How do you make a hard difficulty mode that is also fun?

How do you make a hard difficulty mode that is also fun?

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Enemies hit harder, they're more offensive and revamped waves.

1.2x modifier to enemy damage and status conditions
0.8x modifier to your damage and status condition
enemies break out new attacks that you don't see in standard difficulty
enemies also move 2 squares to your 1 and aggressively chase you down :^)

Enemies have more HP
You do less damage

Add complexity to the battle system and increase the power of enemies
That way the amount of skill required increases, while the difficulty of enemies increases as well so your previous skill isn't enough to succeed
Simply giving enemies more power is shit and should be avoided at all costs

The fun comes from the challenge, if you don't think it's fun then you shouldn't be playing on hard. Ya filthy causal plebian

Aggressive AI. Enemies die easily. So do you.

So MGR.

You do and take more damage, every enemy potentially dies as quickly as you can. The AI will be the best the game can offer and there will be semi-scripted strategies and new spawn points where they can flank rush you from different angles unlike the previous modes and if you get shot up/caught in a combo at all you're dead.

You dont, thats wasting valuable marketing money.

Don't give enemies more health, just make them deal more damage

Asking how to make a hard mode fun is like asking how to make an easy mode fun. It's not for you.

>enemies die easily

So the games easier. You don't seem to have a solid grasp of what "hard" is.

>increase player and enemy damage
>add new enemies or enemy variations
>add new attacks and attack patterns for enemies
>improve the AI so they act tactical and do stuff like flank you
>add new items/abilities/weapons

more like, how do you make an easy difficulty mode that is fun?
When a game is too easy your actions literally don't matter (you're going to win anyway), so why even bother playing? Go watch a movie instead

>how do you make an easy difficulty mode that is fun?
thats gay

stop making me want to play warcraft 3 again

>more like, how do you make an easy difficulty mode that is fun?
Making the game mocking the player playing it on easy.

There is no way. Difficulties are retarded. Play the game it's meant to be played.

>why even bother playing? Go watch a movie instead
Easy mode is for people who don't agree with this sentiment

Hard Mode should give enemies new spells and abilities instead of just beefing up their stats. Higher stats just means more grinding, but if an enemy is able to do moves that they previously couldn't, then that forces the player to make new strategies instead of brute forcing your way through.

Give enemies new attack patterns and make them more unpredictable.
Make them slightly faster, depending on the game.
Increase damage calculations on literally everything.
Less health/ammo/wwhatever pickups.

Whatever you do just don't do this retarded crap

>easy mode
still too hard

Just do what Morrowind does and have a fucking slider that turns mudcrabs into the most nimble things in the universe

The Thief games did this well.
Give the player less health, forcing them to focus more on stealth. Give the player more/stricter objectives, forcing them to explore more.
Thief is tougher on harder difficulties, but it's more about making the player really understand and use the game mechanics, than it is about RNG or buffing enemies.

Higher damage higher health more aggressive new spawn patterns new moves. There you go. Regardless of what you idiots think scaling up the numbers is perfectly legitimate difficulty.

Haven't played the original Thief yet, does the game really gives you more objectives the higher the difficulty?

>higher difficulty just turns enemies into damage sponges with more HP

Difficulty modes are stupid in the first place. I just design the game i want.

>more aggressive new spawn patterns new moves
yes
>Higher damage higher health
no, then people will just turtle and cheese.

>being this much of a brainlet

didnt you read the "so do you" part?

Take Metro 2033 for example. Virtually any enemy can be killed in a couple shots but so can you.

Depends on the game. Their damage determines how many mistakes you get, getting less mistakes makes the game harder. Their health determines how long you have to play well for, too low of health and you can luck your way through fights.

>no, then people will just turtle and cheese.
That's if you're a fucking pussy. Are you a pussy, user?

>those master and legendary modifiers
Holy shit, this is fucking stupid.

>Bethesda
Why I'm not surprised?

More enemies with larger movesets, any stat buffs should be small. Ideally the player is encouraged/enabled to use a larger move set of their own, adding depth and variety to combat.

>Give the player more/stricter objectives
I think this is the best way to make hard more fun. Rather than replaying the game but with harder enemies I find that giving new, harder objectives gives you a new incentive to replay the game if you played on normal or easy first. It also gives incentive to play on the easier modes first to get a feel for the game.

Timesplitters 2 is one of my favorite games that does this. Areas that you never had to venture in before are important, the levels are longer, new areas open up for exploration, and new, tough and cool objectives have to be completed.

>single player game
>difficulty

by actually making it hard instead of just giving enemies more health

I enjoyed Bioshock and Bioshock 2 way more with no vitachambers, no compass/objective arrow, and harder difficulty.

God Tier:

- The AI is smarter, everything else is the same so the player needs to further advance from the tactics he learned in easier difficulties.

Great Tier:

- Hard difficulties have different encounters where the enemies have better equipment than in lower difficulty settings or where the player faces more and different enemy types, etc. - ideally these should still make sense within the narrative, i.e. no "bandits in glass armour" like in Oblivion but rather: evil sorcerer now summons three wererats instead of two and additionally a green slime and his henchmen carry swords+1 rather than just swords.

Bad tier:

- Enemies turn into bullet sponges by simply giving them more HP than they had before, making the game more tedious rather than harder.

Shit tier:

- Player has a higher chance to miss, which achieves the same as the HP bullet sponge shit making things more tedious but also annoying and frustrating to look at.

Not that this isn't awful, but I think about this more like a new game plus. You can get so grossly OP in bethesda games that they could give you a .1/10x mode and you'd still be broken. It's just dumb that it's a """difficulty""" you can pick at level 1 that would make the game unplayable.

But if there's no time limit all the player has to do is find the safest way to kill enemies without being damaged. Then the challenge is gone it becomes a waiting game. There has to be a balance. If it's too easy to luck your way through fights then the design is probably shit.

Enemies get more aggressive and have new moves. Bloating HP values should be kept to a minimum basically
Killing Floor 2 does a great job at demonstrating what this looks like ideally

> They hit harder you hit softer
> more mobs than ever
> Change in Ai tactics esp boss fights
> finding later game mobs earlier in the game. (Looking at u OOT masterquest)
> reduce safe spots, save locations and replenishments.
> Reward for finishing the game on hardest mode, Eg new cutscene, Easter eggs or 'novel' items.

>They hit harder you hit softer
shit tier

Depends on the genre. In all genres you should have more complex AI or techniques. You can add more objectives e.g. Goldeneye 64, you can add more enemies in each encounter, you can have harder enemies appear sooner. Enemies can be more aggressive, or less if it helps them (using cover or ambushes). You can reduce or change the resources given to the player. There's much that can be done without even touching health or damage values.

Go beat wizardry 4

Playing safe is part of good play usually. Watch someone play something like god hand or dmc on the highest difficulty. They play really well and interestingly but also make sure they put avoiding damage first.

Yes, that's the playstyle hard difficulties reward in almost all cases. If hard makes you completely helpess with no damage output and the weakest enemies in the game 1shot you I play it safe or look for alternate routes like stealth.

>play uncharted
>put it on highest difficulty
>can't do any cool grappling hook shit cause I'll just die so the game becomes a boring cover shooter

Literally witcher 3 NG+ death march.entire game was literally just fought one fight at a time.

Still have a video on mr beating the final boss and only taking one hit (lost 80% health)

>playing a game with really shitty balancing for difficulties
>mod the game so that both you and enemies have 5x damage multipliers
>enemies die super quickly
>but the HP for the enemies is still larger than your own, so a sneeze can vaporize you
And this is how you don't rebalance a game.

Like this

>making the game more tedious rather than harder
I don't understand why people always make a distinction between something being hard and something being tedious. It's like the required patience and concentration for an extended period of time don't actually make up difficulty when they do. Walking 500 miles IS harder than walking 5 miles, not more tedious, because of these factors.

>The AI is smarter
Have any games ever really done this? I can see them changing the behaviour of the enemies to, say, use cover when they wouldn't in easy difficulties but "smarter AI" specifically isn't something I've seen in a game I can really think of.

Make those 500 miles fun
Wasn't FEAR like that?

>Have any games ever really done this?
It's normally not done but a man can dream.

Some of the Halo games at least, where Elites can potentially become hypercompetent on Legendary. FEAR also made the Replicas both more aggressive and react a lot more viciously on countering and flanking the player. But I don't think most games actually make enemies 'smarter', unfortunately.

I think Witcher 2's thing of having unique weapons and armor that only exist at the hardest difficulty was cool in concept, but really it just incentivized grinding for the craft2win items. If there was more variety in this gear, and it also nerfed certain attributes in addition to greatly benefiting others, I think it would have been better. Something that incentivizes strategy or conceptualizing a build or specific playstyle in order to be successful on the hardest difficulties, rather than just making all your swords into cardboard and roiding up all your enemies would be nice.

Design a game you want to make without catering to retards, finish it. Call it hard mode. Think about how fucking idiots will play it and add in aid, call it easy mode.

Done.

>Yes, that's the playstyle hard difficulties reward in almost all cases
That's the problem with modern gamers right there. Instead of standing their ground and proving their worth, they look for easy conveniences. It's like those fucking people who play Nier Automata who always stay at range spamming their gun instead of going in. They're forcing themselves into playing an unfun way because it's the easiest way instead of challenging themselves.

>Make those 500 miles fun
Fun doesn't factor into difficulty. If you don't have the patience to do something, then it was too difficult for you, whether you enjoyed it or not.

>I don't understand why people always make a distinction between something being hard and something being tedious.
One requires greater mechanical, tactical or strategic skills to beat the other just requires the same skills over a lengthier period of time. One might argue that one needs to be proficient to keep it up for that long, but ultimately the player is doing just the same rather than having to reconsider his approach or learn new things.

>Easy
Fewer enemies, they don't use all of their tricks.
>Normal
Intended number of enemies that make use of their entire suite of abilities, but not until later in the game after you fought simpler versions in the beginning.
>Hard
Intended number of enemies (sometimes more in certain scenarios) that use everything from the get go, with the occasional additional elite enemy with them that uses everything the normal version can do in addition to things that you the player are otherwise uniquely capable of.

Don't fuck with any numbers. That's a brainlet tier "high" difficulty setting.

Or just balance the game around one difficulty instead of trying to pander to everyone.

Not really, Companies tend to not like putting in a ton of work for something a lot of people will never see or notice. Especially something like AI which is hard at the best of times.

Only because something is boring doesn't mean it's hard

By making mechanics that have depth. If your game is played the same by someone who's bad at the game as well as someone who's good, your game probably isn't fun on a harder difficulty

What if mean polygon writes an article about the game not having easy mode to cater to fucking braindead cum suckers?

Different and more enemy placements.

I wouldn't qualify this as smarter 'AI' but G-rank monster hunter adds a few moves to their set, and things like delayed stomps to mess with habitual dodge spam on knockdown.

>Don't fuck with any numbers. That's a brainlet tier "high" difficulty setting.

Not really, it's a pretty huge change in strategy between 1-2 hits killing you and 3-4. The entire dynamic of fighting games gets changed up because of this kind of thing.

You do the same amount of damage compared to the default difficulty
Enemies hit you like a truck
You get more abilities or slots to put abilities in to compensate
AI is more aggressive
You are given less health overall
KH2 critical mode is a fantastic example on how to do higher difficulties right. I hope that KH3 takes it's cues from it instead of the later Critical modes

>It's like those fucking people who play Nier Automata who always stay at range spamming their gun instead of going in.
Did you even play the first game?

I think the original DOOM games did it well. The easiest difficulty doubled ammo, made you take half damage, and put enemies at the lowest count. Each difficulty above that normalized ammo and damage, but increased the enemy count to the point where Ultra Violence in Doom 2 can fill areas to the brim with foes at times. Then Nightmare mode is pretty much a joke difficulty added when people told the developers Ultra VIolence was too easy for pros, where your ammo gets doubled again but enemies respawn indefinitely unless gibbed, and enemies attack almost non-stop while projectiles move a bit faster to boot. Pretty much turns DOOM into a bullet hell - with hitscan foes aplenty.

>One requires greater mechanical, tactical or strategic skills to beat
You're making up a definition of difficulty that doesn't make any sense. Here's an actual definition:
>difficult to do or accomplish; fatiguing; troublesome:

>Only because something is boring doesn't mean it's hard
>It's not actually difficulty, I can absolutely do it, I just don't want to do it!
Excuses, excuses. Instead of admiting something is too difficulty because you can't do it, you'd rather redefine what difficulty is to not look like a loser.

That doesn't change anything about what I said.

This is pretty much the answer I expected, I see a fair amount of games that will give enemies AI more options, but I mostly wanted to point out that "smarter AI" is kind of a generic statement that is kind of hard to actually out into practice in a game.

>Excuses, excuses. Instead of admiting something is too difficulty because you can't do it, you'd rather redefine what difficulty is to not look like a loser.
Oh yes I remember the absolutely enthralling difficulty of Gone Home

Build the game around it.

Devil May Cry's Heaven or Hell mode. Everything, including bosses, dies in a single hit, but so do you. It's a blast.

If it's harder to get hit than to hit in the first place, then no, it's not actually harder, it's easier.

Not nearly as fun as DMD or even Very Hard imo.

>Excuses, excuses. Instead of admiting something is too difficulty because you can't do it, you'd rather redefine what difficulty is to not look like a loser.
youtube.com/watch?v=KjcW4E3mY6w
Not him but I beat this on hard and it's fucking horrific, I never want to do anything like that again. Hard mode is just turning him into a damage sponge on top of being able to block all of your attacks unless you hit him at very specific points. The only difficult part is having the patience to very tediously chip off his massive health bar over 20-30 minutes while he repeats the same phases of hopping between platforms and spawning enemies over and over. This is a perfect example of why just scaling stats up is awful "difficulty".

By trying harder

Lame as hell.

>"smarter AI" is kind of a generic statement that is kind of hard to actually out into practice in a game
It is, but it's not up to us to tell developers 'how' to develop a smarter AI. The idea that there are better and worse players is nothing out of ordinary. In every competitive multiplayer game you can find players of different skill levels. Actually representing this concept in the programming however is far from straightforward and since developers are always under tight schedules it is to be expected that they don't have the time for the kind of research developing a better AI would demand.
The concept itself however is not hard to envision so it is by no means an outlandish demand.

>final boss fight with motherfucking darth vader
>he just calls up a bunch of grunts most of the time
What the fuck is this

Design the game around hard mode, then turn everything down for lower difficulties.

hard mode is supposed to make the player use all the game-play elements to win, so choosing anything less is robbing yourself of value.

shut the fuck up, retard. you have no friends, no one likes you. you're an intolerable moron.

who says its harder to get hit you fag

I think actually putting effort into the small things goes a long way. MGS2 did stuff like adding mines or more guards, or fighting MG Ray more near the end.

To give a few examples over several action and RPG mediums:

>Better AI, but nothing that feels unfair to the player
>More attacks for bosses to give variety
>Stronger versions of enemies earlier
>Hell, add more bosses or boss forms (LISA The Painful did this and it was great).
>Change the loot table or the chest contents to make things easier or harder depending on the difficulty.
>Raise prices in stores.
>Less Ammo pickups or limit ammo.
>Longer maps or more complex areas, or have the same map and have the scripting go through different areas depending on the difficulty.
>Change puzzle difficulty

I hate when games simply add a shitton of new enemies and more health to them and have them do more damage and nothing else.

>This is a perfect example of why just scaling stats up is awful "difficulty".
My point is not that tediousness is not "an awful way to do difficulty". My point is that it's actual difficulty because of factors like patience and concentration. Even if other methods of doing difficulty in videogames are better, that doesn't remove the fact that tediousness tests these factors in ways that can be hard.

Oh no, did I undermine your brittle achievements?

>who says its harder to get hit you fag
Depends on the game. Saying that it's a factor of difficulty that always holds true doesn't make sense because of how the games can work.

But user, this is cheaper to develop. Don't you want more content? :o)

See: Rabi Ribi

Enemies get more attacks, attacks go faster, more bullets per attack, have to do more damage (so you can't JUST dodge, you need to weave constant attacks in as well) and take less hits.

You give all the enemies radically different movesets that actually require you to learn patterns and how to use the main characters move set.

Put new enemies, gear, events, and endings behind it

Unironically

The best hard modes reward the player for the extra effort and skill

hey fag guess what, no one likes you still and you being butthurt that i said so changes nothing. sorry bloke.

As long as taking those risks actually rewards you with greater efficiency, that's fine. If the safe, boring way is also the most effective, then the game is poorly designed.