Game Theory: Hard Mode is a LIE! (Sekiro Easy Mode Controversy)

The release of the second dose of Shadows Die Two has sparked a lot of debate in the gaming community about whether

game

s should have

easy

mode

s or not. If I pay for a

game

, do I have the right to see it through to completion, or is it ultimately the designers' prerogative? as for the experience they specifically want to create, screw the players, are they difficult games, just unnecessary controls or are they actually forcing players to face adversity in an effort to create a truly rewarding experience when they finally succeed today, I'm not here to actually take a position on that controversial issue.

No, oh wait. Internet. I've learned my lesson. I've stepped on these types of landmines too many times in the past, so no, Mr. Bob, I'm here to tell you a much less controversial statement. you're just not as good at games as you think it's so bad - it's worse it's true it's a fact it's a fact well hello internet welcome to game

theory

where today I'm not here to tell you to be good I'm here to tell you that they get better, so this

easy

mode

controversy

really disappears in passing, it seems like every time a software is released, the debate about the difficulty of the game just disappears, which makes sense, honestly, I mean, this is a company that literally made a name for themselves by giving their games taglines like prepare to die edition the entire software library the entire brand of this company has been created by simply taunting gamers into trying to beat their games they're like that older brother constantly giving you He grabs your arm and hits you and tells you why you turned yourself in why you and your son stop, stop God, give these guys an inch and they take a mile, my God, Sakura, even though it's the game that made the dam will burst quite a bit.

Frankly, what used to be just a few discussion threads here and there suddenly erupted and flooded the gaming community with a full-blown

controversy

that spawned dozens of articles and YouTube videos, all debating the pros and cons of including controls. difficulty sliders in your game because ladies and gentlemen, welcome to 2019 and if there is outrage, my goodness, there will be outrage. Oh, and by the way, you're a terrible person and you should be ashamed of yourself if you chose the wrong side. The unfortunate thing is that apparently they are both. wrong sides, so today I am NOT going to choose a side.

I'm here to say that this is all nonsense because you've probably been playing on easy modes your entire life without even realizing it and that's not an opinion, hell, it is. just a

theory

. Oh, game theory, it's just a fact, it's literally a fact. If you read articles on sites like Danis Sutra or listen to talks at events like GDC, it becomes clear that game developers lie to you, artificially fabricating scenarios that increase tension. they make you feel better in the game than you really are and some of the most beloved games in history with best reviews have difficulty sliders that you didn't even realize, it seems like this has been a problem that's been waiting to explode forever.

I mean, let's be honest. Games haven't always been kind to people looking to calibrate the challenge to a level they're comfortable with. I mean Doom and Wolfenstein are famous for naming are easier difficulty settings things like you need a wet nurse or yellow belly R Us, for every way to hurt me badly, there's an equally embarrassing way Can I play dad? where your epic hero is suddenly shown wearing a baby hat and sucking on a pacifier in the visual embarrassment category, meanwhile, there are games like Metal Gear Solid 5 and I Want to Be the Guy that forces players to take the more difficult routes. easy to wear chicken hats or bows in their hair as symbols of their weakness as a player. watch video Kajima, this chicken hat here is why you can't work at Konami anymore my friend, where you wear a chicken hat of shame Konami saw four dollars worth of wasted microtransactions, people pay for this kind of stuff right now , but these are all small things, you swallow your pride, move on and don't have to deal with it too much anymore.

The worst situations here are the moments where the actual endings or gameplay are dated behind the

hard

er difficulty settings: Twisted Metal; for example, it would only give you one level and one boss to play before a stop sign appeared on the screen with the words, no losers, oh wow, why offer the mode if you only offer me one level to play? So sometimes the alternative to offering the full game wasn't much better. I will never forget playing Star Wars Shadows of the Empire for the n64 as When I was a kid I wasn't good at third person shooters so I lowered the difficulty to easy only to get to the end of a very long game and discover that actually I wouldn't know if my character had survived the final battle until I replayed the entire game on

hard

er modes, so you know what I did.

Internet. I played the whole game again and yeah I got good and I saw that the renderer survived and it was disappointing but I got really good. in game the same with Superman 64, yes Superman F in 64, one of the worst games ever printed on a cartridge, Superman 64 actually hides its true ending behind multiple difficulty settings and it's not just the normal difficulty setting , but if you want to see the ending of this amazing game you have to put it on hard mode let me tell you as someone who beat this game three times three times to get that sweet ending cinematic I'm worth it I mean look look this camera works like The word camerawork is too mundane a word for what you're seeing behind me on the screen right now.

What this is can only be described as art. Hmm, it brings tears to my eyes just thinking about the time I experienced this as a child. The YouTube videos seemed about as artistic as the ending of Superman 64. Simply put, since the early days of gaming, many franchises have fostered some sort of negative attitude towards easy modes, they have given rise to this mentality of getting good health , but it's Hypocritical, it's all smoke and mirrors because behind the scenes they've been inventing these secret ways to make us think we're better at these games than we really are, admitted Ken Levine, one of the creators behind Bioshock, in a tweet now removed. that the first enemy shot in bioshock will always miss quote from twitter the first shots in bioshock always missed that was the design i think it was fully implemented quote unquote it was a way to prevent players from dying out of nowhere and instead give them a warning be on guard and start reacting and that's not all Bioshock would do to help the player, according to another designer, this time Paul Hellqvist quotes again on the bio shots, if you had taken your last point of damage you would be invulnerable for about a to two seconds so you have more barely survived moments and if you thought that was enough Bioshock was how my beer waits because we're not done yet, even the life bar in this game was a lie on easy and medium difficulties that you can actually take. one hit more than your health bar could make you believe that the first hit that would kill you would reduce your remaining health to one.

The only way to disable this in the game is to play it on hard or survival mode. day Bioshock is one of the most praised FPS games ever, guess who else is working on these little life bar hacks according to game design and ArenaNet lead Jennifer schürrle Assassin's Creed, where the ultimate hell is courage, simply Don't be more to give you the feeling that you have survived the encounter, oh yes, and doom, you know the game that openly mocks players for choosing easier difficulties, yes, that one really has systems that artificially increase your threat levels , they increase your guard and give you more staying power as your health depletes, meaning a health bar that looks like it only has 10% left could actually be closer to 20 percent full, according to Jennifer.

These are dating mechanics designed to build tension in combat, giving the player a feeling of barely surviving. difficult situations while keeping them safer than you think end of quote according to Schürrle there's actually a biochemical reason why these mechanics give players a positive feeling something we've actually covered here in game theory before quote again endorphin rushes are something we've all experienced at some point Think about the great feeling of overcoming a difficult situation and the sharp focus that follows, it feels good and she's not the only one who talks this way during a speech opening at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco.

Sid Meier, yes, Sid Meier, the guy whose name is In addition to every civilization game, yes, he said that this game roll is a psychological experience in real life, you don't always win, however, in the world of games are almost always won, the psychological phenomenon is that the player does not really complain. About that, I don't get letters saying, "You know, dear, sit down, I loved your game, but I won too much, giving the player extra health or making their weapons do more damage without revealing these things to the player, these are all ways of let them win." more often without making it seem like the game is necessarily easier and that seems to be the key idea here without revealing it to the player because apparently when you do it you create controversy it's like the second row easy mode issue that came up but I'm here .

The big complaint that you people who are always looking to pick a fight have been going into overdrive in the comments right now. All of this is built into these games. Sure they may be lies, but its standard systems for that game, so it's not like I'm suddenly playing. an easier game due to a normal difficulty is still a normal difficulty, even if my health meter and the production of my weapons may be lying to me, these are just systems built into the game to make them more exciting and not necessarily easier, and yes, you know what You're right, or at least you would be right if many of these games didn't automatically correct themselves based on your performance.

It's actually called dynamic difficulty adjustment. Let me tell you, it's everywhere in the original Crash Bandicoot series games, for example these. The games are brooding and require precise platforming and complex 3D environments, the first game in particular was especially unforgiving, which is why in a massive article looking at the evolution of the Crash series, co-creators Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin were very honest about how they corrected this challenge. In later installments I quote and it is big so forgive me if I read it here we had realized that if a novice player died many times we could give him a cou aku which are the masks that serve as health and the crash bandicoot series in At the beginning of one round, they had a better chance of progressing and we realized that if you died a lot running off a rock, we could slow the rock down a little each time, if you died too much a fruit box would suddenly appear. it became a continuous point eventually everyone was successful at shit our mantra became helping the weaker players without changing the game for the better players we call all this dynamic difficulty adjustments didi I told you this was important and in The moment we did it was pretty Nothing, this would lead to later crash games being inclusive and perfectly balanced games.

They became good players, bad players. Everyone loved crash games. They never realized it because everyone was playing a slightly different game balanced for their specific needs. I just want to say that says it all. There is finished episode, except no finished episode. I need to give you more examples that just fail. It would be one thing if Crash were the only game to use this DDA system, but that's not the case. Let's take another look at Bioshock again based on this threat on Twitter quotes. Did we get on the Big Daddies' nerves after the player's death to avoid a spiral of failure?

We did it with the older sister in the bio, because her choosing fights and summoning enemies suddenly become easier based on whether you died or not, which isn't as weird as it could be. I think the Silent Hill series is about fear coming from a feeling of helplessness. You rarely have a weapon in these games and most of the time your best option is to just keep going. Silent Hill Shattered Memories had these nightmare sequences where the character would be chased by Little Niemann maybe looking at things called raw shocks, but according to game designer Sam Barlow, for every death you had due to raw shocks and every time you had to respond, the eyes are actually robbed of one of their senses and I mean senses like smell.

Listening to your sight after too many of those deaths, thenumber of enemies is simply presented directly, but perhaps the best example of this is Resident Evil 4, yes, what many gamers consider the best Resident Evil game, one of the best horror games and even one of the best games ever. 8 times to adjust the difficulty for you while you play. No, I could stand here and explain it to you, but why would you want to listen to me when instead you can have Resident Evil 4's expert speedrunner, JT, at last? The summer games of the year are over, they explain it to you quickly, take it away JT B, there is something called difficulty adjustment based on how you do in the game and the way enemies react to you, while you have to change, so if you really like it.

You hit a lot of enemies badly there and you become a little weak, a little more passive, if you're doing really well they become really hostile, all that kind of stuff for a very clear example of exactly what JTP just described. take this moment from resi 4 super best friends game super best friends are IP, they enter the room which is known as the infamous water room in this game and you can clearly see nine enemies who are about to attack seven in the bottom part and then two on these two balconiesAt the top, now Matt and Pat die and they have to reload the room, except this time you notice something is missing, something different, which of these things is not like the other.

If you look closely at the balconies, you'll notice that those two guys that used to be up there, they're both gone, now they're gone. The difficulty level for them didn't change it, it just dynamically adjusted based on their game and unless they were looking very closely for it, they would never have noticed it while playing. They didn't notice any changes if you want an awesome breakdown of how dynamic difficulty works for this particular game. I recommend watching this video from the channel's Game Creators Toolkit. By the way, it's really good, it's also very short, it's from a couple of years ago onwards.

YouTube so five minutes maybe mmm so good YouTube 20 19 20 minutes are very long but the best part is that sometimes games don't even care how you're doing before they slide the difficulty sliders for you . The epic games you heard about them created quite a bit. game called Fortnight I Don't Know, a kind indie darling, they were aware of the importance of psychology and how it affects the way people play years ago, when they were working on Gears of War, according to Lee Perry, who was previously a lead designer of Epic found that among 90% of first-time players, they won't play a second multiplayer game if they don't get killed.

First games are important, so we start with some important ones and administer additional damage bonuses that decreased with your first kills and quotes. Oh, that information emerged in 2017, a decade after that original Gears of War game was released on Xbox 360, and it's probably a good thing gamers didn't know about it when it was available. Firstly, it would probably deprive new players of the sense of satisfaction and accomplishment it was designed to instill, and secondly, can you imagine the amount of salt people felt they had been unfairly killed by a new player who I was getting a free damage bonus.

I don't know about you, but it makes me wonder what kind of adjustments they've been quietly making behind the scenes and for tonight, huh, think about it, maybe there's a reason why tonight is as popular as es, but that's a theory for another day anyway, in short, this dynamic difficulty is a real thing that exists in tons of games you've been playing and has also existed for literally decades in this industry, it sure takes a lot of things different. generates damage boosts misleading HUD information Enemy AI modifies additional elements, whatever that may be, in many games, regardless of genre, regardless of whether you're playing on easy mode or hard mode, it's just not something the gaming industry games post a lot and probably for good reason at At the end of the day, they just want you to have fun while feeling heroic and revealing the way the trick is done, that illusion they are trying to create, that's why I'm here, theory of games, ruining the fun of video games for eight years. years, yes, so ask yourself: is it better to choose easy mode or let the game make that choice for you?

Honestly, I don't know, debate it in the comments. I think it's actually a fascinating discussion anyway with all this new information, maybe that Twitter meme that's been circulating in the wake of the Sakura drama should look a little more like this. They have been cheating not only the game but also the player. We have not grown, we have not improved, we have been given shortcuts without us knowing that we have gained nothing, we experienced an empty victory, nothing was risked, nothing was gained, it's sad that we didn't know the difference, but hey, that's just a theory, a game theory, thanks for watching.