The problem with difficulties is that it’s much more difficult to design an AI system which you can tweak and make it smarter or dumber as opposed to just increasing damage and health values, so devs will just implement the best AI they can and leave difficulties as afterthought.
After playing a lot of games that don’t even have difficulty settings, I’ve started to believe in the idea that difficulty selection is just outdated game design and that having a single difficulty but optional areas/content that is more difficult is the way to do it. OSRS is one of my favorite examples - everyone plays the same game and going through levelling or whatever isn’t mechanically demanding. However, there are bosses and challenges (like Theatre of Blood which is an end-game raid or Inferno which is an end-game challenge) that are incredibly challenging and require weeks if not months of attempts to master and finally beat, but also are perfectly skippable and most casual players don’t even bother with them.
I’d like more games to be like FromSoft games. The difficulty is adjusted by what gear you have and what spells you use. None of that turning bosses into bullet sponges nonsense.
Just going to ignore the hundreds of levels most players need to accumulate?
Sekiro was the only one that actually respected players time. Players bitched endlessly it was too hard.
If fromsoft actually gave a shit they’d add in adjustable parry windows and iframes and that works cover 90% of the people who weren’t good enough from sekiro. They won’t because they love to be gatekeepers.
Leveling is a normal thing in any game. You level up in most games.
Also you don’t need to level up in most FromSoft games. The bosses usually have a gimmick or movement patterns that are easy to learn.
Sounds like you just suck at the games. No shame in that but don’t say something is harder than it is.
A lot of people say this and I don’t get it. What would be lost by having each playstyle be balanced properly and then adding difficulty scaling on top of that?
That’s not at all surprising. PvE game design is almost always about making the computer less competent in fun and/or believable ways. If you’ve got a computer that can simulate every item and skill in an enemy team’s arsenal and game out the best combination in milliseconds, the player is going to be dead by Turn 1 or stun-locked and dead by Turn 2.
I’ve been immensely impressed with DOS2 AI. If an enemy is sleeping, another enemy will use part of its turn to hit the enemy to wake it up. There were several instances where I paused and just stared awestruck
AI will also save up abilities with side effects until armor or magic resistance has been depleted. Such as knockdown on a battering ram ability.
but there’s so many other ways to change difficulty.
change number of enemies and where they spawn change gear and abilities, the Witcher did that one with how the stamina system worked. it didn’t drain on the lower difficulties. horizon zero dawn made everything in the shops more expensive and made the enemies drop less money. honestly, that one also sucked. only served to make the game grindier.
point is, there’s other options.
I had fun with Zero Dawn but came out with a list of minor improvements that would make the game significantly better. Forbidden West had almost all the same problems, and added several more besides. The game really started to lose me when I was trying to upgrade a particular piece of equipment and just had to keep doing laps up and down a goddamn mountain with no nearby quick travel location, hoping that an elite version of an enemy would spawn, then laboriously killing it in the hopes that a particular resource would drop, only to get disappointed by the RNG and have to repeat the process, because that was the only place where that resource could be got, and that was the only place where that enemy would spawn.
The grind was appalling, and it took what was a moderately interesting fight the first couple of times and turned it into a monotonous chore.
Also the upgrade barely turned out to be worth the effort.
I finished the game more out of spite than anything else, and I did not purchase the DLC, nor do I have any plans of getting any sequels. Damn shame, because there’s an awful lot about both games to like.
I hate bullet sponges, but I do think this joke gets too reductive for my taste. There are many games where enemies die so fast on easy mode that you don’t get to experience whatever mechanics they have. By increasing health it can have the impact of revealing those mechanics that already existed.
It has to be a reasonable increase that doesn’t turn into a slog though.
The only thing i really dislike is that there is often no middle ground. Easy is super easy, normal is still easy, and hard is annoying. I like games that tell you what difficulty the game is made for. Doom for example, the game is geared towards “nightmare” (i think) and the game really is best played on that harder difficulty.
Going from expert to expert+ in beat saber was jarring. Songs that we getting easy on expert still seemed impossible on expert+.
Until I realized the modifiers on the side weren’t just a cheat board, but a way to smooth the curve. And that no fail was essentially free (doesn’t affect score if you pass, reduces score by 50% if you fail).
So you use difficulty increasers on the expert songs and difficulty reducers on the expert+ and the transition is way smoother. I’ve gotten to the point where some of them are fun again at expert+.
Totally. It’s a hard problem of course. Everyone wants an experience that’s right at their personal edge, but that’s different for every player.
That can be fixed by changing the factors that affect difficulty. Instead of giving the enemies less health or making your attacks stronger, give the player more health or weaken the attacks of enemies on easier modes. This would result in each combat experience being roughly equal in length and intensity, but allowing a more novice player to make mistakes and soak attacks that would be fatal in higher difficulties. You would still be able to experience an enemy’s special mechanics.
This scales well in the other direction as well - say an enemy has a powerful attack that you need to dodge. On easy, you can maybe tank 3 of them from full health, medium is 2, hard is 1, and nightmare is a one-shot kill.
Another scaling option is the speed of enemies either movement speed or the time it takes for them to land hits, attack animation timing, etc.
Castle crashers was my first experience with this. Atleast they added some new boss mechanics though
It’s either this, or they just scale up the damage by some arbitrary factor, that is a quantum leap from what the bad guys were doing originally.
oh? he did 10 damage in vanilla?
lazy, underfunded programer: dmg= base.dmg^2 <<endl;
monster_hp=selected_game_difficulty * base_hp
I mean this can work if you also give the player the option to unlock stronger gear by grinding a bit. But yeah i agree its often done really badly.
I think I will have to disagree somewhat. Difficultly should change how you play, not how long. Needing to Grind better gear is not respecting the players time.
That said there are games I did enjoy the grind, “the world ends with you” is one of them, but that is a case of earning new ways to play in most cases.
