Insomniac Games has said that it has changed its approach towards video game difficulty in recent years, and has chosen to make its games more accessible to a wider audience as opposed to worrying solely about what hardcore players want.
Speaking to Axios Gaming, Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart game director Mike Daly said that the team has “sort of shed this conventional wisdom that games kind of need to be a hardass in order for you to get satisfaction out of it.” This doesn’t mean that developers are doing away with difficulty levels. However, they are opting to include more options for those who simply want to experience stories and settings without worrying about dying every minute. Accessibility options also make it possible for disabled gamers to enjoy modern games.
While Rift Apart isn’t a difficult game, it does come with the option to skip puzzles like The Last of Us Part II. According to Insomniac’s Mike Fitzgerald, adding the ability to skip puzzles “would have been unthinkable three to five years ago.”
“We no longer think about, like, ‘What will make the most elite players feel good about themselves?'” Daly concluded. “And more like, ‘What will enable everybody to have the experience they want to have?’ Because that’s sort of the most important thing to us.”
Daly’s thoughts are echoed by many others in the industry. More recently, Double Fine announced that Psychonauts 2 will come with an invincibility mode because the studio believes that everyone should be able to enjoy the game.
[Source: Axios]
