The Insomniac Games studio has a somewhat different approach regarding the difficulty levels in their games.

Mike Daly, who was the director of Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart (which not only topped the PlayStation Store’s sales charts on PlayStation 5, it also took the top spot in North America in retail sales, according to the NPD Group’s June report!), told Axios that regarding the games’ difficulty, the studio’s mindset has changed over the past few years. Insomniac Games is now trying to benefit a wider range of audiences, so the emphasis is no longer on satisfying the true hardcore gamers and their needs.

„The team has sort of shed this conventional wisdom that games kind of need to be a hardass for you to get satisfaction out of it,” Daly said. This comment doesn’t mean that the devs have thrown the difficulty levels out the window. In case you want a challenge, you can still pick a harder difficulty. But, Insomniac Games is now opting to include more options for those who simply want to experience stories and settings without worrying about dying often. There are also accessibility options, making it possible for disabled gamers to enjoy modern games.

Ratchet & Clank: Rift Apart has the option to skip the puzzles, which is something that The Last of Us Part II also provided. The studio’s Mike Fitzgerald says that the option of skipping the puzzles „would have been unthinkable three to five years ago.” „We no longer think about, like, ‘What will make the most elite players feel good about themselves?’ And more like, ‘What will enable everybody to have the experience they want to have?’ Because that’s sort of the most important thing to us,” Daly concluded.

Silent Hill 2 pointed in the right direction twenty years ago: it came with two difficulty options. One was for combat, while the other one was for puzzles! Konami was forward-thinking!

Source: PSL