I’m going to talk more about ableism in gaming–especially in From games. I have done two posts on it, and here’s the second post. I am currently rewatching Nath from Playstation Access playing Sekiro, and I have to shake my head at how easy he makes it. I mean, he’s still dying, but he is so much better than me at the game. His reflexes are almost automatic whereas it took me forever to realize someone was attacking me and maybe I needed to attack back.
I try not to bang on about it in the RKG Discord because I don’t want to harsh anyone’s high, but I really want people to realize that not everyone can play the game. It’s not a matter of ‘gitting gud’, at least not in the way that it’s normally said. By the way, the mini-boss that Nath fights, Snake Eyes Shirafuji, is a woman. Here’s a little-known fact that many streamers don’t know/overlook–all the enemies/bosses of this type are women. Which is pretty cool. There are groups in all the games that are made up of women. Well, most of them. I think?
In Elden Ring, it’s the Black Knife Assassins. In Bloodborne, apparently, it’s the hooded Beast Patients in old Yharnam (I just learned this). The above enemies in Sekiro I menctioned are in the Sunken Valley. Huh. There aren’t really groups of female enemies in the Souls games, execpt for the trees in the first DLC of Dark Souls III.
It’s interesting to me how many gamers just assume enemies or bosses are male, even when there’s evidence to the contrary. Rory from RKG did it all the time in the early seasons of Prepare to Try. He kept calling the Dancer of the Boreal Valley and Sister Friede from Dark Souls III ‘he’, which was like–I mean, with the second one, it’s right in the name.
He would not make that same mistake now, which is great, but a lot of people do. The default, sadly, is still male. It’s frustrating and just a small part of the problem in the industry.
Sekiro is a beautiful game. I think it’s a very well-made game, but it’s not accessible or disabled-friendly at all. AT ALL. It’s the worst of the games in that respect, and it’s one of the reasons it’s my least-favorite game. When you cannot do the main conceit of the game (again, cannot, not will not), it’s not fun. At all. I could not even explore in relative peace because there were assholes all over the place. And because it was assumed that you would be able to deflect them, FromSoft thought nothing of putting five or six really hard enemies in the same cluster.
In the video I have included above, Rob is the side-man, commenting as Nath plays. Rob is notorious for being the one on the team who quits difficult games if he can’t immediately beat a boss. The team had to walk him through Bloodborne to get him the plat, and he screamed and raged the whole way. He’s very honest about how he did not have what it took to beat these games on his own–which means he would never play Sekiro. You can’t summon for it.
Ian’s brother said he wished there was an easy version of Sekiro for the people who can’t do the combat because it’s such a beautiful game. He wants people to be able to see it no matter what. I mean, people can watch videos of playthroughs for that. I get what he’s saying, but the whole point of the game is the combat. There really is no way to make it combat-free or the combat easy enough. And, honestly, in this game in particular, it’s meant to be difficult. This is the most unforgiving of the From games, and it’s not even close.
So, yes. I have changed my mind about whether or not they should include accessibility aids. They should. In the newest Final Fantasy, there are…I want to say rings you can wear that are accessibility aids. Here in an article at The Verge about them and how they’re a step in the right direction, but should not come at a cost (sacrificing ring slots). I do think in Elden Ring, there are more concessions than there are in any previous game (probably because they were expecting it to be way more mainstream–and it was), but it’s also because the game is more Souls than Sekiro.
I still don’t know how to make the games more accessible, combatwise. Actually, weirdly, I can see ways to do that for Sekiro more than the others, probably because it’s so rigid in how it’s meant to be played. I think ‘aim assist’ so to speak would be easier because it’s just the deflect that matters in the game. So having the option of making the deflect automatic would be easier than, say, tweaknig all the different attacks of a boss if there a million ways you can defend those attacks.
Do I think FromSoft will do it? No, I don’t. Not only because they’re very much into making the games the way they want to make them, but also because Japanese companies in general have shown less than zero interest in being accessible. I mean, to be fair, it’s not like Western companies care that much in general, either, but there’s at least lip service and an attempt by some Western companies to at least try.
The bottom line is that they don’t need to care. They are doing just fine doing what they’re doing–and they’ve exploded in popularity with Elden Ring. I don’t quite know what made this game rocket them into the stratosphere. A combo of what they normally do, an open world, and movement of the pandemic into an endemic? All I know is that for whatever reason, it became THE game of 2022, and I was happy for From that this happened for them. They sold more of this game in a month than they have in toto for many of their other games.
The hype for the DLC was the same, but I’m sure that many of the poeple who bought the base game are not going to buy the DLC. Why? Because you have to beat a very hard (and out-out-of-the-way) boss to get there. Doing a quick Google, roughly a third of Steam players have beaten the boss you need to get into the DLC. I’ll be very interested to see the sales numbers for the DLC.
I know that within the next game or two, From will be out of my ability zone. I could not play Armored Core VI Fires of Rubicon (yes, that’s the name of the game) because of accessibility issues. I will get to that in the next post. Maybe.