One of the eternal video game discourse topics is if games designed to be difficult should have easy modes. It tends to bubble up everytime a game that's slightly hard to grasp or beat comes out – most recently it was Elden Ring. While gatekeepers will keep telling others to git gud, developers will continue handling this topic in whatever way they see fit – just like Ron Gilbert's Return to Monkey Island, which will feature an easy mode, of sorts.
"[One thing] that people really want in games today are built-in hint systems," he said in an interview with Ars Technica (thanks EuroGamer).
"If [players] don't have a built-in hint system, they're just going to jump over to the web and… read a walkthrough," he continued. "[There was] a lot of stuff that we did [during the production of The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island: LeChuck's Revenge] and didn't think much about—a lot of very obscure puzzles.
"Hiding a piece of information somewhere with no clues about where to find it—that kind of thing just wouldn't fly today… Having hint systems means that if you make the puzzle just completely weird and obscure, people just go to the hint system." Gilbert went on to say that this hint system will not be "more than just a walkthrough" and will be incorporated into the game to ensure continuity of immersion.
Return to Monkey Island will also feature a casual mode which will be for "people [for whom] this is their first adventure game, or they haven't played adventure games in a long time, or maybe they have lives and kids now," he said. "They can play the casual mode, which is just a lot of simplification of the puzzles. That is our main way to get people into playing a point-and-click game if they haven't done it before."
Much to the dismay of git guders, one modder has created an Easy Mode for Elden Ring. It comes in three different tiers, each easier than the last so that you can get your desired experience. And to show you how popular it is, it had over 50,000 downloads as of April 15.
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