Noted video game personality Alanah Pearce is adding her voice to the chorus of critics who believes the core fundamentals of FromSoft’s ‘difficult’ video game design philosophy are somehow unfair and restrictive to disabled individuals.
[Editor’s Note: A previous version of this article described Pearce as having a 2-year old herself. This was incorrect, as Pearce does not have any children, and has since been corrected.]
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Pearce, who prior to her current position as a writer for Sony’s Santa Monica Studio had notable stints as a YouTuber, IGN editor, and Rooster Teeth employee, offered up her hot take in a video uploaded to her personal YouTube channel.
Titled ‘Elden Ring DLC is ‘TOO HARD’ (it’s not)’, Pearce’s main point was not to call for a reduction of the game’s difficult, but to share her opinion as to “why I do think it would be great if disabled players could play Elden Ring.”
Following a brief explanation of her general thoughts on the game’s recently released Shadows of the Erdtree DLC , Pearce eventually posited, “It has been brought up various times, across various mediums, by various people, that Elden Ring – or From Soft games in general – are not particularly accessible to disabled players.”
Elaborating on her argument, the God of War Ragnarök team writer asserted, “When I’m asking for accessibility, I’m not actually asking for an easy mode. That isn’t the intent. Here’s the thing I want to spell out where accessibility is concerned: people who are disabled – there are also multiple kinds of disabilities especially where gaming is concerned. There are long-term disabilities, there are situational disabilities, there are temporary disabilities – it counts as a disability where a video game like Elden Ring is concerned if you have a kid. You have a 2-year-old you’re trying to play Elden Ring, you can’t pause. That is a situational disability that you have where the game, not having the option for you to be able to pause for example, is a hindrance for your particular disability, a situational disability. You may need to pause to stop your kid from putting a fork into a a socket a power outlet.”
“And there are temporary disabilities, like you break your wrist you, sprain your wrist, where you’ll temporarily have trouble playing video games,” she continued. “You would need something to help you press certain buttons if you’re playing Elden Ring.”
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Further building her case, Pearce added, “[As for] the third [category of disabiliites], long-term people who have long-term disabilities. I have tendonitis in both of my wrists from playing too many video games, unironically that is a thing from, tapping too much. That means any rapid button mashing in any game I’m going to have a lot of trouble with unless there are accessibility options to prevent that. It’s part of what I worked on God of War Ragnarök, that’s part of why I made an accessibility award show, to highlight this particular thing.”
“Here’s the thing about accessibility and Elden Ring, where any of those things are concerned,” she then asserted. “I think there’s a misunderstanding that people think disabled gamers, or whoever else, want an easy mode. This is not the case. It’s that the appeal of Elden Ring being really hard is also appealing to people with disabilities. They too want to play the extremely hard game that is very hard for them to beat. They’re not asking you to give them an easy mode and make it easy for them to get through they’re asking for a version of the game that can be played with their particular disabilities so they can still enjoy really hard games as well.”
Putting forth a possible solution to the disability/accessibility discourse, Pearce opined that in exchange for adding certain accessibility toggles, “What if you just get a screen at the end with the credits that shows exactly how you played it, or what options you had on or off? In my head, this would alleviate a lot of that discourse.”
Drawing her thoughts on the topic to a close, Pearce ultimately made it clear that her demands for accessibility were not demands for the game’s difficulty to be lowered, as in her opinion, any non-disabled individual complaining about Elden Ring‘s brutally challenging nature simply need to ‘git gud’.
“The gamers are the ones just saying it’s too damn hard,” she noted, referencing the numerous bad reviews left on various platforms by players who found the Shadows of the Erdtree DLC to be particularly harrowing. “For any of those people who do not have accessibility specific issues, you just gotta explore more dude. You can do it. I think you’re being impatient. I think you can do it.”
“I would love to see them have more accessibility options,” concluded Pearce. “I would not like to see them make the games easier or less challenging, but it’s a difficult balance to strike obviously.”
