Game Difficulty

[Boontaker]

I have noticed a trend with my gaming lately, especially with newer game titles. I no longer play games on the hardest difficulty, in fact I often just play them on the default. I find newer games use really ****** methods of "difficulty increase", enemies just become bloated masses of HP, or resource scarcity makes "stealth archery" style gameplay necessary for completion. This doesn't feel like the game is harder, it just feels like i'm forced to play in very specific ways in order to complete the game. I recently started Robocop and started on hard and enemies were just bullet sponges, it didn't seem like they were using better AI or other that I was getting swarmed with an increase in enemy numbers. Only that I was forced to shoot them more and would need to build for combat rather than exploration. Also taking cover as RoboCop? ******* ********

What are your thoughts on game difficulty, particularly around Nu games.

Maybe i'm just getting old

Also its fun to just embrace the power fantasy and crush all opposition, as long as there is at least some illusion of challenge

[rusty_shackleford]

What are your thoughts on game difficulty, particularly around Nu games.

Difficulty is a bad feature and shouldn't exist. Give me the intended way to play your game.

I tend to pick one down from the hardest because it seems to usually be the one developers actually intended for games to be played as.

[Manny V]

aye, i often feel difficulty options in games is now just 'how much ******** do you want to put up with'

[wndrbr]

I find newer games use really ****** methods of "difficulty increase", enemies just become bloated masses of HP, or resource scarcity makes "stealth archery" style gameplay necessary for completion. This doesn't feel like the game is harder, it just feels like i'm forced to play in very specific ways in order to complete the game.

it's always been like that.

[Tinky Winky]

I always choose normal these days because I don't have enough love in nu-games to master them. And also because of lol old.

[Boontaker]

I like when games use difficulty as a way to implement more mechanics, BG3 is a decent example with honor mode adding new abilities to the enemies. I remember when I used to play games multiple times, and for games that had modular difficulty options exploring them and trying to do them all at once was fun. These days I just want to enjoy the hours I spend on the game, I don't seem to get as much satisfaction of playing on the hardest difficulty.

[wndrbr]

I like when games use difficulty as a way to implement more mechanics, BG3 is a decent example with honor mode adding new abilities to the enemies.

I'm not sure if it's a good idea, as playing on lower-than-Honor makes you feel like you're missing out on seeing these cool new abilities. Difficulty-tied custom encounters - now that's another thing.

I remember when I used to play games multiple times, and for games that had modular difficulty options exploring them and trying to do them all at once was fun.

customizable difficulties are a copout solution, devs only use them when they don't know how to actually balance their game. I don't mind optional modifiers being unlocked after you beat the game in an intended way, but giving the player a bunch of choices before he even started the game is the wrong approach.

[rusty_shackleford]

customizable difficulty is just cheat menus for zoomers who get offended when you tell them it's cheating

[1998]

If there are three settings, I usually chose hard. If more are than that, I go for hardest minus 1.

[Val the Moofia Boss]

I would like my games to be sufficiently challenging enough that I need to buckle down and build my characters and then consider what I do during battles (though not no-lifer levels of hard). For this reason I play the Trails games on Nightmare difficulty (not Sky or Crossbell though). Unfortunately, for whatever reason this does not seem to be the default difficulty of a game, but is usually considered to be a hard mode. I have to wonder whether or not this would be the default difficulty if there were no difficulty options, but my gut tells me I would just be left with a game where there is no way to really engage it on a higher level. The Banner Saga 1 at release was sufficiently challenging on the normal default difficulty. I gameovered on the final battle and then had the satisfaction of beating it on my second attempt. However, supposedly that was just too hard for most people, so the devs nerfed it.

[TKVNC]

I play hardest mode generally, as it makes the game tend to last longer.

Regardless, hard mode is for losers who are trying to trick their brain with fake accomplishment.

[methoxetamine]

I don't mind difficulty options but they shouldn't go lower than normal. As for what difficulty I choose, it depends on the game/genre.
Also I despise having to unlock the harder difficulty. SMT4 only had normal/easy, but they ****** the difficulty balancing so much that normal was very hard for the first 5-6 hours then **** easy to it's detriment for the second half of the game. SMT4A which is its sequel has 4 difficulty options so I've been playing on War (hard equivalent, one below the highest) and it's perfect. SMT4 would've been much better with that option, though of course properly balancing the difficulty for normal would've been fine too. FF16 is another example, the combat is some of the most shallow, boring, and easy trash in existence, but if you had hard unlocked from the beginning it probably would've been a lot more tolerable

For this reason I play the Trails games on Nightmare difficulty (not Sky or Crossbell though).

I played most of the series on normal but started playing Nightmare on Reverie, it's made the games a lot more fun. I've heard how completely ******** Sky/Crossbell are though, especially the SC prologue. Not sure I have it in me if it's as bad as people say

[Val the Moofia Boss]

For this reason I play the Trails games on Nightmare difficulty (not Sky or Crossbell though).

I played most of the series on normal but started playing Nightmare on Reverie, it's made the games a lot more fun. I've heard how completely ******** Sky/Crossbell are though, especially the SC prologue. Not sure I have it in me if it's as bad as people say

The issue with Sky is that the combat and character building was not well designed enough at the time, and the game did not originally have difficulty settings. Hard and Nightmare were made by the localizers in imitation of later Falcom games that introduced those difficulties. Melee characters are starved for CP which means they cannot use crafts often, and melee damage scales terribly in comparison to simply stacking ATS and spamming Aero/White Gehenna/Death Scream, and anyone can be built into a mage. Enemies with the nightmare scaling applied to them move too fast and deal too much damage, but you don't have options to deal with this like in the Cold Steel games with Chrono Burst, Shining, Chevalier, etc. Your only option is to have one or two people constantly spamming Earth Wall to refresh the party's shields. So the gameplay boils down to 100+ hours of everyone just spamming Aero/Death Scream/White Gehenna and Earth Wall, which is not engaging. Crossbell's combat still has the same issues with spamming Lord Inferno being just straight up better than being melee oriented.

It is not until Cold Steel that CP intake and craft design makes melee characters become competitive compared to casters (but the correlation between the CP, delay cost, and actual damage and effects of the craft has no logical progression, so there are many crafts that are straight up bad and should never be used), and you get enough tools at your disposal to manage high incoming damage. Though on the Abyss difficulty of Reverie and nightmare difficulty of Daybreak, you are once again back to spamming Earth Wall/shields, but at least you are doing a little more than just that and spamming arts.

[methoxetamine]

For this reason I play the Trails games on Nightmare difficulty (not Sky or Crossbell though).

I played most of the series on normal but started playing Nightmare on Reverie, it's made the games a lot more fun. I've heard how completely ******** Sky/Crossbell are though, especially the SC prologue. Not sure I have it in me if it's as bad as people say

The issue with Sky is that the combat and character building was not well designed enough at the time, and the game did not originally have difficulty settings. Hard and Nightmare were made by the localizers in imitation of later Falcom games that introduced those difficulties. Melee characters are starved for CP which means they cannot use crafts often, and melee damage scales terribly in comparison to simply stacking ATS and spamming Aero/White Gehenna/Death Scream, and anyone can be built into a mage. Enemies with the nightmare scaling applied to them move too fast and deal too much damage, but you don't have options to deal with this like in the Cold Steel games with Chrono Burst, Shining, Chevalier, etc. Your only option is to have one or two people constantly spamming Earth Wall to refresh the party's shields. So the gameplay boils down to 100+ hours of everyone just spamming Aero/Death Scream/White Gehenna and Earth Wall, which is not engaging. Crossbell's combat still has the same issues with spamming Lord Inferno being just straight up better than being melee oriented.

It is not until Cold Steel that CP intake and craft design makes melee characters become competitive compared to casters (but the correlation between the CP, delay cost, and actual damage and effects of the craft has no logical progression, so there are many crafts that are straight up bad and should never be used), and you get enough tools at your disposal to manage high incoming damage. Though on the Abyss difficulty of Reverie and nightmare difficulty of Daybreak, you are once again back to spamming Earth Wall/shields, but at least you are doing a little more than just that and spamming arts.

In Daybreak 1 I barely even needed shields because S-Craft spam was insane. They went heavy handed on nerfing it in Daybreak 2 but it seemed better in Kai, though I rushed through Kai and didn't play it on Nightmare yet

[rusty_shackleford]

Dork Souls guy was completely right. You aren't even discussing the same game most of the time, I've seen this happen a LOT with e.g., the Pathfinder games because there's such a significant difference due to difficulty.

[Valter]

Dork Souls guy was completely right. You aren't even discussing the same game most of the time, I've seen this happen a LOT with e.g., the Pathfinder games because there's such a significant difference due to difficulty.

If you want to discuss gameplay you can still discuss it with other people who cleared it on the hardest difficulty. Difficulty levels being named helps this become a non-issue.
It's 2025, plenty of people unironically play games for the plot.

[Eyestabber]

Dork Souls guy was completely right. You aren't even discussing the same game most of the time, I've seen this happen a LOT with e.g., the Pathfinder games because there's such a significant difference due to difficulty.

If you want to discuss gameplay you can still discuss it with other people who cleared it on the hardest difficulty. Difficulty levels being named helps this become a non-issue.
It's 2025, plenty of people unironically play games for the plot.

It's a big issue, actually. Storyfags have been a blight upon gaming since forever and "easy modes" exist to exacerbate the issue. The reality is that "choose your difficulty" is a lie and RPG mechanics rarely, if ever, work properly with one difficulty, let alone several.

What does increasing difficulty do in most games? Make enemies tankier and increase their damage! Such design, much wow. All that does is pidgeonhole the player into being forced to play a handful of grossly overpowered build and use as many exploits as possible. It kills build variety and experimentation.

On the other end of the spectrum, easy modes give people trophies without requiring them to do the bare minimum: learn the ******* game. Worst of all, it creates a race to the bottom that results in the "hardest difficulty" being banal once you're past the early game (eg Bioware games).

Difficulty needs to be challenging and that is only possible when it's designed from the ground up, which means Miazaki is correct. And sure, you can cope and say "but in X game raising difficulty actually does..." but my point stands: it needs to be designed from the ground up. In an ideal world of infinite resources we would have well thought out difficulty modes, but in the real world we thank God when a game has ONE working difficulty setting.

[Valter]

Dork Souls guy was completely right. You aren't even discussing the same game most of the time, I've seen this happen a LOT with e.g., the Pathfinder games because there's such a significant difference due to difficulty.

If you want to discuss gameplay you can still discuss it with other people who cleared it on the hardest difficulty. Difficulty levels being named helps this become a non-issue.
It's 2025, plenty of people unironically play games for the plot.

It's a big issue, actually. Storyfags have been a blight upon gaming since forever and "easy modes" exist to exacerbate the issue. The reality is that "choose your difficulty" is a lie and RPG mechanics rarely, if ever, work properly with one difficulty, let alone several.

What does increasing difficulty do in most games? Make enemies tankier and increase their damage! Such design, much wow. All that does is pidgeonhole the player into being forced to play a handful of grossly overpowered build and use as many exploits as possible. It kills build variety and experimentation.

On the other end of the spectrum, easy modes give people trophies without requiring them to do the bare minimum: learn the ******* game. Worst of all, it creates a race to the bottom that results in the "hardest difficulty" being banal once you're past the early game (eg Bioware games).

Difficulty needs to be challenging and that is only possible when it's designed from the ground up, which means Miazaki is correct. And sure, you can cope and say "but in X game raising difficulty actually does..." but my point stands: it needs to be designed from the ground up. In an ideal world of infinite resources we would have well thought out difficulty modes, but in the real world we thank God when a game has ONE working difficulty setting.

Yeah designing the experience around one difficulty makes it the richest, naturally. So you do that, and call it the highest difficulty (or in fromsoft's case the only difficulty, it's the same concept).
This does not impede lesser difficulties from effortlessly being made by just tuning down some numbers or reducing enemy count. Since storyfags care little about the gameplay, similarly they shouldn't care about balance. That privilege goes to people on the highest difficulty.
Does tuning down some numbers really take a significant amount of dev time?

[Element]

Dork Souls guy was completely right. You aren't even discussing the same game most of the time, I've seen this happen a LOT with e.g., the Pathfinder games because there's such a significant difference due to difficulty.

Cannot describe in words how punchable Hideous Kojimbob's face is

[A Chinese opium den]

Dork Souls guy was completely right. You aren't even discussing the same game most of the time, I've seen this happen a LOT with e.g., the Pathfinder games because there's such a significant difference due to difficulty.

If you want to discuss gameplay you can still discuss it with other people who cleared it on the hardest difficulty. Difficulty levels being named helps this become a non-issue.
It's 2025, plenty of people unironically play games for the plot.

It's a big issue, actually. Storyfags have been a blight upon gaming since forever and "easy modes" exist to exacerbate the issue. The reality is that "choose your difficulty" is a lie and RPG mechanics rarely, if ever, work properly with one difficulty, let alone several.

What does increasing difficulty do in most games? Make enemies tankier and increase their damage! Such design, much wow. All that does is pidgeonhole the player into being forced to play a handful of grossly overpowered build and use as many exploits as possible. It kills build variety and experimentation.

On the other end of the spectrum, easy modes give people trophies without requiring them to do the bare minimum: learn the ******* game. Worst of all, it creates a race to the bottom that results in the "hardest difficulty" being banal once you're past the early game (eg Bioware games).

Difficulty needs to be challenging and that is only possible when it's designed from the ground up, which means Miazaki is correct. And sure, you can cope and say "but in X game raising difficulty actually does..." but my point stands: it needs to be designed from the ground up. In an ideal world of infinite resources we would have well thought out difficulty modes, but in the real world we thank God when a game has ONE working difficulty setting.

Cheating is way cooler and commands much more respect than going on very easy mode btw, don't know why storyfags don't just use cheat engine like a man.

[rusty_shackleford]

You aren't even getting the same story when you play a game on its non-intended setting. The idea that you can play on easy "for the story" is complete ********, you cannot divorce a game from its story, they are intertwined.

"OK guys we gotta defeat this big bad tough guy"
*kill him in one hit*

you just ruined the story

[TKVNC]

Warband again does this better than most games.

Enemies have the same health and armour regardless of difficulty. You can turn down the damage they do (if you are ********), but otherwise it stays the same.

What actually changes is how they use formations, whether they feign or parry - if they attack head on, or try to flank - both from a macro for formations, micro on the individual troop level.

Seeing an NPC force their way around to your non-shield side, then kick or shield bash you, is insanely zased.

[Lord of Riva]

There should be only of difficulty.

[KOS-MOS]

How an ennemy is supposed to be threatening if you one shot him?

[Valter]

you cannot divorce a game from its story

Yes I can, otherwise turn-based games would feel like Clown Town. "What are these ******* all doing waiting for each other's turn? Are they just being polite?"

[rusty_shackleford]

you cannot divorce a game from its story

Yes I can, otherwise turn-based games would feel like Clown Town. "What are these ******* all doing waiting for each other's turn? Are they just being polite?"

It's not part of the game or story, it's basically time pausing without anyone noticing

[KOS-MOS]

you cannot divorce a game from its story

Yes I can, otherwise turn-based games would feel like Clown Town. "What are these ******* all doing waiting for each other's turn? Are they just being polite?"

No, everyone agrees that a turn represents aroudn six seconds of action. It’s not about “enemies patiently waiting for you to decide”; it’s you, the player, taking time to plan your next move, which is then carried out instantly by the character in-game. Turn-based gameplay is essentially like playing chess.

[Valter]

you cannot divorce a game from its story

Yes I can, otherwise turn-based games would feel like Clown Town. "What are these ******* all doing waiting for each other's turn? Are they just being polite?"

It's not part of the game or story, it's basically time pausing without anyone noticing

Specifically the ones without individual characters' initiatives. Player Team Turn vs Enemy Team Turn. Are the stories in those games discarted because of this?

[Eyestabber]

If you want to discuss gameplay you can still discuss it with other people who cleared it on the hardest difficulty. Difficulty levels being named helps this become a non-issue.
It's 2025, plenty of people unironically play games for the plot.

It's a big issue, actually. Storyfags have been a blight upon gaming since forever and "easy modes" exist to exacerbate the issue. The reality is that "choose your difficulty" is a lie and RPG mechanics rarely, if ever, work properly with one difficulty, let alone several.

What does increasing difficulty do in most games? Make enemies tankier and increase their damage! Such design, much wow. All that does is pidgeonhole the player into being forced to play a handful of grossly overpowered build and use as many exploits as possible. It kills build variety and experimentation.

On the other end of the spectrum, easy modes give people trophies without requiring them to do the bare minimum: learn the ******* game. Worst of all, it creates a race to the bottom that results in the "hardest difficulty" being banal once you're past the early game (eg Bioware games).

Difficulty needs to be challenging and that is only possible when it's designed from the ground up, which means Miazaki is correct. And sure, you can cope and say "but in X game raising difficulty actually does..." but my point stands: it needs to be designed from the ground up. In an ideal world of infinite resources we would have well thought out difficulty modes, but in the real world we thank God when a game has ONE working difficulty setting.

Yeah designing the experience around one difficulty makes it the richest, naturally. So you do that, and call it the highest difficulty (or in fromsoft's case the only difficulty, it's the same concept).
This does not impede lesser difficulties from effortlessly being made by just tuning down some numbers or reducing enemy count. Since storyfags care little about the gameplay, similarly they shouldn't care about balance. That privilege goes to people on the highest difficulty.
Does tuning down some numbers really take a significant amount of dev time?

Ask ITS, that's exactly how they did difficulty in both Colony Ship Game and Dungeon Rats. I play tested the latter and I can confidently say the lower difficulty levels weren't even part of the beta test. The game was fully designed around the "murderous psychopath" difficulty and yes, this is a compromise that kinda works. But I prefer journos filtered out and seething. Also, it goes without saying the lower difficulties weren't "designed" in any way.

[anvi]

How an ennemy is supposed to be threatening if you one shot him?

Exactly. You have to get roughed up by hard enemies or there is nothing to strive against. Also nothing is a real threat if you can press a button and somethin awesome happens.