As unlikely as it
sounds, there is a
furious debate raging
on Twitter, the popular
social network for
bored freelancers
and maniacal
dictators. Sekiro: Shadows Die Twice,
the latest game by Dark Souls creator
FromSoftware, is a popular action game
in which you play an angry shinobi who
sets off in search of his missing elbow,
having had it swished right off near the
very beginning of the game.
Like the developer’s other titles, Sekiro
is known not for its sensitively told
story about a disgruntled amputee who
goes on a murderous rampage through
Japan, but for being hard as hell. Combat
is punishing, demanding a degree of
competence and skill that frequently
borders on rude. Mistakes are not
forgiven, and progress is only achieved
through a string of demoralising failures,
and usually by chugging down health
gourds like it’s happy hour at whatever
the Sengoku-period equivalent of a
Wetherspoons is. Regardless, it is still
good, and people like it.
The argument is that a game like
Sekiro should have an easy mode, to
allow those players who need some
assistance to progress through the
game as they wish, and to enjoy what
they otherwise wouldn’t be able to,
maybe getting to fight a few more
naughty samurai along the way.
The counterpoint to this appeal to
accessibility is that making Sekiro
any easier would be undermining the
developer’s artistic intent, whatever that
may be. Those who believe that Sekiro
should stay teeth-grindingly difficult
believe that, like driving tests and open-
heart surgery, you shouldn’t be allowed
to make more than a few whoopsies
before the authorities step in and politely
ask you to please stop trying.
I appreciate both sides of the debate,
although I can’t say that I’ve ever seenactually very rewarding once you’ve
mastered it,” insist the fans, knowing
that they must salvage some twisted
claim of enjoyment from all the relentless
abuse they’ve suffered, their Stockholm
Syndrome having fully taken hold of their
tired brains.The problem
The thing is, games don’t have to
be hard. They were invented that
way back in the days of the arcade,
when you needed to feed coins into
huge machines in order to play them.
Developers made games like this partly
to make loads of money, but also to stop
gamers playing Pac-Man for so long that
they died and had to have their corpses
disposed of in the bins round the back.
It was only once home consoles
appeared that games started to become
easier, with extra lives and health bars,
and once they were easier they could
become longer and better too, with
increasingly elaborate plots and open
worlds and full-colour FMVs where Tim
Curry plays a Soviet president. Hard
games paved the way for easy ones, but
easy ones paved the way for good ones.The solution
What’s the solution to the Sekiro
impasse? Obviously it’s that everybody
should be kinder to one another, and
that yes, there should probably be a
special button that makes all of the
bad guys immediately explode into their
constituent limbs, but each time you
press it the protagonist should say,
“I am a rubbish assassin who is bad
at videogames.” That way the players
who worked so hard to develop a set of
non-transferable ninja skills can still feel
that they have proven themselves to
an indifferent universe, while clumsy-
fingered idiots can still stumble their way
through the game to see what happens
at the end. QSteve also writes for City A.Mjoy on the face of a seasoned Dark
Souls player. They all have the vacant
expression of a concert pianist at the
top of their game, stripped of the basic
gratification of hitting all the right notes
after decades of repetitive lessons and
achingly marginal improvements. “It’sINSIDER OPINION
This month, Steve takes on the hot topic of game difficulty
The Fixer
Steve Hogarty is...
“I can’t say that
I’ve seen joy on
the face of a Dark
Souls player”
018 THE OFFICIAL XBOX MAGAZINE