The developers of the game have a clear vision of how they want their game to be difficulty-wise and I don’t think sticking to that is a problem, it’s their intended way of experiencing the game and making sure everyone, regardless of anything, are in the same playing field, difficulty options are not necessarily about accessibility, it depends entirely on the intention of the developers.

There’s a lot of other options you can have on your game for people with all sorts of needs and necessities, just look at recent Sony games for example, and From Software sucks on that front, they desperately need to put more accessibility options for those that need it.

Judging from even the g*mer places A LOT of people who would like to play have problem with the difficulty level.

If you’re talking about Elden Ring/Souls games specifically, I’m gonna be honest, this whole reputation of them being this “difficult, brutal, unrelenting, unforgiving” games is mostly wrong. It’s mostly just a different type of gameplay loop than other type of games. And yeah, it can be difficult depending on a lot of factors like the level of familiarity someone has with playing games, more specifically 3D games, or someone’s tolerances, preferences and mood. There are things in these games that are made to be difficult, like a specific area or boss, but it’s not nearly as close to what people make it seem to be, it’s just different from other types of games.