Oh heck, now my yum is all yucky…
Right on, that’s why I thought the topic deserved its own thread—keep ’em coming. Or as the Dark Souls/Sekiro bosses say “I got all day, what you got?”
I generally disagree, and my view is more eloquently expressed by Dave Thier in the Forbes article you linked:
“an almost stunning lack of respect for players with the idea that they cannot be trusted with their own gameplay experience, that even those who want a challenging game would somehow be lured by the siren song of lower difficulties and destroy their own experience because they’re too impatient or immature to know what they actually want”
That’s the bit I have difficulty with. If you argue for less options in some games, why? Why does the option that works for me somehow affect your game?
Thier also says:
“only a certain sort of player with time, inclination, reaction speed and lack of physical issues will ever see the final boss fight anywhere but on Twitch”
In the Cnet article by Andrew Gebhart, he talks about:
“They’re meant to be teaching exercises. They’re meant to provide a feeling of hard-won accomplishment not found in other games.”
I checked the blurb on Steam. It says nothing of the sort, so where did Gebhart get his claim? Some obscure blog where one of many developers tried to defend their design doesn’t count—what’s on the product buy page is what everyone sees, and that’s where the nature of the game needs to be explained.
…”not found in other games” shoots his credibility anyway—or has he managed to survive 100 turns against a dozen opponents in Civilization 4 on Deity difficulty?
But again, for me it boils down to:
Why does an option for me somehow spoil your game, or anyone else’s game?