Comment by nkrisc
12 hours ago
I’m not suggesting you hit a new player with a wall of configuration options. Guide them into the gameplay experience as you intended it, but also allow them to make changes to settings as relevant to the game.
I liked when games used to include cheat codes or debug commands. Let me trivialize the game if I want to. I paid for it and it’s my time I’m spending. Not once did I ever play The Sims as intended. And enjoyed it enough to buy another version or two. I used cheats all the time in WarCraft 2 and StarCraft single player.
And when games don’t include that, almost always someone will create a hack or mod that does do that, because there is a demand for it.
That's fair, but I think each difficulty level needs to be designed as its own challenge, as oppose to the developer exposing the internals of the game so you can turn all the nobs and make anything trivial.
In short, there needs to be intention and design, and not just exposing the developer tools, generally speaking.