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  • We need to stop arguing about difficulty settings in games

    It seems as though every six months or so the discourse around difficulty settings in video games lights up across pockets of the internet — typically tied to the release of the latest soulslike. These games pride themselves on being a challenging experience in which overcoming the odds through skill and dedication is the ultimate reward for most players. Many enjoy piecing together the lore, exploring the world, or playing with the fashion as well, but it is the sense of pride one gets from overcoming these tough, but fair, obstacles that has made it one of the most popular genres in recent memory.

    Naturally, this leads to some debate about whether or not these games should offer any difficulty options, and if they do, like Lies of P: Overture has not so long ago, if playing on a lower difficulty “counts,” is not the “developer’s intent,” or one of a handfull of other reasons that miss the point entirely. There is no argument to be had surrounding difficulty settings and it is time we stopped pretending there is.

    One size doesn’t fit all

    Difficulty settings are accessibility settings, full stop. We might not think of them the same way we do colorblind or visual indicators for sound cues, but there’s functionally no difference. If an option allows someone to experience a piece of media they otherwise couldn’t, it should be celebrated. Suggesting that lowering the difficulty is somehow cheating or not getting the “real” experience just sounds like gatekeeping and ignores the main reason those options exist. It is there for people who, for whatever reason, could not engage with the game on the default setting. Everyone is at a different skill level before taking into account genre familiarity, time, and any disabilities. You and I might experience the same level of challenge, but on opposite difficulty levels because our natural skill levels simply vary that much.

    It should go without saying, but everyone is unique. That is why options exist. Even in cases where someone uses an easier difficulty when they could spend the time practicing to overcome the challenge, why should it matter to anyone else if they decide to lower the difficulty? We all come to games for different things and enjoy them for different reasons.

    Promised Consort Radahn standing with two swords in Elden Ring.
    FromSoftware

    A newer argument I’ve seen cropping up as of late pivots the focus from people who use lower difficulty options robbing themselves of something to robbing the developers. The term I see thrown around most often is “developer’s intent” and the assumption that the default difficulty, or a game without any options, is the way developers want players to experience the game. While quite presumptuous on its face, I do get the logic. Whatever the normal difficulty is tends to be what the game was balanced for first, with higher and lower options being tuned after the fact. That isn’t always the case, of course, but it seems to be the most common approach. That’s about as far as I’m willing to go with that logic, though.

    For one, every major game goes through tons of changes and playtesting to find the right level of challenge. That doesn’t stop when a game releases anymore, either. Elden Ring underwent some major balance changes for bosses, weapons, and abilities. Was the original version the developer’s intent before bosses like Radahn got nerfed, or after? Difficulty is a fluid thing and always the result of the entire team working to find a balance that appeals to the target audience best. Again, this goes right back to the first point where what is easy for some might be overwhelming for others.

    We need to stop pretending that difficulty is a one-size-fits-all situation. Even if you believe that a developer wants a game to be hard, understand that “hard” is a subjective term. Me playing on easy might pose just as much challenge to me as you playing on ultra-nightmare, or whatever. Even if we lived in a perfect world where everyone was at the same skill level and there were no disabilities to accommodate, there’s nothing to gain by shaming people for playing a game differently than you. The death of the author should apply just as much to narrative as difficulty in games — we should be free to experience and take away whatever we want from a game.

  • We need to start having real conversations about AI in gaming

    AI has become a dirty word across almost every discipline over the past few years. As big corporations keep pushing this technology forward, a vocal resistance among creatives, critics, and passionate communities has risen up in opposition. While every creative medium is at risk of AI influence now, gamers are particularly sensitive about this technology sucking the creativity and human element from our beloved medium. Even the mere mention of AI being used in game development triggers a massive backlash, but we need to start being more nuanced in how we talk about the ways AI should and should not be used. Because, like it or not, AI is going to become more ubiquitous in gaming. We can’t keep talking about AI as though it is a black-and-white thing. It is a tool, and like any tool, there are ways it can be used appropriately.

    The question we need to ask ourselves now is, when is it ethical to use and what crosses the line?

    A blurry line

    Game development is complicated. I say that upfront to acknowledge that it is easy for us to play armchair developer and say that AI shouldn’t be used under any circumstances, but the reality of the situation is very different. Developers, pundits, and analysts have all been shouting from the rooftops for years now about how unsustainable the current AAA landscape is, so at the very least, we can say that publishers are looking for solutions that cut cost, time, or both.

    AI is the big bet right now across multiple disciplines, and that includes gaming. We’re already seeing players like PlayStation experiment with things like AI characters, while Steam is setting up flags to let players know if a game includes AI-generated content. It has been reported that Microsoft’s massive 2025 layoffs were done in part to fund its $80 billion AI infrastructure initiative, which will no doubt seep its way into Xbox’s massive portfolio of studios. Unless there’s some major piece of regulation put in place (which I could never see our current administration doing), then it is only a matter of time before it becomes the norm.

    So, when is it okay? There are some clear examples of when it isn’t, such as AI-generated art, writing, or even entire games. Anything that we would hope has a human touch that comes from a person’s vision to communicate something to the player. No one wants to play a game made by AI, right? Okay, so that’s the easy part. But what about the less obvious stuff? We all seem to be okay with AI upscaling. That doesn’t hurt anyone and can be a huge load off developers’ shoulders. What about AI creating code? That’s influencing the game, but is invisible to the player if they weren’t told. Odds are a ton of games are being coded with AI assistance right now to cut down on some of that time-consuming technical work. That’s another way to be more efficient, so should we accept that as well?

    A branching life choice in The Alters.
    11bit studios

    The Alters got hit with a double-whammy of controversy recently over AI, and both are fascinating examples of how grey this entire issue is. The first is that one in-game display uses AI-generated text. This text is illegible under normal circumstances and was left in by mistake, with the intention of replacing it with randomized text before release. Is there so much difference between AI-generated garbage text and pre-generated text? I can understand how one feels worse, but isn’t the end result the same? The other example lands on the wrong side of the ethical line for most. Some of the in-game films the player can watch were added so late in development that 11 Bit Studios didn’t have time to localise them in all languages. So, they used AI to generate subtitles. That’s a bad practice that likely harmed the final product more than if those videos hadn’t been included, but it raises some interesting questions.

    And then there’s testing. AI can stress test and find bugs thousands of times faster than a person, but now we’re threatening the jobs of QA testers. Replacing humans is where a lot of people draw that ethical line, so should we not use it here, despite the potential to speed up development? I would never call for people to lose their jobs, but it is a sad reality that some industries do die out as technology advances. If AI is best suited for brute force work like that, is that something that should be embraced? I don’t like slippery slope arguments, but I do think we need to be cautious as to what we support with AI, knowing that capitalism can and will push it to the limits. If these jobs are okay to replace, why not those?

    Perhaps an even bigger question we all need to wrestle with is the exceptions to those rules. If we say AI music is unacceptable in games, is there any exception for a solo developer self-funding their game who can’t afford to hire a musician? Would it be better to launch without music or not launch at all? There are arguments to be made on both sides. Going back to the subtitle example, what if a team can’t hire a localization team? Is it better to not let players who speak another language engage with the product at all over using AI as a necessity?

    I pose all these questions without answering them because I can’t. I can tell you where I fall on each of these issues, but that isn’t the point. What I am hoping to present are the grey areas where we can have productive discussions about when and where AI is acceptable, if we’re willing to approach it in good faith.

    We can’t afford to lump all AI into the same bucket of “AI bad” anymore. It is too nuanced a tool with too many factors to make a blanket judgment call on anymore. Yes, we don’t need AI to make games — we’ve been doing it that way for decades. The issue is that games are so complex, time-consuming, expensive, and risky that we’re in an era where even successful studios are getting closed down. If AI has the potential to ease some of that pressure and make game development a slightly safer industry, we need to start having deeper conversations about when and where it is appropriate to use it instead of vilifying it as a whole.

  • The Stop Killing Games movement hits a major milestone for game preservation

    The consumer initiative Stop Killing Games has gotten one step closer towards its goal of preventing game publishers from effectively deleting online games after discontinuing their service. The European Citizens’ Initiative just passed the required 1 million signatures needed to appear before the European Commission, where it could then lead to legislation being put in place.

    For those unaware, the Stop Killing Games movement was started by content creator Ross Scott after Ubisoft’s The Crew was taken offline in 2024. Without any official servers, this always-online game that people purchased was rendered useless. This prompted Scott to begin a campaign that seeks to require publishers to transition their games into a playable state after ending support. Ways this could be done include adding an offline mode and giving players the ability to host private servers. The main goal of this initiative is to remove the ability for publishers to remotely disable games, thus making preservation impossible. The initiative also calls out the misleading nature of purchasing a good when, in reality, it is just a license with a hidden expiration date.

    The petition, which just crossed the minimum 1 million signature threshold, will now be presented to the European Commission with the hopes of bringing enough attention to the matter to put new laws into place that will require publishers to offer some way to continue playing their games after ending official support. This comes just days before the July 31 deadline, but that still doesn’t guarantee it will be effective. For one, the petition will be vetted to ensure there are no invalid signatures so more signatures are still being collected to hopefully account for that. Second, appearing before the European Commission doesn’t necessarily mean any legislative action will be taken.

    Sadly, this movement is only possible in the EU right now, so those of us in America are unable to sign to show our support. However, this initiative’s passing would still likely benefit us as well. The rationale here is that if publishers are required to offer an offline mode or private servers in the EU, there’s no reason not to apply it worldwide. Considering how many games — even single-player ones — require an online connection today, this issue will only grow as time goes on.

    If you’re curious about this initiative, there’s an extensive FAQ page that gives detailed answers to all the major questions you might have.

  • Katamari Damacy gave me the strength to keep rolling on

    Games can be a great tool for getting through hard times, and at this moment it feels like the times couldn’t be harder. The current social, political, and economic climate is more than enough to send any one of us down a dark spiral. Of course, life has a way of piling on and, in my case, it came in the form of a concerning diagnosis.

    I am still waiting on more tests, but after years of searching for the source of some elevated blood levels we have figured out that I have a mold in my body and brain. While I’m already on a treatment plan, hearing that you have a foreign pathogen in your brain isn’t exactly comforting. My natural instinct was to turn to games to help get me through this low point and restore some hope. I typically like to pick games that directly attack the issues I’m dealing with in real life as a way to work through them. In this case, I considered going back to Like a Dragon: Infinite Wealth to revisit Kiryu’s approach to mortality, but thought that might be a bit too overdramatic. The Last of Us also came to mind, but mostly as a dark joke considering my specific condition.

    In the end, I chose a game that had just come to PlayStation Plus but had never played before. We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie turned out to be exactly what I needed to get out of my own head for a day.

    We love Katamari

    Learning that there’s an invader inside your head infects every part of your life. A fungus growing in my guts, I could deal with, but my brain? That, pardon the pun, is something I just couldn’t get out of my head. The only reason I have been able to hang on to my sanity at all is because it isn’t fatal — this isn’t a tumor or cancer. In that way, it almost feels unfair to complain. Still, after my morning exercise on Saturday and having an empty day ahead of me, I could feel a heaviness starting to set in.

    Normally, work would be my refuge. That sounds unhealthy — and it probably is to some extent — but I am in the extremely privileged position where I can work through personal issues in my writing as you are seeing here. I didn’t have that luxury over the weekend and needed something else to redirect my thoughts. Games would be my natural go-to, but I didn’t want anything too challenging or narratively driven in that state of mind. I needed something comfortable and easy to get into.

    Enter We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie.

    While I had never played a Katamari game before, I certainly knew it from its reputation. The gameplay of rolling up objects to grow your Katamari to pick up even bigger objects seemed like exactly the type of mind-off experience I was craving. While it can be that, I appreciated how oddly optimistic the game was. As familiar as I was with the core mechanics and design of the Prince and King, what was new and surprising to me was the framing of it all.

    I had skipped the intro cutscene in an effort to enjoy the game on a raw gameplay level, but read through the four or five lines that proceeded each level. At first I took these as borderline nonsensical excuses for why I was rolling a big ball of junk in various locations, but started to notice a theme after a few. Each fan in the game handing out levels had a problem or dream they needed help achieving. They were all silly and quite unserious, but I found myself admiring how the game was able to apply the single solution of rolling up objects to anything from making friends to becoming an Olympic swimmer. I could’ve so easily been turned off by such a naively optimistic take on the world, yet found myself eating it up. I didn’t realize until then that I had been starved of any kind of uncompromising positivity for who knows how long.

    Katamari paints a world where no problems are too big to overcome with some effort and help. But more than that, the Katamari itself was never what those people needed. Time and time again, they would let the Katamari go into the cosmos to become a star or planet. It is overly idyllic, saccharine, and innocent, sure, but it invited me to live in that mindset for a few hours. I, too, could get through this minor crisis if I just kept rolling.

    The prince rolling up little objects in a bedroom.
    Bandai Namco

    I didn’t take away any big revelations or new perspectives on my life or the world around me by playing We Love Katamari Reroll+ Royal Reverie. It was a purely vibes-based experience for me, and that was perfect. If I really wanted to, sure, I could try and find some greater commentary that the game’s story was communicating, or what the gameplay of rolling a ball just to make a bigger ball could be saying. The one poignant level I couldn’t help but read into was the last one. Here, a meteor is crashing towards Earth and I had to roll up all the countries on the planet to intercept it. The concept of a world coming together against armageddon was inspiring at first, but soured just hours later after I returned to reality and saw the latest news.

    While it did end on a slightly dour note, for me on that Saturday, just having a bright and colorful game about rolling around a big ball of junk was exactly what I needed.

  • You may have access to hundreds of free games you’re not taking advantage of

    Ever since Nintendo was the first to breach the $80 threshold for games with Mario Kart World, the concerns over game prices have been top of mind across the industry. Between tariffs, inflation, cost of living, and what appears to be an inevitable recession right around the corner, I have already been preparing for how I can be a more discerning consumer of games.

    There are tons of ways to be more thrifty with our favorite hobby. You can wait for sales, trade and borrow games, rely more on subscription services like PlayStation Plus and Game Pass, or just stick to the wealth of free-to-play games. But there’s one resource I never see brought up that could give you access to a huge library of major titles for free: your local library.

    If you haven’t been to a library in years like I hadn’t, it may come as a surprise to learn that many have grown some impressive video game catalogues in addition to books, manga, and movies. I can vaguely recall a few people mentioning that libraries had started carrying video games over the years, but I always assumed it would be some small corner with half a dozen Xbox 360 cases that may or may not have a working disc inside.

    This past weekend I was once again reminded about libraries being a resource for games and finally decided to see just how viable they were for someone who wants to save money but still have access to new releases. Now, this will all depend on what your local library carries, but I was shocked to see the quality and quantity of games offered even in my mid-sized Colorado town.

    This is a photo sample of a library taken with the ultrawide camera of the RedMagic 7.
    Adam Doud/Digital Trends / Adam Doud/Digital Trends

    It took a minute to figure out how to navigate my local branch’s website to just show video games, but once I did, I was greeted with a list of over 200 games in stock between the PS4 and PS5 generations. And these aren’t purely educational or obscure titles, either. Games like Doom: The Dark Ages, Kingdom Come: Deliverance 2, and Assassin’s Creed: Shadows are all available for PS5 and Xbox Series X at my local branch, with most of 2025’s earlier big hitters accounted for, too. Looking through all the pages of games online, I have already compiled a list of games I wasn’t able to get to at the time and can now easily pick up at my leisure with nothing but a scan of my library card.

    This isn’t the ultimate hack to play every game you want for free with no strings attached. Everything has drawbacks, and in this case you will have to be okay with waiting a few weeks or a month after a big game comes out before your library gets it. It will be on a case-by-case basis in terms of what games your library will get, but at least in my area they post a list of upcoming games they plan to get and I can make requests to the staff as well. There’s also the fact that you may not be the only person privy to this service and someone else might check the game out first. Even with those caveats, you can’t beat the prospect of free game rentals in this day and age.

    Libraries might seem antiquated in this day and age, but they are incredibly important community institutions. They provide tons of resources and programs for people in their communities and ask for nothing in return. Most libraries get funding based on how often they are used, so you can know that you’re helping support the people around you while also getting to play great games at no cost. While you’re there, I also suggest checking out some of those events. My local library, for example, has weekly Warhammer 40K: Rogue Trader and virtual tabletop RPG groups I had no idea existed so you might be surprised.

    With all the factors at play in the world, everyone is looking for ways to somehow save money without giving up the things we love. If you have a library nearby, I highly suggest adding it as one more tool in your toolbox for keeping your passion for games alive when you might otherwise be priced out.