Maybe you should google how to think for yourself, mother fucker
*I’m not talking about MMOs by the way, y’all don’t wanna see my fully unhinged, 
- tier rant about that fundamentally misguided genre of WoW-clones
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I’m going through a terrible time and am feeling compelled to share my aggressive thoughts 
Meta-gaming is a fucking blight, death to America
I would even argue that Elden Ring already possesses an “easy mode”, it’s just not a literal stat increase to you and a stat decrease to all enemies. Spirit Ashes and multiplayer co-op are optional features to make the game easier, and you can also add status effects to your build without much effort which are pretty busted in Elden Ring at least. In previous games, access to these statuses were considerably more limited; now, you can make over half the weapons in the game into artery-eviscerating WMDs.
I have personally mellowed out on the whole “Souls games SHOULD be really hard!” thing because I’ve listened to the critique of others on it and I think they’re correct. The bizarre crusade against video game journalists that gamers do really gets on my nerve. Some of those journalists are right - some games should be more accessible. But Elden Ring… literally is more accessible than its predecessors? If you want it to be, it can be the easiest game that Miyazaki has made. The open world means that you can much more easily get good weaponry if you explore rather than fight bosses immediately, you can find spots to overlevel (cough Greyoll cough), the crafting system means you can apply statuses to enemies and buffs to yourself, etc. You can’t even be invaded online anymore unless you summon somebody, and even then, if you immediately start the boss then the invader is forced out of the world.
Compare this to Dark Souls 1, where you’d get oneshotted by Dark Bead users every 30 minutes if you played online, and if you decided to head down to the Catacombs first and found your way to the Tomb of the Giants at level 20, you were just fucked because you couldn’t warp until halfway through the game.
I wouldn’t regard myself as Elden Ring Fan #1. I do have a list of problems with the game, and that list was added to with the DLC; I think I was in the minority that found the DLC to be kinda disappointing if anything. But I do think that From Software is genuinely iterating towards better games over time, including in accessibility.
I agree but I also think accessibility is a weird discussion. To follow the book analogy that has been used in this thread: Rewriting books so they use shorter words and less flowery language would make them more accessible to a broader audience, but they would also lose something integral. I think it’s the same with games. Yeah super meat boy could just have a mode where you don’t die, but that’s not the story/art/whatever. Macbeth could be less weirdly written, but that’s part of it. Disco Elysium could just have an “auto win roll” button, but it doesn’t for a reason.
I don’t think games should be hard, but I also think that’s not the entirety of the argument, and it saddens me to see people reduce it to that (not saying you’re doing that, I feel like we agree).
And games like Elden Ring and dark Souls strike me as weird, because they have summons and so much more that’s meant to make the game “easier”