What “Difficulty Settings” Say About Who Games Are Really For

The difficulty select is usually the very first question a game asks you. Easy, normal, hard? It looks like a simple menu about how much of a fight you want. But look a little closer and that screen is actually telling you something else: who the people who made this game were picturing when they made it. Difficulty settings are a mission statement in disguise, and over the last decade, that statement has changed a lot.

The old way: pick your insult

For a long time, easy mode came with a side of mockery. The classic example is Wolfenstein, where the easiest setting is called “Can I Play, Daddy?” and shows the hero in a baby bonnet sucking a pacifier. Later versions cheerfully described it as a mode for “the spineless gamer.” It wasn’t alone. Ninja Gaiden slapped a girly purple ribbon on you and renamed the hero “Ninja Dog” if you dropped the difficulty. Lollipop Chainsaw used a literal chicken.

The joke was always the same: easy mode is for babies, and real players suffer. And buried inside that joke is an assumption about who the game is for; someone young, skilled, competitive, with plenty of free time to “git gud.” Everyone else got a pat on the head and a pacifier. If you were disabled, new to games, short on time, or just there for the story, the menu made it clear you were playing the wrong way.

The reframe: a choice, not a judgment

Then a small mountain-climbing game changed the conversation. Celeste is genuinely hard. A precision platformer where you’ll rack up thousands of deaths. But from day one it included an Assist Mode that lets you slow the game down, turn on invincibility or infinite stamina, or skip whole chapters. What made it famous wasn’t merely the toggles, but the note attached to them, which basically says: this game was designed to be challenging, we think that difficulty matters, but if the default is inaccessible to you, we still want you to be able to experience it.

The really telling part came later. Disabled players pointed out that the original wording — calling the difficulty “essential” — subtly implied that anyone using assists was falling short. The developers listened and softened it, changing “essential” to “intended.” Same game, same difficulty, completely different message. Instead of prove you belong here, it now said however you need to play, you’re welcome here. Difficulty as hospitality, not a bouncer.

Design that assumes you’re worth keeping

Hades took a similar tack with its “God Mode,” which makes you tougher every single time you die. The description is completely matter-of-fact — no bonnet, no chicken — reminding you that “death is not a big deal in the underworld” and inviting you to switch it on for any reason at all, story included. You can toggle it on and off whenever you like. It’s a design that assumes struggling players are worth keeping around, not laughing at.

Even naming carries a tone. God of War skips numbers entirely and offers “Give Me a Story,” “Give Me a Balanced Experience,” “Give Me a Challenge,” and “Give Me God of War.” The easy option is framed with dignity — you’re here for Kratos, fair enough — while the hardest is pitched as a dare (Sony cheekily reserved it for people “who wrestle polar bears in their undies”), not the price of admission. Nobody’s a coward for wanting the story.

The holdouts have a point too

Not everyone agrees, and the most famous holdout is FromSoftware, the studio behind Dark Souls and Elden Ring. These games famously offer no difficulty menu at all, and every new release reignites the “should there be an easy mode?” argument. Their answer is that the difficulty is the game, in the shared ordeal, the hard-won triumph, the fact that every player suffered through the same boss you did. An easy mode, they’d argue, would fracture the one experience everyone is meant to hold in common.

That’s a legitimate artistic stance, not just gatekeeping. It’s worth noting Elden Ring smuggles in flexibility anyway. You can grind levels, summon help, or over-power a boss, so it offers difficulty settings by other means. But make no mistake: choosing to have no easy mode is still a statement about who the game is for, and FromSoftware makes it deliberately.

So who are games for?

Increasingly, the honest answer is: more people than before. The journey from baby-bonnet shaming to thoughtful Assist Modes tracks gaming growing up, from a niche club that made you prove yourself at the door into something closer to film or books, where nobody’s asked to earn the right to enjoy the story.

Difficulty will always matter, and for some games it’s the entire soul. But the direction of travel is clear: away from initiation, toward invitation. The menu that once sneered “prove you belong” now, more and more, just says welcome, play it your way.