Game Theory: Hard Mode is a LIE! (Sekiro Easy Mode Controversy)

the release of second dose shadows die twice has erupted this huge debate in the gaming community about whether or not games should have easy modes if I pay for a game am i entitled to see the whole thing through to completion or is it ultimately the designers prerogative as to the experience that they specifically want to craft player be damned are difficult games just needless gatekeeping or are they actually forcing players to confront adversity in an effort to create a truly rewarding experience when they do eventually succeed well today I'm not here to actually take a stand on that controversial topic nope oh wait Internet I have learned my lesson I have stepped on these sorts of landmines way too many times in the past so no siree Bob I am standing here to tell you the much less controversial statement that well you're just not as good at games as you think you are what is this bad - is it worse it's true it's a fact it's a fact [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Applause] well hello Internet welcome to game theory where today I'm not here to tell you to get good I'm here to tell you to get better so this easy-mode controversy is really blown out passing it it seems like every time from software releases a game the debate around video game difficulty just drops up which makes sense honestly I mean this is a company that literally made a name for itself by giving their games taglines like prepare to die edition the entire library of from software the entire brand of this company has been made on just taunting the players to try and beat their games they're like this older brother who just constantly grabs your arm and smacks you and says why you gave yourself why you and your son stop it stop it God you give these guys an inch and they take a mile holy geez Sakura though is the game that made the dam burst quite frankly what used to be just a few trickles of discussion here and there has suddenly broken forth and flooded the gaming community with a fully fledged controversy prompting dozens of articles and YouTube videos all debating the pros and cons of including difficulty sliders in your game because ladies and gentlemen welcome to 2019 and if there's outrage to be had gosh darn it outrage shall be had oh and by the way you're a terrible person and should be ashamed of yourself if you picked the wrong side unfortunate thing is apparently they're both wrong sides so today I am NOT gonna pick a side today I am here to say that this whole thing is dumb because you've probably been playing on easy modes for your entire life without even realizing it and that is not an opinion heck it is barely even a theory Oh game theory it's just a fact it is literally a fact if you read articles on sites like Danis Sutra or you listen to talks from events like GDC it becomes clear game developers lie to you they artificially manufacture scenarios that heighten tension to make you feel better at the game than you really are and some of the best reviewed most beloved games in history have difficulty sliders that you never even realized it feels like this has been an issue that's been waiting to boil over forever I mean let's be honest games haven't always been the kindness to people looking to calibrate the challenge down to a level where they're comfortable I mean doom and Wolfenstein are both infamous for naming they're easier difficulty settings things like thou needest a wet nurse or yellowbellies R Us for every hurt me plenty mode there's an equally embarrassing can i play daddy mode where suddenly your epic hero is shown wearing a baby bonnet and sucking on a pacifier over in the visual shame category meanwhile are games like Metal Gear Solid 5 and I want to be the guy which force players who take the easier routes to wear chicken hats or bows in their hair as symbols of their gamer weakness see video Kajima this chicken hat here this is why you can't work at Konami anymore my friend where you saw a chicken hat of shame Konami saw four dollars of microtransaction going to waste people pay for this sort of stuff right now but all of this is small stuff right you swallow your pride you press onward and you don't have to deal with it too much anymore the worst situations here are the times where the actual endings or more gameplay is dated behind the hardest difficulty settings twisted metal - for instance would only give you one level and one boss to play through before it threw up on the screen a stop sign with the words no losers oh wow why offer the mode if you're just offering me one level to play so sometimes the alternative to offering the full game wasn't much better I will never forget playing through Star Wars shadows of the empire for the n64 as a kid I wasn't good at third-person shooters when I was growing up so I knocked back the difficulty to easy only to get to the very end of a very long game and learn that I wouldn't actually know if my character had survived the final battle until I played through the entire game again on harder modes so you know what I did Internet I played through the whole game again and yeah I got good and I saw that - renderer survived and it was anticlimactic but I got really good at the game same with Superman 64 yeah Superman F in 64 one of the worst games ever printed onto a cartridge superman 64 actually hides its true ending behind multiple difficulty settings and it's not just the normal difficulty setting but if you want to see the ending of this amazing game you got to put it on hard mode let me tell you as someone who beat this game three times three times to get that sweet sweet ending cinematic I'm so worth it I mean look look at this camera work like an a the word camera work is too mundane a word for what you are seeing behind me on screen right now what this is can only be described as artistry hmm brings tears to my eyes just thinking about the time that I experienced this as a kid would that are mere YouTube videos looked as artistic as the ending of Superman 64 the long and short of it is that since the earliest days of gaming many franchises have foster in some form of negative attitude towards easy modes they've given rise to this get good mentality but it's hypocritical it's all smoke and mirrors because behind the scenes they've been concocting these secret ways to make us all think that we're better at these games than we really are ken Levine one of the creator's behind Bioshock admitted in a now-deleted tweet that the first enemy shot in Bioshock will always miss you quote from Twitter first shots in Bioshock always missed that was the design think it got fully implemented unquote it was a way to prevent players from getting killed out of the blue and instead give them a warning to be on their guard and start reacting and that's not all that Bioshock would do to help the player according to another designer this time Paul Hellqvist quote again in bio shots if you would have taken your last point of damage you instead were invulnerable for about one to two seconds so you get more barely survived moments and if you thought that was enough Bioshock was like hold my beer because we're still not done even the life bar in this game was a lie in both easy and medium difficulties you can actually take one more hit than your health bar might lead you to believe the first hit that would kill you instead reduces your remaining life to one the only way the only way to disable this in the game is by playing it on either hard or survivor modes to this day Bioshock is one of the most praised FPS games in history guess who else works in these little life bar hacks according to game design lead and ArenaNet Jennifer schürrle Assassin's Creed where the last bit of hells is value just don't be bit more to give you the feeling of having just survived the encounter oh yeah and doom you know the game that openly mocks players for choosing easier difficulties yeah that one actually has systems in place that artificially raise your threat levels increase your guard and give you more staying power as your health depletes meaning that a health bar that looks like it might just only have 10% left might actually be closer to 20 percent full according to Jennifer these are quote mechanics that are designed to build tension in combat giving the player a feeling of just barely surviving difficult situations while keeping them safer than you assume end quote according to schürrle there's actually a biochemical reason that these mechanics give players a positive feeling something that we've actually covered here on game theory before quote again endorphin rushes are something that everybody's experienced at some point think that high feeling of getting through a difficult situation and the sharp focus that ensues feels good and she's not the only one talking this way during a keynote speech at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco Sid Meier yeah Sid Meier the guy whose name is on top of every civilization game yeah he said this roll that clip gameplay is a psychological experience in real life you don't always win however in the world of games you pretty much always win the psychological phenomenon is that the player doesn't really complain about that I don't get letters saying you know dear sit I loved your game but I won way too much giving the player extra health or making their weapons do more damage without revealing these things to the player these are all ways of letting them win more often without making it feel like the game is necessarily easier and that seems to be the key idea here without revealing it to the player because apparently when you do you get controversy is like the second row easy mode issue that's come up but I already here the big complaint that you people who are always looking to pick a fight have revving up in the comments right now this is all inbuilt into these games sure they may be lies but their standard systems of that game so it's not like I'm suddenly playing an easier game because of a normal difficulty is still normal difficulty even if my health gauge and weapon output might be lying to me these are just systems that are built into the game to make them more exciting and not necessarily easier and yeah you know what you're right or at least you would be right if many of these games out there didn't also autocorrect themselves based on your performance it's actually called dynamic difficulty adjustment let me tell you it is everywhere in games the original crash bandicoot series for instance these games are broody requiring precise platforming and complex 3d environments the first game in particular was especially unforgiving which is why in a huge article discussing the evolution of the crash series co-creators Andy Gavin and Jason Rubin were very honest about how they corrected for this challenge in later installments quote and it's a big one so forgive me if I read it here we had realized that if a novice player died a lot of times we could give him an a cou aku that's the masks that serve as health and crash bandicoot series at the start of a round and they had a better chance to progress and we figured out that if you died a lot when running from a boulder well we could just slow the boulder down a little each time if you died too much a fruit crate would suddenly become a continued point eventually everyone succeeded at crap our mantra became help weaker players without changing the game for the better players we called all this didi dynamic difficulty adjustments II told you this was important and at the time the extent to which we did it was pretty nothing it would lead later crash games to be the inclusive perfectly balanced games they became good player bad player everyone loved crash games they never realized it because they were all playing a slightly different game balanced for their specific needs just I mean that says it all right there episode over except not episode over I need to give you more examples that just crash it would be one thing if crash was the only game to use this DDA system but it's not let's take another look at Bioshock again according to this threat on Twitter quotes did we nerve Big Daddies after player death to prevent fail spiral we did with big sis in bio - because she picks the fights and quote enemies suddenly get made easier based on whether or not you died to them which isn't as uncommon as you might think the Silent Hill series is all about fear coming from a feeling of powerlessness you rarely have a weapon in these games and more often than not your best option is just to run ahead Silent Hill shattered Memories had these nightmare sequences where character would be pursued by little Niemann maybe looking things called raw shocks but according to game designer Sam Barlow for every death that you had to the raw shocks and every time you had to respond the a eyes are actually robbed of one of their senses and I do mean senses like smell hearing your sight after one too many of those deaths the enemy number just gifts her adduced outright but perhaps the single best example of this is Resident Evil 4 yeah what many gamers consider to be the best Resident Evil game one of the best horror games and even a top game of all time 8 to adjust the difficulty for you as you play no I could stand here and explain it to you but why would you want to listen to me when you can instead have expert Resident Evil 4 speed runner JT be at last year's summer games done quick explain it for you take it away JT B there's this thing called difficulty adjustment based on how you're doing in the game that the way the enemies react towards you while should you change so if you're like doing really badly getting hit a lot enemies there and become a little bit weak hair a little bit more passive if you're doing really well they're getting a really hostile all that kind of stuff for a really clear example of exactly what JTP was just describing take this moment from the super best friends playthrough of resi 4 super best friends are IP they enter into the room which is known as the infamous water room in this game and you can clearly see nine enemies who are about to strike seven along the bottom and then two in these two balconies along the top now Matt and Pat die and they have to reload the room except this time do you notice anything missing something different which of these things is not like the other well if you look closely at the balconies you'll notice that those two guys that used to be up there both disappeared they're now gone the difficulty level for them didn't switch it just dynamically adjusted based on their play and unless they were looking really closely for it they would have never noticed while they were playing in fact they didn't notice any change if you want an incredible analysis of how dynamic difficulty works for this particular game I recommend watching this video from the channel game makers toolkit by the way it's really good it's also really short it's from a couple years ago on YouTube so five minutes maybe mmm so good YouTube 20 19 20 minutes are bust so long but best of all sometimes the games don't even care how you're doing before sliding the difficulty sliders for you epic games you heard of them created a little game called fortnight I don't know kind of an indie darling they were aware of the importance of psychology and how it affects the way that people play games years ago way back when they were working on Gears of War according to Lee Perry who was previously a lead designer at epic they found out that quote 90% first time players don't play a second multiplayer match if they don't get themselves killed that first games important so we started you off with some major and manages like additional damage bonuses that tapered off with your first few kills end quotes ah that information surfaced in 2017 a full decade after the release of that original Gears of War game on xbox 360 and it's probably a good thing that players didn't know about this back when it was going on first off it would probably rob new players of the feeling of satisfaction and accomplishment that it was designed to instill and secondly can you imagine the amount of salt from people who felt like they'd been unfairly killed by a new player who was getting a free damage bonus I don't know about you but it does kind of make me wonder what sort of tweaking they've been doing quietly behind the scenes and for tonight huh think about that maybe there's a reason for tonight's as popular as it is but that's the theory for another day anyway the long and short of it is this dynamic difficulty is a real thing that exists in tons of games that you've been playing it's also been around for literally decades in this industry sure it takes a lot of different forms damage buffs misleading HUD information enemy AI tweaks extra items whatever it's in lots of games regardless of genre regardless of whether you're playing on easy mode or hard mode it's just not something the game industry publicizes all that much and probably for good reason at the end of the day they just want you to have fun while feeling heroic and revealing the way the trick gets done that illusion that they're trying to create which is why I'm here game theory ruining the fun of video games for eight solid years yes so ask yourself this is it better to choose your easy mode or let the game make that choice for you I honestly don't know debate it out in the comments I think it's actually a fascinating discussion anyway with all this new information maybe that Twitter meme that's been going around in the wake of the Sakura drama should look a little bit more like this they've been cheating not only the game but the gamer we haven't grown we haven't improved they've given us shortcuts without us knowing we've gained nothing we experienced a hollow victory nothing was risked nothing was gained it's sad that we didn't know the difference but hey that's just a theory a game theory thanks for watching [Music] you

Channel: The Game Theorists

Views: 3,601,951

Rating: 4.8589926 out of 5

Keywords: sekiro, sekiro shadows die twice, easy mode, hard mode, difficulty sliders, easy mode sekiro, controversy, easy mode controversy, video games, game developers, dark souls, cheating, lie, lies, doom, bioshock, wolfenstein, bioshock infinite, assassins creed, assassin's creed, resident evil, resident evil 2, gears of war, epic games, fortnite, game theorists, game theory, matpat

Id: vJj9nI_T5VQ

Length: 18min 34sec (1114 seconds)

Published: Sun Apr 28 2019

Reddit Comments

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[u/Matvejka]

Pls help me, what's the track in 9:55 - 12:15 ??

[u/tundrat]

Awesome to mention Game Maker's Toolkit! I love that channel. :D

[u/MegaPompoen]

Games like Doom(2016) and others also have systems in place that limit the amount of enemy's that can attack you when you engage a group (and at higher difficulties more enemy's can attack you). So you don't get absolutely swarmed or stun-locked. In this case it's to give you that "one man army" feeling.

The alternative approach would be have the player encounter a few enemy's at a time (and that gets boring fast).

[u/OBakkus]

LOL. All of his examples are from the most mainstream of mainstream AAA titles...