I agree that if the difficulty is too high you ought to return it. Typically games are balanced for a sizable enough audience, if a game’s tutorial is impossibly difficult then it’s probably not a good tutorial or the game’s for a hyper niche audience.
I guess I can understand the appeal of easy modes just for experiencing the story. This does hit a wall though when a game’s story is dependent on its gameplay. Like Fromsoft games demand a lot of attention to understand the story beyond a basic level, they clearly want to gatekeep that and it’s part of their games’ identity.
My point is basically, difficulty is one of the tools a developer can use to craft their experience. While most games want to appeal to as many people as possible, it should be just as valid for a game to decide their experience requires inherent skill requirements, at the risk of people returning it if they aren’t the target audience.
I agree that if the difficulty is too high you ought to return it. Typically games are balanced for a sizable enough audience, if a game’s tutorial is impossibly difficult then it’s probably not a good tutorial or the game’s for a hyper niche audience.
I guess I can understand the appeal of easy modes just for experiencing the story. This does hit a wall though when a game’s story is dependent on its gameplay. Like Fromsoft games demand a lot of attention to understand the story beyond a basic level, they clearly want to gatekeep that and it’s part of their games’ identity.
My point is basically, difficulty is one of the tools a developer can use to craft their experience. While most games want to appeal to as many people as possible, it should be just as valid for a game to decide their experience requires inherent skill requirements, at the risk of people returning it if they aren’t the target audience.