Back when I first installed Command & Conquer, I managed to finish a few missions on the trot. However once I hit a roadblock (e.g. losing a level twice in a row), I took a break, and it was for several days before I tried the level again. The habit of “taking a break” continued on for other games, including StarCraft and Diablo 2. Diablo 2 had the longest intervals as the game was hard. The experience with Andariel in Act 1 was one fraught with misery and frustration, that made breaks really God-send.

When I gotten the PS3, games such as Infamous and Fallout 3 occupied my time and those games on the seventh-generation console were AMAZING. Being as difficult as they were when even on normal difficulty mode, it took months, or even a year to finish them, in the case of Fallout 3 and its expansion, Broken Steel. When it came to Sucker Punch’s magnum opus on the console, that last boss fight with the big bad in Infamous took a month for me to finish.

Another game that took a while to finish was XCOM: Enemy Unknown which I played on the Mac. Steam has my play-time clocked at 166.2 hours! That’s pretty crazy but just when I thought I knew what a difficult game was, in came XCOM 2. XCOM 2 really broke me even at normal difficulty and it was a paradigm shift.

It had me thinking that while I would certainly would want to finish the game and enjoy the intriguing storyline and be entertained at the same time, I really do not want to be left hanging over the difficulty level. Hence I restarted XCOM 2 at the easiest difficult the game had to offer and I finished it in 41 hours of game time.

I’ve tried the same thing on subsequent games, including Command & Conquer: Red Alert 3 and the Halo games in the Master Chief Collection as I wanted to move on through the stories in these games. Some game developers have actually caught on to the fact that for some gamers, having an easier way to complete a game is also a form of accessibility and have made innovative provisions for that.

Great examples would be Nintendo. In New Super Mario Bros. U Deluxe, players get extra power-ups as a leg-up if they keep on having to repeat a level, and players can also choose Nabbit, who is practically invulnerable to enemies and obstacles such as fire, as their character, making it a lot easier to tackle the platformer.

I did however, did finish Fallout 4 at a higher difficulty level, simply because the game just suites my style and I love the series. The same goes for Diablo III. But there’s really shouldn’t be an issue in picking a lower or easier difficulty level to finish a game regardless of whether you want to finish the story, or for accessibility purposes, or any other reason. I’m not judging, and neither should anyone else.