When did "normal" difficulty become the new easy, and "hard" became the new normal in games?

When did "normal" difficulty become the new easy, and "hard" became the new normal in games?

2007

I always play on hardest difficulty, feels more immersive.
Except on Bethesda games where I have to adjust player damage with mods

Who knows or cares. As long as the game doesn't auto lock you into a difficulty from the start, or the locked in difficulty isn't shit then it literally has no bearing on the game at all, go find something else to be mad at pleb

Bethesda games on "hard" just becomes hitting the attack button for 3 minutes straight on a single enemy. It's one of the worst difficulties in any game ever made

...

Soon.

when you got better at video games

>Playing Wolfenstein II on I am Death Incarnate
>Things are going well as enemies aren't sponges outside of bosses
>The game then decides to throw me into a rape room with no cover
>mfw

GTA 5 already did this why are people acting like its new?

>Normal is too easy
>Hard is ballbreakingly hard in the lazy way (damage values modified)

Making enemies damage sponges or your guns shoot nerf darts IS artifical difficulty. It's fucking lazy and doesn't add anything new to the game.

Higher difficulty should mean better AI, different groupings of enemies, potentially limited resources, etc. Something that isn't just "hit more, get hit less"/

Like a decade ago. We're at the point now where companies can't even put the word "easy" in their difficulty settings because it makes people feel bad, so now it goes something like "casual - normal - hard"

Kinda depends because with GTA IV, you could skip the objective you kept dying on and move to the next.

how does easy feel worse than casual?

No, it's "Tell me a story" mode
And to top it all off, the game has a shit story

>with GTA IV

no, you could not skip segments in gta 4

>it's the games fault I suck!!!!!

>Normal is too easy
>Hard is ballbreakingly hard in the lazy way (enemies have laser aimbot AI)

>makes enemies tougher and gives player less health
>becomes more challenging and demands a higher level of adaptiveness to get past
>pleb inevitably dies to this
>wtf, this isnt my fault, its the game being cheap!!!

I dunno, people just don't like it. Like it implies the game was dumbed down because they don't have the skill to play it normally. "Casual" isn't a bad word to people outside of Sup Forums, it's only used as an insult here.

I don't know how you got that from I wrote, but I guess I'm not retarded so I can't follow your thought process.

DOOM (1993)

This

difficulty settings:
>heh
>nothin personnel, kid
>*teleports behind you*

which do you choose?

>Enemy has the same exact attack pattern as normal
>Takes 5 hits to kill instead of 3
>Only takes 2 hits to kill you now instead of 4

WOW SO CHALLENGING AND FUN.

Last gen with Nintendo/Wii
See also
They renamed the difficulty in the Prime Trilogy. "Normal" was easy in the original and "Veteran" is actually the normal difficulty.

Did hard difficulty become the new normal or are we just too good at video games?

>game becomes crouch-behind-object-for-10-minutes-per-fight-while-your-magic-flech-regenerates-your-health simulator
>game is linear hallways and this is literally the only tactic that could achieve success

Casual is just patronizing. It's the bullshit catchall term for people that want to "play the game for the story" without having to be insulted by picking the difficulty basically meant for children or people who have never played a video game before. Saying this difficulty is easy is basically saying you're dumb and bad while casual is cool they're just enjoying their time

Deus Ex Human Revolution's easy difficulty is something like "Just the Story" and I swear there have been other games that had a "Story" difficulty or something along those lines

No. Go back and play NES or even SNES games on "hard" and see how badly you get your ass kicked. Actual hard games may be in the minority today but they were the standard 20 years ago.

>all games are bethesda games

bit of both, i would say.

>Hard mode just gives enemies more health and some of them can one shot you when they couldn't before.
Nobody does hard right.

nothin personnell

>game doesn't have easy > normal > hard difficulties
>game has Sweet > Mild > Bitter difficulties

Half Life 2 was not hard on hard.

Thoughts on these difficulty choices?

>enemies hit harder
Good
>player dies faster
Good
>enemies can take significantly more hits/ player deals significantly less damage
This shit is fucking tedious and needs to stop.
The optimum would be to make everyone glasscannons, ie the enemies hit like trucks but also die faster than on normal. Kinda like the hardcore mode on some shooters

When you got old.

Why the fuck did I put GTA IV. Meant V

>play Metal Gear Rising on Revengeance mode
>supposedly it's the hardest i was told
>it's not that hard at all. I can die pretty easily but so can everybody else. so its cool.

akumu on TEW was fucking ridiculous desu, but things have gotten so shit it was still a breath of fresh air compared to 99% of AAA games now.

Saged, reported, called the police

>If you can't afford to tip, you can't afford to go out and eat

How about 'if you can't afford to pay your staff an entire wage, don't run a restaurant/cafe"? Fuck paying people for work they should ALREADY BE DOING. I'm a customer not your boss. If they perform poorly why not complain and get them fired rather than just passive-aggressively not tipping?

whats the point of this post

bethesda games are pretty much only fun when you get to the point where you're oneshotting everything. having to fight anyone in skyrim just felt like a fucking chore

user, you're asking an awful lot of the business world of america to pay people for the work they do.

>waiter hands me the receipt while silently pointing to the recommended gratuity line
Ya blew it, buddy. Act like a beggar, get treated like one.

>Work as Banquet Attendant
>Basically means I'm a waiter who ALSO sets the entire event up and breaks it down
>On top of everything, babysitting the food and waiting tables and all other nonsense
>Absolutely no tips because "lol not at a restaurant". Like just no one gets tips in this environment even though we work hard if not harder than most waiters
>Go to most restaurants
>Waiter shows up like twice in the span of an hour
>Not even busy
>Fully expecting tip and get bitchy if you don't

entitled fucks

I hate this shit. Every game is too easy for me on normal but hard ends up being just "double the amount of enemies" or tripling everything's hp.

Every single game.

Normal makes me want to put a bullet in brain from boredom and hard is usually just so fucking retarded mechanically that it's not even challenging, just cheap or lazy.

thanks for posting this for me

>there are people here who don't immediately default to hard mode so they aren't able to compare it to normal

This way you'll never know if they're damage sponges or not. As far as you know it's the base experience

The latter. Most games that Sup Forums played in their childhood weren't hard either. Kids just get stuck on the simplest of challenges.

>Be ausfag that's always lived in Japan
>Used to staff giving top notch customer service and bending over backwards
>Yet they understand personal space and only come when called
>Go to the US
>Staff everywhere are slow, lazy and rude
>Come to your table literally every 3 minutes with "is everything all right? How's your food?"
>Usually never tipped and straight up told them their service was bad
The fucking look on their faces was priceless too. Tipping doesn't work because lazy staff expect high tips for barely doing their job.

>Prepare yourself
>For my mistranslated difficulty

Even if you don't know what normal feels like you'll still dislike hard if the enemies are damage sponges since it's time consuming and not all that fun.

>increasing the difficulty just increases everything's damage including your own

Sounds like the entire Souls series to me

>dislike hard if the enemies are damage sponges
Whatever the game is shit?

How would YOU do difficulty, Sup Forums?
>damage never changes
>the higher the difficulty, the more aggresive and varied the enemies are
OR
>no difficulty options at all, just scale bars for you to determine damage received/dealt, enemy sophistication, and penalties for death

Bastion's Idol system was one of my favorites. You can make it as easy or as hard as you want in increments.

When the highest selling games went from being Japanese to being western.

No difficulty AND no sliders. One consistent gameplay experience. There's no need to waste dev time on that.

I don't play games to lose to artificial difficulty. I play games to have fun.

That's completely irrelevant and you're just trying to start shit.

You can't lose to artificial difficulty if you don't know if its artificial to being with.

As far as you would know, you either lost because you're bad or under leveled.

...

>if you can't afford a tip, you shouldn't eat out!
>but cashiers at shops should be standing 8 hours a day because i'm their fucking king!
fucking americans i swear to god

More casuals. Sup Forums has gotten pretty casual though so they mostly play on normal.

You must admit that even adaptive difficulty would be interesting, right? I mean why can't be a game that pushes you to stay out of your comfort zone? Where you're just as rewarded for stealth or open combat. I want a game where you can be a stealthy player but that makes your enemies more stealthy. Where you can choose to be non lethal but that makes enemies more likely to ambush you.

I would just do it like devil may cry. You take more damage and enemies have more health on higher difficulties. They are also more aggressive have new moves and enemy placement is different.

No matter how much you guys cry about it damage values are a legitimate difficulty tweak, they decide how many mistakes you get and a high difficulty should allow very few mistakes.

>new remixed versions of old enemies that have slightly more stats but way harder attack patterns and AI
>customizable difficulty like in System Shock
>only one difficulty and its hard as balls and makes game journalists cry
any one of these 3 is fine especially if picking a easy difficulty gives you a fake ending or some sort of subtle badge of shame so you can spot out the casual scum in the forums

When consumer interest became more important than product quality. If you're ever in a position of power and someone suggests market testing pay the mob to kill them.

>getting mad at waiters instead of the greedy owners that pay you so little that you need tips to make a decent wage
Pitting you against each other is how they keep you in line, btw

People crying about a video game calling them babies for picking easy will never not be funny

>muh greedy people who own the entire business and give you money to do work for them they should be giving me more money I deserve it

If you don't want to afford going on strike then you don't really need more money.

going on strike for most of US citizens is a good way to starve and get evicted

Meh. This is only the case for the "impossibles" and other such modes. Most games have 3-5 difficulty tiers and those with only 3 tend to be a joke on the hardest. 5+ difficulty tiers have autismimpossible at the top. So usually the best answer is "play 1 above normal" in almost any game.

It's a good idea to not complain about how much you're paid then, especially when you're very easily replaceable. If you don't like it then stop underachieving and work at a mill or septic.

...

I wish this happened to me at some point