Gaming

I mean, presumably because it'd compromise their vision for the game or some such? Some games use gameplay as part of the storytelling, so nontrivial difficulty swttings would compromise the story being told (for example if the game wants you to experience a gruelling trek through a hostile area). Now that doesn't mean a story mode or similar is bad, but there are reasons to consider for a game dev to consider such settings incompatible with their game. Also in a game with more complex mechanics difficulty would be more complicated than player and enemy stats, and a dev might simply consider implementing satisfactory difficulty settings not a good use of their time.

You don't have to play difficult games. Not everything has to cater to a wide audience. Most of today's re-boots and sequals were from stories that catered to a niche audience only to lose its appeal by going too mainstream..

I enjoyed difficult games a lot more back before I got a job.

I’ll keep saying it: I already have a job. I want to play a game to unwind.

This is not a universal response. Some people like difficult games for many reasons. Overcoming a challenge can give me a taste of triumph absent from my day job.

Implementing a wide gamut of difficulty settings is also an accessibility feature, and allows people with certain physical or mental challenges the opportunity to enjoy your game firsthand. Why would you want to deny your audience this opportunity?

Sure, maybe, but the devil is in the details.

I suppose it's not the game maker's responsibility to stop people from ruining their own experiences. I'm pretty confident that some people would just easy-mode through dark souls and have a vastly diminished experience. "I don't see the big deal. It's just an action game", they might say, because easy mode gave unlimited healing and no monster respawn. The difficulty (which is vastly overstated) is part of what makes it work. People remember Blight Town and Sen's Fortress because of the ordeal. I can't remember a single dungeon from Skyrim.

Furthermore, meta game options found in menus is not the only way to do difficulty options. Elden Ring, for example, is very generous with spirit summons.

Difficulty is not simply one aspect of a game that can be adjusted with a slider. Difficulty is the confluence of many different gameplay aspects coming together. Sometimes, those systems allow for easy and discrete adjustment like with the old Doom games where settings can simply vary the enemies that spawn, the damage dealt, or the health and ammo from pickups.

The deliberate decisions and balance that make Dark Souls good also make it difficult, it's not good simply because it is difficult. Take Blighttown for example, one of the most notoriously difficult areas of the game. It's difficult because the architecture is hostile and confusing, and encounters place immense pressure on the player through application of Toxic and confined or deliberately open spaces that allow you to dodge yourself off a cliff. How do you make that "easier"? There really isn't an abundance of enemy placement throughout most of the game, it's very deliberate. Equipment attribute numbers are all low to maintain a tight balance and even things like parry windows are affected by the specific shield you have equipped. Adding in additional difficulty options is a retuning of the entire game, which also retunes the formula. Look, I'm sorry if it sounds snobby but there's just no other way to say that if you start making substitutions to a dish at a restaurant it's not the same dish!

This insistence that all games MUST be for all people is what leads to the bland homogeneity of modern game design. Dark Souls comes from the rich legacy of dungeon crawlers like King's Field before it and those games are notoriously oppressive and difficult, it's why people like myself love them. Everyone attributes poison swamps to Miyazaki but go back to Eternal Ring or Shadow Tower: Abyss in the early 00's before his involvement and you'll find mandatory poison damage areas there as well. It's a staple of the genre. Heck, play Megami Tensei (no, not Shin Megami Tensei, MEGAMI TENSEI from the NES) and there's a whole section of mandatory fire damage that you can't negate until you're already 4/5 of the way through it.

I also find the accessibility angle disingenuous and a little insulting even. All props to devs that add difficulty to their game as a means of accessibility when they are able to or want to, but it should not be necessary. This also diminishes real accessibility options like colorblind modes, reading assistance modes, keybinding modes, etc. I do not appreciate that.

Everyone thinks they're a critic because they don't like a game or certain things about a game and that it would be better if it catered to them, but difficulty is already highly subjective to begin with and insisting that devs find ways to foresee and cater to all possible permutations is untenable.

If you don't like the game: fine. If you want to levy valid criticisms about the game in your opinion: fine. But this insistence that the developers are being foolish for creating a game to their vision and not yours is the actual thing cheapening it as art.

Celeste is the perfect embodiment of that philosophy IMO. The whole story is an explicit metaphor for overcoming a great personal challenge. And the gameplay's difficulty is what drives that point home and makes the game an all-time great.

I've seen a couple streamers with G4m3r Skillz breeze through Celeste, and the game didn't leave them much of an impression. But it touches very deeply those who struggled through it because the struggle is the bond that ties the player to Madeline.

Other games it doesn't really matter. Portal 2 is a great game even if the puzzles are quite easy, because the greatness lies in its writing, atmosphere and worldbuilding. There's an Aperture miniseries just begging to be made - but a Dark Souls or Celeste cinematographic adaptation would miss the entire point.