Raise difficulty

>Raise difficulty
>Enemy gets more HP and does more damage

I always hear people complaining about this, but what's the problem with it? It might be "lazy", but both these things DO make the game harder.

Enemies doing more damage means you have to make less mistakes or die, and enemies having more HP means you need to keep doing well for longer and can't kill enemies super quickly using some shitty spam move or whatever.

What's the issue? What's a better way to do it that wouldn't take tons of effort?

And don't say "make the enemies more aggressive" because that's literally just "enemies attack faster", which is on the same level as "enemies have more HP and power"

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Because in a game where you've mastered the mechanics at whatever difficulty you just came from nothing changes
Use your image as an example
If you're good at dodging then you'll die very little if at all, all they have done by increasing the damage done and health pool is make your fights last a little longer
Adding additional moves sets to enemies or simply changing a pattern would make it "more difficult"

>dark souls enemy in NG
>close to melee, raise your shield, hold left to circle around, when it does an attack, backstab

>dark souls enemy in NG++++++++
>>close to melee, raise your shield, hold left to circle around, when it does an attack, backstab, and then do it again 7 more times

Difficulty is supposed to change the way you play and challenge you in new ways

Because you don't make things harder to a player who actually understands the game, all you are doing is extending the amount of time he has to spend on every individual fight

it's a difficulty slider, not a how much time do I feel like wasting slider

both of these apply only to the
>enemies get more HP
part, what's wrong with enemies doing more damage or attacking faster? Surely this would make fights be over quickly

great idea. Lets take away half the movesets of our enemies unless you play on the hardest difficulty. lol. how fun. This sure won't ruin the rest of the difficulties by making enemies boring as shit!

You're at least partly responsible for the way you play the game, don't act like backstab fishing is the only way to play dark souls.

It's not "harder" - it's just "more tedious"

I remember when the kids here were shitting on the game using the buzzword "artificial difficulty"

good times

>attacking faster

Name one game that does this

>doing more damage

Just don't get hit, same as on the low difficulty.

nice job picking just the "enemies have more HP" part and ignoring the idea of making enemies more powerful or attack faster

Because you're not challenging how a person plays the game by increasing the damage dealt by regular enemies, you aren't making anyone improve on the things they learned in a previous playthrough

there's lots of games where raising the difficulty makes enemies attack faster or much more frequently

Devil may cry for 1

If you want decent difficulty settings, go for STALKER
>you die faster
>enemies die faster too
>every firefight is much more intense

Entirely depends on the game and the enemy. Sometimes it does nothing more than make things more tedious. Sometimes more HP means you have to rely on different strats. For example, you might be able to one shot an enemy with a cheap attack (plunging attack, backstab, whatever) on easy, but if that only takes out half of its HP on hard and you suddenly find having to 1v1 it fair and square, it definately makes things more challenging in a good way.

so, what, the only solution is to lock off moves to higher difficulties and making all the other difficulties more boring/cutting content?

I've played the shit out of all DMC games and that is not the case.

Increasing the difficulty in those games changes the AI to be much more pro-active and coordinated in trying to kill the player, as well as increasing the number and variety of enemies in every encounter, as well as the health/damage increase.

yes

except you have to make sure the lower difficulties aren't actually a bore to play, so basically make a good game

Artificial difficulty

Lazy tier: Making enemies bullet sponges

You tried tier: Putting out more enemies on the screen

This is how you increase difficulty tier: Enemies have new attack patterns, are placed in harder positions on the map

anything that does not make the enemy AI smarter is a waste of everyone's time.

it's not harder, it just takes longer. you take a boss killed in fifty turns/actions, and make it a boss killed in 100 of the exact same turns/actions. no one benefits because there is no actual extra challenge

>raise difficulty
>enemies get new moves
>enemy placement is changed
>enemies hit harder, but their health isn't increased

DMC got difficulties right.

no, making enemy having sponge health is just artificial way to increase difficulty (unless your damage goes up as well)

It's not actually difficult, it's tedious. It's not necessarily bad, but it's not the best way to extend longevity. Legend of Mana has three difficulty modes and they only amount to higher levels, which means you take more and deal less, requiring far stronger weapons.

This is a bad game to use as a baseline, however.

I guess if I was to issue you an example, Castlevania Adventure Rebirth has easy, normal, and hard. On Easy the jumps are easy, the enemies go down easily, you take no damage, really. On normal the enemies are still the same and for the most part, so is the platforming, but the enemies are no longer gimmie. On Hard, the platforming changes in meaningful ways that change how you approach the placement, damage remains normal and scales normally, but the enemies you fight and in what quantity change dramatically. There may be less enemies but a stronger more troublesome enemy takes it's place, or previously harmless enemies gain one more in a location that makes platforming more difficult.

This is meaningful difficulty changes.

An action game that applies this in a meaningful way I guess would be DMC which changes moves, enemy placements, and damage, but leaves health intact where it belongs.

But someone who is "good" so to speak at Dark Souls when playing on higher NGs will not be affected by the part where they do more damage

They will either have +10 shield w/ parrying skills or just be good at rolling at the right moment, if they fuck up they'll probably still have enough HP to recover and heal even at the highest possible iteration of the NG cycle. In Dark Souls even if every enemy punished a fuck up with an instant kill, is that much really lost?

>tourist mode
enemies can't see you
>easy mode
enemies can't aim for shit
>normal mode
for the normal gaming experience
>hard mode
there are more enemies
>brutal mode
more enemies with better weapons
>bullshit mode
you deal half damage and take double

>having difficulty levels

dying and replaying for missing a one-shot deathblow from a starting rat is included in "tedious" part

>raise difficulty
>ki starts using cheats

I hate when games punish you in shitty way for playing on hard/hardest difficulty

For example: skill upgrades in system shock 2 are more expensive on impossible so i would just switch to easy every time i was levelling up something because i think the game should kinda encourage you to play hardest difficulty by making it completely opposite - skills are more expensive on easy and cheaper on hardest

give them more skillsets, change placement/amount. EDF 4.1 does this really well.

this, harder difficulties should never be less rewarding than easy

if you have self impose challenges for a game to be fun than the game is badly designed

>Enemies doing more damage means you have to make less mistakes or die, and enemies having more HP means you need to keep doing well for longer and can't kill enemies super quickly using some shitty spam move or whatever.
Not entirely wrong, but it only works to a ceertain degree. Harder difficulties should introduce new mistakes for players to avoid.

The game that this bothers me the most with is skyrim.

on legendary difficulty you may as well not bothering blocking until your skill is high and you have perks because you die anyways.
Its worse than the "miss miss miss" of morrowind.

>might be "lazy"
Is it lazy.
Instead of giving the enemies better AI or more complex move sets, they just crank up their damage/health because dumb faggots like you buy it.

>Skyrim
>in order to play on hardest difficulties without killing one draugr 10 minutes you have to upgrade every single one of your shit with enchanting/smithing
i swear smithing is awful when it comes to balance
what were they thinking

Zestiria does this stupid shit. Less experience on harder difficulties. More $$ though but it doesn't matter because you must do 300(!!) battles on this difficulty to unlock the better randomly generated inventory in the shops; being underleveled fighting inflated leveled enemies and proceeding. It's not fun no matter what NG cycle you're on

Not really the case though. You can't circlestrafe+backstab everything and once you make it to the first enemy it doesn't work on (Gargoyles I think? Maybe Taurus?) you adapt your playstyle or quit. And once you make it to that point you will see that more flexible playstyles are more effective and also more fun.

>AI rolls for 15% success
>wins several times in a row
Come on now, at least show the real modified numbers.

It is the case though.

You're probably just a skilled player and take advantage of the "enemies not on screen attack less frequently" mechanic.

I lked the way Furi did Higher difficulty. The bosses have the same HP but have different movesets make the game fun to play again as it is a fresh experience. Dark Souls (for me) is fun for one playthrough. NG+ doesn't really give me anything new

>getting bored of skyrim so decide to do some kind of "autist" immersion build where I just be a highly focused blacksmithing warrior
>select Master or whatever difficulty is the highest
>mobs basically one shot you and have infinite HP
>you're forced into grinding iron daggers and enchanting your shit to hell and back so you can comfortably kill wolves

I don't know what I expected from Bethesda, they couldn't make a decent combat system even if their lives depended on it.

>I don't understand probabilities

>Playing the shit show that was Zesty at all

DS2 makes the game spawn additional enemies in critical locations, it's pretty fun. A shame It's the "worst" Souls game, they really nailed what NG+ should feel like in that one

this

It really should be pseudo random.

got it as a gift, figured i might give it a shot after i saw a 60fps fix

Enemies actually do swing faster on higher difficulties along with choosing to attack more often.

Their HP is increased in each difficulty

>Raise difficulty in Elder Scrolls
>Enemies gain triple health

>Raise difficulty in Fallout 4
>Enemies gain new abilities and unique equipment

It was gifted to me. I don't judge games unless I play them and some people really really wanted my opinion.

Every RNG in computers is pseudo random.

Fuzzy logic should always be used. Input reading is the lowest shittiest form of difficulty.

>NG+ can just be emulated by nit increasing stats or upgrading weapons

Only people that fall for mindless skinnerboxes fall for NG+. It's just bigger numbers.

It's an insignificant increase considering how much damage you can do on higher difficulites

>Enemies gain new abilities and unique equipment
You wish, faggot
Fuck off, Todd

I haven't done a NG cycle since souls since Demon's, there's absolutely no point.

I love new game plus because I love keeping all my shit and not having to fucking find everything again and shit

lets me play through the game in lots of different ways rather that missing everything until the game tells me to get it

>Driving game
>Rubber-Banding AI

truly the worst

fuck whoever thought of that shit and ruined driving games for me

i can't think of a single good racing game without that shit

I bought it on sale and after wasting 25 hours on it I can say easily I never want to play any more of it. the whole game is just a slog.
What were your thoughts on it user?

It's actually a very notable increase

In DMC3SE going from Normal > Hard adds so much HP

>Basic Hells die in a single three hit combo from Rebellion on Normal
>Can actually do shit to them on Hard
First time I played SE it blew my fucking mind how easy Normal mode was

one of the things killing floor 2 did right was completely different enemy behavior on higher difficulties. the enemies were faster and had different attack animations.

In Dark Souls 1 at least circlestrafe works on every single enemy in the game, with the exception (but only somewhat) of enemies in groups, simply because another enemy will hit you while doing it

This is why Gargoyles and then Ornstein and Smaugh are the hardest boss battles first time round

You might want to enlighten me.
I was referring to the system in which the probability of something triggering is increasing with each successive instance of it not triggering until it triggers and the probability resets.
It's used to more 'fairly' represent probability so you can't get string of 20 unsuccessful triggers while the probability is for instance 50%.

wasn't there a mod for ds2 that made the enemies more aggressive and they would aggro from half way across the area?

Probably the only game which handled this well

>fight real people
>get owned faggot

Speeding up movement and giving them the ability to basically cheat the system seems fine. Like dodging/backing up mid attack, going halfway through an animation but back out and do another quickly like a feint

>I was referring to the system in which the probability of something triggering is increasing with each successive instance of it not triggering until it triggers and the probability resets
You should google the definition of pseudorandomness before spouting bullshit then

>PC RELEASE NEVER EVER EVER

You mean with?

Also I think Burnout 3 had rubber banding, but it also meant you could just fucking wreck them even more often.

No, I mean WITHOUT.

I wanna play a new racing game without it, but I can't think of any.

Metal slug 3 on the xbox. Change it to very hard and the enemies move faster, attack faster, and take more damage.

Adding hp is a sensible addition if it actually presents a more tangible difficulty than tedium. KH2FM does this by increasing damage and hp of enemies, I'm unsure about increasing enemies, but it does make a normal encounter hard by having every enemy do a huge amount of damage per hit, and early game Critical Mode KH2FM is hard as shit without the tools you gain along the way. Enemies hit for 40-60% of your health, low amounts of healing, slow recharge on mana etc. Some enemies even one-shot if you don't take your time to farm up a bit of defense.

The image of KH2 being a buttonmasher is true until Critical Mode, until you hit end-game where that suddenly becomes true again, to an extent. The bosses are still assholes, and the optional ones even more so. How people manage Lvl1 Critical Mode is beyond me.

World of Warcraft does it pretty decently when it comes to the raid difficulties.

LFR is absolutely braindead, but rewards shit loot.
Normal is fairly braindead, but rewards ok loot.
Heroic requires some coordination, but rewards good loot.
Mythic requires a lot of coordination, assignments, high dps and healing requirements and changes core tactics from the other difficulties, but rewards the best loot.

From the easy difficulties to Mythic difficulty there are number increases, but the entire flow of the fights often changes as well.

I'm not going to elaborate too much having done that already in it's own thread, but I'll give you the short of it;
All the systems in the game work against it. Difficulty, the requirements to hit weakspots to combo (yet providing you with only a linear way to hit those), enemies that require massive amounts of customization to get past the *weak to element* but *magic/physical resistant* bullshit, and of course the shop system. Which when tied to the customization is so bad that it takes literal hours of your time to get up one character alone to deal with the games systems.

The bait and switch with Alisha is also the most heinous shit I've ever witnessed in a game. They replace a character with some sort of dimensions with a literal "can do everything including murder" fucker. The range of visual emotion that every character can display is non existent because that engine is ass, so you're better off giving everybody in the game shades and forgetting that there are faces under there.

And despite the strong script the dub is filled with living memes trying to voice it out in a way that I would still find endearing if I wasn't busy hating the game every step of the way. Not to mention every step "after the end" as well, with perhaps the laziest bonus dungeon I've ever experienced. A literal hallway with a boss at the end, repeated, and then a "super boss". Which like every boss in the second half of the game has super armor and can break out of being stunned from his vulnerabilities before you can even get a combo started, stretching out the fight long as fuck but not providing a challenge, even on the hardest difficulty.

And take in mind user, this is the short version of why this game is shit. The only solace you can take from this game is that due to Baba's... "promotion" there will never be another one like this.

>cheat the system
I hate 9 ball

Same with Ninja Gaiden

FromSoft should take on that principle if they ever do another Soulslike, give the enemies new movesets for the post-game. Bloodborne did something close with insight changing enemy attacks but it only affected like 3 of them.

>How people manage Lvl1 Critical Mode is beyond me.
You can just use accessories and stat boosters that make it so that your health is irrelevant for the most part.

You still can get one shot or combo'd to death without once more and second chance, but that's not a big deal.

create-games.com/article.asp?id=1957

I'm sorry I triggered you with incorrect terminology.

>literally all turn based RPGS
>difficulty is based entierly on how much grinding you have done

fuck turn based games

it's ALL FUCKING GRINDING

DISGAEA, FINAL FANTASY, ARE YOU A HIGH LEVEL, YOU WIN! NO? FUCK YOU!

skill doesn't matter at all

Because it doesn't change the way you play the game in a significant way. All that really happens is that you do the same routine you dod before an extra 10 times to take out the extra HP.
Good difficukty increases will at least add more enemies or switch up the enemy placements and abilities to make you use more tools in order to win.

This would be the case in games where a set routine for a boss works every time, all the time. Other games don't do it like that. For instance, some games with a regular encounter of a bunch of enemies can become stupidly hard, because no longer can you deal with one or two of them fast enough until an onslaught of bullshit from the other enemies heads your way. And now you're stuck with an encounter that is usually easily disarmed before it even starts, but is now actually a threat. Souls games NG+ does this in a way, though not until later parts where your gear isn't completely overpowered.

I agree, turn based games are shit.

Because it just makes it longer, not more difficult. To beat higher damage and HP enemies you'll have to just grind in most cases.

>FINAL FANTASY
Depends on which one
I've done the low level challenge in a few of them without too too much problem. Turns out that the games weren't balanced too well to withstand any kind of strategy.

Probably one of the worst examples, yeah.

I think their logic is that if your character grows in power so exponentially then you should raise the difficulty so you will no longer feel that growth.

Hooray.

Blacksmithing, enchanting + dual wield and Elemental Fury shout makes even Legendary a pisswalk. Full resistance enchants, One Hand damage enchants, Elemental Fury makes you attack 5 times a second on dual-wield power attack, and suddenly you've killed a legendary dragon on legendary difficulty in 4 seconds.

Skyrim's balance is completely fucked.

That's not what pseudo random is, retard. You just see a pretty word on the internet and start spewing crap on the internet like you know shit.

Project Cars

That's the case in many, but not all.

Demon Gaze rewarded skill-based play and strategy, teambuild and preparation.

yeah try a low level final fantasy 7 run, there's a few bosses you need to pull out all the exploits just to have a chance of beating.

>you need to keep doing well for longer
this imo.

i'm ok with enemies dealing double damage, but double hp is artificial longevity

What? Pseudo random literally means it appears random but in reality it isn't.
When applied to distribution of attack modifiers between attacks in this context it makes perfect sense.
Also it's term originating from Warcraft III, so it's probably older than you anyway.

>Also it's term originating from Warcraft III

Sometimes you can beat RPGs at really low levels by exploiting status effects and other mechanics.

Of course, those are battles against RNG using strategy, rather than player skill being an important role, so I see how players such as yourself would like down on them.

>What? Pseudo random literally means it appears random but in reality it isn't.
Correct.
>Also it's term originating from Warcraft III, so it's probably older than you anyway.
Incorrect.

Most things we call random are actually pseudorandom. Like dice for example.

>And don't say "make the enemies more aggressive" because that's literally just "enemies attack faster", which is on the same level as "enemies have more HP and power"

You are wrong. Let's take the darkwraith in your pic.

He'll swing a few times or try a dark hand and all you need to do is dodge it and punish, rinse and repeat. Him having more health doesn't change that formula, just extends it. Him doing more damage means you have less room for error, but you've already fought him, you already know what he can do and how to counter it, the chances of fucking it all up are low.

If he were to attack faster, or bait and punish, or link attacks into other attacks, or dodge effectively it would provide a fresher and harder experience which is the point of NG+. Inflating health and damage doesn't change the experience enough.

Actually AI was designed intentionally so that you can exploit it. Otherwise it would be unbeatable. When's the last time you've played an RPG where the enemy attacks your weak healers and nobody else?

Besides Star Ocean V's boss fights I guess

>Also it's term originating from Warcraft III
Jesus Christ

Persona 3 Portable's hardest difficulty not only makes the enemies prioritize healers, it also makes them exploit weaknesses and hit more often.

It's quite bullshit and unfun.

Christ that does sound quite unfun.