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[DonkeyPunchJr]

I appreciate them being considerate towards those of us with child disability, don’t know how to aim disability, and refuse to play any game we can’t win disability.

 

[RiccochetJ]

A ton of games these days have what is commonly called "Story Mode" where your characters are highly buffed where the enemies are insanely nerfed. It's especially common with RPGs. Look at any of the Larian, Owlcat, or Obsidian crpgs. Hell, even the Baldur's Gate EE versions have the story mode where your characters can't die. What Bioware is doing here isn't anything new.

 

[Majormaxxx]

You can't die if you don't buy the game.

that is the real no death mode

 

[Raven117]

For this… sure.

The appeal for a lot of these games are the world and story. Not combat.

 

[asdasdasdbb]

FF 15 has this.

On Easy, Carbuncle will fully heal the leader if they are ever KO'd, also giving him a buff boosting Strength and Defense. Carbuncle won't appear in all but the easiest hunts, as well as other particular locations.

Difficulty level

Difficulty level is an option for players to adjust the degree of challenge best suited to their level of skill or play-style. The option to change the game's difficulty was not initially a staple in the Final Fantasy series, and has mainly appeared as an extra in re-released versions of games...

finalfantasy.fandom.com

Note that even on Normal, items are cheap and plentiful.

 

[EverydayBeast]

I liked veilguard as a candidate for game of the year 2024 one of the weaker years.

 

[Shake Your Rump]

What I want is for the game to be designed so that you never have to restart, or reload, or even replay a segment. Some games handle this well. If you fall in battle, it will prompt you retry the battle (amongst other options). Reloading a save file or otherwise playing through the same story sequence is incredibly immersion breaking.

 

[Majukun]

one part of me asks then why play the game at all..but if that is what it takes to have a challenging game on normal/hard; I'm ok with other kind of players having something for them as well..it's better than a game with none of these option that is way too easy to be satisfying to play

 

[Corian33]

For what it’s worth, I absolutely love this option in Spider-Man 2 because my son loves Spider-Man but he’s 4. Letting him be invincible is great, he can swing around the city and fight bad guys and just have fun.

 

[Cyberpunkd]

More accessibility options is always a good thing.

Not necessarily. You can make a point (as they mention in the first sentence) that designing games for everyone is what got us into this thrash we have right now, and at the same time killed all risk-taking and creativity.

 

[Gandih42]

Not necessarily. You can make a point (as they mention in the first sentence) that designing games for everyone is what got us into this thrash we have right now, and at the same time killed all risk-taking and creativity.

I think it is more interesting to make a distinction between accessibility options and game appeal when "designing games for everyone".

You can make a game that is extremely challenging to appeal to a niche audience, and still make it playable to everyone with accessibility options. It could be skill-type accessibility like god-mode, trivially easy difficulty, etc. or disability-type accessibility like colorblind modes or customizable controls. This could obviously still affect game design, but in a much less significant way than trying to appeal to everyone. I find this to be almost universally positive.

Trying to appeal to as big an audience as possible is a much bigger issue and threat to creativity and risk-taking. I think this issue is especially exacerbated for AAA games, as part of the wide appeal is high-end graphics which takes a lot of resources but doesn't necessary inject a lot of creativity (more likely, stifles creativity in terms of gameplay design). I think the problem also exists to a certain extend for indies, even though their budgets are much smaller they are also in an extremely competitive space. I think this is part of the reason we see certain types of games being highly over-represented (roguelikes and metroidvanias comes to mind). That being said I don't think the amount of risk-taking and creativity in indies has really gone down. Small scale game dev having gotten more accessible seems to produce an abundance of really cool games and ideas.

To get back to this new Dragon Age game, I don't really see how the "No Death" difficulty is a problem. Old games used to have "God Mode" cheats (wish that'd make a comeback...) and this is a formalised version of that, which requires minimum input to allow more people to play. I would say they get a subpar experience, but that is not for me to decide and for some it is the only way to get AN experience from it.

 

[Hudo]

I fucking swear, why don't they just make the sex scenes available from the main menu and be done with it.

 

[pqueue]

I fucking swear, why don't they just make the sex scenes available from the main menu and be done with it.

why bother with that. just release the sex scenes on youtube.

 

[Hudo]

why bother with that. just release the sex scenes on youtube.

Good point.

 

[don-mika]

why bother with that. just release the sex scenes on youtube.

theres special sites for this kind of content

 

[Insanemaelstrom]

Makes a lot of sense.

Difficulty is simultaneously the easiest and hardest thing to do right.

Coding wise, it doesn't require a lot of work and is honestly pretty easy. Not to mention, most of the settings and parameters are already created beforehand for testing( even for testing things like level design and object placement, you might add no death or hover mode)

But it is difficult with regards to variance in people and their skills. For example, in gt7, I found the nurburgring CE to be pretty average in terms of difficulty, since it suited my driving style, the track played to my advantages, etc but for a lot of people it was extremely difficult( you can check via Google, the amount of people that were complaining about it) at the same time, I found the Laguna seca CE to be extremely difficult while others would rate it far below nurburgring CE in terms of difficulty.

A player may be good at one thing but terrible at others. A good difficulty set up envolves a lot of testing yet one size can never fit all. By adding difficulty options and especially ones that let you customise it, your settings can fit more people. As for "no death" more, it can be great for people who want a relaxed experience or are disabled. Nothing bad about it. It is an option, it is there, you don't have to click it. They will probably be using easy settings with "no death" parameter turned to true.

 

[Tal Shiar Agent]

Not necessarily. You can make a point (as they mention in the first sentence) that designing games for everyone is what got us into this thrash we have right now, and at the same time killed all risk-taking and creativity.

The "designing games for everyone" ethos and accessibility aren't the same thing.

The former is when you try to make a game that appeals to the widest possible tastes, the latter is when you try to make sure that your game is playable for everyone despite and handicaps they may have. Like those low-vision modes in TLOU2, descriptive subtitles, one-handed control schemes, the ability to pause at any time, customizable difficulty, etc.

 

[{insert code here}]

That's honestly kind of insulting to disabled people. They make high-end input devices specifically for people with disabilities and I don't recall a single person ever having an issue with the standard character deaths in games. They want to play the same games as everyone else and I doubt they need this kind of handholding during their experience.

Just admit you put this feature in there for players that aren't good at games