I somewhat agree that a single difficulty option is usually shit because different things are difficult for different people. For example, one of the nu-Tomb Raiders includes a puzzle difficulty. Great, I love puzzles so I can just max that out and not have Lara outright tell me the solution every time, right? No, because puzzle difficulty also tightens timers which just makes things more frustrating for me. Ideally, difficulty options should be about specific aspects of the game that the player may have difficulty with or just doesn't want to deal with.
Your retort also conveniently focuses on the opposite extreme of your (presumably) desired rare steak while discounting the entire range of more reasonable doneness options for which there exists no objectively best. I may very well like my steak more rare than what the chef likes - or rather what the chef thinks the average customer wants, which is what you mostly get if there are no options.
These things can and should be improved without removing difficulty settings. Removing settings won't magically make devs put any effort into balance either.On the first playthrough, if a game asks me what difficulty setting I want to choose, it's automatically a negative for me. For a couple of reasons:
1. Difficulty settings make the game predictable
2. The player doesn't have enough information to choose a difficulty setting
3. Difficulty settings result in lazy balancing
Trying to make single-player games into shared experiences is extremely gay. If anything, individual experiences make for far more interesting stories you can share. Challenging yourself should be about improving YOUR experience, not about being able to compare yourself to other players. If you want a dick measuring contest, use this instead:4. Difficulty settings don't allow players to have a shared experience
They ruin the joy of defeating a really hard boss that you might get stuck on for hours or enjoying the moments of absolute power after you have done the hard work to become strong (think Gothic games), the moments that you are eager to share with other players. With difficulty settings, moments like that are ruined and cheapened and do not become memorable enough to be worth sharing
These are great an much better things to focus on than worrying about whether there is an overall easy mode or not.1. Adding secret easy mode withing the confines of the game-play itself: like the sorcerer class in Dark Souls or certain weapons/aspects in Hades
2. Dividing the game-world into different difficulty settings, kinda like what Gothic games did. You are technically free to go wherever you want, but certain areas are hard to get through if you are still weak (this one works for open-world and semi open-world games
Difficulty dynamically adapting to player performance is the worst cancer that has ever happened to game balance, even worse than level scaling. Fuck you if you want to force me to give up because you think I am taking too long or need too many attempts to get trough something. Anyone who does this in their games should immediately quit the game industry and dedicate their remaining life to meditating on what is wrong with their brain.5. Adding dynamic difficulty (like Resident Evil 4)
Even better than making the overall difficulty dependent on the build is making the shape of the difficulty curve vary between builds. Allow me to chose to challenge myself early in the game with a pea shooter glass cannon so that I can later mow down enemies before they even think about damaging me if that's what I want.Difficulty settings are shit, make difficulty dependent on build instead. This works for all genres not just RPGs btw.
This isn't about telling them how to do their job but about being able to accommodate different preferences. The cook's job is to be able to consistently achieve the desired doneness. Same should be true for the game developer: focus on making the player have the best experience, which you are not going to be able to do for all players with only one setting. It's worth remembering that games are an interactive medium, which means their strength is that the experience can vary from player to player so why not take advantage of that. Within reason of course, no one is expecting any other difficulty setting to receive the same amount of balancing effort as the default one but that doesn't mean the others shouldn't exist at all.Why is nobody mocking this take? This is unironically true. Asking the staff in a nice restaurant for your steak to be well done is akin to asking them to spit in your food and serve it with a side of ketchup.Letting the diner choose how they want their steak done is fundamentally bad cooking.
If the diner (or the player) needs to tell you how to do your fucking job, you're shit and shouldn't be in the industry. Not all games should be for all players, and if someone is playing a game that's too easy or difficult for them, well that was a failure of marketing or a really stupid consumer. It doesn't take some sort of 79 year old grognard to figure out that Europa Universalis is going to require a few more neurons to get through than Mario Party.
Your retort also conveniently focuses on the opposite extreme of your (presumably) desired rare steak while discounting the entire range of more reasonable doneness options for which there exists no objectively best. I may very well like my steak more rare than what the chef likes - or rather what the chef thinks the average customer wants, which is what you mostly get if there are no options.