Difficulty settings and accessibility
Author: Danne Borell
Accessibility specialist and UX designer
danne.borell@useit.se
Reading time 10 minutes
ArticleWhat does accessibility have to do with difficulty settings? Well, a lot, and not very much at the same time. But if we're going to unravel this particular tangle we should start at one end and work from there.
In the beginning there were difficulty settings...
Difficulty settings in games are a way for the player to select the level of challenge they want to face. Often divided into easy, medium and hard they've been around for a while now. But the discourse around them really rose to the front when the Dark Souls games came out, mostly because they didn't have them. These games were hard, hard but fair. A moment of carelessness in these games meant that even the lowliest enemy could stab you dead, a single misstep could see you falling to your doom (looking at you Blighttown), and the bosses would see many players beating their hands bloody against the controller trying to learn their patterns well enough to finally, somehow, beat them. And that was the point.
The director of the Dark Souls games, Hidetaka Miyazaki, wanted players to experience the feeling of going up against a challenge, struggling to overcome it, and finally, euphoria! To do so.
Because of this philosophy he chose not to have difficulty settings. These games were supposed to be difficult. He reasoned that including difficulty settings would dilute the experience, and in turn the feeling of overcoming the obstacles. This is by no means a bad design philosophy, and it resonated with players. But there is a problem with this; it relies on objective difficulty. And objective difficulty... doesn't exist.
Objective difficulty versus subjective difficulty
Ok, that was me being dramatic, but it's really quite simple. Let's say that we're designing a game and we want the difficulty to be around 'medium'. We build the levels, design the enemies and tweak everything around this, and when we test the game with a selected group of players everything is working great! And then we release the game and a player who only have the use of one of their hands try to play the game, and suddenly it's a lot harder for them than 'medium'.
The whole idea of a set difficulty level being an equitable experience relies on every player having equal abilities to play the game, and this simply isn't the case. Coming from an accessibility background my primary angle here is concerning accessibility, players with a disability will be having a harder time playing your game.
So, if we have a game designed for difficulty, like the Dark Souls games, and a player with a disability plays it, they're playing on an extreme difficulty level, which is not the intent of its creator, remember, they were supposed to be hard but fair.
Difficulty is subjective. It's going to be different for everyone playing the game. I've mentioned gamers with disabilities, but the same is true for those with limited experience with games. My wife didn't grow up with a Nintendo controller clenched in her hands like me, which is ironic since she's from Nintendo's hometown, and when she plays a game, it doesn't come natural to her the way it does for me.
There is, unfortunately, a culture of gatekeeping in some parts of the gaming community. A feeling that if you can't handle hard games, then you're not a real gamer. But as a game developer you want people to be playing your game, erecting barriers that stops them from doing so is counterproductive.
But like I wrote earlier, challenging games aren't a bad thing. They can be a great experience. So how can we keep the experience without diluting the challenge? Are we going to need difficulty levels after all? No. We can do better.
Making difficult games accessible
All we have to do is let players adapt our game to meet their needs while still communicating that it's meant to be a challenging experience, simple!
Well, actually doing it takes some work. But the idea is simple.
Any game should have accessibility settings. These are not, and I can't overstate this, difficulty settings. Difficulty settings are a tool for broadly changing the difficulty of the whole game. Accessibility settings are more granular controls that lets the user customize the game to fit their needs. If there aren't any accessibility settings then some gamers with disabilities might use the difficulty settings to try to make the game playable for them, but since these are made for a general difficulty level, not to address individual accessibility needs, this is rarely a great experience.
We're going to look closer at different accessibility settings in other articles, as well as on how to implement them in the process of actually making the game.
By using these settings the player can make the game meet their accessibility needs, and bring the inflated difficulty down to the level actually intended by the developers.
So if you're playing Fortnite with limited hearing, you can turn on visual markers for sound, and now you can see the footsteps when someone tries to sneak up on you. Or if you can’t physically move fast enough to react as you’re swinging around in Spiderman 2, set up a shortcut to reduce the game speed when you need it, and get back to saving New York, again.
At this point someone usually asks me “But Danne, what if someone without a disability uses these settings and lower the difficulty more than they should. Wouldn't that be *gasp* cheating!”
To which my response usually is “Yes, and?”, because this isn't really a problem.
Ok, let me explain myself, put down that chair! It's true that in a multiplayer game, if accessibility settings would give some players an unfair advantage, then that would be a problem. And that needs to be considered when designing them. But in a single player game, that you play all by yourself in a room without anyone else in it. Does it really matter if someone cheats?
Sure, they could get a game achievement and then someone else will see that on their profile and not realize they're actually a filthy cheater, oh the humanity! But that doesn't matter at all. That will not detract from the experience for anyone else.
That's a small price to pay for the benefits that accessibility settings give.
Here ye be dragons
But since we don't want the players to make the game too easy, unless they really want to, we should think about how we communicate this. I quite like how this is done in Celeste. That's a game all about the main character Madeline scaling a mountain, literally and figuratively. It's designed to be difficult, and it has pretty good accessibility settings.
What I like is that when you first open these settings the following message is shown “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”. This lets the player know that the game is meant to be difficult, and these are the tools they can use to find the balance of difficulty that is right for them. It's effective, and it's respectful of the player and their ability to make their own choices.
So, we communicate that the game is meant to be challenging, then we give the player the tools they need and trust them to make their own decisions. That's it.
“I beat Sekiro with a trombone as a controller while upside down under water!”
When the question of accessibility in hard games surfaces there will often be someone who mentions that a person with [insert disability here] beat [insert hard game here], and so any player with a disability who can’t do that are just whiny and should 'get good' *ugh*.
This argument floats about as well as The Titanic, not at all. There are players who beat Hollow Knight: Silksong using a guitar hero controller or got through Silent Hill in four hours using a dance pad on hard mode, but we don’t expect every player to do that. Playing a game without decent accessibility options can be very similar to that for many gamers with disabilities. There are some who are into that challenge, but most just want to play the game.
The case for difficulty levels
With all that said, difficulty levels can be very good to have. Not everyone who would benefit from accessibility settings are going to use them, and having a lot of settings to tweak can feel intimidating. So having easy to use settings for the difficulty can be very useful.
And keep in mind to be respectful of the player. If your easy setting is called 'Weak baby loser' then that will communicate to your player that your feelings towards someone who chooses this setting might not be very respectful and will worsen their experience from the get-go.
If playing on easy is not a good experience there's a problem with the game design, not the player.
And now I'm off to play Hades on easy! Just kidding, Hades doesn't need difficulty settings. It could do with more accessibility settings though, call me, Supergiant Games!
Talk more to Danne about accessible games.
