As someone who is interesting in speedrunning, I’m used to learning about communities that specifically make games harder for themselves in order to achieve faster times, from complicated movement strats to frame-perfect exploits, to limiting the amount of resources/upgrades that are collected for the sake of time management, speedrunning can add whole new levels of complexity and difficulty to various games.
However, I’m also someone who is interested in gaming accessibility, an area of interest that is often frustrated by games not being too easy, but rather, too hard. Some people have issues with reflexes, visual and auditory processing, motor function coordination, and even adversities with stressful stimuli that make notoriously hard games inaccessible – not because they aren’t skilled enough, but there is a accessibility barrier of entry. With a game like Dark Souls, which requires lightning-fast processing and reflexes, that is a set of skills that not every person is going to possess.
The obvious solution to this would be to offer greater difficulty settings in games that are notorious for their high skill floor, like the Dark Souls series. However, for some people, this ruins the “spirit” of the game. For some, being good at such an infamously unforgiving is a badge of pride, and they feel like offering a more accessible experience – both to people who have disability accessibility issues, as well as just gamers who aren’t experienced enough to be able to navigate the game – ruins all the fun.
In my personal opinion, I think difficulty settings should be more accessible, because, ultimately, if you want to play on a harder setting, nobody is going to force you to play on an easier one. Maybe the game can reward the player for playing on the “intended” super-difficult setting with a special achievement, item, bragging rights, whatever. However, I don’t think difficulty should be an absolute barrier that excludes those who want to experience a game, but are left out of the experience because of the limited accessibility adaptability that the game provides.
