appeal to you, not because they (and/or their communities) actively gatekeep you.
“Difficulty is a fundamental part of the design”
This is true! I agree. But difficulty isn’t the only factor here. If difficulty was the only factor, then the game wouldn’t be about a cool-ass one-armed shinobi fighting droves of samurai. Setting, story, and aesthetic aren’t just window dressing for challenging experiences, they’re fundamental to why the challenge is satisfying. If all that matters is difficulty, then why bother with all these gorgeous settings and animations? Perhaps you could just play a game with basic shapes, and when they change colors you have to press a certain button real fast. “Dude, have you beaten Rhombus yet? That boss is crazy!”
But that’s obviously not a reasonable argument. It’s not the pure mechanical elements that make it satisfying. For example, you don’t have to go far to see folks gushing about the oft-misspelled Mikiri Counter skill, in which you can stomp an impending thrust attack to the ground and perform a glorious counterattack. Pulling those off feels great. Not just because they require good timing, but also because they look cool as fuck and make you feel like a badass ninja. It’s not about pure, abstract difficulty. It’s about the intersection of challenge and fantasy.
Games don’t just challenge us, they put us in a context where overcoming arbitrary challenges is dramatic and thrilling. This is even true on the opposite side of the genre aisle. For example, take the Ace Attorney games: just look at the facial expressions, sound effects, and animations and you’ll see what I mean.
“Having an easy mode might ruin the experience of those who are uncertain about the challenge”
This is perhaps the most baffling argument I’ve seen. To me, it feels like game design elitism without any sense of creativity. In a perfect world, the game itself knows the gamer so well that it gives them the exact transcendent experience they want without any prompting. It just knows how to adjust itself to meet their needs.
That’s hard, of course, so instead a lot of games simply offer different difficulty levels. Some, like Shadow of the Tomb Raider, split difficulty into multiple options that can be customized independently or in preset groups. Others, like Celeste, simply provide a togglable mode with a ton of options and sliders that put all the power in the player’s hands. When we say Sekiro should “add an easy mode”, what we mean more generally is that it should provide difficulty options. Plenty of game designers are savvy enough to figure out how to intelligently introduce difficulty variation. Saying that an easy mode would ruin the experience of people who choose it is really just a failure of imagination. If that’s truly the concern, there are plenty of more interesting ways to address the problem.
And conversely, if the devs are clear about which experience is the bespoke, intended one, most players who would have a positive time with that mode will gravitate towards it anyways. If the developers themselves were saying “we shouldn’t include less skilled players, because then other players might ruin their own experiences”, then sure, maybe that’s a real concern. But hearing it from players themselves, who don’t really have business policing the experience of other players, seems disingenuous. This brings me to my next point.
“Designers have artistic intent that should be respected”
This is, once again, not wrong at all on the surface. But fundamental to this argument is the idea that designers shouldn’t have to think about players who are differently capable than themselves or their target player base. And I’d argue that developers of AAA games should absolutely think and care about that, because it helps them reach more people. From Software’s games aren’t niche because they’re intentionally trying to have a small player community; they’re niche because they design along a precise skill level. That might be fine, but it doesn’t mean that their games wouldn’t be improved by finding ways to offer their experience to more people.
“Consistent difficulty creates a shared experience”
This argument might be the most illusory one of all. Having played so much of the Souls games, it’s hard to deny that mentioning certain encounters invokes a universal understanding between players. Ornstein and Smough, The Pursuer, Father Gascoigne, Pontiff Sulyvahn. To those who’ve played the associated games, these names often conjure potent memories. But the consistency of these experiences is only skin deep. Sure, we all technically fought those same bosses. But we probably had different builds going into the fight. And maybe I found a cheese strat online. And maybe you summoned an ally to help you win.
The point is, I could do a crossword puzzle with only my wits and you could do the same one using the internet to research every clue, and we’d still have done the same puzzle. That doesn’t mean we had the same experience, or that we overcame the same difficulties. And our differing experiences doesn’t mean that we can’t still bond over having completed the same challenge; if anything, it gives us more to talk about.
Closing Thoughts
In the end, my pie-in-the-sky vision for a better version of Sekiro would be something like an “adaptive difficulty” toggle. Those who want the base experience need only leave it off. Those who would like the game to shift in response to their adventure can enable it. It would make subtle changes to things like enemy attack animation speed, deflection timing windows, damage dealt by attacks, drop rates of money or items. It would make sure you’re always struggling, but never quite getting truly stuck. It might offer hints that remind you which other routes you haven’t explored yet. It might curtail or disable systems like Dragonrot. It might reduce resource costs for items and upgrades. It might even let you freeze it at whatever difficulty it has adapted to so far.
Do all those things take a lot of work on the part of the devs? Absolutely! And talented as they are, they’d probably come up with much cleverer ways of implementing difficulty options. Ultimately, I think the true question here is how we can take more innovative and flexible approaches to game difficulty. It should be obvious that accounting for a broader player base will incur more cost and more planning. But more difficulty options would absolutely make Sekiro an even better game; not necessarily for me, but for Alternate Me and lots of other players! That’s why this is worth talking about. And if anyone thinks that excluding those players for the sake of some sort of artistic purity or so that they can be sure that their buddy put up with the exact same shit they did in a fight, then maybe they’re the one who’s being entitled about the experience they think they deserve.
Note: I ended up writing a stupid amount, so apparently this hit a nerve. I don’t actually expect anyone to read it. But tl;dr, watch this video about dark souls 2 difficulty: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MM2dDF4B9a4 . You watch it? Good. Sekiro does that too. OK, on with the novel.
Have you watched someone who is “bad at games” play this? Cause this is the first FromSoft game where the difficulty argument has had any merit to me. In souls games you had difficulty modifiers in the gameplay: messages, npc summons, player summons, and usually a ton of items that let you decrease or increase different mechanics to your liking. Sekiro is the first game that seemed to remove all of that. You want more health: beat a boss. More damage: beat a boss. So, it’s the first time I’ve ever actually listened to these sorts of arguments. Which brings me back to my first question: have you found someone who legitimately wanted to try this game, gave it a real attempt, and after a few hours gave up? Before starting a discussion on fixing a problem, it seems important to verify there is a problem.
I ask because I’ve been gaming my entire life and my girlfriend is hot garbage at games. Plays mobile games and Skyrim, you probably know the type. But she saw me playing this and thought it looked fun and pretty and wanted to try. I warned her about the difficulty, but she tried it anyway. She’s progressed about 10% slower than me. That’s it. And it’s because FromSoft are better game designers than I think you give them credit for.
For some context, I play FromSoft games because I love the combat. In DS1, 2, and 3 I played close range melee because that was the hardest, “truest”, way to play. I went into Sekiro with that mindset, and given that you said you played DS, I suspect you did too. It’s hard to view the game from an outside perspective, but watching her play was quite eye opening.
She saw Sekiro and thought played in a way that felt safe that she loves: stealth. Watching her play was infuriating because she wasn’t just running in and fighting. But as time went on, I realized a couple of things. One, these maps are incredibly designed. While I would “run and gun”, she would walk in slowly, analyze everything, and plan her attack. Most of the time she could stealth kill everyone. And when she couldn’t, she ran away to try again, which is incredibly effective. One of the important part of FromSoft games is that the AI is dumb. And that’s by design. Sekiro is no exception. You get lots of second chances. And because she was careful, she never died to non-bosses. In the same point in the game as me she had loads more gold and experience to buy items and skills. Making the game easier.
But who cares about that right? It’s the bosses in Souls games that matter. So, let’s talk about them. I assume you’ve played through Sekiro once, yes? Try it again. Don’t worry, you’ll breeze through it on a second go. Pay attention to how difficult the starting bosses really are. And more importantly, are they there to challenge you, or to teach you something while making you feel accomplished. The tutorial boss makes sure you know how to parry. The second boss makes sure you know how to dodge and jump on people’s heads. If you know the skills the game is teaching you, the boss themselves is trivial. Next is the Ogre. This is basically a dark souls fight in that you just dodge and attack. If you got dodging down, then it’s easy. But what if you don’t? That’s fair, that grab is brutal. Then you explore. And learn that it’s scared of fire. But you can’t do anything with fire. So maybe your exploration is rewarded with a new area. You know where this is going. You say the game should give you hints on where to go next. It does. If you can’t move forward, move somewhere else. *It’s a MetroidVania game*. You have a meticulously designed world to explore and exploring rewards you in ways that make the game easier. And exploring itself is not hard, it’s fun. But if you’ve already “got gud”, you can rush ahead.
Back to the bosses. If you went to the estates, your next boss is the Shinobi killer, which teaches you the Mikukubu counter. ( I admit, this should have been a default skill. Without it the game really is too hard. But in FromSoft’s defense, a.) front loading the game with a bunch of skills is supper off-putting, so it’s a difficult balancing act and b.) It’s like the second thing you can unlock and makes it clear that it will be super useful. ) Then you fight the drunk guy. Again, if you want to be a masochist you can run in and do a 10 on 1 fight. But my GF feared that. So she stealth everyone, ran away, and repeated. Then stealthed the Drunk and got help from the NPC. This is the first hard fight in the game, and Sekiro has a massive difficulty slider on it.
Back at the main world, you have a samurai mini-boss who starts to warm you up to getting a feel for the “real” combat (I’ll get back to this). Then the snake, which is just stealth, and finally our first real boss, the dude on the horse. This is like the Gaping Dragon in DS1, super intimidating, not hard at all. Makes the player feel empowered. And once again, if you’re having trouble, explore. You’ll find NPCs telling you animals are afraid of loud noises and, oh hey, a firecracker attachment you can find. Once again, you have a difficulty slider. You can parry everything the horse guy throws at you, or you can scare his horse and wack him. And if you get hit, it’s ok, he does very little damage. Next is the bull. I’ll be honest, I don’t have a good reason for the bull, but once again, if you’re having trouble, explore, get firecrackers, and you can kill him pretty easily.
Lastly on my list, you have the seven spears and the…purple dude who kicks you. Lets start with the spear guy. If you’re like me, you’ve already killed Lady Butterfly because you hate yourself and like dying. If you’re my girlfriend, you have not. You know what pops up when you first fight the Seven Spear guy? Another tutorial box reminding you a.) bosses need to have health lowered and b.) on hey, if you dodge and attack that sometimes helps. This is the NINTH boss so far, and we’re still in the tutorial. It also is there to make sure you learned the MachuPicchu counter if you skipped the Estates.
And lastly, the purple dude. This was where my girlfriend first started to get frustrated. On the tenth boss. Because he doesn’t have a gimmick. You just have to get the combat. The ebb and flow of attack, deflect, attack, and most importantly: be aggressive. And this is going to be the cornerstone of my argument: Sekiro isn’t difficult if you “get” the combat. And the combat is very different than any other game. If you are not aggressive, you will not beat this game. But it’s at this boss where you finally have to understand how the game works to proceed. The 10th boss some 10-15 hours into the game. I had to tell my girlfriend that she was sitting around holding block when she should have been attacking. Once I did that, she “got it”. And don’t get me wrong, I think there’s something to that being too hard. None of the bosses up to this point taught you that. All you had was flavor text on every other loading screen saying: “be aggressive”. I wish there was a better way to teach it. But I honestly couldn’t think of a way to improve on the way FromSoft did it.
As an aside, you notice that up until this point all but 2 of the mini-bosses can be stealth killed? Once again, a difficulty slider. If you like stealth, or want an easier game, Sekiro is happy to give you 50% off the first 9 mini-bosses health. Want a challenge? Go straight in.
Now I’m not saying there are not hard bosses in this game. There are. But to get to them, you have to go through 10-15 hours of Sekiro teaching you how to Sekiro. And once you know how to Sekiro, you have all the tools you need to beat the game from any reasonable starting level (more on that latter). I think the best way to express this is to go through your possible solutions.
Enemy attack animation speed: This starts with the assumption that you should be able to react to attacks on your first try. Which shows a fundamental misunderstanding of FromSoft games. I suspect the reason they have such a hard reputation is because you learn enemy attack patters by getting hit or dying. Which, in most games, is super punishing. In Sekiro it’s 25 seconds of your life to run back to the boss. Honest question: could you deflect lady butterfly on your first try? I sure couldn’t. I got hit. I got hit again. And died. And died again. And then I got it. I wasn’t reacting to all her attacks. I was reacting to her first telegraph for which attack pattern she was going to use and remembering the pattern, not unlike a rhythm game. I would encourage you to pay attention to the wind up on bosses first attack. They are hilariously long. Making them longer would not help.
Deflection timing windows: Go fight the centipede again. See how forgiving the deflect window is. He hit’s you 10 times in a flurry, and if you miss any you get hit. Do you really think you got all 10 down perfectly? Probably, not, but the game gives it to you. The deflect timing in this game is really forgiving *if you have the rhythm down*. If it was any longer you could spam parry. Guess and hope. I would argue if you’re spamming and hoping and getting lucky, you’re not having fun. You don’t feel like you beat the boss, you feel like you got lucky. On the other hand, if you remember the rhythm, the parry timing feels downright generous.
Damage dealt by attacks: This is literally an item for this. You use the items in this game? I didn’t. I am bot a masochist and I have serious “too good to use” syndrome. But I shouldn’t have because they drop sugar in this game like a billionaire dropping singles at a strip club. My girlfriend did use them. Holy shit are they broken. I swear the stealth one makes you 100% invisible and I’m pretty sure the attack one doubles your power. Seriously, bosses go down in no time.
Drop rates of money or items: This is a skill you can buy. Again, FromSoft has done the “difficulty through game design” by letting you decide to grind enemies to get more gold and items. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not a fan of grinding, but how else would you add this to the game while keeping the feel of the game alive.
So what’s my point on this psychotically long comment no one will read? That once again FromSoft has delivered on something no other game company on earth does well: difficulty sliders through gameplay. They have a tutorial second only to Portal and once you’ve been taught the combat you’re still handed several ways to change the difficulty. If you could lower boss health at a menu you wouldn’t feel like you overcame a challenge. But if you stealth kill half their health and use a Sugar to lower their posture, raise yours, and increase your attack, you feel like you used the tools available to overcome a real challenge. Even if behind the scenes you’ve effectively done the same thing.
Now I don’t think this game is for everyone. A 10-year-old could not beat this. You do need some reflexes. But given that this game is rated M for 17+, I don’t buy that argument. This game is accessible to a very wide audience, the only thing stopping people from picking it up is its reputation, which is perpetuated by articles like this, which start with the assertion that the game is “too hard for the casual players”, and tries to bring it down.