Assassin’s Creed 3 creative director Alex Hutchinson doesn’t believe in “easy modes”, and thinks that they ruin the experience.
According to Hutchinson, “A lot of games have been ruined by easy modes. If you have a cover shooter and you switch it to easy and you don’t have to use cover, you kind of broke your game. You made a game that is essentially the worst possible version of your game.”
He went on to use the analogy, “It’s like if I picked up a book and it said, ‘Do you want the easy version or the complicated version?’”
The analogy seems to be tortured since game stories don’t change depending on the difficulty level, and such titles as Deus Ex: Human Revolution and Mass Effect 3 have used easy difficulties to allow players to enjoy the stories without having to sweat combat. In fact, Deus Ex: Human Revolution’s mode is called “Tell Me A Story” while Mass Effect 3 offers a “Story Mode”.
The entire game difficulty issue has come into focus with Dark Souls director Hidetaka Mizayaki stating he was thinking of adding an easy mode to his game.
Hutchinson recently complained that Japanese developers were given a pass by the press for when they released “rubbish” while Western developers weren’t.
