In Defense of Easy Mode

One of the first criticisms I read when I began my academic study of videogames was the idea that difficulty settings are bad game design. This article, insightful at the time, made me realize how limited most game settings truly are. Though the argument made me think, the reality is that many games – particularly big budget, AAA-style experiences – often come baked-in with difficulty settings, however limited. And so, instead of viewing difficulty settings as “bad design,” I have chosen to think of them as modifiers of accessibility. While not always imaginative, and not always inclusive, I have encountered most difficulty settings as necessary features. 

Thinking of difficulty settings as accessibility modifiers instead of bad design is a much more inclusive ethos, in my opinion, for it accounts for and bypasses much of the toxic “git gud” culture that accompanies games which are notorious for their stubborn challenges. One of the perennially relevant discourses that arises around each From Software game – yes, it’s worth holding them accountable for the pugnacious fanbase their games have created – is whether difficulty settings should be introduced by the developers so that more people can play the game. Oftentimes, you will encounter the trite hand-wringing that such difficulty settings would impede the artistic vision of the creators, which is as short-sighted as it is nonsensical. Yes, games like Dark Souls have gained a reputation primarily because of their inherent requirement to bash your skull into a metaphorical cinderblock for hours at a time. Protecting yourself with forehead padding, these gamers often argue, would detract from the overall “experience.” 

These arguments are elitist and exclusionary to their core, no other way around it. What these players – and the author of the article about difficulty settings being bad design – have in common is a protective need to map their own experiences onto everyone’s experience with specific gaming software. (The author of the difficulty settings article makes some concessions to disability concerns but dismisses this as a failure of hardware rather than something to be accommodated through software settings in-game.) Both the “git gud” types and critics of difficulty settings alike share a contempt for any variable experience that isn’t explicitly authored by developers of the game. With that contempt in mind, however, the question about authored difficulty settings still remains.  

I think specifically to Kojima Productions’ Death Stranding, for instance, which was ridiculed before release for including a “Very Easy” mode for people whose love of cinema – not gaming – led them to purchase and play the experience. For those players who couldn’t be bothered by enemies or other common failure conditions, they were able to play the game in a way that prioritized the storytelling and cinematic delivery that’s at the heart of the Death Stranding experience. At the time, some of the loudest voices on Twitter – and a surprising number of reputable gaming outlets – were quick to lambast Kojima’s inclusion of “Very Easy” mode as “Game Journalist mode,” a derisive jab that pokes fun at various game journalists who have found themselves stuck in the tutorial phase of games like Cuphead, for instance. People who can’t overcome challenge shouldn’t be writing in the games industry, so the argument typically goes.  

I also think to one of the most difficult games I’ve ever finished, Celeste, which has a generous array of difficulty modifiers that players can switch on and off at their leisure. When I first booted up Celeste, I instinctively toggled over to the settings menu to see what was on offer. In seeing an abundance of difficulty settings, I proceeded to explore them before I was met from a message from the game’s creators. This message indicated that I could turn on these difficulty settings at any time without penalty or guilt, but that the creator’s explicit vision did not intend for these options to be turned on. For a number of years, Celeste was the only game where I was fully aware of difficulty settings but chose to ignore them; though the creator decided it was important to add these settings for purposes of inclusion, I decided that I would throw myself at the challenge of the game until getting frustratedly stuck. Once I was stuck, I would simply turn them on.  

With Celeste, I got stuck. I got frustrated. But I was inexplicably never tempted to toggle on these difficulty settings. (I have written before about how Celeste successfully manages to make failure feel like an immediate feedback loop that encourages you to keep playing, despite frustration or difficulty.) While you could certainly make an argument about the analogies between Celeste and Dark Souls, I still think there’s a fundamental difference between the two games’ design ethos – even if I never tested the difficulty settings for myself in Celeste. The sheer fact that they’re there if someone needs them doesn’t remotely compromise the intended design experience. If anything, they paradoxically gave me the confidence and courage to keep going, because I knew that getting stuck wouldn’t be the end of my playthrough; I could keep going or open the settings menu, no matter what.  

The fact that I have brute-forced my way through games like Cuphead or Celeste, both of which became nearly instant classics for my gaming tastes, has not changed my approach to games that have explicit difficulty settings, especially those games whose difficulties must be selected (and locked-in thereafter) before a playthrough begins. In rejecting the notion that difficulty settings are bad design, simultaneously embracing games whose difficulty is accounted for, I have eagerly comported myself towards what might seem like a paradoxical ethos: when a game gives me difficulty options, I always opt for the “easy” mode.  

There are weird edge cases like Kojima’s Death Stranding where my first playthrough was simply one notch below the “normal” (intended?) experience. Upon a replay, as I have written in-depth about, I swapped the difficulty as high as it would go. Death Stranding was a unique and peculiar experience in this regard. I decided to replay at the highest difficulty in order to obtain all in-game achievements, but this decision was also partially impacted by a sense of desiring a greater challenge from the experience. I had already played through the game on “easy,” so I knew that I had escaped some otherwise nasty situations without undue fuss, and I wanted to see if some of the core aspects of Death Stranding – namely, delivering packages – would be considerably altered by the difficulty modifiers. If I didn’t already have a deep, reverent love for Death Stranding, I would assuredly not have gone out of my comfort zone into “very hard,” even for an experiment.  

But with most games, in most cases, most of the time, difficulty settings are – I must admit – bad game design. Your average difficulty modifier almost exclusively impacts the amount of damage dealt – whether you damage enemies less or they damage you more. Only in rare cases does difficulty have any substantial impact on the gameplay systems themselves. I have never played a game where you are blocked off from a new fighting style simply because you’ve avoided the “hard” difficulty, but I have finished games like Cuphead that will truncate some of the story behind a difficulty mode of sorts – and that’s a shame. Especially where artistic direction and storytelling are concerned, I don’t think there should be any remote connection between the player-selected difficulty options and the otherwise developer-intended experience. Resultantly, most games limit their difficulty modifiers to the aforementioned damage meters, and so I feel entirely justified every single time I select “easy” mode before starting a game because I know that I will not “miss” anything. 

I have been lucky enough in my three years of Twitch streaming to not encounter people who would (unironically) lambast or ridicule me for defaulting my chosen difficulty to “easy” mode. As recently as the month of this writing, however, prominent Twitch streamers have circled through the headlines in a resurgent discussion about the pressure that they face from viewers who pester them into playing at higher difficulties. There is a tacit “stigma” on Twitch, and presumably other gaming outlets as well, expecting people who stream games to embrace the skill challenge that is possible in games with “hard” or “very hard” settings. I have certainly been lucky to avoid encounters with difficulty-hungry viewers demanding (in a trollish way) that I increase my self-selected challenge. In the rare cases where I have been tempted to explain the rationale behind my decision, I have said something to the following effect. 

(Readers of Epilogue will be nearly fatigued by the amount of eager, quasi-prosthelytizing Yakuza content that I’ve published on the website over the past six months, but I hope readers will indulge me for a paragraph longer for the sake of this example.) 

Each of the Yakuza games features standard difficult modifiers – easy, normal, and hard – with the only perceivable change having to do with combat damage. The Yakuza games, though often well-made, are not prized primarily for their brawler gameplay; rather, the pastiche of heartfelt and humorous substories, along with cutscenes so long that your controller desyncs from inactivity, are what often carry the experience. Though the brawler-style combat of the Yakuza series (Like a Dragon notwithstanding) is undoubtedly fun, there are a number of combat scenarios in the series that effectively function like JRPG dungeons. That is, you are simply hacking through waves of enemies in order to reach the end of the proverbial tunnel, thereby igniting the next cutscene and storybeat. With the hundreds of hours I have sank into the Yakuza series so far, I don’t think anyone could reasonably say that I have in any way circumvented the “true” or “intended” experience. If anything, I have taken a daunting task – playing seven games in a franchise back-to-back, many of which exceed 50 hours of story alone – and considerably reduced the amount of time required to appreciate the narratives.  

In saving myself probably dozens of hours across the Yakuza series, I cemented my conviction that playing on “easy” mode is a perfectly acceptable practice. Not only is there no shame in playing games at a lower difficulty level than is possible, but there’s a decidedly time-saving element to doing so. Furthermore, removing the difficulty simply eliminates the friction inherent to some games, bypassing what would otherwise be walls to progress. Unless we’re discussing games like Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy, where frustration and failure are part of the narrative experience, I never want to get so frustrated with a game that I stop playing it.  

This leads me back to the belittling joke, “game journalist mode,” which many gamers have used to dismiss the critical perspectives that many games writers offer when reviewing games. The notorious Cuphead example is still used several years later as a cudgel with which to beat these critics, ridiculing them for not having the fortitude to surpass the varying challenges that games like Cuphead present. Every time I see this example of the Cuphead tutorial, I count my lucky stars that I am not a games journalist. For, if I were crunching for review deadlines, as is alarmingly common at major gaming publications, I would have undoubtedly committed some embarrassing gaming sin akin to the Cuphead tutorial example. In the overwhelming majority of cases, writers who receive advance review copies of games do not have the luxury of YouTube let’s plays or written walkthroughs and trophy guides to coax them through; they must completely trust that the current build of the game they are playing will be self-explanatory and bug-free enough to enable them to review it on time for release day. 

The sheer reality for people who write about games is that they often receive massive, hundred-hour experiences like the newest Assassin’s Creed or Cyberpunk 2077 with a mere week before the embargo lifts. Thus, people under this deadline cut corners, get overly frustrated due to time constraints, and many of them (justifiably) ratchet down the difficulty modifiers so they can report on the game in a way that doesn’t cannibalize their work-life balance. And yet the overwhelming rhetoric across the industry seems to echo the idea that playing on “easy” is somehow a lesser experience. This reductive rhetoric often extends towards players who casually use these settings, even if their profession has nothing to do with games.  

I used to joke about how I’m bad at video games. In reality, I have learned that I’m decidedly average at most games – decent, even, at least when I am determined to overcome something for the sake of a story payoff, like surmounting the Valkyries in God of War (2018). That being said, dedicating a ton of my free time towards gaming over the past several years has forced me to reckon with the role that difficulty invariably plays with games as a whole. These years have taught me that I am not, in fact, bad at games; I am simply impatient. Whether I am binging an entire series and simply want to eliminate the redundant time during combat, or whether I am just not in the mood to see how the game wants to “test” me through skill checks and difficulty spikes, I have learned that I crave control over my experience. Sometimes that control manifests itself as “easy” mode, while other times I ignore difficulty options entirely. For anyone to suppose that I should not have this agency over the experience, however, is ridiculous.  

What about games that don’t have difficulty settings; how do they fit into this ethos? Maybe I’m playing something extremely challenging like Hollow Knight or Dark Souls. Or perhaps I’m playing something breezy like Wandersong or Night in the Woods. Whatever the case, I think the idea of difficulty has almost nothing to bear on the quality of these experiences themselves. Dark Souls isn’t remarkable because you will die seven-thousand times along the way, nor is Wandersong remarkable because you can glide through the entire story without hitting a wall. Rather, games make their impact on the quality of engagement – whether mechanical or narrative – that they provide.  

Games should never be arranged into a self-serious hierarchy where challenge is what defines an experience. Or, at least, that eager attitude towards challenge should solely be viewed as one way – not the only way – to appreciate a game. There are exceptions where games like Celeste and Dark Souls tell a story that can only be understood in terms of the simultaneous difficulty faced by both player and protagonist. Most games, however, cannot be boiled down to this single dimension, nor should they. At the same time, this is far from an argument that certain games shouldn’t be difficult. Rather, people who play games need to develop a collective understanding that allows for the widest possible range of players to appreciate the games we all love, whether everyone wants to face that next challenge or not.  

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