I felt it started well, but when it tied back to Dark Souls, you could feel the arguments getting a little disjointed. Like they were trying to cover both ends of the argument because if you talk about adding a difficulty slider to Dark Souls, that "welcoming" community would lose it's shit. They drew a weird line in the sand, where it's like... Well "Dark Souls is about overcoming that challenge and that sense of victory"

Personally my take on difficulty is that what is difficult to someone can be almost literally impossible to someone else. If I play a Civ game, for me, challenging might be going at it on Immortal or Deity, for someone else that same challenge might be on a much lower setting. Depending on your experience, that feeling of overcoming a challenge won't be on the same difficulty level. Difficulty is relative.

I can't think of a single game that is worst for having even attempted to add difficulty modes. Even when that mode is complete bullshit or done in a lazy numerical fashion it still makes the game more inclusive and finds extra players, and a lot of them still get that same thrill because difficulty is relative... Even MMOs and multiplayer games have been typically better for it, as long as there's some incentive/reward/leaderboard to showcase the players that did go the extra mile. I can think of bad games that have them, but not bad games because they have them.

The fear I have with Dark Souls is that to keep up with the Hardcore base that is only getting better, they are quickly losing a lot of people. The game is still fair, but the barrier of entry I believe is only getting higher. Even the devs seem to know this, but parts of the player base gets almost violent at the suggestion of a difficulty slider. Luckily the devs aren't stupid, and still have tricks, like how they are getting really creative with level design and gating off some of the truly hardcore stuff with New Game +. However even with all that, I'm sure they are still losing some potential players, I'm not ashamed to say they lost me around Dark Souls 2, with the extreme dodge and multiple enemy encounters focus. I don't know if that's translated into loss of sales, but we may one day hit a point where more people are interested in watching someone else play a Souls game than actually trying it.

Again, loved the discussion, but when it looped back to talking about Dark Souls, it felt weak. It turned into this direction where... "Oh you don't play Dark Souls for it's incredibly rich lore and world to explore, it's just for that sense of overcoming a challenge" I was like... Oh so it's ok not to put difficulty modes as long as the story sucks, the game is fair, and it isn't the focus of the game...