Was in a comment section about designing games to respect the player’s time and mentioned I never finished Hollow Knight because it makes you fight the final boss again each time you want to give the secret boss another shot.
Someone jumped in literally telling me “GET GOOD” and when I told them there were other things I’d rather be doing, they followed up with “so don’t get hard games just to complain about.” They never responded when I asked them how I was supposed to know exactly how hard everything in the game would be before I ever played it.
Every fucking time. I swear I can set my watch by it. The Dark Souls series has earned my undying enmity for what it has done to gaming discourse.
i don’t think anyone has a problem with color blind settings, subtitles, or turning off shaky cams.
Sure, but Celeste’s accessibility settings go so far beyond colorblind settings, subtitles, and turning off camera shake it’s unreal!
I haven’t really messed around with the accessibility settings for Celeste because I like the challenge where it is, but holy hell can you tweak just about everything about the game experience to precisely your desired level.
Want to change it so that you don’t get fatigued hanging onto walls as quickly (or at all)? You can. Want to give yourself an extra dash or 3? Go for it. Want to slow the entire game down by 10% because your reaction times are just a touch slow? Yeah, you can do that too.
You’re really underselling Celeste’s accessibility features, is what I’m saying. They are gameplay difficulty modifying features, because the Celeste devs understand that a ridiculously hard platformer like Celeste can be made accessible to a much wider audience if you think carefully about gameplay difficulty settings and how to implement them well.
I really do think the existence of Celeste and its accessibility menu should have put this “debate” to bed. Devs should be adding menus like this to every single game. I understand it’s a lot more work, especially to do it well, but it’s work that I think is really important, because I’d like video games to be widely played, by all kinds of people, and having a menu of settings you can tweak to tailor the experience to a difficulty level you prefer can open up these experiences to a ton of people who otherwise would never have been able to play the game.
i’m not underselling celeste, i think there’s a big difference between granular easy/challenge modes and accessibility features.
if something is challenging, anyone can try and be bad at it. if something is inaccessible, some people physically can’t participate at all.
having sound design so immaculate that a blind person can play street fighter is accessibility, the simplified control options are some other thing we should have a different word for because it’s not about mitigating disability.
Celeste’s wealth of settings are interesting but they abdicate the work of designing the learning curve onto the people least able to make informed decisions about it and that has downsides on their experience too. Games are unlike other media because you have to learn a whole new set of rules and mechanics every time and it’s completely unreasonable to put all those decisions on people who have no idea what they’re getting into.