Based, soulslikes should be difficult or not be called soulslikes.

Oh, yes, agreed! Should be determined on a case-by-case basis, and the parents should always be the ones to have final say. As you've offered this example, I'd offer the flipside, there may be things inappropriate for some children even if they meet age requirements! And, again, down to their parents' best judgement!

Same as yourself, I've been trickle-fed more mature stuff as I was growing up. I was lucky enough that mum actually took an interest and at least gathered some superficial information about the stuff I wanted to try out, to determine if yes or no. For instance, she got me the Serious Sam games and GTA III as I entered 6th grade, and they were perfect! Until then, it was mostly old platformers, cute puzzlers and point-and-click adventures, to get used to computers. As soon as she noticed I started listening to more mature (i.e. edgy) music and showing interest in more complex books, she considered I was mature enough to handle games!

As a counterexample, I walked in on her watching Alien when I was three, and I suffered from night terrors for a good couple of years afterwards!

Of course, it must be said that games are VERY different now than they were back then, with the addictive elements being reinforced in order to squeeze Whales and get players hooked on the ecosystem... GTA III was literally child's play compared to the hellscape that is GTA Online, for instance...

Edit: then again, if I hadn't been traumatised by Alien, I wouldn't have developed a fixation with horror and the grotesque, and would have missed out on so much hidden beauty!

While I agree, just play whatever you want and stop gatekeeping, I do think there's a degree of bad design that often happens around difficulty sliders. Many games will have different difficulties that boil down to something like, "Easy: enemies have half health and do half damage", "Medium: 1x health and 1x damage", and "hard: 2x damage and 16x health"

Instead of a pretty well tailored, and maybe difficult challenge that can be overcome with skill or by using the game's mechanics, you just have a game that either doesn't challenge you or does, but every fight is going to be bullet/damage sponge hell.

Yes exactly! I'm one of those people who can't help lowering the difficulty given the choice, even though I know I'll enjoy the game more if I keep at it, but that's a me problem. I prefer games with a good normal mode and more organic difficulty settings, but I certainly don't think that's what every game should be like

The thing is, if a game gave me a difficulty option, I probably wouldn't play the game on the "ballbustingly hard" option that gives me those highs you get in soulslikes after beating a seemingly impossible boss

I bet this person plays with a controller while sitting in a chair. Fucking noob. Sit on a bed of nails and just wave your hands in the air like a real souls player.

Kinect controls sound awesome lol

But it only works 73% of the time. Completely random and you have no control over that.

Sounds like the original PC port of DS1

My least favorite was Resident Evil Village. I kept dying during one part because I hadn't played a console shooter in forever (and there was a glitch causing the game to be black and white but that's a totally different topic). The game asks "You wanna lower it to easy?" Sure. Why not. Lonakd behold, you can't bump the difficulty back up once you do and I didn't want to play through hours of content again. Horrible design in my opinion.

I play Celeste with accessibility on and set the game speed to 90%. It's amazing. Still difficult but the hard hard hard sections don't take me literal hours to finish.

I am of two minds here.

I don't really care if people use the options, but I also believe that difficulty options are only good when done in one specific way; by adjusting the number and type of mobs in every encounter and not just giving them more/less heath and damage modifiers.

The former actually creates difficulty differences. The latter just makes things a breeze or a slog compared to the default (and design intended) difficulty.

I get your point. I'd say tho that when I have the choice of having just an ok version of difficulty options instead of none, I'll take the ok version.

I do like the few times I have seen games with two different difficulty settings and I tend to use those more. Games where they have difficulty for the action, and a separate difficulty for the puzzles.

Depending on the game, I'll crank the puzzles up to the hardest or lowest. The newer Resident Evils? Harder, pls. Onimusha back in the day where every puzzle was just a slider? Easiest. I'd skip them entirely if I could.

Yea! I always look back fondly on Shadow of the Tomb Raider and its awesome difficulty sliders. If more developers included stuff like that, we all would be much better off. And people wouldn't be so hell-bent on hating difficulty options then, I presume