Personally, I gave up at the first fight in Bloodborne (I have 40 min of gameplay). Never touched a souls game ever again.

I've been playing video games since the 1970s. Now I'm just a poor old man. My legs are grey. My ears are gnarled. My eyes are old and bent.

These days I mostly play video games for the story and to relax so I usually play on easy. And I'm ok with that.

Kojima:

We added Very Easy Mode

Also Kojima:

Get good or wear the chicken hat

I think Terraria has a really good approach to this.

Your first playthrough is on "normal" mode. Boss fights aren't about skill, you don't have to be on your toes constantly, etc. — except, that doesn't matter. Because your first playthrough is hopefully blind and without the wiki, meaning you'll have really bad, inefficient gear, and most of the challenge will come from finding and understanding good gear and how the world works before you can even find and beat bosses. Normal mode on your first playthrough has its own kind of challenge.

After that you will know how to progress and want more challenge and excitement for your second playthrough. Enter "expert" mode. New loot, new super powerful cool accessories, everything is way harder, even basic mobs hit twice as hard. Now everything is about staying on your toes, showing your skills in boss fights, meticulously crafting plans — but you're rewarded for it by a new experience and what feels like a new, more exciting Terraria. If you get tired of expert mode (I'm gonna say 200–300 hours of playtime later), there's the ridiculous "hard" mode. And "hardcore." Endless possibilities.

But everyone is given a chance with normal mode, which is really extremely easy. Everyone gets a chance to get to know the game. But you are rewarded with the full game, in a sense, for playing the proper difficulty.

Both are perfectly acceptable philosophies, but many Souls players need to learn that losing at a game for 150 hours is not what other people find fun.

Difficulty settings are accessibility settings and anyone who disagrees can kiss my ass.

Celeste did it perfectly imho with their Assist Mode. Just add those difficulty options in for accessibility, with a statement that it is not how the developers intend for it to be played, but still to use it freely if need be.

"Celeste is intended to be a challenging and rewarding experience. If the default game proves inaccessible to you, we hope that you can still find that experience with Assist Mode."

It is 2026. Gamers should be able to enjoy any game they want at any difficulty they want without judgement, as long as it does not affect anyone else.

I'm not paying for a game that doesn't allow changing difficulty if I want/need. I work two jobs and have to do most home cleaning and maintenance. I used to game competitively back in the early 2000s, but I don't have time for that shit nor gatekeeping.

Making a game hard for the sake of making it hard is a cheap way to increase difficulty.

The challenge shouldn't come from enemies being damage sponges or the AI having superhuman reaction times. It should come from player skill.

Balatro is one of the best examples of this. The game naturally gets easier as the player learns its systems and gains experience through playing.

Destiny 2 also had excellent skill progression. Say what you want about the game as a whole, but the core gunplay and the mechanics of its three classes rewarded players for improving their own abilities.

Even games like Madden and NBA 2K have, to a lesser extent, systems that reward player skill rather than simply inflating difficulty.

Many older games were made extremely difficult because they were relatively short. The increased difficulty extended playtime and made players feel they were getting more value for the price. That's one of the reasons games like Ninja Gaiden on the NES earned their reputation for being brutally hard.

As for Soulslike games, they're simply not my cup of tea. I fully acknowledge that they're well-made games, and if you enjoy them, that's great. They're intentionally designed to be challenging. While the original Dark Souls was developed under a tight schedule and has some rough edges, its high level of difficulty was a deliberate design choice rather than the result of bugs or glitches.

All art should have difficulty sliders. I want to listen to avant-garde jazz but I think it should be in 4/4 time signature and they should play the most melodic notes. And I think art house movies should have a version where the script is rewritten so the characters explain the allegories and symbolism of the movie while I'm watching. And I think opera should have someone reading what is being sung because I find it hard to follow along with the singing

There’s a lot of “you made your art wrong” in here. If you don’t have legs, you’re not going to be able to play soccer. You can make your own no-leg soccer if you want, but I’m just going to make an “ew” face at you if you say that soccer needs to change for you. Try arm wrestling!

The best argument against games (or any software) that don’t work for you is that you often can’t get refunds, and that’s a valid concern, but it has nothing to do with the content itself.

The first philosophy is why so many modern AAA games are complete crap. Why not just have FMV of the actors doing the scene and have the audience press X to continue to the next scene?

"...to first face that challenge and to overcome it in some way that suits them as a player."

Honestly when that player is me, this is just going to mean playing a different game. I'm old and busy, I really don't have the time or energy for hard games.