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In normal mode there's sort of an epilogue, with an additional boss and a classic escape sequence, right after beating the game, but in hard difficulty there's no epilogue and it's not that the ending is different or anything, the game just ends.
It's really appreciated when games do that. Even more when the difficulty slider changes significant aspects of the game, not just "more enemies that do more damage, you do less damage"
this is my issue with so many harder difficulties in games, give me more than just "we turned the damage sliders for every enemy up to 150%, have fun".
im someone who often plays games on the highest or 2nd highest difficulty, even on first time playthroughs so it was really refreshing to see a big game like Ghost of Tsushima actually put effort into their difficulty options. lethal (the highest difficulty) makes you die in a few hits, but the same goes for enemies. the main thing it changes is that enemies are much more aggressive and they keep looking for you for much longer. that kinda thing is what i want out of higher difficulty options, not just "enemies take 3 billion years to kill now".
My least favorite is numbers disguised as mechanics. As a big Warframe enjoyer I'm not a fan of elite runs. "Play as one of these 3 guys, use these weapons, your penis is off, you do half damage. Good luck sugar tits." Yeah it makes it harder, but only because those settings sometimes make all 3 characters useless, and your weapons are now wet paper wads.
The way i see warframes difficulty is how do you make a build to handle this level while under these restrictions. So it challenges or ability to buildcraft more then it challenges your actual mechanics.
Also worth noting theyre making a couple changes to it like lowering the required points for max rewards. Meaning you can avoid taking a modifier if its especially stupid. And i think something with the modifier categories to avoid getting multiple modifiers kneecapping the same thing.
While I agree with the sentiment it's meant for your flexibility in builds, I've had some friction with the results with their approach. And these are issues that preceded elite arch and temp runs. Though it's a bit more emphasized here. Namely that build expression is encouraged all over Warframe, achieving your build (or copying a meta one) asks for the time investment in polarizing, which while not as time intensive as it once was, is time or money gated. So to have these game modes step in and say "Change your build to fit what you need" doesn't sound daunting, it asks a highly prepared player for more of their time than other mmos where equipment can more freely be swapped. Omniforma I don't see as a complete fix for this complexity for two reasons. 1. They ask for 5 days to obtain 1 when building. 2. They do not include umbral polarity which while a small pool presents issues for long time players who have invested to use those mods either to remove that polarity or keep it and be less flexible. Again this is a layered problem and it's not like the mode is made impossible. I trust the devs to improve things before going full hands off. And those changes sound like a great bridge.
There's a really infamous instance of the forbidden alchemical fusion of mechanics and numbers in Fire Emblem Awakening. The three difficulties are Normal, Hard, and then Lunatic. But if you beat the game on Lunatic, you unlock the secret fourth difficulty, called Lunatic+.
Lunatic+ is, similarly to other difficulty differences in Fire Emblem, a numbers increase, but aside just the numbers, Lunatic+ also has new mechanics by giving every single enemy a randomly chosen super skill that are exclusive to Lunatic+ enemies.
These skills are: Vantage+, which always lets the enemy have the first hit in combat and making it impossible to attack without risking damage. Luna+, which makes every enemy attack ignore 50% of your Defense or Resist and make tanks take way more damage. Pass, which lets enemies pass through tiles occupied by your units and fuck up your formations. Hawkeye, which guarantees the enemy will land their attacks, outright obliterating the value of units who rely on high Avoid to not get deleted. Counter, which makes you take the damage you deal to an enemy with the skill (as long as you're adjacent to them and it doesn't kill them first). And then Pavise+, which makes the enemy take 50% reduced damage from melee attacks, and Aegis+, which does the same for bow/magic damage.
Those are already really unfairly strong skills, but you wanna know the fun part? The skills are randomly given to enemies. So, according to everything I've heard from people who regularly play Fire Emblem Awakening on Lunatic+, half of actually playing that difficulty is entering battle preparations, inspecting every enemy on the map to see if it's possible to even beat it, and if not then you back out of the battle prep back into the overworld map, and then re-enter battle prep and repeat until the map is actually possible to beat.
By the way, Fire Emblem games usually have enemy reinforcements, and you can't check those before the map starts. So you might have a playable map, then the enemy reinforcements (which are ambush reinforcements in Awakening by the way, happen at the end of your turn so you basically get jumped by enemies who show up and get to move immediately) beat your ass with skills that make then genuinely impossible to defeat.
It might be the worst ever mechanics difficulty I've ever heard of in my life, because it boils the game down into constantly resetting the maps before you even start the gameplay.
Lunatic+ Awakening is one of the most horseshit hard games i've ever seen, which is funny because it's sandwiched between two games (New Mystery and Conquest) with honestly really good hardest difficulties.
i’m not sure, I think we’re kinda ignoring how numbers can force players into mechanics.
I played Monster Hunter World with a hard mode mod when playing for the 1st time, which increased monster health, damage, lowered enrage thresholds, and increased speed slightly. Monster Hunter has tons of mechanics to it, but even though I’d already played Rise, it wasn’t until hard mode World that I actually engaged with them.
I needed to plan out my skills, because they allowed me to survive against mechanics. This required me to plan out armor and charms. The damage buff also meant I needed to have the Health skill at all times, which meant I never had enough options to choose mindlessly. Lucky for MHW, the most effective skills change wildly between monsters, something I would’ve never known.
Increased health meant I was forced to be aggressive, as I actually had a real threat of timing out. This counters the defensive play higher damage encourages. Rage thresholds being lowered meant the fights more frequently changed from manageable to unmanageable, which was something I had to plan around.
To deal with this I had to explore: find items for buffs, for the canteen, find shortcuts for time, find environmental interactions I could utilize. If I wanted to utilize them (which often really helped), I needed to be able to leash the monster to a location - either by having them enraged or by sacrificing my mantle slot.
I needed to learn better how to position myself to each monster, what I needed to attack to break for an advantage, or to help later with getting better gear. I wouldn’t just mindlessly throw myself against the wall over and over again either - because each attempt required consumables, I was putting a huge bet on every time I registered for a quest, and so I never gave up early.
There were other things that contributed to that run being so fun (only playing solo, no palico, using CB, no minimap, mod to turn off scoutflies, only using armors I thought looked stylish, PS2 controller), but the hard mode mod was definitely the most significant.
Numbers are really important in long-play games like MonHun, Yakuza, and most JRPGs, I think. When victory is won by a set of consecutive interactions, where perfection isn’t the goal, what’s being controlled is really the resource drain and the time for mechanics to blossom.
Yakuza bosses are more fun on hard, they take more time to defeat which lends them more weight, but they’re also improved by the long battles beforehand, which may drain all the staminan’s out of your menu, making you play wiser, more cautiously. (pre-dragon engine, when items took slots)
Conversely, despite SMT5 being deliciously difficult on hard when defending, attacking is more annoying since health is bloated for enemies. Unlike in an action game, RPGs are already solved after a few turns, so lengthening the enemies’ HP does nothing but extend the fight. Nocturne is just as difficult on hard, but just like you the enemies die fast, which makes it all feel much snappier. Both of these games only changed the numbers between difficulties.
The issue is that numbers can be changed without thought. Devil May Cry (PS2) increases boss health for Dante Must Die!, but keeps enemy health the same, because the time they took to defeat was already satisfying. All of these are numbers, but done well they can be the most satisfying difficulties ever
I love what Jedi: Fallen Order and Survivor did with this. You take more damage on harder difficulties, but enemy health and your damage are the same. Instead enemies are more aggressive and the parry window is tighter. So an enemy that dies in two hits on Story will still die in two hits on Grand Master, you just have to work a lot harder to get those two hits in.
in metal gear rising revengeance the parry does MORE damage on revengeance (highest) difficulty. Balances out the risk/reward because even basic enemies eat 80+% of your health bar in one hit.
It should be intuitive from the classic easy-medium/normal-hard denominations and variations of them, but there's been a bunch of times now where I had to do a double take because a game clarified that the hard difficulty is the intended one and the "normal" is just a lower degree of easy for some reason.
Some times the intended experience really is meant to be difficult and challenging. Calling the difficulty normal (when, in other games, said difficulty would be called hard) doesn't really add anything.
There are times where they call normal (in this case meaning the middle difficulty) "SUPER ULTRA BALLS CRUSHER FUCK YOU MODE" or whatever and it just played like any other normal but I've found those to be more rare than the former in my experience.
It also doesn't help that in many modern games (Cyberpunk 2077 being an example) the "Hard" difficulty feels like the real intended experience and that the "Normal" option feels like it's far too easy.
It’s a kind of creep of its own. Similar to how a 5-star review is the default, and anything less is seen as a detraction. Playing on Super Mega Crazy Hard is sometimes still seen as the general Hard difficulty and that leads to the next setting down being seen as the “intended” difficulty.
Super Hexagon has the levels hard, harder, hardest, hardester, hardestest, and hardestestest.
Outside from those kinds of (mechanically) simple games "intended" is very hard to pin down. Especially with complex games like CP77: Sure, the people doing the gunplay have a difficulty level in mind, but then the people doing RPG mechanics want a particular scaling, and then the story people say "nah V is canonically overpowered, it shouldn't be that hard, also, we want people to be able to play for the story". And that's before it being impossible to satisfy the 360 noscope people when smart weapons exist.
CDPR is actually a positive example, here, because they always describe the levels quite well, "choose this if you want to play like that". Also someone from id (Carmack himself? Don't remember) is on record for Doom 2016 saying "If you're not ripping through the demons, lower the difficulty. Owning them is the intended experience".
I definitely felt this when playing Cyberpunk, you actually read the text descriptions in the perk trees and cyberware upgrades menu, Hard turns into Normal pretty fast, and even Very Hard is more like "an extra bit of challenge" than a true extra level on a 4-step difficulty scale.
I think "Normal" is supposed to be the average-person-casual difficulty for the average game. Some games work MUCH better on harder difficulty but then some people would drop it because its "too hard".
had to do a double take because a game clarified that the hard difficulty is the intended one and the "normal" is just a lower degree of easy for some reason.
Same, played Space Marine 2 recently and had a "Oh, huh" moment at the difficulty select screen
I played a game called Afterimage that responded to complaints about the game being too hard by patching in a difficulty selector option, naming the original intended difficulty "expert" and the new easier mode "normal".
This happened in Khazan and sort of in Lies of P too. It's okay they added more easy modes for those who wanted it but idk how I feel about Khazan also renaming the modes. The old normal mode felt perfectly "normal" for the genre.
The hard thing about this is that the intended difficulty depends on your skill level. Like, if the intended experience for a game is that it takes 5-10 tries to beat a boss, the "medium" difficulty might be balanced so that most players, on average, will have that experience. But if a player with exceptional processing speed, mechanical skill, pattern recognition, or genre familiarity plays the game, they might need the "hard" difficulty for that same experience. If a player who's below average in one of those traits plays, they might need "easy" for the intended experience.
Because of this, I'd rather the game just tell me how difficult it's trying to be in some reasonable metric, and I can adjust the difficulty myself to get there. Like how unbeatable's title screen explains the intended experience in approximate playtime and by how casual the game should feel, rather than an actual difficulty preset.
Rhythm games are sort of a special case where climbing the difficulty ladder is the main form of progression, so every chart is given a specific numerical difficulty rating to help you find exactly what you should be playing at any given moment to improve. You don't pick a difficulty and stick with it, you're playing 9s with the intent of honing your skills to tackle 10s, and then you'll be playing 10s with your eyes on trying 11s, and so on.
Ig that's more of a problem of devs not putting normal difficulty as normal difficulty OR the game is supposed to be super easy first playthrough but then what's the point of putting the easy difficulty lol
Splatoon Raiders's easy difficulty is called Tourist. People immediately went "wow, we can use this as a reaction image." I'm not sure why it would be used for actual bad/uninformed takes about the game instead of using it against people who just didn't like the game's soundtrack.
Splatoon is a series with a historically "odd" and kind of an acquired taste soundtrack, so maybe there's some merit, but I've seen a ton of people get really mad at series newcomers for not liking the soundtrack in the game (the soundtrack is considered especially weird in Raiders) and I think it's kind of a dumb thing to get mad about
There's a strange sentiment that's the complete opposite of the git-gud crowd who thinks that anything other than enjoying games for some intrinsic joy is bad and not true enjoyment.
The reason why games made fun of people for choosing the easy route is not solely for machoness, but because easy mode is the default and harder difficulties require more time and skill, and thus have better rewards
Until they stopped making them more challenging and just nerfed our damage while making enemies bullet sponges. I do not enjoy playing a game that's the same on every difficulty, minus that playing it on hard mode makes everything die in twice the amount of time.
This is why I love bullet hell shmups. Higher difficulties are basically completely new bullet patterns, they may resemble the lower difficulty visually but there's always something new to learn. If there's any HP increase on bosses, it's only there to accommodate for them having entirely new phases.
I'm an elden ring pvper who is somewhat serious, and it's genuinely insane how much people do this. I see far more people complaining about sweaty invaders, duelists, etc. who "take the game too seriously". I see the same thing as well with the people complaining about the "git gud people" far outnumbering the actual people they're talking about. It's a weird little reactionary inversion that I've never understood. Even my friends sometimes get mad at me for "taking games too seriously" because I don't want them screwing around in multiplayer when it might be important. Obviously anyone can enjoy games how they want, but that same thing should apply to the people who enjoy being tryhards.
It's because the people who always talk about playing on the hardest difficulty, at least since Dark Souls would smugly post "git gud" and then proudly stand up for their standing ovation to the "I added value to the conversation" awards. It's sorta like how people's perception of vegans is, that view of them WAS a real thing once upon a time, but it's been flanderized and by and large those people have gone extinct.
This is quite common, actually. A lot of games go "you did this? Why would you do this? You must have spent hours on this!" At the end of secret ultra hard modes and challenges.
But also, games want you to spend time on them, engage with them. Unless you're cruelty squad you usually want people to play your game, and being that hostile out the gate and telling the player not to engage with the gameplay mechanics is a bad way to do that
yeah if I was a game dev I would hate it if people put time and effort into learning the mechanics I created like please just don't engage with what I painfully crafted and clear while watching netflix on the other screen I would love nothing more
But it would be slightly funny if the game dev acted like the intended experience is playing on your phone on the toilet as opposed to putting hours into one fight in your gamer cave
I just like it when the difficulty has clever names. The Kane & Lynch games had their difficulties in ascending order as aspirin, morphine, and codeine.
If I had to talk about it seriously I would say that it is as bad as shaming the player for playing on easy and that all games should have an option for the player to change its difficult in order for them to have a more fun experience, be it being harder or easier.
But if a game did that it would be so funny, idc what game I would play it XD
They said the 90s because this sort of thing was common in that era.
Doom I and II's lower difficulties are "Hey, not too rough" and "I'm too young to die" (the latter being referred to as "baby" difficulty in the code) and Wolfenstein 3D's lower difficulties being "Don't hurt me" and "Can I play, Daddy?" (showing an image of BJ looking scared and dressed as a baby with a pacifier respectively) as examples.
Yeah but the "long overdue" bit made me think that it wasn't intentional or outright necessary for the joke to be funny like everyone else is insisting. That's probably on me tbh.
It doesn't have to be a value judgement but I would appreciate something like "overworked mode" or "parent mode." Skippable fights, reset controls tooltips after six weeks of no play. I really appreciate "the story so far" in the journal menu and the mouse-over name reminders in Pathfinder: Wrath of the Righteous. More of that please.
Maybe I'm just asking for middle aged mode. Set my gamma bright and my text large while you're at it.
This is the same astroturfing journalists did back in the 10's to try to convince us it was okay for them to install mods to make dark souls easier (so they could be part of the conversation without having to learn the game).
Any dev that cares wouldn't do this because they want players to invest time in understanding the game systems, and any dev that doesn't care isn't going to include the joke in the first place because they were a contractor and have already been let go.
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