XX Y XY said:
People like to brag! Yep, that's pretty much it.
You really didn't spend much time thinking about it, did you.
There's a lot of things to consider here, and brag rights are certainly one of them, but in my opinion the most important are game design and gamers' desires for things to stay the same within a franchise. Let's start with that last one.
The current trend of game reboots and shifted perspectives on a franchise's vision has managed to prove one thing: most gamers don't like a series changing philosophies. A few really good examples are Dragon Age 2 and Devil May Cry. In the former, beyond a game that feels rushed, you got a wildly different combat system and a shift in perspective from a slow-paced RPG to a more action-esque style. In DmC, you got a complete story makeover with different characters whose only link to the past titles were their names and general roles within the story. Both of these titles got very negative fan reactions for the very reasons that they were changed. Now, where does the easy mode debacle come into play?
When a game is known and revered for being difficult, when difficulty is one of the game's major attractions and selling points, changing something within this core element constitutes the type of change that will anger gamers. People aren't so trusting of devs anymore, not after so many examples of sequels that changed and went bad. It's why they're already damning Dead Space 3, which is likely to bomb. It's why they've criticized the shit out of DA2 and Diablo 3. Because even though it shouldn't, drastic change nowadays seems to imply a drastic loss of quality. And gamers are afraid of the franchises they love going bad. Obviously, they don't want that.
But there's another major aspect to it which requires a more in-depth analysis. Here, I can't speak for Fire Emblem, but I can damn sure speak for Dark Souls. As I've said before, the game uses difficulty as a mechanic. If you've played Dark Souls for a reasonably big length of time, you'll have noticed that the game tends to stay fresh and offer ways of dealing with enemies at different levels of skill and familiarity with the game. On your first playthrough, you tend to use a shield, block, wait for the enemy to swing and then counter. That's how most of the encounters with normal enemies go. As you get more familiar with the game, you learn to backstab. You learn to parry. You learn to let go of the shield as a crutch, and start going crazy with two-handing weapons or even dual-wielding. As a result, the game is kept from getting stale, and has a longer lifetime and better replay value. It's the kind of organic replay value where you play it because the fights are still fresh and the combat just hasn't gotten boring yet. Difficulty ties in to that, because the game is designed so that losing your focus is detrimental to your experience and it WILL punish you if you start playing mindlessly.
When you're familiar with the game, you start seeing some of its flaws that were previously hidden because you were too busy shitting your pants at unseen terrors: the game itself is small. The areas are relatively brief and can be run through quickly assuming you don't die and have to return. There's a few unbalanced items and techniques that can wildly change your experience by making monster and sometimes even boss encounters trivial. Spells are samey, and the combat doesn't really have that much depth to it. Rather, it relies on the tension created by its punishing aspect and the difficulty of its execution to keep you hooked. The main quest is more or less a giant MMO fetch quest with interesting encounters along the way, but the plot is incredibly straight-forward.
Why you don't see, or don't mind, these flaws is largely because of difficulty as a core mechanic. It builds tension and atmosphere, it keeps the combat fresh, it lengthens the game and makes it seem like it has much more content than it actually does. That's why, when people become *really* good at the game, they get bored and either seek out ways to handicap themselves to make the game challenging and intense again (/r/OneBros [http://www.reddit.com/r/OneBros/] bearing testament to this) or they turn to the game's PvP aspect, with the proof of this being the relatively large online community developed over the years with unofficial community-driven themed pvp events still going strong despite the huge amount of connectivity issues.
This game lives and dies on its difficulty, and its main way of keeping itself fresh is
staying difficult. And then the director comes and talks about an "easy mode". This isn't just people wanting to keep their bragging rights, or being too smug to acknowledge that everyone needs to play it. It's just a really bad idea from a design standpoint, at least for the original Dark Souls. For DS2, it would require a massive redesign of its core philosophies. Meaning it would lose at least a considerable part of what made Dark Souls great.
