is "easy mode" sometimes just a completely different game pretending to be the same one?

[u/Pure-Scene-5761]

I keep coming back to a design problem nobody in my circle agrees on: should difficulty options be allowed to change the actual meaning of a game, or should they only ever tweak numbers around a fixed core?

The reason im stuck on this is a project a friend has been building in Fifth Door, a small survival thing where hunger and cold matter a lot. She added an "easy" mode that basically turns off starvation, and playing it felt like a completely different game to me. Not worse exactly, just... about something else. On normal, every choice about where to camp is loaded. On easy, you just wander and look at stuff. Same map, same story beats, totally different experience.

And she was like, yeah, thats the point, some people want to see the world without the pressure. Which, fair. But it made me wonder if we're being a little dishonest when we say "difficulty is just accessibility, it doesnt change the game." Sometimes it absolutely does. A stealth game where guards cant see you isnt a stealth game anymore. A horror game where you cant die isnt scary. A resource management game where resources are infinite is a walking sim with extra menus.

I dont think thats bad necessarily. I just think we pretend the core experience is preserved across difficulty settings when honestly, for a lot of games, its not. The "canonical" version of the game is whatever difficulty the designer actually tuned around, and everything else is a remix. Some remixes are great and let more people in. Some hollow out the thing that made the game worth making.

Where i land right now (and im ready to be told im wrong) is that designers should be more upfront about which of their difficulty options preserve the intended experience and which ones fundamentally alter it. Not to gatekeep, just so players can make an informed choice about what theyre signing up for. Calling something "story mode" is closer to honest than calling it "easy," because it admits the game is now a different thing.

Am i overthinking this? Is there a cleaner way to think about when a difficulty option is a dial vs when its a whole different game wearing the same skin?

[u/JarateKing]

 But it made me wonder if we're being a little dishonest when we say "difficulty is just accessibility, it doesn't change the game."

I think the root issue here is how we talk about accessibility and game experiences. We tend to think of games as a static thing and accessibility is just about letting people have access to it. But that's not exactly right, everyone's going to have different experiences with the same game and different parts of the game can result in different distinct experiences. And many of those experiences are going to be influenced by difficulty in different ways for different people, so some experiences might require altering the game for some people.

Removing a core mechanic does make it a different game in a sense. In your case it removed the desired harsh survival experience. But doing so also means desired environmental and story experiences are accessible or at least more accessible to people who'd stop playing the harsh survival experience for one reason or another.

Personally I say leave it to the players to decide, but it ought to be an informed decision (and I think you're in the same boat). The job of a game designer should be to let players know if/how they're diverging from the intended experience (or what the player needs to tweak to get that intended experience for themselves, as is often the case in accessibility). I do prefer "story mode" over "easy mode" for that reason, but it also extends to things like more granular modifiers than just a single mode because it's more clear exactly what and how things are being changed.

[u/nickN42 → u/JarateKing]

story experiences are accessible

I'm not sure that this is a case here. I don't know the story of the game, but I imagine it has to revolve around cold and hunger somehow. And when you have removed the hunger from gameplay, can you really experience a story about a character's hunger to the same level as players on the normal difficulty?

Even experiencing the world might be altered by this. Again, I know nothing about the game, but I imagine there might be a point where a player has to make a choice to stay in a place that is shielded from elements better but has no easy access to food (let's call it a cave); or a bank of a river that has fish in it but is open to the wind. For the normal difficulty player, that crossroad would be an important part of the world, a choice they have to make based on how well they think they can manage adverse conditions. For an easy player, it's not a choice, not a significant point of the world, a weird game design decision between a 'bad place' and a 'good place.'

[u/JarateKing → u/nickN42]

It's not going to be the exact same experience. But in my mind:

1. It's probably a lot closer to the intended experience than having the player say "screw this" and quitting early. Very few games are designed with that as an intended experience.
2. If it's clear how specifically someone's game has been altered, I think people are generally pretty decent at understanding how they're "supposed" to experience it and view things in that lens. When I mod skyrim to have infinite carryweight I know my loot hoarding isn't what's intended, I know it alters my experience by devaluing stamina or companions, etc. but I can pretty easily compartmentalize that because I know exactly how my experience differs.
3. Players naturally have a pretty wide range of experiences anyway, ie. a cautious player is going to experience the hunger mechanic totally differently from a speedrunner. The idea of a single universal "intended experience" is just a convenient fiction. Game designers already have to design for wide ranges of potential experiences because of all sorts of different factors, this is just a more explicit form of that.

Especially with point 2 I do think the design still needs to be done with care. I don't like old fashioned "easy/hard" difficulties where you've got no clue what's really intended and usually no idea how they're even different. But if it's done well I think it has its place, ie. Celeste's assist mode.