Control Resonant‘s lead gameplay designer, Sergey Mohov, has written a fascinating essay on the forthcoming sequel’s approach to accessibility options and how they pertain to the game’s difficulty, and it might just be one of the most nuanced discussions of the topic I’ve read. This game is going to let you adjust the finest details of the challenges it throws at you, from enemy projectile speed to the length of a boss fight’s perfect-dodge window, and crucially, move those dials in both directions. But importantly, as Mohov petitions, only after you’ve tried the game as it was intended.
While there’s no question that Ubisoft has been the primary pioneer of driving accessibility options to welcome in an ever-wider audience to video games, it’s been a pleasure to see a growing proportion of the gaming world join in with this push. Remedy has been doing great work in this space too, and with Control Resonant it seems to be stepping things up to a new level.
As Mohov argues in his article, “Historically, difficulty in action games is handled with blunt instruments,” referring to the crude and traditional “Easy,” “Normal,” and “Hard” options. “While that technically works,” he says, “it can completely undermine the meticulous tuning of a combat system. Nobody likes fighting a damage sponge unless they’re doing the dishes, and lowering enemy health across the board can make your progression feel unearned.”
So instead Resonant is opting for what Remedy calls “a granular control panel.” Why? Because it far better recognizes the specific reasons why a person might need to resort to lowering a game’s difficulty in the first place. “We recognize that players have vastly different needs and constraints,” Mohov observes. “A player with motor control difficulties might find standard dodge timings impossible but have no problem managing the cognitive load of a complex resource economy. By exposing individual gameplay variables to you, we let you isolate the specific mechanic causing problems and adjust it without necessarily changing everything else.”
This gets so detailed that there are ways to prevent being overwhelmed by the number of enemies swarming from off-screen, or to widen dodge windows so you’re able to react to enemy attacks in time. There are meters for lowering or increasing enemy damage, or doing the same for your own, while you can change the timings on how long it takes to break an enemy’s guard. And if you’re like me and melee is always your weakest aspect, there’s a way to increase what’s called “enhanced melee magnetizing” that means you don’t need to worry about positioning as much. Or at all.
Making life harder
This all goes both ways. “We know a lot of action-RPG fans out there are actively looking for pain,” writes Mohov, noting that the original Control only had options to make challenges easier. This time, if you’re finding the game isn’t fighting back hard enough for your skill, you can slide all those meters in the other direction until you have the level of difficulty that suits you.
But even more importantly, Mohov makes the crucial point that Remedy doesn’t want anyone fiddling with these sorts of options until they’ve given the game a go first. Like any developer, Remedy say it has worked excruciatingly hard on setting the game’s challenge where it truly believes is best, and hopes that everyone will approach it on its own terms at first. Find out what you can’t do, or can do too easily, before fiddling with the creator’s vision.
Death of the developer
The endless argument about difficulty levels in games seems to generally boil down to two sides: First, those who believe games should set a level of challenge for a player to reach up toward, persisting in the face of failure to improve and master; after all, this is the developer’s artistic intent. Second, those who want to play the full game they’ve bought and not have a specific moment of difficulty wall them off from the rest of the experience, wanting to enjoy the full narrative despite falling short of one challenge. Each believes the other is fundamentally misunderstanding the very point of playing games, often at a loss as to how they could so seriously fail to comprehend the other’s position.
I’ve frequently approached this topic from one side, vociferously arguing for the option to skip moments of difficulty in order to continue enjoying a game. I’m fortunate that I’ve also heard the opposing position argued articulately by my colleagues. And I truly believe the solution is exactly what Mohov is pitching in this post: play the game as intended, and then, if necessary, tweak accordingly.
There will always be those who argue, “But if you can lower the difficulty, then people will and they won’t play the game properly!” And my general position is to tell such people to stop policing everyone else’s lives and focus on their own. Yes, of course there are games like Elden Ring where difficulty options would break its purpose, but that’s not all games, and most crucially, such a position is so widely exclusionary of anyone with any disabilities, motor issues, and so on. A good friend of mine has arthritic hands, and doesn’t get to play so many games he wishes he could; Resonant is going to let him tweak things to suit his digital limitations. Authorial intent has boundaries. This is something Remedy seems to recognize.
We talk a lot internally about designer intent. We do have a meticulously crafted, intended experience for CONTROL Resonant. It’s balanced to be tense, demanding, and rewarding.
However, our philosophy is straightforward: if you run into a wall and the friction becomes too much, we would much rather you tweak the rules to overcome it than put the controller down and stop playing. Your time is valuable, and there’s no single right way to experience the game. Because of that, we absolutely do not gate any trophies or achievements behind these settings. Play the game exactly how you need to.
Resonant is also going to offer a suite of other accessibility options less directly attached to difficulty, with colorblind modes, adjustable subtitle and text size (something every game should do), options for those with motion sickness, a variety of volume sliders, and a “hyperacusis filter” which sounds like a god-damn blessing to my ADHD-riddled ears.
