Setting the Record Straight: Accessibility vs. Difficulty
To be completely clear right off the bat, there is a distinct difference between difficulty and accessibility. When I talk about accessibility here, I am specifically referring to design choices made to accommodate players with physical, motor, or sensory conditions. Making a game playable for a wider audience in that regard is always a positive thing.
What I want to address is a design trend that has become increasingly prevalent across both indie games and AAA titles: the push toward hyper-granular difficulty settings that offload the core balancing of the game directly onto the player.
The Shift from Curated Modes to Granular Sliders
Historically, most of us grew up with broad difficulty settings: Easy, Medium, Hard, Extreme, or creative variations like Doom's "Hurt Me Plenty" and "Ultra-Violence."
These traditional settings were broad, sweeping baselines. They adjusted a few core boolean values or multipliers—like enemy health, damage output, and accuracy—to shift the global experience while keeping the core game loop intact. Crucially, they offered a curated, tested experience where the developers retained control over the game's intended pacing and flow.
Lately, however, we are seeing games shift away from curated modes in favor of handing players near-total control over individual variables. While well-intentioned, this level of control is both a blessing and a serious design risk.
The Temptation of the Assist Button: The Celeste Dilemma
Take Celeste, for example. It is a fantastic precision platformer with additive friction—a deliberate, rewarding frustration that makes victory feel earned. However, sitting right there in the menu is Assist Mode.
Assist Mode can grant full hazard immunity, unlimited stamina, or infinite dashes. For accessibility, it is phenomenal because it allows anyone to experience the incredible narrative, art, and music. But outside of accessibility needs, having that toggle ever-present poses a psychological challenge for the player.
Think of it like looking up a guide in a puzzle game like Myst:
- Checking a solution bypasses the struggle, but it also robs you of the breakthrough moment.
- It breaks the learning loop, leaving you unprepared for harder puzzles down the line.
- Once you open the door to skipping friction, it becomes significantly harder to close it again.
The Danger of the Granular Buffet: Mina the Hollower
On the far end of the spectrum, you have games like Mina the Hollower. Instead of a single assist switch, you are presented with a massive list of modifiers: enemy health, player damage, aggression levels, item drop rates, and economy tweaks.
While this allows fine-tuned customization, it places an unfair burden on the player. Balancing a game takes months or even years of internal testing, iteration, and data analysis. Expecting a player—especially someone in their first few hours—to understand how adjusting an arbitrary slider will ripple across the entire systemic ecosystem is an unrealistic expectation.
When you let players adjust individual floats and integers on the fly, you risk completely destroying the game's flow state—that delicate balance between boredom and frustration that keeps players immersed.
Why Players Shouldn't Be Balancing the Game
Good game design relies on a fundamental psychological rule: when the player fails, they should blame themselves, not the game. Blaming yourself keeps you engaged and eager to improve. Blaming the game makes you feel cheated.
When developers provide a massive menu of systemic sliders, it subtly shifts that mindset. The moment a player hits a wall, instead of analyzing their strategy, the immediate temptation is to blame the game's tuning and manually rebalance it. The presence of the modifier list acts almost as an admission of guilt from the developers, signaling that the base tuning might not be right.
In conversations with other designers, I increasingly hear developers say, "If players find it too hard or frustrating, we'll just let them tweak the variables." Offloading the responsibility of tuning the experience to the player feels like a shortcut around the hardest part of design: finding the baseline balance that makes a game uniquely compelling.
A Michelin-Star Menu, Not a Buffet
I once worked with a developer who put it bluntly when asked about difficulty: "My game isn't a buffet. It's a Michelin-star menu. You get what you get, and it will be great, but you don't get to rewrite the recipe."
While that mindset might sound rigid, there is immense value in standing behind a curated vision. Great games often achieve greatness because of their specific friction, not in spite of it. When every parameter is customizable, the identity of the game softens, and the shared experience between players disappears.
So the question worth asking both designers and players is simple: Do you really want every game to be a sandbox you have to calibrate yourself, or do you want to step into a focused, uncompromising vision and experience it as intended?
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