Granular difficulty options also help. Things like being able to make the parry timings easier or harder than that rest of the difficulty.

If your difficulty presets are turning a bunch of levers at once, letting folks make their own can be very helpful.

There's also things that aren't often considered difficulty, but that can definitely make a game harder for some folks.

With Witcher 3 the only way I was able to play it successfully was modding it to be able to ignore a bunch of mechanics I found tedious. Things like ignoring carry weight, turning off item durability, lengthening potion duration, having items scale to my level, and hoovering up loot. Inventory management is often exhausting for me.

It's not an easy fix this can break a game's economy, and I think I had separate mods to reduce the impact of that.

Good games have a difficulty curve that scales, usually they just speed up level by level.

"Life is just like tetris, it just gets harder, then you die." - Mark Twain

You can't make an 'easy' mode for tetris, but you could effectively start at level minus 10 or something.

I completely disagree. Difficulty is not an accessibility option. It's a cheap way out of fixing more complex problems, but ultimately easier difficulty just means that you won't have to interact with the game as much to get through it. No problem if the parrying lacks clear indications when you can just take the very weak hits from the enemies instead of learning the parry system.

But for most games, it doesn't really impact anyone if you add a difficulty slider, so game developers just do that instead of dealing with accessibility issues in their core systems.

And then there's the souls games. These games would become objectively worse by adding a difficulty option. When overcoming impossible odds is the core principle of the game, then adding a slider to make the odds mildly inconvenient instead of impossible will actively jeopardize that very principle!

In fact there are countless stories of people with severe disabilities who found new hope in clawing through the souls games. They let go of their learned helplessness precisely because they realized that what their playing is hard and failing over and over again is an important part of the process.

That being said, the souls games do deserve some criticism in some aspects regarding accessibility. There's a lot in the UI and feedback department that could be done to improve accessibility without having a negative impact on the game itself.

And as a last point, there are plenty of ways in which you can tweak several difficulty aspects of the souls games. Mavic is way easier than heavy strength builds which is way easier than dex builds. So, if you just want to go sight seeing, then why not use cheats and magic?