I’ve always been against having “easy”, “normal”, and “hard” modes.
We need an accessibility mod, not an easy mod for accessibility (like in Celeste, Nine Sols and Another Crab’s Treasure).
Changing the difficulty freely during the game can be a problem.
If you can change the difficulty at any time and you you find an obstacle what do you do?
Do you think that the difficulty you chose is right and then you go explore and do some looting, upgrade your weapons etc. or do you think that you did everything correctly but you chose a difficulty that is not right for you?
For less patient players, who, when faced with an obstacle, instead of learning, decide to lower the difficulty, a choice that can ruin the gaming experience, as the satisfaction of overcoming the obstacle is lost, and all future obstacles in the game, which are increasingly more difficult, will be encountered without the tools (understanding of the game) necessary to solve them (since they did not obtain them before).
And on the completely opposite side there will surely be stubborn players who take it as a given that they are forced to complete the game on hard difficulty, and end up having a poor experience in the other direction, where the game is so difficult and punishing that they cannot learn.
On the other hand selecting a difficulty at the beginning of the game without having tried it is still problematic,
If you heve not already played the game, you don’t know its systems, you don’t know the controls, you don’t know how the combat works, you don’t know if it’s similar to a game you’ve played before, how do you determine what difficulty is right for you?This is part of something I already wrote here: Game Accessibility and Difficulty, Unsolved and New Problems (Breach Refind)
If we want to make the game easier or more difficult, it should be done through items and game mechanics.
As if that wasn’t enough, the promise that the normal difficulty would be the one intended by the developers has not been kept, partly it’s a balancing problem (the fact that the game in the mid game is much easier than in the early game and then slowly becomes difficult again) but looking at my brother’s playthrough, it’s clear that the normal mode is much easier than it was before the introduction of the hard mode.
And even when I advised my brother to try the hard mode, he insisted on the normal one because he wanted to experience the experience intended by the developers as his first experience. But the end result was that he had a worse experience.