Games, Difficulty, and Why We Keep Arguing About It

Silksong stirred up the old, reliable debate again: game difficulty. It’s a many-headed hydra, yet internet discourse somehow collapses it into “too hard!! lol git gud” versus “baby mode when?”—said with varying levels of snark. Rather than tether this to one title, I’m looking at difficulty from both sides of the screen: as a player and as a developer. Because when difficulty lands, it creates emotional spikes you can’t get anywhere else; when it misses (for a given player), it smothers a promising experience in its crib.

This is long on purpose. It’s a collection of viewpoints and working notes I’ve been hashing out in forum discussions—tidied up into one big “state of the difficulty discourse” post.

The Obvious Foundations (That Still Matter)

Difficulty isn’t one thing. It’s a bundle of demands:

Silksong stirred debate by raising the
difficulty bar without saying so out loud

Knowledge and pattern recognition
Reaction time and prediction
Attention (visual/audio signal picking)
Motor precision and coordination
Spatial awareness
Working memory & multitasking
Problem solving and routing

Players vary. Baseline skill, rate of improvement, and—critically—motivation differ wildly. At a high level we play for two umbrellas of reward: emotional experiences (joy of discovery, flow, mastery, surprise, aesthetics, narrative immersion, social wins) and learning (rarer as an explicit motive, but real).

The price of the highs are the lows. Frustration, irritation, stress, unfairness, shame/embarrassment (“I should be better than this”), loss. Different players value these costs and benefits very differently. Your classic HC skill-first player discounts retry frustration to near zero and chases the high of victory. A more casual player may avoid negative spikes almost entirely, and their “win high” scale is broad or context-dependent.

Knobs That Create Difficulty

Examples across action, soulslike, metroidvania, etc.:

Simpler vs. more complex enemy move sets
Error budget: how many mistakes before death?
Precision required per action
Attack speeds and reaction windows (or telegraphing quality)
Telegraph clarity (clean tells vs. deceptive/late)
Randomness vs. predictability in patterns
Focus width: one enemy or a zoo of mechanics simultaneously?

Punishment scale is its own axis: time loss, resource loss, forced re-grind, lockouts. Punitive loops are polarizing. They can amplify the “I earned this” high later—or just feel like the game wasting your life. Hardcore (permadeath) is so distinct it’s basically its own universe.

UX and controls contribute too. Clarity, responsiveness, readability. We usually file these under “design quality,” but they absolutely change effective difficulty.

Progression isn’t linear. Often we expect it to be. Implicit tools (grind, power growth, open-world detours) can invert the curve: hard early, trivial late. People disagree strongly about whether that’s good or bad.

Streamlining != easier (necessarily). Early 2000s streamlining + difficulty dips arguably set the stage for soulslike’s rise as a counter-trend. Many “QoL” changes still have challenge implications.

Authentic Challenge vs. The Illusion (And Why Illusion Still Works)

Some players need to feel the challenge is real; others are happy if it feels real. We have a whole toolbelt for “managed difficulty”: rubber-banding AIs, generous timers that look scary, soft fail-safes, optional helpers, grindable power, route flexibility, etc. Games are artificial by nature, but if you strongly value “True Achievement™,” noticing the strings ruins the show. Heavy players or designers spot more of the strings.

Explicit Difficulty, Implicit Difficulty, and External Tools

Design patterns:

Fixed difficulty: classic Mario energy.
Implicit tools: Elden Ring—summons, levels, upgrades, grind, open-world routing, build variety.
Explicit modes: the menu you already know.
External: mods, trainers, cheats—nearly unbounded customization in single-player (with security caveats).

Difficulty tools don’t just adjust the challenge; they also shape how the community perceives the game and the social meaning of beating it. In some circles, beating a famed “no-modes” game carries social capital. Add explicit modes and that signal blurs.

Case Study Lightning Round

Silksong and the Sequel Dilemma

Sequels face a fork:

mirror the original’s difficulty progression, or
continue from where veterans “ended.”
Silksong seems to have picked #2 but didn’t market it that way. Mix in few implicit or explicit easing tools and you get a storm: broad audience curiosity + higher starting demand + expectation mismatch.

Path of Exile 1 vs 2

POE1 tests knowledge heavily; POE2 leans more on mechanical execution. If you loved POE1’s “learn the system, profit” arc, you might feel shut out when the sequel raises the “hands” bar.

POE2 shifts the test from knowledge
toward execution, reshaping who feels at home
Dark Souls, Elden Ring, and the Guide Effect

DS1 can be a knowledge challenge if you play “blind”; with guides, you transmute mechanical difficulty into planning and routing. Elden Ring’s open structure + build tools let many of us sculpt the challenge into our personal sweet spot—without explicit modes.

Roguelike vs. Roguelite (Philosophy, Not Just Permadeath)

Roguelike: the curve is almost entirely player-skill growth.
Roguelite: meta power (and in-run power) can smooth or replace skill increases.
Plenty of roguelites are, at core, carefully staged illusions of difficulty—by design. That’s not a diss; it’s a philosophy. It’s also why some genre purists bristle.

On the other end, cozy games intentionally minimize negatives and shower predictable positives. Most difficulty debates are about where on this “negatives for bigger highs” spectrum a game should sit.

Psychology: Competence, Autonomy, Meaning

Games can feed three deeply human needs:

Competence (mastery)
Autonomy (agency)
Meaning (significance)

If you already get these from work or life, you might want fewer frustration spikes in your leisure. If games are a primary identity pillar, the challenge-as-rite-of-passage narrative gets louder.

Related: our brains often connect meaning with effort (“easy come, easy go”). That’s one reason difficulty can inflate perceived significance—and why grinding sometimes “works,” even when we complain about it.

Scarcity Kids vs. Abundance Adults

A generational lens: many of us grew up when games were expensive and rare. You beat what you had. That’s scarcity. In adulthood we have money, infinite backlogs, and life stress. Abundance. In abundance, “growth mindset via games” becomes optional; “choose the experience that fits tonight” becomes default. You can still seek hard things—but you don’t have to.

This colors our takes on modes, guides, skips, and refunds. It also explains why a “story mode” existing doesn’t harm those who won’t touch it—and might let others enjoy the rest of the game.

Marketing: Expectation Management Is Half the Battle

Late-stage marketing is not just about hype; it’s about setting accurate expectations. If your game leans on a fixed, high bar and offers few tools to flatten it, say that out loud. Conversely, if you support sculptable difficulty (explicit modes or implicit systems), sell that vision. Most of the ugliest flame-outs are mismatches between what players think they’re buying and what they get.

Streamers intensify this. Genre-specialist skill gods often shape the first public opinion—and their bar is not representative. Social media then amplifies a “consensus” that may not be one.

The Community Layer: Shared Pain, Shared Pride

Challenging games build tribes. Shared hardship bonds people (see: boot camps, to a vastly lesser emotional degree). If your community’s identity is “we endured X,” then “helpers” (modes, guides, cheese) can be read—often subconsciously—as threats to identity. That’s where “you didn’t really beat it” energy comes from. It’s messy, and it’s human.

Hades’ adaptive ‘Heat’ system shows how
difficulty can flex without fracturing the core experience

Hades is a neat counterexample. “Beat the game” isn’t the communal badge; “32 Heat clear” is. The community shards into sub-tribes by self-selected challenge, and that’s fine. Importantly, the game’s implicit tools (keepsakes, Pact of Punishment, meta power) let difficulty be adaptive without feeling bolted on. The psychological framing is elegant; the systems are optional yet narratively integrated.

Explicit Difficulty Modes: Pros, Cons, and Nuance

Benefits

Don’t hard-gate the audience on ability, tolerance for frustration, or accessibility.
From a dev lens: broader reach, more commercial potential.
From a player lens: agency to tune a core axis of experience.
Given the multidimensional space of skill/tolerance/reward preferences, having a few dials is not a sin—it’s common sense.

Costs

The “I beat it” signal blurs. This is largely subconscious but socially real in challenge-centric communities.
Self-knowledge trap: many people down-tune too early and later feel robbed of a better long-term high. (Yes, this is a thing; yes, people learn over time; no, this doesn’t justify removing the option for everyone.)
Bad implementations degrade design fundamentals (e.g., “hard = sponge enemies + chip damage,” “easy = turn off half the combat”). It can warp pacing and fantasy if it’s just number scaling.

Neutral/Contextual

“No difficulty modes” can be a positioning signal—legit if you market it clearly and deliver for that audience.

What about cheat codes and mods?
They used to be common in-game; today you’re often pushed to external tools—great flexibility, worse UX/security. In principle, single-player cheats are fine when used after you’ve sampled the core and decided which parts you want to keep enjoying. They’re another way to “pick the raisins out of the bun,” as long as you know what your raisins are.

Knowledge vs. Mechanics (and the Souls Factor)

A recurring theme: some games primarily test knowledge (build planning, route selection, matchup understanding); others primarily test execution (timing, reactions, inputs). Many “too hard” debates are really “I signed up for the wrong test.”

Guides can flip one into the other. That’s why Dark Souls can feel fair and satisfying both to the blind explorer and the spreadsheet enjoyer—just in different ways. It’s also why sequels that shift the mix (POE2, faster modern soulslikes) upset parts of the original audience.

“Experience It As Intended” vs. Personal Tailoring

A surprisingly universal sentiment in film/TV/books/music discussions—“experience it as intended”—bleeds into games. I get the purity appeal. My lens is more pragmatic: mass-market works are never perfectly tailored to any one individual. Some limited personalization (skips, pacing tweaks, difficulty dials) can turn “not for me” into “this was great,” without flattening the author’s voice—if done with care and restraint. There’s an axis between “original intent, untouched” and “homogenized mush”; we don’t need to sprint to either extreme.

Why Keep Fixed Difficulty At All?

A reasonable developer question: “Why not add explicit modes (or at least broad implicit tools) to widen the audience?”

Answers that actually hold water:

Core emotional design hinges on shared, fixed hardship. The game’s identity, marketing, and community are built around that rite-of-passage feel.
Systemic integrity. Some designs collapse if you scale them crudely. If you can’t implement additional dials without breaking pacing, economy, or fantasy, don’t.
Positioning. You’re deliberately serving a niche that values the undiluted test. (Then say so clearly.)

If none of the above are true, strongly consider implicit adaptivity (builds, helpers, open routing, meta power) or explicit modes. The gains—for players and for the business—often outweigh the soft costs.

A Note on Blame, Choice, and “Marketing Tricked Me”

Echoes of Myth: my own spin on Hades-style
roguelite loops with Soulslike combat grit

Players can’t truly know difficulty fit without touching the game. Good marketing sets the bar accurately; good players develop selection heuristics. Both fail sometimes. When they do, that mismatch alone can sink an otherwise solid title—especially in an abundance world where refunding after an hour is normal. As devs, we own our expectation-setting.

Streamers, Perception, and the Echo Chamber

Highly skilled streamers often frame the public’s first impression. Their bar is skewed, but the megaphone is loud. Social media amplifies vocal minorities into perceived consensus. Devs can counter with in-game analytics, but the perception weather still matters—especially if your game’s reputation (“hardest ever!”) becomes a self-reinforcing myth. DS1’s aura likely benefited from hitting a cultural moment after a decade of smoothing; beating it felt like beating the zeitgeist, not just a boss.

Personal Position (So You Know My Bias)

I treat games primarily as leisure: I want good vibes, low friction, and I’m happy to sculpt difficulty with in-game tools and knowledge. I still enjoy a measured push (I finished DS1–3 and Elden Ring), but I’ll gladly use OP builds, early upgrades, and routing to keep retries on the happy side of frustration. That’s how I extract the most joy. Others genuinely want the “face the wall, overcome, bask” arc. Both are valid; design should acknowledge both exist.

Practical Takeaways for Designers

Decide where your emotional peaks come from. If they mostly come from overcoming challenge, be cautious with easy outs; consider opt-in ceilings (Hades-style heat) so the top end still has prestige signals.
If your game has rich non-challenge value (world, narrative, aesthetics, discovery), consider multiple on-ramps—explicit modes or robust implicit tools—so more players can reach those parts.
Market the truth. Make your target audience crystal clear, and don’t bury the lede on difficulty profile or tools.
When adding modes, avoid lazy number-only scaling that breaks pacing. Aim for holistic tuning (readability, recovery windows, economy pressure, assistive systems).
Embrace community pluralism. Let different sub-tribes have their badges.

Closing: The Argument Isn’t Going Away (And That’s Fine)

The spiciest debates will keep clustering around games that:

choose a single fixed difficulty/profile,
also offer a lot of other emotional value beyond challenge,
attract a broad audience,
but provide few player-side tools to shape difficulty.

That’s the gray zone where tribes collide: “this should be for me, too” vs. “don’t dilute our thing.” There isn’t a single right answer. There is, however, a better question: What experience are we trying to deliver, to whom, and how honestly are we telling them?

If we can get that part right—design, tooling, and expectation-setting—the rest of the discourse can stay lively without being toxic. And maybe, just maybe, we can argue about something else for a week.

PS. All content of the post is sourced from my collected forum posts and collated by AI into this single blog post.

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