Let me arbitrarily change the difficulty whenever I want. I hate games that don’t let you do this. The worst offender was Resident Evil Village. It let me lower it but wouldn’t let me increase it back without starting over.
Depends on when I hit that difficulty spike and how changing the difficulty works. If I can change the difficulty at any time and not lose progress, I’ll do it and not think twice.
I was playing the evil within 1. I was at the end of the game right before the final boss. The game up to that point was balanced on hard. It gave a good survival horror experience. Every boss fight or mini boss felt reasonable.
At the end of the game, they suddenly throw you into an arena with a ton of enemy waves that wouldn’t drop enough ammo to deal with them all. Looking it up online, the recomendation was to save ammo the whole game specifically for this fight. But nowhere prior did i feel like that was needed
Suddenly, the game went from being fun to frustrating. I didn’t wana have to replay the level so at that point I hung up the towel and moved on.
Great game otherwise! Might replay it on normal one day lol
I’ve played and finished a lot of really brutal games on brutal difficulties.
If you think, in the situation where a game is simply too hard for you to progress, that dropping the difficulty so that you can experience the game you paid money for is giving up your “dignity”, you have a really fucking toxic relationship with your ego/self image/self worth, and with all the care and compassion in my heart you need to take some time to look inward. I do not say that as a judgemental statement. I say it because you will be happier and more satisfied if you can unlearn that.
Allow yourself the compassion to not reach your goals. Pursue your goals with fervour and drive and passion, of course - but be compassionate enough to yourself to let them go when they do not serve you.
It’s hilarious to me when people whine to devs that changing the difficulty is bad, because what, do we really want to view beating a single player game as competitive? It’s single player. Who cares.
I would if I could, but Dying Light didn’t have that option. It also didn’t have the option to let me quit a mission after I got softlocked behind a room full of bullet sponge enemies, having run out of every resource because those stay gone for good even when you die and reload.
So yeah, I quit that game.
The difficulty of a game I’ve found to be separate from whether it’s fun or not. I’ll play a game till it’s end if it’s fun, even if it takes me a long long time. If it’s just difficult, but a bore, dropped.
I just want more granular difficulty/accessibility settings. Give me more sliders to tweak my experience. I know it might be greedy and asking for a lot but Easy/Normal/Hard or whatever is just so clumsy.
Imagine we had sliders to tweak dodge i-frames and parry window lengths? I might actually dare pickup Sekiro if that was the case.
To your point, the easy-hard concept is so vague. What does that mean? Less enemies? The same amount but they have less hit points? I take less damage? Longer time before enemies react? It can be literally anything.
Let us control the settings like you said, and then have some presets for easy configurations and starting points.
I think a special shout out needs to be made to the sniper elite series, which let you reduce the difficulty of the enemies but keep the difficulty of the sniping mechanics.
Just give me explicit visual cues on when I’m supposed to party and I’ll be happy. I hate when devs assume I understand what “just about to hit” means.
Yess! Bloodborne parry windows for everything ᕕ(ᐛ)ᕗ
i would kill for parry window length settings!
I set every game to the bare minimum floor difficultly. If I find success at that difficulty for a full playthrough, I’ll up the difficultly on my second playthrough, if the game merits one.
My life is hard. I have very little free time. My games should be fun.
Edit: Also I proved my gaming prowess back when easy games had not been invented yet.
Edit: Also I proved my gaming prowess back when easy games had not been invented yet.
This is so true lmao. Every time I play old NES games I’m dumbfounded. It’s like half because they’re hard and half because the design is wonky. So much has changed since then.
I guess part of it is because arcade games were meant to drain your quarters and older games sort of followed that style to an extent.
Excellent. We should play games on our own terms. I’ve hit skill barriers in many games, set them aside ‘for a short while’ and never returned to them. I bet I’ve missed so many great moments due to this so now my policy is to lower the difficulty if I’m getting too frustrated.
Also, difficulty levels can be quite arbitrary especially in games that have a particular play mechanic and then introduce something complete different for one level. (My pet hate is token platforming inserted into shooters.)
I remember one game (Indigo Prophecy I think) had a tiny segment that required subtle joystick control to get the player across a narrow beam. Nothing else in the game was like this. I couldn’t do it, countless fails. I asked my young nephew to have a go and he got it on the first try.
I feel the same way. I’ve won my golden joystick. I don’t need to “prove myself”.
I’d definitely lower the difficulty first.
A game that comes to mind for me is Frostpunk. It has easy, medium, hard, and extreme. Naturally I selected normal at first.
Normal difficulty Frostpunk is not for beginners. I learned that very quickly. That game was basically the dark souls of city builders. It was a super fun game though, and probably near the top of my list of best games I’ve played.
They changed the difficulty names in FP2 to citizen, officer, steward, and captain. I believe the default is citizen there. I guess even they realized there is nothing easy about that game. FP2, while a drastically different game, was also hard.
In my experience, the really difficult part of frost punk is initially just understanding the shape of the situation the player is in.
Like, like most will fail on normal because they just don’t know what options are available to them and what pressures they’ll be put under over time.
After one successful play through I found the game a lot easier just because I knew what I was up against and what resources I had at my disposal to deal with it.
Yeah. Like… Uh. Major spoiler. Don’t open if you haven’t finished.
Frost Punk 1 spoiler
The sheer length of the end game freeze was crazy. Of course, if you knew just how long and how intense it would be then it wouldn’t really be fun to encounter. The fun of that is the surprise of how long and intense it is, even with the game telling you that you need tons of food it’s still crazy.
But even apart from that, there are times when you make decisions based on limited information only to realize there is something that gives you more options soon after, and if you’d pursued that other thing you wouldn’t have needed the first thing. These was a bit of that in FP1 and FP2. I liked 1, didn’t finish 2 but I still liked it. My main complaints about 2 were the UI being wonky and a few mechanics not being very clear.
I appreciate the devs of FP1 making it so buildings didn’t need to be smushed. There used to be this way you could trick the game into shoving more buildings in than it typically allowed, but they just made that happen by default. Changes like this deserve praise. Pointless micromanagement should always be eliminated.
this was my experience as well. took me like 6 tries to do the first mission on normal. then all the others i did first try (although not exactly optimal).
a few months later i did the first mission on hard - first try.
its almost a bit dissappointing, because FP is a lot of fun, but once you “get it”, it kinda feels like a lot of the challenge you feel early on is gone.
I’m usually a normal-difficulty gamer and usually don’t turn down the difficulty from there. However, as the article says, If I started on a higher difficulty, I’m more open to go back down to the default.
I would change the difficulty and then regret it later, which I did with Furi and Jedi fallen order.
Furi’s combat is so good, and the easy mode is well designed too (still challenging, enemies just have less complex movesets and possibly fewer phases), but I wish I had taken a break and fought through the game properly. Now that I’ve finished the game on easy and seen the ending, I don’t think I ever will revisit it.
Eh, not really. If it’s not fun, I’ll lower the difficulty or refund if this is not an option, I don’t care.
I play all of my favorite games on the hardest difficulty because the challenges they throw my way are a big part of why I find them fun—why would I bother with higher difficulties if I’m not having fun?
Conversely, why should you bother with lower difficulties at all if you’re not having fun to begin with?
I like to set the difficulty high enough to where I don’t feel the game is too easy, but low enough so that I’m not getting frustrated and feeling like the challenge is bullshit.
I think that comes down to the genre and game. I’ve definitely played games where I was enjoying the story and wanted to see its conclusion, but couldn’t be bothered with a boss rush in the middle of the game. In a similar vein, games with sudden difficulty spikes in the mid- to endgame portion might benefit from it.
At the end of the day, I’m a working adult, trying to fit in having some fun with all the other crap I need to do. I don’t have time for games that need me to treat them as a second job to get good enough to make any progress in them, but games with random difficulty spikes or boss rushes that just serve to pad out play time by making you grind for levels or the ideal equipment or skills/summons out of nowhere feel like an annoying bait and switch to me.
Right, I can see that. I tend to have less patience for (what I consider) annoying gameplay despite good stories, therefore I wouldn’t try lower difficulties if it’s a hassle to me.
I tend to move on / abandon games quicker than I would have done when I was younger, and I know what genres I tend to favour.
Artificially padded games are usually a pass for me too.I don’t play too much in the way of action RPGs, but it’s definitely an annoying thing that tends to pop up in JRPGs, though less so nowadays. Still, I do appreciate being able to dial the difficulty down as an option if I’m enjoying a game, get 30 hours in, and run into one of those two issues. If it’s not an option, I’d just drop the game, but it gets annoying when you’ve sank in a month or so of free time, only for a game to pull that on you.
Hmm… I think of difficulty, or lack thereof, as integral part of the fun. I think they’re inseparable, essentially.
I don’t really enjoy the process of learning and getting better at 3rd person shooters, for example, so I don’t typically enjoy playing those on higher difficulties. If I pick one up, I know I’ll most likely have more fun playing on lower difficulties because it eliminates a process I don’t really enjoy. In other words, shooting shit is still fun, but I need the difficulty toned all the way down to enjoy it.
Conversely, I love learning the intricacies of combo systems of action games and figuring out how to exploit enemies and whatnot, so I have to play those on the highest difficulty to get the full experience and have the most fun.
Interesting, thanks! That’s not quite how I approach fun, or difficulty, in a game.
I’m happy playing on higher difficulties so long as the gameplay loop is interesting (to me), and that’s how I go about shmups for instance, gradually increasing difficulty as I start to “master” the game (as if), however if the “default” gameplay isn’t fun to me, lowering the difficulty is not going to help.
Yeah, I play shmups the same—still stuck on arrange in Crimzon Clover, haha. Gotta put more time into practicing the TLB.
What are your favorite shmups on Steam?
GL! I certainly have to give Crimzon Clover a fair try, I liked the few runs I did so far.
Favourite would be DoDonPachi Resurrection / DFK, but I have to practice more for the 2nd loop / TLB as well haha.
Some developers are kinda bad with balancing though, there are definitely instances where I lowered the difficulty and just went through the game.
It’s not a pride thing, it’s just that I’m so used to not thinking about difficulty modes that they don’t occur to me as a solution in the moment. I straight up forget that the game is more than the version of it I’m currently experiencing.
@theangriestbird
In addition to ego (which I’m sure plays a role) I think I would find myself reticent to lower the difficultly to “Easy” for a couple reasons- The default difficultly, which is typically “normal” is often the intended experience, and if I can play like that, I see value in it.
- Related to (1), difficulty settings are often poorly thought-out; it’s quite common for hard mode to simply make enemies bullet sponges or for easy to turn them into cardboard cutouts, which is a disappointing experience.
Games can’t be easy enough for me. I like playing with dolls essentially. pew pew. that being said I firmly believe elden ring leaves a lot of cheese to give folks an easy mode without having to put in an easy setting. Sorta a cake and eat it to or official deniability.
There are a few games/genres like this for me. Like the Anno games, whenever I play one, I just turn it down to the lowest difficulty, and just build and expand. I kinda treat it like an idle/incremental game. That’s also why I normally don’t play any of the survival city builders, like Banished or stuff like that, it’s just not what I’m looking for.
Banished is so nostalgic but replaying it is so bad lol. I love colony management games. Probably my favorite genre. Rimworld is my favorite at the moment.
