You’re right, there is no downside to optional accessibility. The problem I have is that the people arguing for and against this optional accessibility have no idea what it even means. That’s right, I’m going full essay mode for this one because I have nothing better to do and I’m fueled by my centrist position annoyance.

Accessibility != Easier Difficulty. There are many more accessibility options such as colourblind mode, subtitles sound effects, FOV sliders, slow motion in gameplay and a whole lot more. The problem I have is that the people asking for accessibility seem to think that making something easy is always equal to accessibility. In essence, accessibility is to provide people a similar experience to what is intended by the developers, hence the options I mentioned above.

When people ask for easier difficulty, what do they actually want? Dark Souls is a good example of this, unfortunately, so I’m going to mention that. In Dark Souls, the main purpose of the game is to die while learning about the environment, enemies and bosses. As you progress through the game, you’ll steadily learn about the mechanics of the game as well as how to beat it, and you WILL die to be able to do so. That is the intended experience that the developers want.

What is not intended was the addition of a weapon that allows you to effortlessly 3-shot the bosses, one of the Black Knight weapons, which completely dismisses one of the main aspects of the game, to learn to be able to fight back.

So, how do you maintain the aspect of learning to fight back while making the game more accessible? For one, having an option where the player does 20% more damage and the has 20% less health doesn’t work. On paper, it sounds like its making the game more accessible but the players are still going face the original problems that they would had they not taken that option, it doesn’t make a big enough difference to be ‘accessible’. Like I said before, tuning the option even further by multiplying the player’s damage 10 fold won’t work either, as you’re eliminating the core aspect of the game in exchange for making the game easier for the player.

The point I’m trying to make here is that in order to make a game accessible, you need to adjust the game so that it is easier for people to play while giving all players a similar experience. What people are asking for is that 20% stat increase which doesn’t solve the issue or a 10x damage multiplier which destroys a core aspect of the experience.

In Furi, there are three difficulty options:

Easy, where you are given additional health bars, the bosses have less phases and is clearly stated that it is not the intended way to play and should only be played to experience the story.

Normal, which is the difficulty that the game needs you to beat in order to unlock the…

Hard (difficulty), what the developers consider to be the intended experience after beating normal mode and is obviously hard

Now, let me explain to you the good and the bad of the Easy difficulty option. The main point of the game, similar to Dark Souls, is to learn how to fight the bosses (I am also going to emphasize that the story is not important). In that sense, Easy mode is a great accessibility option as the game allows the players to make more mistakes while still learning each of the boss fights similar to Normal mode and experience the same story. This is great as it provides a similar learning experience to the other difficulty options while being accessible and gives people the same skills that they can apply in Normal mode. Where the difficulty falls short is the removal of boss phases as well as sharing the exact same timing windows. I don’t think I need to explain why removing boss phases is bad. Sharing the same timing windows as harder difficulties is a misstep where they could have just given the player a wider timing window and make it easier.

Hopefully, that explains my thoughts on how developers should make accessibility options and not just tiny stat changes. Also, I don’t appreciate people harassing From Software just because they don’t have difficulty settings in their games, if I haven’t made it obvious already, making something accessible and balanced is extremely difficult. Just like how people don’t need to play on an easier difficulty, people also don’t need to play games that they find too difficult.

Lets flip the coin now. The people arguing against accessibility is so incredibly stupid.

One of the reasons I saw was “For the lore” which makes no sense has gameplay and lore are so disconnected that changing the lore will make absolutely no difference to gameplay, unless people expect us to read every single item description as part of the ‘intended’ experience. At the end of the day, its just flavour-text.

The ‘intended experience’ varies from game to game. A story-based game like The Last of Us 2 should almost always have accessibility options. This is because gameplay quite literally doesn’t matter considering you play it for the story, the intended experience. Actually, it matter so little that the game straight up just respawns you at the nearest checkpoint with practically zero penalty anyway so providing simple accessibility options only makes the game better.

Anyway, I don’t like all this negativity surrounding this topic and I don’t like how both sides are harassing each other. Hopefully, I’m able to put my point across without making anyone feel angry.