are modifiers in video games not just exactly the same thing as cheat codes were in older ones?
people are freaking out about their gamer cred being flushed down the toilet because you can make a game easier, but you were always able to do that.
imagine saying "man gta san adreas sucks and is so woke because you can just spawn in a tank whenever you want!"
@pettanko@tsundere.love
@pettanko yeah there are 100+ settings in the game you can mess with to make it harder, easier, or just weird shit like filters. It's supposed to just be for fun but chuds on Twitter are getting mad that you can use them to make the game easier.
@newt @pettanko yes indeed. that's dark souls. this is mina the hollower. some games are meant to be really easy. some games are meant to be perfectly approachable by a wide audience.
what's with the trend of everyone trying to force games to contain dark souls level challenge? it's a really narrow thought process that i think stems from insecurity and/or pride.
The trend you're describing is a long psyop by media and the AAA gaming industry to remove the essential nature of challenge from video games and turn them into Epstein-approved skinnerbox slop. It's been happening in every genre, and many genres have been taxonomically killed because they didn't fit with this narrative.
People are not trying to force/inject anything into games. What you're seeing is a small sliver of pushback against the "slushification" of gaming, and the notion that all games must be interchangeable and made for all audiences - that for a game to have a distinct form and a requisite challenge is an unforgivable sin.
The games that Mina the Hollower is taking direct inspiration from, the 2D handheld Zeldas, didn't have modifiers that let you step over every pit and play the game with generous checkpoints. Yet they still sold mountains of copies to children like me. Why does Mina the Hollower need to have a 50% game speed option and a hundred other options?
@Hephaestic @beardalaxy the trend of "requisite challenge" (the proper name is artificial difficulty) you're describing is a long-standing psyop that was created long ago by arcade cabinets manufacturers to bleed pockets dry and transformed later to sell 20 minute games as 200 hour experiences, and mountains of slop were sold to children because children are known to not know any better
same psyop evolved to sell battle passes and to keep grownups' attention so they would keep logging in like the game is their second (or fourth) job they have to clock in daily, which is the direct opposite of fun and games
you come into media built on variables and beg "oh please, please, remove as many variables as possible" and act like that's how it should be; I'd recommend you something like rhythm games because there's absolutely nothing else other than wanking over difficulty, but even those have difficulty options and modifiers, 50% speed included, so at this point just go watch a movie
Then again, there is no trend to clone dark souls. Afaik there's only two or three games in the genre from other devs than FS and that's it. There are more CoD games than soulslikes.
@newt @pettanko iron pineapple.
i'm not talking about clones strictly, though. i'm mainly talking about games that have an extremely high challenge floor. shit like silksong, cuphead, and nine sols count too even though they aren't soulslikes. and that's totally fine, like those games can exist, i just don't get why everyone cooms over how difficult they are and then demands other games meet that same level of difficulty.
Silksong doesn't a high challenge floor, unless you compare it to something like Mixtape where you just cannot possibly fail. There should be a separate term for these things, because Mixtape is most definitely not a game.
