Sadly many "gamers" do not want challenge. They want easy games that still tell them that they are hard so they feel powerful and accomplished.
Thats why everything gets dumbed down, including WotC with D&D 5E and OneD&D.
And its not only D&D/BG3. Except for a few games which use difficulty as a way to differentiate themselves like Souls games everything gets more and more easy to "broaden the appeal". So much so that you often have to try very hard to actually lose.
Many Story modes are kinda insulting though. Like "here, have a random +2 on stuff that has nothing to do with battles" in BG3.
I for one fail to see the appeal of games like Dark Souls who have difficult battle mechanics just to ..have difficulty battle mechanics. For some people challenging themselves is fun. Others want to enjoy the world and a story.
On top of that, what does "lose" mean to you? Is it a call to become better or does it mean to not achieve what you want?
To take an extreme example: Visual Novels. In many visual novels there are no bad ends, so getting a game over would be a challenge. But if you pursue a specific route and fail to do so, just getting the "normal ending" instead, would that be losing to you? You did not read the characters correctly, so you failed at your goal.
Losing and winning are usually relatively to the person playing. So someone who plays for the tactics sees a defeat in battle as a challenge to overcome.
Someone who is here for, say, creating a specific character sees loosing when he fails (in their opinion) to truly play that character.
If you fail at a challenge that you do not care about, you are not feeling like you are loosing, you are feeling annoyed that something unimportant to your enjoyment is stopping you from the challenges you are here to.
And its not only D&D/BG3. Except for a few games which use difficulty as a way to differentiate themselves like Souls games everything gets more and more easy to "broaden the appeal". So much so that you often have to try very hard to actually lose.
Losing means for example running out of money in park builder games (currently nearly impossible to do with current builder games) or in RPGs that you simply can't do a encounter and have to go or solve it another way, even if it means following a different story branch, or if optional leave it out entirely.
And insulting? Thats the problem. People want to always succeed but don't want to see that they are playing easy mode, thus the games become easy mode by default.
And its not only video games, D&D itself also follows that pattern.[/quote]
Well, I actually disagree with your examples. The game may have game over screens at certain points, but that is just the end of the game. Losing means failing at the goals you yourself set. And if a game has a mechanic which are just tertiary to your goals, not managing to do that is not loosing, it is annoying.
The only thing lost is enjoyment. And that is the point of a game ultimately. Not showing how good you are or getting specific routes or creating empires. This are just ways to play a specific game. The goal is to have *fun*. How people have fun is subjective, so their goals are subjective. What the game tells you are guidelines. And you should pick a game that tailors to your personal idea of fun.
I'm not going to play something like Elden Ring and then grumble about the difficulty. I know that before hand and know this game is not for me. But a game like BG3? They *try* to give different groups a chance to play the game to have fun. They succeed (probably) for people like me.
Like I said multiple times before, I was baffled when I learned that there are people who enjoyed battles in BG2. I love(d) the game for the ability to create a character and have companions talk to them. The battles where an annoying distraction from exploring and waiting for the next banters.
But at the end of the day, that game was for me (Banters) and for people who like challenges. It was not perfect for our exact tastes (I assume), but it still created enjoyment.
Everything, difficulty, mechanics, story, they are just there to give us a chance to have fun. Difficulty itself does not make a game good. Neither does story. What makes a game good is the best mix of multiple elements to give its players enjoyment. Everything else is meaningless.
Also, sorry for messing up quoting in my last post, I have some lag with the forum and that makes quoting weird for me.
