What does Sup Forums think of difficulty settings?

Do you like the concept of difficulty settings?
Do you think they should be removed from games leaving only ones that are made to be easy or hard

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They're good to have, but often implemented wrong.

This.
More enemy health isn't hard, it's just more time-consuming. Enemies should be smarter, maybe in some cases inflict more damage to you (but only enough to encourage more defensive/evasive play, not ohko bullshit). Faster is sometimes acceptable.

>easy is a joke
>medium is easy
>hard is normal
>expert isn't hard, just outright cheap thanks to bloated health and/or severely reduced health

Shit, meant bloated enemy health.

The easiest way to have a hard difficulty without putting in the work of making enemies more difficult would be to reduce health for both the player and enemies. It isn't ideal, but an unforgiving game is better than a tedious game and it could still be accomplished with the few variables that developers can be bothered to change.

These settings only really work if you want to make a game easier for you. I would much rather the base game be diffcult and challening, and then have the option to make it easier.

Because what often ends up happening is the more difficult settings simply just either make you have lower health, or have thee nemies have much mre health, which isn't really adding challenge, just padding and tedium.

They're relics. Game difficulty should adapt to how you play.

all games should be made to be as difficult as possible unless the story is the driving force of the game.

I like the Platinum approach to difficulty settings where they switch up enemy encounters.
>Remember that enemy that gave you so much trouble on normal? Here's 4 of them with adds

These, many modern games need to learn the difference between a challenge and outright grindy bullshit so there's an enjoyable experience

I think most games should do it like Thief. Just design your game and make that the hardest difficulty. Then remove certain things like objectives or the amount of things you have to do for the lower difficulties. This might not work for all games though but just raising and lowering health values is a stupid way to do difficulty.

This.
Also worth noting they work differently in different genres.

I like faster, usually does a very good job of speeding the game up.
More or different enemies and enemy placement can go a long way as well.

This. The Evil Within did that very well.

Another good one is to make changes to the enemies. Mass Effect 2 put protective armour or shields on every single enemy, so you really have to use different abilities and weapons to fight instead of just relying on raw damage and crowd control. Wish more games did stuff like that.

>yfw

I approve this post.

I still remember the look on my brother's face when he found out that the mook demons in Devil May Cry could Devil Trigger on higher difficulties.

>mfw playing W101 on Hard and two turtle fuckers spawn in the first level on a cramped bridge

I hate when I can't select all the difficulties at once. Unless it's like DMC3 or something, just let me choose.

>beat normal to unlock hard
>beat hard to unlock very hard
>beat very hard to unlock fuck you

Normal and Hard are all you really need.

I prefer no difficulty selection at all. Just make the game inherently hard and give the player in game choices to make things easier for them if they choose to.

difficulty has always been a terrible idea, because it makes progression feel arbitrary and leaves you with a feeling of having achieved even less than beating a video game

the experience of 'winning' is an illusion anyway, so its important to craft that illusion skillfully

the best way to do this is the oldest way, to create a significant portion of the game that is accessible to most players, and then crank the difficult way up on the narrative and explorative edges

why is winning an illusion?

I could explain this a few ways, but the real answer is one that most people can't accept

they intentionally choose "cheesy" ways to get past difficult sections rather than using the default tools the game provides

finding these cheeses is probably the single and most important source of fun that games provide, so I am not arguing against this natural human activity, only stating that players are rarely as 'good' as they imagine themselves to be, and thus their success is a masturbatory fantasy

I like sanic im

LOL

i love masturbating. so you're saying that when i have sex i'm really just masturbating? i feel aroused at this.

>you have to beat the game to unlock harder modes

intredasting

So lvl 6 Deprived w/ default gear runs are the only way to REALLY win Dark Souls?

Normal Mode
>Get 5 large health packs
Hard mode
>Get 5 small health packs instead of just 1 large health pack

Fuck you Dead Space 3

It's not like the game was designed to be played like that.
Incidentally, Dark Souls was the game that best drove home this concept.
There's at least several situations in that game where it's you getting a new gear that solves the part you were having trouble with.

No one actually plays through the game with a longsword and a heater shield. And not because it'd be hard, but because it becomes boring.

What game is this from?

I think its shit. The developers will obviously make the game with one difficulty specifically in mind, it would be better to just spend that time making that one difficulty much better. Take Doom for example, they didn't expect you to play anything other than ultraviolence and tacked the other shit on, and making difficulties for games like that is very time consuming since everything is done by fucking hand, and anything not done by hand is automatically fucking shit see Oblivion or Call of Duty where the only difference are enemy stats.

Looked it up and it's like one of those browser MMOs that you played when you were 10 and didn't know better. Fantage.

OP probably got it from Google.

Inflating enemy HP/reducing player damage/HP is a terrible way to do difficulty. Better ways to change difficulty:

>change enemy spawns (easy to implement)
>make enemy AI more aggressive or responsive to player tactics (difficult to implement)
>change enemy movesets (not too hard)
>remove a "crutch" mechanic from the player's arsenal (Witch Time in Bayonetta)
>limit the abundance of items/tools found in each level/area (another easy change)
>add NEW objectives (Thief Gold Hard/Expert modes)

Changing damage is a lazy way to extend gameplay, but any combination of the above elements makes for a far more interesting and accomplished run for a Hard or Expert difficulty.

Difficulty in action games or even action RPGs is fine, but I think anything turn based should not have difficulty options, there should just be one difficulty, because you can't properly implement difficulties in turn based games, a perfect example of this would be Bravely Default, in the hard difficulty, one of the final bosses has an AoE that normally would deal a lot of damage, but in hard, it deals around 7000 damage regularly and 9999 damage on crits (which are pretty common) and that's with a Lv.99 party with the best equipment, the only way to finish that game on hard is to just use broken abilities and setups.
Giving enemies double all of their stats is not hard, it just forces you to break the game.

>remove a "crutch" mechanic from the player's arsenal (Witch Time in Bayonetta)
>limit the abundance of items/tools found in each level/area (another easy change)
I don't understand why any game at all should do this if players will create challenges for themselves anyways

What are games with really good and well balanced difficulty settings?

I like having difficulty options, but I respect games that have a clever way of making things easier by going a little out of the way: Metal Slimes in DQ, for example.

Locked difficulty settings are cancer

>want to play on hardest difficulty
>LOL NOPE YOU HAVE TO FINISH THE GAME FIRST TO UNLOCK IT XD

When will this fucking thing die already? Let me play on hard on my first playthrought if I want to you fucking niggers.

like choosing magic in Dark Souls?

I agree with the sentiment, even though I always opt for Normal on my first playthrough.

>play Hard
>(usually) haven't had enough time to refine my skills/strategies
>have an awful time
>game moves slowly
>time wasted if I didn't like the game, still a drag even if I did

Like I'll play plenty of games on their highest difficulties because they're fun, but I'm sure as fuck not going back to Odin Sphere (provided I ever finish it) to play that on Hard. If I'd picked Hard from the start chances are I'd have gotten tired of the combat even earlier.

But yes, locked difficulties are aids.

I don't think there's any problem with giving enemies more health.

EDF has pretty fun harder difficulties which are mostly attribute changes, but affects strategy.

There are good ways and bad ways to implement difficulty.
Honestly, the best way to do it is not by having a setting, but by doing something specific that triggers a hard mode, or by having your choices make it easier or harder. With proper rewards.
Good examples of doing something specific to make it harder in an MMO would be Firefighter Mimiron, Yogg Saron alone in the darkness etc... too bad Blizz has been ignoring this for a while. 4 fucking difficulty levels for the same content. Why the fuck would anyone bother going above normal?
The best example of organic difficulty in play style choice would be Dark Souls 1. You can just take sorceries and play on easy mode. Or you can choose if you want to be more dodge or block oriented.
A shitty way to set difficulty in strategy games would be just to straight out buff resource gain and research of either you, or the ai.
What i consider good is when the ai actually acts smarter.
Maybe the shittiest way to set difficulty is just to flat out increase the enemy health and damage. Looking at you Skyrim.

God Tier
>Difficulty settings where the objectives change, the enemy has different units or abilities, and approaching situations differently
Okay tier
>More units, shorter time limits
Absolutely dog shit tier
>You have less health and do less damage they have more health and do more damage

>more enemies and you take more damage if you get hit, but the enemies have the same health on every difficulty

Well that was mildly disturbing.

I like having extra difficulties aimed at people who have beaten the game on its "base" difficulty, it gives extra replay value and a reward for gitting gud.

Provided the difficulty is done well and not just inflating enemy HP/damage, but a dozen people have already said that this thread so it's a given.

To be fair, Bravely Default is broken as shit to begin with, starting with the fact that nearly every single enemy attack in the game is physically based.

Faster, better aim, better ai, and more enemies/different enemies is the best way to increase difficulty. Like almost everything it seems, older games like doom got it right. 99% of games today seem to follow Valve's or Bethesda's lazy style of increasing difficulty.

I like games where the hardest difficulty/difficulties make enemies and bosses pull out new moves or attack patterns. Games that just add more health or more defense suck unless they at least add an incentive to play them, like more experience points in an RPG or something.

>hardest difficulty is so hard the game buffs certain things in your favor so you can even stand a chance

>>limit the abundance of items/tools found in each level/area
I'm a fan of health items being less abundant on higher difficulties. Not so much of a fan on ammo being removed, especially if they add more enemies or more difficult enemies.

>IA behaves exactly the same in every difficulty
>Difficulties are dealt by conceding unfair advantages to the IA

>difficulty setting is actually a global damage factor

that doesn't apply to all players, i don't remember trying to look for exploits when i've played any game. sounds like you just suck at hard games and you want to find an excuse for it.

>enemies have same health, more damage
>you have same health, less damage
>but
>you can parry attacks
>parrying on the highest difficulty does a fuckload of extra damage

Metal Gear Rising was fun on Revengeance difficulty.

youtube.com/watch?v=BagfYOZJQfk

>highest difficulty setting makes it harder to make enemies flinch

When the AI gets more aggressive/crafty due to increased difficulty, or more numerous, that's good difficulty. When the enemies simply do more damage, and absorb more, it's a shit system.

I'd rather just get through the game and see the story than waste time on some dumb gimmick.

> Bayo 2
> pic related only shows up once in the entire game, maybe twice if you find the optional fight
> Try the hardest difficulty
> They're fucking everywhere, harder to fight than most bosses, and get paired up with those buffing demons constantly

They're always good to have no matter how well they are done as says.
At worst you receive less damage which is what some games with bad mechanics need to be enjoyable. Playing a game with bad mechanics on hard like skyrim is retarded.

I often notice that when I play a game to progress because I'll unlock an item, the next story segment, or I just want to see the ending I often forget to have fun and receiving the reward feels empty.

I feel only two difficulty settings are necessary, normal and casual. The first is the game the way it's meant to be played, the second one is there not to lose the babby market.

The only way to do it right is switch up enemy encounters and give them new movesets along with increased difficulty

Basically Ninja Gaiden

Everyone says this but I don't agree at all except in games that have supposedly equal rules for players and AI, where health/damage don't apply.

If I'm playing an action game or a shooter or whatever, I see no reason to artificially gimp AI. Enemies should never be drooling retards on any difficulty, they should be as interesting as possible always.

Imagine if easier modes in MGS made guards not pay as much attention to their surroundings. Like Normal guards can't see footprints in the snow and Easy guards don't hear gunshots. That'd be terrible.

I've always hated them.

>oh you beat our game?
>not really shithead, now do it on hard

Just design the game to be as hard as you think it should be. Start off easy and ramp it up. Maybe extra challenges but not entire replays.

Smarter AI in harder difficulties rather than modifying their health & damage output/intake.

If its the latter, remove difficulties entirely.

A Youtuber named videogamedunkey put this issue in the best way. No link because I'm lazy.