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Easy Mode Is Actually for Adults
(www.theatlantic.com)
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this post was submitted on 11 Jan 2024
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I absolutely agree. Give the player the option between "story mode," "normal" (intended experience), and "hard", perhaps with an additional mode or two as well. I have never been mad at having too many difficulty settings.
I personally almost always play on the default difficulty since that's probably what got the most testing, and play on a harder difficulty if I really like the game and want a challenge.
The issue is that mechanics for scaling difficulty need to designed into the game from the start, not tacked on at the end of a feature backlog. Making an easy game harder by upping enemy health and damage or nerfing RNGs is lame and often unbalanced. It should be the opposite - the game balance should be designed around the hard mode and than pared back for the easy mode.
The thing that really drives me nuts more than anything is nerfing complex control schemes to target console controls. The best example of this is Witcher 2 having an amazing and complex combat system which lent itself to a huge variety of play styles, enabled by complex controls with a high skill floor. And then Witcher 3 turned it into "spam dodge and counter" because all the richness of the control scheme was dumbed down to target consoles.
Exactly.
For example, shortening delays in boss movements is a fantastic way to distinguish "easy" from "hard." That doesn't feel as cheap as increasing health and damage output, but as you said, it needs to be considered from the start.
"story", "intended balance", "hard", "no reloading hard", "custom because you like hard except for that one bit of bullshit"
To me that's the perfect balance of settings.
Oh, I absolutely love how Mount and Blade: Warband does it, though the "AI smart" setting doesn't work properly.
A recent one I saw had pretty good options for this - Pathfinder: wrath of the righteous. Had so many different knobs to tweak to get the difficulty just right.
And don't make "hard" excessively hard. Nothing kills my interest in a game faster than having to turn the difficulty down partway through because the stupid giant turtle mechs are nigh impossible without spending 20 hours farming parts to upgrade your weapons, and then having to turn the difficulty down even more because the FUCKING BULWARK MELEE PIT IS LEGITIMATELY IMPOSSIBLE ON HARD MODE. I've never understood why people thrown their controllers at their TV until I tried that shit for two hours straight. The developers of Horizon Forbidden West could come to my house and tell me that they playtested it on hard mode and I wouldn't believe them. The hunting grounds stealth challenges are quite literally mathematically impossible in hard mode unless you have end-game gear.