Would you rather stop playing a game than lower the difficulty? The First Berserker: Khazan devs reckon you would

Are you the sort of player that would rather drop a game altogether than simply bump the difficulty down (if such an option exists?) If so, then you might be in better company than you think – at least that’s what the developer of The First Berserker: Khazan has deduced from poring over its player data, anyway.

In an update on Steam, Neople revealed some interesting information about the behaviour of players that picked up its hardcore action role-playing game since its release in March 2025.

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As part of the game’s big June update, Junho Lee (Khazan’s creative director) posted a big rundown of the thinking behind the game’s difficulty rework that explained the reasons for adding a ‘Beginner’ mode to the game. Whilst the update is a couple of weeks old now, I’ve seen the statement doing the rounds in dev Discords and message boards this morning, and thought it was worth bringing to attention more broadly.

“At launch, we set our intended standard experience as ‘Normal’ and added a more accessible option labeled ‘Easy’,” wrote Lee. “We figured that if players found the game too difficult, they’d simply switch to Easy. But when we looked at the data, we saw that many players just quit the game without ever changing the difficulty.”

Per Lee and the team’s research, there was a simple reason for this: he believes players feel like “[they’d] rather quit with dignity than drop it down to Easy.”

It’s a fascinating study of player psychology. Just look towards something like Bloodborne or Sekiro – games that launched without a second difficulty mode – and the fervent conversation that kicks up every single time someone suggests slapping an ‘Easy’ mode in those games. People get very defensive about their ability to master difficult games like these, and see it as a mark of pride that they can take on the (in some cases) extreme challenge that comes with the action-RPG genre. Just think back to the discourse around beating ‘pre-patch Radahn’ in Shadow of the Erdtree, for example.

Lee continues: “Some also said that if the default had been called ‘Hard’ instead, they would’ve felt okay about switching down to ‘Normal’.” Again, this demonstrates player ego more than anything else – did Neople’s decision to call its difficulty modes ‘Normal’ and ‘Easy’ affect player retention? It would seem so.