I got thinking in light of hearing that Uncharted was a much better game on normal then hard because you’re encouraged to get out from cover and shoot, punch, shuck and jive your way to the top - do difficulty modes rob away from video games more than adding to them? Now in my mind Metal Gear Solid 2 jumps to mind. In that game, I played on very easy and easy and thought I had the game dialed. I jumped to normal, and suddenly guards were in new spots, there were more cameras, and the puzzles, were more puzzling. Frankly, I had wished the game just started on normal, it became a tighter game.
Thinking back, I default to ‘normal’ as choices on video games. I know many on sites like this would choose ‘hard’ I understand why. However, I think these choices take away from the games. Think of the dev time taken on them. Most of the time these choices just lead to how spongey enemies are.
Can anyone think of a time when the difficulty choices were stronger?
Actually, my experience with Uncharted is that higher difficulties bring the importance of mobility into high relief, since enemies will be relentless about grenading and flanking you out of cover, and zero on you the more you stay in one spot.
Making a blanket proclamation that difficulty modes are always deleterious doesn’t really take into account the huge range of possible vidcon experiences. It’s wiser to say that some games should only be played one way, while others do better to give the player more options.
I like that thinking. I’m just questioning if those options are limiting - how likely are people to replay the game on a different difficulty to open up that line of thinking? Shouldn’t the game do that regardless of mode?
I jump on hard because I want the game to pressure me to use my tools correctly for situations they’re designed for. Without enough barriers,any strategies can fall into ‘locally optimal’ and I won’t learn as much about how the mechanics of the game interact.
This is highly dependent on dev experience and time! Elder Scrolls can’t do difficulty at all, but they’re also constrained by the huge range of possible player power levels. Witcher 3 was excellent on hardest because I felt like I had to use all my potions and cheap tricks to take down a hunt – it was a type of role-playing. It also distorted the balance so that swarms of weak enemies became the most dangerous encounter, but the tradeoff was worthwhile once I recognized it.
Personally, I’m only comfortable increasing HP by 50% and damage by 100% on hard; in order to raise combat difficulty more, I then turn to quicker animations, more use of enemy special moves, tougher spawn groupings, etc. Never restrict player abilities on hard.
I exclusively play on the hardest possible since it forces me to make the best of all the mechanics. Case in point, playing Dead Space 2 and while it’s not overly ammo-sparse even on Zealot, I still like to have a cushion just in case. Because of that, I actually try to take advantage of the telekinesis power a lot more, either by grabbing poles or monster limbs to shoot at enemies. If I was playing on easy, I wouldn’t even bother. Higher difficulty just requires a much stronger scrutiny of everything in the game, and unlike normies, huge chunk of my engagement with games is based on analysis and historical appreciation. Even if I don’t actually fully theorize myself in writing on such and such a game, or even think certain elements through, there’s always this “wow, what an interesting juxtaposition of activity X with activity Y” etc going at the back of my mind. Playing on hard just forces me to be fully invested, and I like that. Plus I don’t like to retry for perfectionism, so playing on high difficulty elevates that. That party member was killed in that battle? Well shit, not going to go through that again, let him be dead.
Also I think it’s a lot harder to design systems and mechanics that have such sublime gamefeel that you’d opt for them out of pure enjoyment or novelty rather than efficiency.
I do dislike bullet spongey approach though, even if the game pushes me to max damage output.
I just wish games were 100% EXPLICIT on the fucking title screen what the difficulty does. Tired of having to do a separate investigation for it. If I put Impossible for my RTS game campaign, I’d like to know in advance that this means the enemy economy is invulnerable so I don’t have to fuck myself over by trying to gut the AI economy even if it’s essentially impossible to do so.
There are mods that eliminate all level scaling from Elder Scrolls games that make them universally more fun. It also makes them “more annoying” in that you will be able to wander into many areas that you simply cannot beat yet. The friction there is only with player expectations, not design principles.
I do this in theory but in practice different kinds of games have different uses of difficulty modes. Like, it’s silly to play EU4 on Hard until you’ve played many many hours on Normal. (In fact, Hard mode is a late addition from a patch implemented years after the game’s initial release.) Also, obviously you should jump right into UV in Doom/2, like why do the other difficulties even exist, but you should NOT jump right into Nightmare, which is essentially an alternative game mode and not usually preferable even for experts.
Your average FPS or action-adventure game though, yes, I play on the hardest mode available unless otherwise notified.
I mean yeah, there’s certain games where the hardest is either unlockable or incredible brutal to begin with, so I don’t play it on that, yeah. But of course, those difficulties these days are not accessible on first playthrough anyway.
I don’t trust game developers to know how to make a game, so I always play on Normal. I assume that the game was designed around Normal, and then artificially inflated for hard and deflated for easy. Do not want!
There are very, very few games where I’ve found the hard difficulties at all rewarding. In my experience, it usually means spending more time on either menial garbage (levelling up, grinding for gear, etc.) or really irritating mechanics, like hiding behind cover for way to long, or taking advantage of broken AI.
Obviously there are exceptions, but things like
make me feel like I need to do a bunch of research before I even choose a difficulty, and screw that.
To be fair, I’m not the kind of person to play through a whole game twice unless I absolutely love it, so there are only a few instances where I’ve played on normal and THEN hard, which I suppose is probably the intended path.
Big exception: racing games. But the whole game loop is typically designed around beating the difficulties in order, so I trust that those were designed properly.
im like 85% sure this is true: in splinter cell (chaos theory, maybe others too) the guards all speak english to each other on normal difficulty, but they speak their native languages on hard onwards. Shoutout to that.
I think @Father.Torque is bringing up some great points against my thesis… idea… whatever here. But what’s reflecting more now on me is the inconsistency/ unsure reason many wouldn’t like the difficulty modes. I mean for rouge likes or a game you’re going to do many runs on… sure, but diving into a 20+ hour game, gimme the deets.
big levels that suddenly serve no function because 90% of the mission objectives were stripped out
find inscrutable machines and objects no longer acknowledged by the game systems
game just ends like 40% of the way through without a boss and you get an ambivalent message asking you to try again
try out normal sometime, bump into new content you’ve never seen before, feel like you’re having one of those dreams where everyday actions become agonizingly convoluted and deferred, or looking at an outsider art piece where every bit of blank space on the page becomes colonized with thick scribbles of meaning… sink back into the limpid waters of the easy mode
one day, a realization, that invincibility mode all weapons infinite ammo, is the easiest mode of all
strip out last vestiges of pacing and meaning from all environments, turn everything into a weird dollhouse animatronics ride where you float around while 20 dudes following behind you clip through each other and roll around while firing aimlessly past you
all directions are as good as any other… where am i going? where do i want to go? i move into one of the featureless cabins from the goldeneye snow levels and momentarily feel at peace. i could build a life here…
30 seconds later, am firing rocket launcher endlessly against the wall, trying to stack enough explosions to destroy all destructible objects within a 20ft radius and get the game speed down to 5fps. occasional yearghh sounds as people outside wander into the blasts. human consciousness grinding blindly into a 3d wall, forever. is this easy mode, or the hardest mode of all…?
you turn on noclip and float further, into the night…
I actually enforce some self-made restrictions in certain games as well. Like in Baldur’s Gate style party-based RPGs, I only allow saving (besides cautionary saves against crashes) in inns. If you didn’t do that, you could almost always savescum any encounter to net you a perfect run with no one dead. However, when I do this, I actually have to be careful with people getting killed since it generally can set you back quite a bit money-wise to resurrect your companions.
I don’t know, considering the FPS was still young at the time. Doom is exactly where many of us built those skills up and it’s not like there were many other games to do that with yet. Now of course it’s different, and similarly there are plenty of .wads that don’t even have skill levels implemented.
Difficulty Modes are something I, in general, approve of, though many of my favorite games dont’ have them, but it really is a pretty much unsolveable problem to communicate to each individual player which mode is right for them. As a rule, if the game is from a developer that I don’t necessarily trust to have strong mechanical/level design, and I’m playing the game because of the characters/story/aesthetics, etc., I’ll leave it on Normal, but for games I trust to hold up to higher-level play I try and intuit what the game seems to be “suggesting” (either though descriptive text, or just defaulting the cursor to that difficulty, or whatever) and go up one click from there. It’s hard tho! Cuz it’s a totally arbitrary distinction and you just have to trust not only that the developers made a good game, but that they correctly assessed the difficulty of their game.
The only series where I always know what to expect in this area is the Halo series. They’ve shifted around, certainly (the Easy mode gets more and more trivial with each game, and Normal tends to be inconsistent as well), but Heroic is always the mode for me, not only on a first playthrough but in most casual replays as well. I used to always punish myself on Legendary, but tbh the design sometimes falls apart at that point, depending on the game/level.
The thing is, not all games benefit from being arbitrarily more or less difficult since the goal of game design is to imprint an emotional response on the player, one way or another. To flow them into a path where their actions give them a response befitting of the mood and style of the game. Since not all players are created equal, difficulty levels can be said to give this experience more broadly to each player on their own terms, but frequently are more equivalent to being entirely different games with their own playstyles being encouraged/discouraged. What works on ‘easy’ often does not on ‘hard’, and what works on ‘hard’ is often suboptimal on ‘easy’. This can give a very different impression to the player, regardless of level!
tldr; A good designer will treat each difficulty level as its own thing, entirely. Its own take on the game, in a vacuum, with its own restrictions and benefits.
I kind of dislike difficulty levels in a pure numerical ‘this is more challenging and requires a stricter build’ sense. Especially since not all levels are balanced equally, this usually ends up with too-easy normal and too-hard hard, because the designers aren’t really sure what either audience wants. It took, what, twenty years for doom level makers to acknowledge that there are settings below UV and they should be supported? Since the assumption was that you would play on UV because that’s how Real Doomers Play what are you some kind of scrub? Which led to this kind of difficulty race nobody wanted to climb anymore, not even seasoned players.
on a side note, imo most games with ‘good’ difficulty balance over the past few years have been in the category of “can be beaten really slowly without too much trouble if you like, but ramps up quickly if you want to go faster”
dark souls is a good example here. you can cheese anything in that game if you are patient enough.
necrodancer is another; while it does split up the main mode for story purpose so anyone can clear, you can take your time with most content in the game and it does not ramp up too quickly, but if you want to speedrun it you are in for a trip. (this game also gets a lot of speedrun races!)