This whole thing is a nothingburger with the right cheat codes, but because modern gamingTM can't have cheat codes for some reason, we're stuck with these pointless arguments. It's simple:
Make the game as hard or easy as you want.
Add a million cheat codes that gamers can use to customize how they want their personal game experience to be.
The main difference between god mode cheat code and a no-death option is that there's an understanding that if you enter in cheat codes, the game might go off the rails with sequence breaking or even softlocking, which can be overcome be inputting even more cheat codes like level warping.
Yeah, I don't care about having an easy mode - just give me access to the developer console (or even just some config files, I know how to use a text editor) and I'll make my own easy mode, thank you very much (or maybe I'll make a hard mode, you don't know). I can actually respect having a single difficulty mode, since balancing several is a genuinely difficult task - and the vast majority of games with multiple modes don't really do this, they just fall back on the classic solution of "give the enemies more HP and damage", and "I have to hit this enemy 100 times instead of 10" isn't a particularly compelling form of difficulty. Best case scenario would be customizable difficulty, but that's obviously more effort on the part of the dev and I can't demand that - but again, if you just give me access to some way to tweak the game, I can do some of it myself!
I think part of the problem here is that as games are a new medium, we're still in the process of developing the language we analyze and critique them with (and thanks to anti-intellectualism rampant in the community, it's going slow, people got mad about "ludonarrative dissonance" which wasn't even that fancy of a term, like "ludo"'s Latin but "narrative" and "dissonance" are perfectly normal and clear words), and as a consequence a lot of people are falling back on the existing analytical techniques we have. Except the core feature of the artform, the interactivity, kind of changes everything - people love to go on about "artistic vision", but in an interactive medium, the way you experience that artistic vision can be fundamentally different than it might be in a book or a movie.
If you're looking to provide a tightly-controlled experience, where every single moment is delivered perfectly according to your "vision"... then games just aren't the right medium, and trying to do this anyway is how we end up with cinematic AAA slop that constantly takes away control from the player for a cutscene every few minutes and fails you in missions for the slightest deviation from the script. Games actually continuing to develop as a medium requires accepting this interactivity and its consequences, and playing to its strengths rather than restricting it so you can make a mediocre movie with gameplay segments in between the scenes. And part of accepting the interactivity is changing our understanding on what's the "right" and "wrong" way to experience a game - it's significantly more difficult to actually define those concepts here than it would be for, say, a movie.
And besides - your game probably isn't some perfectly-balanced, completely coherent masterpiece, especially if it's some big AAA RPG - no work this massive, made by hundreds of people under time constraints (or dozens of people under even worse time constraints, since you're a AA developer and if you don't release this one on time you're going bankrupt) is going to be. You're going to have that one mechanic that sounded cool at the time but doesn't really fit well with the rest of the game, that one level where you ran out of time and just plopped some enemies down without much thought, that one annoying puzzle or trap that you thought was simple but turns out to be frustrating in a bunch of subtle ways that you missed because you're not Valve and you don't have the luxury of just running a gajillion playtests. Going "damn, this sequence/boss is really hard, I'm just not having a good time here" and wanting to turn the difficulty down for a moment isn't necessarily violating some great artistic vision - maybe the sequence actually just sucks, and doesn't in any way represent what the devs intended for it because they just ran out of time.
100% agree. AAA games continue to ape Oscar bait Hollywood films. Like, don't you think it's weird how all this time, there isn't a genre of comedic games? Comedies are a massive film genre, but I bet you despite the thousands upon thousands of games developed per year, you probably couldn't even name 100 comedic games. Not games that have funny one-liners or funny characters, but games developed from the ground up to be comedic like how a comedy is written and directed as a comedy. And perhaps the worst part of it is that due to its interactivity, games are actually well-suited for comedy, especially physical comedy. Ludonarrative dissonance can be better resolved through lampshading in a comedic game. But because physical comedy is considered low-brow, AAA games have to chase after "emotional moments" that frankly rarely deliver. This is either done through completely noninteractive cutscenes (ie a film within a game) or something like HL2 where all the gravitas of the scene is completely undermined by the player bunnyhopping and hitting NPCs with the crowbar.
Mods make it really obvious games have massive comedic potential and are at their best when there's a degree of levity. Skyrim mods that turn swords into dildos and dragons into flying Thomas the Tank Engine far more embody the spirit of gaming than anything else.
I blame achievements and multiplayer being considered the "real experience."
Achievements turn what used to be just self-imposed restrictions and goals into an external thing acknowledged by the game. Before, something like a pacifist run or no potions run was just something that you did for fun as a challenge. But once achievements became something explicitly acknowledged by the game, there's the question of legitimate achievements and illegitimate achievements (achievements that you got because you entered in cheat code which made getting them much easier). The easiest way to solve this is to just not have cheat codes, which leads to stigmatization as cheat codes are no longer part of a typical gaming experience.
Multiplayer just made people try to judge singleplayer game with multiplayer criteria, so people think entering in a cheat code is the same as running an aimbot. It's also the reason why people obsess over balance even in singleplayer games where balance isn't even that important. Weapon A being better than Weapon B literally doesn't matter if the game acknowledges that Weapon A is better than Weapon B, the least clumsy way being through lore. There was a time when singleplayer was the authentic experience and multiplayer was just something tacked on. Now, it's the complete opposite.
This whole thing is a nothingburger with the right cheat codes, but because modern gamingTM can't have cheat codes for some reason, we're stuck with these pointless arguments. It's simple:
Make the game as hard or easy as you want.
Add a million cheat codes that gamers can use to customize how they want their personal game experience to be.
The main difference between god mode cheat code and a no-death option is that there's an understanding that if you enter in cheat codes, the game might go off the rails with sequence breaking or even softlocking, which can be overcome be inputting even more cheat codes like level warping.
Yeah, I don't care about having an easy mode - just give me access to the developer console (or even just some config files, I know how to use a text editor) and I'll make my own easy mode, thank you very much (or maybe I'll make a hard mode, you don't know). I can actually respect having a single difficulty mode, since balancing several is a genuinely difficult task - and the vast majority of games with multiple modes don't really do this, they just fall back on the classic solution of "give the enemies more HP and damage", and "I have to hit this enemy 100 times instead of 10" isn't a particularly compelling form of difficulty. Best case scenario would be customizable difficulty, but that's obviously more effort on the part of the dev and I can't demand that - but again, if you just give me access to some way to tweak the game, I can do some of it myself!
I think part of the problem here is that as games are a new medium, we're still in the process of developing the language we analyze and critique them with (and thanks to anti-intellectualism rampant in the community, it's going slow, people got mad about "ludonarrative dissonance" which wasn't even that fancy of a term, like "ludo"'s Latin but "narrative" and "dissonance" are perfectly normal and clear words), and as a consequence a lot of people are falling back on the existing analytical techniques we have. Except the core feature of the artform, the interactivity, kind of changes everything - people love to go on about "artistic vision", but in an interactive medium, the way you experience that artistic vision can be fundamentally different than it might be in a book or a movie.
If you're looking to provide a tightly-controlled experience, where every single moment is delivered perfectly according to your "vision"... then games just aren't the right medium, and trying to do this anyway is how we end up with cinematic AAA slop that constantly takes away control from the player for a cutscene every few minutes and fails you in missions for the slightest deviation from the script. Games actually continuing to develop as a medium requires accepting this interactivity and its consequences, and playing to its strengths rather than restricting it so you can make a mediocre movie with gameplay segments in between the scenes. And part of accepting the interactivity is changing our understanding on what's the "right" and "wrong" way to experience a game - it's significantly more difficult to actually define those concepts here than it would be for, say, a movie.
And besides - your game probably isn't some perfectly-balanced, completely coherent masterpiece, especially if it's some big AAA RPG - no work this massive, made by hundreds of people under time constraints (or dozens of people under even worse time constraints, since you're a AA developer and if you don't release this one on time you're going bankrupt) is going to be. You're going to have that one mechanic that sounded cool at the time but doesn't really fit well with the rest of the game, that one level where you ran out of time and just plopped some enemies down without much thought, that one annoying puzzle or trap that you thought was simple but turns out to be frustrating in a bunch of subtle ways that you missed because you're not Valve and you don't have the luxury of just running a gajillion playtests. Going "damn, this sequence/boss is really hard, I'm just not having a good time here" and wanting to turn the difficulty down for a moment isn't necessarily violating some great artistic vision - maybe the sequence actually just sucks, and doesn't in any way represent what the devs intended for it because they just ran out of time.
100% agree. AAA games continue to ape Oscar bait Hollywood films. Like, don't you think it's weird how all this time, there isn't a genre of comedic games? Comedies are a massive film genre, but I bet you despite the thousands upon thousands of games developed per year, you probably couldn't even name 100 comedic games. Not games that have funny one-liners or funny characters, but games developed from the ground up to be comedic like how a comedy is written and directed as a comedy. And perhaps the worst part of it is that due to its interactivity, games are actually well-suited for comedy, especially physical comedy. Ludonarrative dissonance can be better resolved through lampshading in a comedic game. But because physical comedy is considered low-brow, AAA games have to chase after "emotional moments" that frankly rarely deliver. This is either done through completely noninteractive cutscenes (ie a film within a game) or something like HL2 where all the gravitas of the scene is completely undermined by the player bunnyhopping and hitting NPCs with the crowbar.
Mods make it really obvious games have massive comedic potential and are at their best when there's a degree of levity. Skyrim mods that turn swords into dildos and dragons into flying Thomas the Tank Engine far more embody the spirit of gaming than anything else.
Comedy games makes sense, but the average game in that genre would either be Leisure Suit Larry or High On Life. I'd rather neither
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I blame achievements and multiplayer being considered the "real experience."
Achievements turn what used to be just self-imposed restrictions and goals into an external thing acknowledged by the game. Before, something like a pacifist run or no potions run was just something that you did for fun as a challenge. But once achievements became something explicitly acknowledged by the game, there's the question of legitimate achievements and illegitimate achievements (achievements that you got because you entered in cheat code which made getting them much easier). The easiest way to solve this is to just not have cheat codes, which leads to stigmatization as cheat codes are no longer part of a typical gaming experience.
Multiplayer just made people try to judge singleplayer game with multiplayer criteria, so people think entering in a cheat code is the same as running an aimbot. It's also the reason why people obsess over balance even in singleplayer games where balance isn't even that important. Weapon A being better than Weapon B literally doesn't matter if the game acknowledges that Weapon A is better than Weapon B, the least clumsy way being through lore. There was a time when singleplayer was the authentic experience and multiplayer was just something tacked on. Now, it's the complete opposite.