Difficulty, Accessibility, and How Sekiro Failed at Both
/It seems like every time a new high-profile difficult game is released, we start to see the same arguments about difficulty and accessibility in games - and all the moreso if it happens to be a Souls series game. Few titles have embodied this phenomenon as wholly as Sekiro, and it’s not really hard to see why. Sekiro is a really excellent game in most ways, but a lot of people feel like they just can’t play the game, which naturally leads to feelings of “all my friends are talking about it, I don’t want to be excluded!”.
This has led to a lot of discussions about easy modes and assist options, but the problem with this line of thinking is that, when a game is as complicated as Sekiro, difficulty is a very nuanced thing. It’s really doesn’t take much to make a difficult game - being unfair to the player is actually really easy. However what’s important to a Souls style game isn’t so much the pure difficulty, so much as the feeling that the Souls games provide. It’s about giving the player the experience of overcoming seemingly insurmountable odds, without it ever feeling like the task is impossible.
And therein lies the problem. If the entire basis of your game is the concept of overcoming difficult challenges, how then do you create a more approachable experience without subverting the entire point of your game? Clearly this is much more to this than just making an easy mode.
I think that the first thing to consider when broaching this topic, is the potential reasons why a player may fail to complete a specific challenge.
In essence, you can break any game down into a series of challenges, with each challenge being of a specific type. Sometimes you’ll be challenging the player’s reaction speed, other times their strategy, or their puzzle solving, or their memorization, etc. Realistically, each challenge you present the player is probably challenging multiple skills at any given time, and in an ideal world, one would try and have some amount of balance in which skills you’re asking the player to use. Challenging the same skill too often can get boring or even tiring, so it’s good to change things up a bit.
The problem becomes, each player is going to show up with a different set of strengths and weaknesses, as well as varying physical ability to overcome each type of challenge. In other words, what may be hard for one person may be easy for another, or physically impossible for yet someone else. If a player has played every From Software title in the past 10 years, the difficulty level for them isn’t likely going to be the same as it is for someone who, say, mostly plays puzzle games. So how then do you construct a game that offers a challenge that is significant, and yet still able to be overcome, when the difficulty is so variant for a given player?
For Dark Souls, the answer would seem to typically be that, you don’t. From Software has pretty clearly been ok with the idea that their games won’t appeal to everyone. Which is fine, but I don’t think it tells the whole story. On one hand, From Software is a household name now, and in a world where everyone knows your name, I think it behooves them to some degree to make their titles more approachable by a wider audience. This doesn’t mean they need an easy mode, or that they need to dumb down the difficulty. I do, however, think that it means they need to consider better accessibility options.
More to the point though, is the fact that without even looking at difficulty and accessibility modes, Sekiro is actually giant step backwards from their past titles when it comes to approachability. (ironic, for a game starring a protagonist with a prosthetic arm).
See, the main way that I like to think of difficulty in games has less to do with raw difficulty, and more to do with how much power I have as a player to overcome a challenge that has bested me. It’s easy to look at your defeat and think, “well I just have to do it again, but do better”, which is definitely one way to do it. From Software titles tend to lean heavily on “get good” as being your go-to method of surpassing challenges. But in an ideal world we have a bunch of ways for us to overcome a given challenge.
When you have a lot of ways to inch yourself closer to the finish line, it means you’re free to use as many or as few of those tactics as you like or are able to do. This is important, because it means that if you don’t want to, or physically cannot pursue one such path, there are still others things you can do to work towards victory. If you don’t want to grind levels you don’t have to, but that option is there. If you struggle to follow the combat, or have issues pushing the buttons quickly enough, you have other ways to beef yourself up so that you’re performance doesn’t have to be as flawless to succeed. And so on and so forth.
Let’s take a look at what I mean, by looking at three different games, and comparing the different options a player would have if they were to get stuck on a boss fight. For this example, we’ll be looking at Super Mario RPG: Legend of the Seven Stars, Bloodborne, and Sekiro.
| Mario RPG | Bloodborne | Sekiro |
|---|---|---|
| 1) Improve your strategy 2) Get better at timed hits 3) Change up your equipment 4) Try different party members 5) Look for hidden items and powerful equipment 6) Go shopping for healing itmes and missed equipment 7) Stock up on powerful battle items 8) Get FP upgrades 9) Grind levels 10) Get lucky | 1) Improve your strategy 2) Improve your performance 3) Customize your armor and weapon loadout to better match the enemy 4) Grind levels 5) Look for better gear 6) Upgrade your existing gear 7) Summon a friend 8) Get lucky |
1) Improve your strategy 2) Improve your performance 3) Try different Ninja Prosthetics 4) Fight other bosses to increase health and attack 5) Acquire any skills or consumables you're expected to have 6) Get lucky |
As we can see, the further to the right we go on the table, the fewer options the player has to get themselves to victory. (It also happens that, the farther right we go, the fewer RPG elements the games contain).
While this isn’t an inherently bad thing, it means that we are shoving a player farther and farther down a given path in order to achieve victory. If I’m stuck in Sekiro, it feels like my only option is to “get good”, whereas in the other games we looked at, there’s always a bunch of things I can immediately do in addition to playing better, that will help me get there. As much as the Dark Souls trilogy has the reputation of being all about ramming your head against the bosses until they fall over, those games give you a huge variety of options compared to Sekiro, which puts them miles ahead in this regard.
It’s also worth noting that, I feel like this particular aspect of Sekiro hurts even the game’s most hardcore fanbase, who want nothing but to “get good” anyways. With fewer ways to play Sekiro, it means that the game has far less replay value than previous From titles, which is a big deal when that hardcore demographic are the type who are most likely to indulge in a new game+++++++++ run. You get none of that discourse over how awesome your dex-based whip build is compared to your friend’s strength/int build and how you want to try a spear build some day. Every time you play Sekiro you’re using the Kusabimaru to slash and deflect your way to victory.
Sekiro is a very finely crafted, highly rewarding experience, and From Software are well within their rights to make a title that isn’t made to appeal to all audiences. They built their current niche from the ground up, and appealing to a very specific group of hardcore gamers is how they got to where they are now. However I also think that it’s worth talking about the fact that, even if we were to ignore the discourse around difficulty modes or accessibility options, Sekiro is easily the least approachable title in this genre so far. I think there’s an argument to be made that, accessibility options would be a boon to the game, but as things stand, the base experience is so narrow that it hurts everyone who will play the game, not just those who wish Sekiro was easier or more accessible.