While I agree, just play whatever you want and stop gatekeeping, I do think there’s a degree of bad design that often happens around difficulty sliders. Many games will have different difficulties that boil down to something like, “Easy: enemies have half health and do half damage”, “Medium: 1x health and 1x damage”, and “hard: 2x damage and 16x health”

Instead of a pretty well tailored, and maybe difficult challenge that can be overcome with skill or by using the game’s mechanics, you just have a game that either doesn’t challenge you or does, but every fight is going to be bullet/damage sponge hell.

These people shit on accessibility because they see it as something that other people need, not them. The attitude is that if you aren’t good at a game you simply shouldn’t play. It’s fundamentally a lack of empathy.

My go-to argument when people take that stance is to ask “Do you think you’ll still be playing games when you’re 50? When you’re 60? When you’re 70?”

Their answer of course is invariably yes, they will, and so my follow on question is “Will you still have the same lighning reflexes then, that you do now?”

That usually gets the point across.

Right now they can look down smugly from their pedestal, but some day there will come a time when their own body fails them and they can’t make it through Dark Souls 12 anymore, no matter how much they enjoy it and want to finish. And when they complain on Steam all the kids will say “just git gud lol”

Who’s the one crying then?

Accessibility options are important for all of us, no matter the reason. We should all get to choose.

Beep.