>Furthermore, the US left leads on progressive social values compared to Europe, such as immigration and social justice. The average European sentiment on race and immigration, such as their attitude towards Romani/"Gypsies" and Muslims is definitely considered right-wing in America.
Just because the US is fixated on identity politics does not mean it leads on progressive social values. Germany, a country with a quarter of the US population and way less territory has hosted a third of the amount of refugees the US has. Not even mentioning the data on total amount of refugees hosted by the EU because it absolutely dwarfs the US. As a migrant to the EU, the path to (legal) residency was extremely straight forward and easy, compared to the US. This is without going into topics such as socialised health care.
>Further, if someone who has difficulty with Crime and Punishment wants to read it, there are abridged versions, audiobooks, dramatizations, and other ways to enjoy it.
And if you really want to play Dark Souls and can't be bothered with all the tools the game gives you that make it easier, you can mod it or use cheat engine.
>I'm saying that the difficulty should adapt to meet the players where they are to maintain a challenge for them.
(...)
You could say, well, there IS an easy mode; just spend days grinding out levels. That kind of sucks, though.
That is not the only option. Summon other players. But you understand the contradiction of what you're saying, correct?
>[goes on to write a paragraph that could be used as the definition of gatekeeping]
I think you should rethink what gatekeeping actually is, because I'm not sure you know it. I'm not gatekeeping you out of Grave of the Fireflies if you tell me you don't want to watch a sad movie and I suggest against it. It would be gatekeeping if I said 'if you beat the game with summons you didn't actually beat Dark Souls', and it's not something I would say.
People's cognitive capabilities can also degrade as they age. Should every author write easier to comprehend versions of their works because of it? I don't think so. That being said, even with degraded reaction times, every Souls game is completely passable.
It impacts your experience in the sense that development time was given to balancing different difficulties. Even if the Souls games had a 'no damage taken' mode, for example, there are multiple mechanics where you fall off a cliff and die, and these things would take development time to correct. And again, it would mess with the author's vision on what the ambiance of the games should be like; It's oppressive because it's supposed to be, and frankly people who don't get it and demand explicit difficulty settings don't really want to play Dark Souls at all.
You don't need to have explicit difficulty selection to make a game easier: as said multiple times in these threads, there are a bunch of ways From does it without recurring to it.
> Where do we draw the line between considering it a modification of the "soul" of the game?
At this point it is clear difficulty is a staple of the series and the ambiance of all the Souls games. Every time a new game comes out, this complaint is raised by people who don't play the games and Miyazaki has decided not to add these explicit difficulty changing settings, so I think it's evident that its part of the soul of the games.
> Not all ability or disability is on the body, as some may lie on the mind, whether it is because of a persistent problem, a bad time in your life, or just constraints.
You can't expect authors to adjust to every single person on Earth circumstances on their works. This is not accessibility, and I think it's an argument in bad faith to claim it is.
This is not gatekeeping; If you want a challenge with fantastic ambience, you play a Souls game --- If you don't, you don't want to play Dark Souls, and that's perfectly fine, there's million other games where difficulty is not core to the experience. Not every piece of art or entertainment has to be palatable to everyone.
No, that's not akin to having Dostoyevsky on big print --- that is how you consume the content, not the content itself. Those things would be comparable to having a controller that a disabled person can use, which Souls games don't limit: you can play them with whatever controller you want. Requesting an easy mode, or a god mode, is more similar to requesting for the author to modify complex prose, or avoid using words that you don't know.
I agree that accessibility is important, but the games are not unreachable to the disabled. If you are missing an arm, for example, the game will probably be more difficult, but this applies to every hobby in which you are not a passive consumer.
>This is essentially the easy mode everyone wanted but the core souls fans.
I don't think souls fans (which I am) are against 'having an easier time with the games', I think most are just against explicit difficulty settings and stuff like god mode, because they break the motif of the games. Easy mode has always been there, since DeS, in that there are multiplayer summons who can carry you through every fight.
>Having said that, I still think they should add some accessibility features that can make the game easier. What they do in Mario Kart or Celeste I think is great. Instead of making difficulties which means some of them won't get proper design and balance. Focus on a single difficulty, but add accessibility features that can make it easier. I think it's important to do that so people who have handicaps, are younger, are too old, don't have the time and patience, can still experience and enjoy some of the games. They could choose to play some section normally, and when they get stuck, instead of quitting the game, they can try and give themselves some help to get over it.
But why? The difficulty is part of the experience and adds up to the oppressive nature of the ambiance. In a sense, the difficulty is part of the artistic vision of the designers. Not every piece of media or hobby needs to be vanilla and accessible to everybody; you would not request of Dostoyevsky for a 'simpler version' of his works, so that children and those not inclined to reading could experience them.
I had the exact same experience! Had a Nexus 6p, it boot looped and I sweared off Android forever. Ever since then I've been iPhone only and I have no complaints --- went from the 8 plus to a 13 Pro Max recently, but honestly it was a vanity upgrade and was not necessary at all.
I don't know if you're being disingenuous, but health care workers is a very wide group of people; most probably have absolutely no idea about 'whats in this thing', and in my experience most doctors are vaccinated --- it's hospital staff that aren't.