---
title: 'Playing on "Easy Mode"'
pubDate: '4/9/24'
tags: ['Gaming']
---

I have a confession to make; I am terrible at video games! Yes, I've played them regularly for almost 30 years but I still manage to really suck at them. Some genres I'm ok with, such as platformers and turn-based RPGs, but I feel like I just don't have the coordination to pull off shooters and other action games.

I'm not sure if I've just got worse at video games with age, I'm 34 now, or if my patience for the struggle of powering through a particularly hard boss is just a lot lower than it used to be. After all, there are so many games I want to get to, and not enough time in the day. Whatever the case, I find myself turning to easy mode a lot more often.

Sometimes I find easy mode frustrating in a different way though. I recently finished Final Fantasy VII Rebirth, and I spent most of the game switching back-and-forth between easy and medium. I found easy a bit boring, but normal a little bit frustrating for my skill level. On easy, outside of boss fights, I didn't really feel any resistance from the game, and even then, some boss fights felt too...well...easy.

You could say, "Well, what did you expect from easy mode?" And that would be a fair point, easy mode is supposed to be just that. It's not really fair of me to expect anything more. But, at least for me, it robs the game of any sort of tension, and makes it nearly impossible to fail.

One relatively recent game I think did difficulty real well was Horizon Forbidden West. You had the standard "easy, medium, or hard" setting, but beyond that you could customize and tune the difficulty to your own specific preferences.

For example, you could tweak the damage modifiers for both you and your enemies. In my case, I found the enemies a little too weak on easy, so I tuned their damage up a little bit.

On the other hand I found Aloy, the character you play as in the Horizon series, to be a bit too beefed up on easy, so I was able to tune her down a bit as well. I was able to find this sweet spot between easy and medium that wasn't too frustrating but still gave me a satisfying experience.

While this kind of feature is slowly becoming more common, we've still got a long way to go. I realize it's probably not the easiest thing to account for when programming a game – game dev is so far beyond what I do, so I can only begin to fathom the challenges that level of customization would add to the development process – but it's something I think should be taken into account more often, along with other accessibility features.
