The sweet spot is when something is challenging for the particular player and they are able to overcome that challenge through growth. But because each player is different, it is not possible for a single tuning to hit that sweet spot for every possible person.
I don't think that's quite a good comparison -- because leveling up is literally a method to overcome the difficulty. Grind. Get Good. Kill some foes, run back to the bonfire. Kill them again, run back to the bonfire.
Eventually killing them becomes trivial, as a combination of muscle memory and leveling up.
Some might even call that practice.
It's an unwillingness to invest time into practice that hinders people from enjoying more of it, not the inherent difficulty. And this goes for a great many things, sports, music, painting, programming, woodworking etc.
It's also totally ok that people don't want to invest the time -- I'm not making a value judgement here.
For a sports analogy: I don't want to invest time in practicing (or even learning about) basketball. As a result, I'm horrific at it. I'm quite fine with that. It does however mean that a decent chunk of popular culture is inaccessible to me.
If the game didn't have RPG mechanics and there was no mechanism to just make the enemies deal a smaller percentage of your health pool or to make your attacks deal more damage then I'd be much more amenable to the "the game is flawlessly tuned according to the developer's vision and that should not be touched" but it obviously isn't since every single player will arrive at each encounter with different character and weapon stats.
This one-fits-all-or-goodbye approach means I'll miss this game, forever. And just as you say - only damage/defense stats would need to be tuned a bit and I could approach it. Why would that hurt anybody wanting to play it on harder level is beyond me...
When you use the word “grind”, it connotes that you feel the game is extracting an unreasonable price from you in order to allow you to progress: making you play the “bad parts” in order to see the “good parts”. Lesser games are certainly guilty of this! But that’s not at all what these games do. People don’t put “insane hours” into these games because of the grind - they do it because they love it.
All one can ask is that you forget what you think you know, and take another look. There’s something really special here.
I’ve got kids too man, I don’t have time for bullshit, but Miyazaki’s given us something really special here. I’m just thankful that in the few hours left to me each week, I can sit down and play something like this.
But I was just told to grind to level up to make the game easier. That isn't putting in insane hours for fun. That is saying "if you want to beat O&S, go spend a bunch of hours killing knights in Anor Londo for hours."
Look, you complained about gatekeeping, and about the community. This is a bona fide attempt from someone in the community to ask you to set aside your preconceptions and take another look at what the game is trying to say.
If it doesn’t gel with you, well then maybe it really just isn’t for you - and that’s fine. Not every game is for every person. But changing a bunch of difficulty sliders isn’t going to fix that.
> I don't think that's quite a good comparison -- because leveling up is literally a method to overcome the difficulty. Grind. Get Good. Kill some foes, run back to the bonfire. Kill them again, run back to the bonfire.
I don't know how that can be interpreted any other way than "do a repetitive and boring thing until your stats are higher."
I've played all three Dark Souls games as well as Bloodbourne to completion. I switched from xbox to PC for DS1 because I had the original unpatched disk and got frustrated in Lost Izalith. I'm very confident that I would have had more fun if it took me four attempts to beat O&S rather than 20.
I guess just the last thing I would say is that one thing that ER tries to communicate to you early on is that, if something is frustrating you, don’t keep banging your head against a wall. Heed that advice: go away, explore, learn, come back later. With a new perspective it will look different.
Two reasons, first people can't control themselves. Just like people have a hard time not eating a cake sitting in front of them they also have a hard time not using easier difficulty modes, even when they would enjoy the harder ones more. You can't just tell these people to control themselves, to them this is a really important part of the game and adding difficulty options hurts their ability to enjoy the game. Not using easy mode is as easy as not eating so much and get fat, if you could solve the issue that easily then 50% of the population wouldn't be obese.
Secondly is development, if you add easy modes most testers will run the game through on easy, and the game will mostly be designed around easy. Hard mode gets run to see that it is possible, but not to see that it is enjoyable, meaning that in basically every game with multiple difficulty modes the hard mode is a boring slogfest. Fromsoft games is a breath of fresh air here, they are hard without being boring, that is its major selling point.