Nioh 3 director Masaki Fujita says developer Team Ninja never considered adding difficulty settings to its hardcore Soulslike games.
Team Ninja is a developer that is associated with difficulty. Before Dark Souls was around, the studio's Ninja Gaiden was the game people would use as a shorthand for "this is super hard," so when the studio got around to making its own Souls-inspired games, they were naturally even harder. The Nioh series is one that I personally find much harder than any of FromSoftware's proprietary Souls games, but despite that, Team Ninja seems to have a very similar approach to difficulty as FromSoft itself.
