@@costcoRBLX Its actually a W sponsor, but im not paying for that lol, especially if theyre not even releasing actual certificates that are industry-recognized (if this is misinfo, pls feel free to prove me wrong).
My big problem with the intensity option in Smash Ultimate is that it increased every fight you won, and decreased if you died. This was a problem for me cause it was *impossible* to stay within the perfect sweetspot of difficulty for my skill level. I'd win too much, it would get too hard, I would die, then it would revert to being too easy. I really really wished there was a way to just lock it at the level I wanted.
3DS did it best actually feels satisfying to play. They even had color based difficulty paths: Blue: Easier but less rewards Green: Medium with moderate rewards Red: Harder with more rewards Black: Adds Crazy Hand (and beyond) to the final boss and of course, better rewards. Solo Master Hand is a blue path.
@@FireallyXTheories No, that's how Ultimate works. You can only set the slider as high as 5.0/9.9 at the start and it changes from there based on your performance. If you complete a fight, it increases. If you game over at any point, you need to spend gold or a classic mode ticket to continue. Spending gold lowers the difficulty. A classic mode ticket keeps it where it is.
In terms of adaptive difficulty levels, what I really hate is when a game judges you at the very start, like the first encounter or even tutorial fight. You're still figuring out the controls, maybe remap buttons, see if you want to go controller or mouse and keyboard... and the game goes: "Oh, so you suck at games huh? No worries, I'm just going to treat you like a child from now on."
Even without that, i actually like myself trying to overcome a challenge. So dying a second time to something often mean to me that i won't be able to overcome that wall ever, the wall just lowered instead. It's quite frustrating.
Similar flaw with Resident Evil 4’s dynamic difficulty. Minor spoilers ahead: So during the Krauser fight near the end of the game, I had absolutely no clue that you’re actually supposed to fight him with your Knife instead of unloading lead into him (only discovered this maybe a year ago). So I’d go from several failed attempts due to the timer running out to suddenly defeating him almost instantly. I vividly remember on my first playthrough, where the first time I actually killed him with *less than 1 second remaining* only for the timer run out and give me a game over… then the next fight I finish him off in less than 40 seconds and it kind of pissed me off because it felt like the game was pitying me While the game _sorta_ subtlety hints at using the knife, the rest of the game heavily disincentivizes using it unless for knocked down enemies or item boxes
yeah im actually not a big fan of most adaptive difficulty in terms of scaling down the game. i might have failed on my first try but i still want to confront your challenge instead of you just immediately turning it down! i much prefer when the game asks you if you want it to do so such as in MGSV when you restart a checkpoint it leaves the same marks on. it is still adaptive difficulty but the game tells you its doing it and if you restart the mission manually it will unmark them and allow you to do it the True way.
I think 200cc in mario kart 8 is a good example of an increase in difficulty that leads to fundamentally changing how players have to interact with the game to be successful.
I agree, 200cc was the most I've felt challenged by a Mario Kart in a long time. Of course the faster speed is one thing (meaning getting hit will have enemies zoom past you faster), The fact that it requires you to brake while drifting in a lot of instances is quite novel, but also the fact that boosts from ramps and items can sometimes be detrimental if it just makes you hit a wall or fall off a ledge.
@@bojordan64so that's how you're supposed to handle the ridiculous speed of 200cc, I've been trained to only press B to reverse and others hold A and drift. My solution was to build a car with max acceleration and min speed and that mostly worked when combined with practicing the courses at those speeds. (I'm used to Double Dash where the small cars with max acceleration were the best so i decided to return to that mentality)
I think an important game series to point out is Kirby. The usual trend with mainline Kirby games is that they'll be relatively easy on the surface, but beating all challenges or an Extra mode will get very difficult. The extra modes will change the appearance of bosses, change their patterns or even replace enemies in levels. It's crazy to me that this was a thing since the very first game too. And not to mention that bosses always have a pattern where they spawn stars and you can use those to beat them without copy abilities, which can be a self-imposed challenge on its own.
I was thinking this exact thing! Return to Dreamland Deluxe’s Extra Mode is the best example in the series IMO; besides just halving your health and changing aspects of some enemies and all the bosses, it replaces almost every single healing item in stages with one star. It’s a massive improvement over the original, as it used to just feel like playing the story mode again with a bit of fresh paint. Now, the extra pressure brought on by the sheer infrequency of recovery items forces players to be much more careful; in the original you had wiggle room when it came to chip damage, but now that you can go multiple stages without finding any food it can add up significantly. If it’s too much for someone, you can still use Magoland items too! Then, you have the True Arena… Not gonna get into spoilers but if you know, you know.
I can't get enough of that. :D Ninja Gaiden Black not only added new enemies to later settings, and threw stronger variants at you earlier and earlier in the game, but they had direct additions to some of their movesets too. There were even a couple of cases of an old enemy getting a new move that made them a lot more dangerous. All of them were carefully and attentively crafted to pinpoint natural weaknesses in a player's approach to dealing with them.
Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden, and Nioh all love to do that. My favorite being Devil May Cry. Dante Must Die mode remixes the types of enemies in each area and gives all enemies Devil Trigger which grants them super armor, health regeneration, faster speed, and new attacks. Then there is Legendary Dark Knight mode which changes enemy placement and increases the quantity to an absurd amount without giving enemies Devil Trigger. The best part about these games is that you must complete the game on each of the lower difficulties before you can unlock the higher ones; you must prove that you are ready.
For the original Doom the hardest difficulty was originally Ultra Violence but when people were complaining online that it wasn’t hard enough, the devs added a special difficulty mode specifically to troll those players: Nightmare. The enemies are faster and they gain the ability to respawn. Somehow it turned out to be a really interesting challenge for expert players, in large part because of how you almost have to speedrun to survive
@@birdg4I love the people who reply to you and don't realize that in 1993 there wasn't really an online marketplace to respond to devs nor a way for devs to patch the game...
@@LethalLuggage I love you fools that know nothing about the history of the internet or the software you're talking about. Doom is famous for being the first game to heavily market via the internet (public ISPs like AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve [actually serving businesses since 1979] have been a thing since the 80s thanks to standards like X.25), hell users downloading the shareware release of Doom from UW-Madison's FTP server crashed it, Carmack literally patched the netcode overnight as LAN games were causing massive headaches for university system admins. But yes we had "no way to respond to devs", I'd refer you to to the event called Eternal September and internet forums being a thing already and phone in BBSes being widespread even in places where we didn't yet have widespread general access to web 1.0. Services like Steam made online purchasing and maintaining updates easier, they did not develop the frameworks for it.
The adaptive system in RE8 saved me when I killed a boss with the very last bullet. The game probably registered that in order to not have me die on purpose when the boss was nearly down they just gave the kill. Since surviving on your last shot is much more exciting than needing to restart the fight
I wish games did this more often. It always feels bad for an enemy, especially a boss, to survive by 1HP and even worse when they then kill you. Especially as it's usually because of RNG that they happened to narrowly survived.
A fun mechanic to this effect is how in Gears of War, the last bullet in a magazine in SP deals more damage for this exact purpose. Functionally, it results in the player doing vulnerable reloads less often and works as a neat little hidden difficulty modifier.
I had a similar thrill when I first beat Artorias e DS1 I couldn't survive any two hits, was running dex pyro and did the maths: I had to boost my damage to the max and hit nearly every spell so I could maybe finish him I was down to one estus and healed - he started to power up but I hesitated to rush in, it was all over... But then I remembered he would jump and that I don't need to live, only to kill him. I cast chaos firestorm as he leaps at me, we both die. It felt awesome.
It didn't save you though, the only reason you were bad off in the first place was that adaptive system. It is like someone breaks into your house and steals everything but returns tomorrow with everything and returns it. They aren't a hero, they are a thief.
A good idea I had for adaptive difficulty is a recurring villain. If you beat him, he learns from what you did last time and your strategy doesn't work the next time. If he beat you, or you failed to beat him before he ran away or something, then next time, he hasn't learned from the previous encounter and more tactics will be available. The basic idea is if you win, he levels up... if he wins, you "level up." Maybe if you beat him enough times, he tags out and his superior steps in to up the ante.
The concept sounds really great and quite unique however from a technical point its very difficult as the strategies depends on the game type so if we were to have a movement game, it would be extremely difficult to account for every strategy
Reminds me of the Alien in Alien: Isolation: if you repeatedly use the same tactic or tool, such as using the flamethrower to scare it away, it will slowly become less scared by it, which at best results in you burning (literally) through more of your fuel to scare it in late-game encounters with it, and at worst resulting in your death and having to have another attempt. A great way of having adaptive difficulty within the game's difficulty settings.
There is actually a game fully based on that idea. It is named "Echo". I think what was not said in the video is that it depends on the game. It was said we had options, we talked a bit about what makes a good difficulty level, though even the "perfect" system won't suit every game. I really hate immortal enemies chasing us all the time(like in metroid or resident evil) and I think that your idea would be great alternation to that system. Instead of enemy you can't beat that just force you to move and put a time pressure, it would be better(for me at least) if they were not chasing us all over the place, but be occuring event that we can beat, but it can come stronger like in your example. I like to go with my own pace in each game and as I understand a chasing sequence, having an enemy on my back all the time when I am just simply exploring normal region is something I see more as punishment. Like examples in video where they punish you for choosing lower difficulty, here I feel punished for choosing my own pace and the game puts unnecessary pressure on me to change that. What is great about your idea is that it would require from us a different apporach because of the enemy learning, though we would be able to overcome it, instead of having to deal with it all the time.
@@trancandy1 that might do the trick but i was thinking about more of a complex behaviour like you use a weapon too much, it uses a defence that counter it But it all genuinely comes to the game we're talking about
The "intended difficulty" option really needs more telegraphing sometimes. Say, in Hi-Fi RUSH, the difficulty that has demand for good timing but doesn't shoot the damage up is Hard, not Normal (which lets you through duels if you miss one or two prompts). But if you choose Hard on, say, Bayonetta, you're getting your ass kicked. Or even when the difficulty labeling changes, like the problem with original DMC3 where _all_ difficulties were made harder during localization. It is improving at least on being transparent about it tho - HFR as mentioned above, while not saying it's the intended difficulty, does have Rhythm Timing, Enemy Health and Recieved Damage on the same screen you pick them on the first time.
I think Capcom have been thinking about this more with their recent RE titles (come a long way from the infamous "yellow or gold" in DMC3, huh?) I like how every difficulty option comes with a description that often gives a small suggestion on what type of skill level should be tackling said difficulty!
Gaming would be a lot better if "normal" actually meant "normal". As in, the difficulty the game was clearly designed around for a normal playthrough. Instead, it is often mindnumbingly easy to the point where a good chunk of games don't bother having an easy-difficulty.
@@lpfan4491 That ends up being because people get easily insulted if told to play on easy, but then they go on normal and it's too difficult for them. It's a vicious cycle of first impressions and I don't blame the devs for making Normal the true easy; but that's why distinctions like "enjoy the story and won't challenge your skills too much" end up helping more.
@@FaelumbreProject It is the larger evil tho imo, because it is straight up false information at that point. It's like if I made hard easier than normal and easy harder because I felt like it and I don't care about what these words mean anyways.
@@FaelumbreProject Yet I've seen the opposite happen - I know players who'll nope out of a game if Easy isn't an option. (Admittedly, one of them is ten years old, but still) Having the difficulty options start from "Normal" can actually be pretty intimidating to those unfamiliar and show that the game's trying to be harder than your standard fare.
Games like that are the best. Destiny 2 changes behavior in the legendary modes for campaigns. Terraria also has different seeds which can change the experience or make it more or less difficult.
Then Master mode adds onto the risk=reward rule, then there's *Legendary* which is only used on a single seed, set to Master mode, for the most intense experience you can possibly have in the base game-
@@damienearl8302aster mode doesn’t really add to the risk=reward, the only special item is the relics and I believe legendary mode is also technically in for the worthy
Expert Mode is the sweet spot difficulty of the game. The rewards outweigh the risks in the form of increased drop rates and the cool exclusive items from treasure bags. Master is just Expert on steroids and the boss statues don't really mean much.
@@damienearl8302 I was honestly a bit disappointed with Master mode. Expert mode did a lot to make the difficulty interesting, most notably having all the new patterns different enemies have, while Master just increased enemy damage and health. In my opinion, the Calamity mod had a fantastic approach to the increase in difficulty with Revengeance. It did a lot of the same techniques that expert did and gave you more gameplay altering rewards like beating a boss in expert does
Skill trees are the ultimate form of too many options from me. I end up not making an informed choice and just picking whatever is cheapest because there are too many things
@@dabmasterars i think it is good in this case because all the options relate to the same genre of the game, so you can get creative with it. My issue is when a game is so diverse to the point of lacking focus. That is why I dont enjoy Banjo Tooie. Kazooie was very tight in its platforming, Tooie dilutes that with giant maps and a lot of minigames sprinkled that cover a lot of genres.
It is not advertised up front, but "overleveling" in games like Pokemon and Darksouls is a decent way to decrease the difficulty. It in turn allows players to do things like level 1 runs and such. Maybe something the implements these fan made kinds of challenges right into the game would be fun (level caps you can turn on, for example)
Also Dark Souls gives many options for weapons and spells that trivialize the game. Most of the time the main thing that makes the original dark souls difficult is the obtuseness and obscurity of its mechanics. I remember watching a DJ Peach Cobbler video where he talked about how he basically beat his head against a brick wall of difficulty because hardcore Dark Souls fans at told him it was extremely difficult game, so he assumed the absurd challenge he faced was part of the game rather than the game telling him to go the other direction lol
To expand on the level cap idea, the Bravely Default series (Final Fantasy spiritual/side games) lets you turn off xp gains, for both Jobs and character levels (independently, too, iirc). I know at least one YT channel used that to beat the game with lv1 characters (and max Job levels tbf), to prove to people that those levels aren't that important for beating the game.
And is the root of the complaints about modern Pokemon games. The games level curve and xp yields haven't been rebalanced around the permanent exp multiplier from the party-wide exp share, so if you aren't actively avoiding fights (or rotating your team, barf) you end up overleveled without trying.
I personally always like The World Ends with You's difficulty slider. Because you could basically set it at any time, try out a few random battles, and adjust it some more, it was easy to find that sweet spot instead of being locked into it for a whole stage. Dangling rare item drop rates/ unlocking certain rare items tied to difficulty level was a good incentive (which I hadnt seen previously). Hardest difficulty I cleared was Lunatic + on Fire Emblem Awakening in Classic mode with all my characters alive at the end (without looking at any guides or external help). Never again... but it did end up meaning I created some really unique strats that I never used in any Fire Emblem game before or since.
I genuinely despise replaying awakening because of its difficulty options. Normal and hard are way too easy, but early game lunatic and like the walhart chapter exactly are the only hard parts of lunatic and everything else is still very easy in comparison. Lunatic + adding a bunch of resets didn't help that imo
Same re. TWEWY's difficulty, it helped that you also had the four standard difficulty modes, then the slider to decrease your level (and how much HP you had). Then it balanced out by being able to eat foods to increase stats so you could theoretically put the game on ultimate difficulty, reduce your level down to 1, but load up on attack and be a glass cannon
I lived how TWEWY did difficulty. Being able to level down to increase your drop rate felt scary at first but as you got better and got better stats and pins you could even beat bosses at a low level and get their rare pin.
My personal favorite is the Rain World slugcats. Rain world is a speculative evolution survival game set in the far future, with you playing as a Slugcat, which, as its name suggests, plays a catlike role in the ecosystem. You start with the Survivor (classic rain world experience) and the Monk (herbivorous slugcat that needs less food and gets a bit of better PR from scavs). Instead of being dead-up weaker, the harder difficulties pose you in harder ecological niches. For example, the Spearmaster, one of the hardest slugcats, is purely carnivorous and plays a sort of hunting role. The creature lack a mouth and instead feeds by tubes attached to the spears it grows from its tail, so it’s forced to hunt the biggest of baddies daily to continue living. All of the slugcats also provide different perspectives, snippets of one collective lore across all the slugcats.
Interestingly, the generally easier option of Monk can actually be more punishing to the player and more difficult option of Hunter rewarding the player. Sure, as Monk it's easier to tame creatures or to survive in general, but you do (on average) 0.66 damage (not even enough to kill a pole plant with one hit) with spears, compared to Survivor's 1 and Hunter's 1.25, as well as a lung capacity of 1.2 (0.83x standard, higher values = less capacity), meaning you can't swim as long (assuming you don't use the Remix modifier that makes that number 0.8).
I remember once celebrating a friend's birthday and we all took turns trying to defeat ghosts and goblins. We only made it past the first level. But it felt so satisfying even getting that far. But yeah......after that it got too difficult
Oh... and remember that, at the end, it makes you play the entire game again with a specific weapon to unlock a 10 second long ending. Even with save states in an emulator that game is brutal.
Bethesda games tend to have a really... *blunt* way to adjust difficulty. They make enemies harder to kill and deal more damage. But really this only effectively changes how long you fight and how many healing items you have to carry around.
Luckily you can just mod a simple universal damage multiplier. So instead of the enemies taking 1/5th damage on legendary, everyone can take the full 5x. Or just keep enemy health unmodified I guess, my preference is influenced by using other mods at the same time.
It's cheap and lazy but I'm ok with it because they require basically no time or money to develop/impliment. So it's just a player option th at they can ignore if they like, or tweak if they think it's not set right to begin with. I know a few games where I just feel like I plow through all the enemies effortlessly, often killing them before they make a single attack, and wish I could make them a LITTLE bit tougher so that I'd actually have to worry about them attacking to provide SOME challenge.
Vanilla FO4 comes to mind. The bullet sponge motif gets on my nerves. When you face an enemy on the hardest difficulty and their health drops by the smallest of fractions, it gets annoying fast. It's one reason why I'm not fond of FPS games as of late. The whole idea with some of them is just increase enemy health, lower weapon damage, and the developers don't add any new mechanics into the game. It just feels so stale.
I can see someone complaining about certain bosses difficulty (fucking Devourer) but frankly I felt hardmode was handled really well balance wise Granted I didn’t really play the base difficulty so maybe I can’t tell how much of a jump of difficulty it is from one to another, I just know hardmode felt rather fair at most all times (fuck you devourer)
@@TopCurls Not sure how it is in hard mode but basically Normal mode is really easy, and I never had to strategize and do cool badge combos because I could sort of bruteforce my way through everything without any trouble, so I did because I mainly.played it as a spiritual successor to Paper Mario However, the tank (and I imagine the final boss especially) is a massive difficulty leap and suddenly I couldnt get past it, leaving me to choose between going back, looking up/coming up with badge strategies, actually collecting them etc just to finish the game or just dropping it
In cuphead, I would think it would be cool if you were able to beat the game with only simple mode. However, after the devil fight, instead of winning the game, the devil is barely even scratched and the devil takes your soul by force (getting the bad ending) because you were too weak.
In theory that’s cool, but I spy 2 main problems 1. Unless explicitly told, it may be hard for players to understand the difficulty is what’s screwing them over, and may try to do something else (for instance, buying everything) 2. It can be discouraging to work and beat the devil and then be told “you wanted an easier time? Fck you bad ending!” Find a way to squash those problems and it’d be a great idea
Personally I actually love the fact that the simple mode has a drawback. I got so frustrated while playing cuphead that I would have never put the work in to complete it if I could have just chickened out and picked simple. In that way, the game's systems helped with my lack of self control. In other words, normally I would have picked the easier difficulty but I loved the game so much that I persevered in order to get the most out of the game.
I personally really liked the way Star Wars Fallen Order handled difficulty settings, since it didn't touch enemy health, but just the damage they deal, their aggressiveness and the precision required for timing blocks. I love difficult games, but when the higher difficulty settings makes enemies tankier, it just feels tedious rather than properly increasing the challenge.
Reminds me of a diablo game, I don't remember which one that gave bonus XP on higher difficulties so the game wasn't actually harder but just took longer since enemies had more health but still didn't do enough damage to hurt the player.
I feel like RPG's are a lot harder to balance, especially if they give you a lot of party members to choose from. It's hard for me to think of ways to hit that goldilocks zone with set stats and numerous unit combinations.
I think it comes down to 2 things: First: Strategy. Can you immediately switch units? How much do you get from it?(like pokemon with type advantages nearly trivializing all fights with the right pokemon you can conveniently catch near the gym) Second: exp. Most RPGs get easier with level ups and depending on how easy you get these, the game becomes easier the longer you take(assuming the game let's you keep all the exp when you die). I currently struggle with triangle strategy, but I can just retry the fight because the strong enemies give dozens of exp and I can keep them,so my 30min attempt was not worthless and brings me closer to beat the game
Valkyrie Profile do this very poorly. Hard is actually easier than easy, or to be precise, you can enhance your characters better in hard than easy since at hard everyone starts at level 1. And you need to play hard + follow exact guidelines for true ending
@@MrNovascar Still in my first playthrough, and man Triangle Strategy's hard mode is brutal. I wouldn't even consider sticking with it if getting a game over forfeited the exp.
Games with a lot of party member options also end up with OP characters and Useless characters... Or when you know one of them will die and you don't get a replacement (eg Aerith from FF7 who is just gone vs Galuf from FF5 who is replaced by his granddaughter who keeps all his stats, exp & abilities)
And then there's my favourite difficulty slider, Pokemon. It tried it once, with the Key System in B2W2. Aside from (most) bosses for Challenge Mode, the game only adjusts the *levels* of the Pokemon you fight. Pokemon has a complicated internal system of base stats, IVs and EVs. Somehow- I have absolutely no idea how- changing the levels *does not actually change the base stats of your opponents*. Easy Mode drops the levels of Iris's level 59 Haxorus, but internally, it has the same stats- while your Pokemon's level *is* a factor in damage calculations, it only really counts at 4 levels out of 10 (0, 3, 5 and 8 levels). Thankfully, the game was merciful and reward EXP scaled to the original levels. Challenge Mode gives you EXP scaled to the Pokemon's *new* levels, even if the stats haven't changed. The difficulty modes also boast the appropriate AI tweaks, although I'm not sure what form these take.
For Hades, I might even add the option to buy rare materials like Titan Blood and Diamonds in the last world: if you hoard a bunch of money that you'd otherwise use on buffs, healing, or upgrades, and make it near the end, you can buy a resource. So even if you're having trouble turning up the heat, there's another type of challenge you can pursue to get stronger instead
I also think it is also important the other way around. That you are able to tone down a game to prevent it from getting frustrating. For me I loved that Control and Dead Cells let me make it easier with a lot of granularity, as I simply don't have the time to play until I get better. I adjusted some settings, until it was still challenging but not frustrating. I really appreciate that.
It's the same for Don't Starve for me. I can't stand things like the random wildfires in Summer or the frog rains of Spring, so having the option to simply turn them off is an absolute blessing for me.
@@arogustus3984 quick tip in case you dont know, you can make a thing called an "ice-fling-o-matic" that automatically puts out fires when its turned on if you want to give wildfires being on a shot at some point. Of course you could already know this and just hate wildfires but better safe than sorry, right?
@@dinoaurus1 I know about it, yeah, but than I'd have to build my bases with the thing in mind. Turning off wildfires is mostly for the sake of giving myself freedom to design how I want.
I remember one version of _Cave Story_ having a difficulty mode, with "Hard" removing all the Life Capsules from the game, trapping you permanently at 3HP and forcing you to play the game as a no-hit run. HOWEVER, due to the structure of the game's weapon XP system, this also meant your weapons were permanently at maximum power level, too!
Richard Terrell at Critical-Gaming and Design Oriented would take this guy to school and make him look like he's never even heard of a video game. There's not another human being alive who has put as much time and effort studying game design, and who has as thorough and _objective_ an understanding of its principals as he does.
Actually extremely refreshing to see a difficulty video that doesn't spend half its runtime on only dark souls. I think the games are amazing and they handle difficulty well but different. They're good examples for built in difficulty solutions but I really enjoyed seeing other varied examples of this sort of difficulty!! Great video
I believe that Terraria has a both an excellent example of a higher difficulty and a terrible one in its Expert mode and Master modes respectively. In Expert mode, the game adds in new attacks and AI changes to all the preexisting enemies in addition to increasing their hit points and damage. Even without the longer and less forgiving fights brought about with the stat increase, however, the difficulty provides the player with additional difficulty that feels natural and well-designed, as the AI changes provide new avenues through which you can explore the game -- you have new attacks to learn instead of needing to simply be better at the game's Classic difficulty. In addition, the difficulty provides you with incentives to play on this higher difficulty by making all bosses drop one new unique item. Many of these items are so helpful that they completely change how you play the game, like the Shield of Cthulhu's ram dash allowing you to dodge some boss' charge attacks simply by ramming into them at the right time or the Demon Heart expanding the amount of accessories you can equip at once. The higher difficulty provides the player with new content, both through how it buffs the enemies and the unique items it grants the player. On the other hand, Master Mode is literally only a stat increase. While this worked in Expert because bosses had new attacks to learn in addition to the stats, so longer and less forgiving fights could still be fun because they allowed the boss to show off these new AI changes properly, Master does no such thing. The stat changes only make it so you're fighting a less balanced version of Expert mode, not necessarily more difficult because the enemies are harder to dodge but moreso because you just need to be better at those fights for longer. Even worse, Master doesn't provide many item incentives to choose it over Expert or Classic -- bosses will drop new fancy trophies and cute cosmetic-only pets, which despite looking cool are completely useless in-game. Instead of adding in any new creative or fun items, the developers just add on an extra accessory slot to your character -- and because the bosses aren't any more complicated, this extra slot that lets you add on an additional character-buffing accessory sometimes results in those bosses being actually *easier* than in Expert mode despite the higher stats! When a difficulty mode is making certain parts of your game easier than on difficulties beneath it, you've definitely done something wrong.
There is benefit to this approuch. First of all it's easier to make, the alternative would probably be that the master mode didn't exist rather than the mode being better. But having the highest difficulty be more about reward in the challenge itself and not the rewards themselves let you set the difficulty where you want without making the majority of the players feel like they're missing out on something.
I feel like both master mode _and_ expert mode both trivialize parts of the game. While master mode adds a new accessory slot to the player, expert mode goes a step farther by not only adding another accessory slot to the player, but also adding equipment which can trivialize entire parts of the game by existing, such as the soaring insignia, for a singular example. On classic mode, The only infinite flight you have is the UFO. With the soaring insignia or the Shrimpy Truffle, you no longer have to farm through events to get any infinite flight. If you get the Shrimpy Truffle early on in hard mode, that can further trivialize the rest of hard mode as you no longer have to build actual arenas to fight any of the bosses (except for Plantera). Other buffs given to the player in expert mode include enemies dropping more items, NPCs doing extra damage, the travelling merchant having a chance to sell an extra item, increased item drops for enemies, pots, fishing quests, Hard mode Dungeon enemies, buffed defense and banners, and more. While master mode still can be easier than expert mode at times, expert mode can still be easier then normal mode as well, and is still easier than master mode most of the time. Then, if you create a master mode world with the getfixedboi/fortheworthy seed, it becomes legendary mode, which is definitely harder all around compared to expert mode.
@@ss3nm0dn4r8 completely forgot about that, I almost never do martian madness lol however my point about being able to skip most of hardmode still stands, as martian madness can only be triggered after golem while you can fight duke fishron whenever (if you're good enough at the game) and the witch's broom can be obtained during the pumpkin moon which is around the same progression point as martian madness, I'm going to edit my comment to reflect this
@@orangetabby7122 yeah even with golems major buffs its still easier than plantera so the pumpkin moon and martian madness are unlocked back to back duke fishron has by far the best mount if you make an arena with water
I usually don't like it when difficulty settings amount to changes in numbers. More enemy health, more enemy damage; that sort of thing. Fundamental gameplay remains the same, it's just slower and less forgiving. But there are exceptions to that. MGR:R did a great job, I think, by increasing EVERYONE'S damage, including yours. If you're good at the game, you burn through enemies. But if you slip up and get hit, you're pretty much dead. What I usually prefer though is when something about the WAY you play changes. Requires you to THINK more, play better, and adapt to emergent situations, without making the game less fun.
Revengeance mode is not the hardest difficulties in MGR, everything died in second it's pretty easy to just restart and try again. It's a fun mode somewhat like Heaven orHell in DMC but more thoughtful. The best difficulties adjustment in MGR is going from Raiden to Sam DLC, a lot of thing you do with Raiden did not work for the same enemies in Sam DLC.
Heaven and hell mode from devil may cry 3 my beloved. You kill everything in one hit and everything kills you in one hit. It's dumb but oneshotting tough enemies with a single bullet is kinda fun.
Changing numbers will change gameplay if it requires you to play differently as you don't get away with as much. Fallout 4 survival difficulty made everything quite different despite me modding in two quality of life improvements like being able to save in beds without sleeping in them and the ability to travel between settlements by building vehicles and paying fuel for travelling. When you die easily and deaths aren't as cheap anymore you have to change up how you play.
The existence of Celeste and Crypt of the NecroDancer. I usually try to 100% every game, and it’s really nice that I proceeded to choose like 5 games that are the hardest to complete
Something to watch out for with adaptive difficulty, is how you're judging how well a player is doing, and how you change the difficulty to accommodate them. Some examples in roguelikes: -In ADOM, monsters get stronger the more of a single type you kill, this system led to some enemies that would come at you in swarms have the potential to get incredibly powerful if you weren't careful, making normally weak monsters kill you in a few hits and there wasn't much warning about them becoming stronger. -In IVAN, you can get polymorphed into a very strong form, which can make the game spawn very strong enemies which you will be unable to defeat when your polymorph runs out of time. In a guide I've also seen someone recommend not boosting your HP too high because you'll make the game spawn too difficult enemies.
Valkyrie Profile staight up says when turning it on "To see the true ending, you need to beat the game in hard mode". A good way to scare off some players if nothing else lol
If a game clearly communicates this, I have less of a problem. I still don't like them gating off content, but at least they communicate the player at a time where they have not gotten emotionally invested, wasted time, and they can still refund the game.
@@dondashall I personally think gating an ending behind a difficulty is just something that should never be done. I guess I do agree that if the game is directly advertising itself as a hardcore experience that's one thing, but for the most part, difficulties are there so players of all skill levels can experience the main story at the very least. Hiding challenges or post-game stuff behind harder difficulties is fine, but not the main experience.
@@SuspiciousScout I agree, I just meant as a less bad, but still terribly thing. Both are still bad. Even Gucamelee! 1 & 2 which skill-gates the true endings behind challenges (in both I just barely didn't make it) annoyed me and those endings just amounted to slightly different flavour text to mostly the same ending images, I still would have liked to see it myself.
My philosophy with difficulty options like those in recent Metroid games is that, if you can simulate it yourself (less hp, no hit runs) then it's worthless to have as an option
Not necessarily, since by doing so you can add rewards for doing it. Plus it will help ripple since then you can determine if it’s reasonable, and can sort of “train line” the challenge, since anyone wanting extra difficulty can simply simulate it further through that already made difficulty
Oooh! Yes! Something i have thoughts on! Writing this before watching the video but ive come up with alternate words for Easy Medium Hard - being Casual/Relaxed, Intended, and Challenging, becahse it better represents the desires of the players without attaching a stigma to their decision. If they just want a casual or relaxed experience, go for it. This is how the game designer Intended the game to be played, but you're the player, you're in control. Likewise, if you want a more Challenging experience, this isnt what the developer intended, but it should give you that expert level satisfaction. Secondly, if youre dealing with lets say a JRPG style combat system, Relaxed means you deal more damage and take less damage (so that its mlre forgiving of failure), whereas Challenging means you deal about the same amount of damage as intended, but you take way more damage (so that the stakes are higher, and you have to play perfectly, whilst avoiding bullet sponges)
I tried replaying kid icarus uprising recently because it used to be one of my childhood favorites, but I legitimately have no idea how left-handed kid me managed to beat even _some_ of the levels on 9.0 difficulty. The control scheme is outright hostile to us southpaws. Wish this game could get a remake already, it's in dire need of one.
Kirby Return to Dreamland has Extra Mode, unlocked after collecting enough of the games main macguffins. Half max health, EX version of all the mini and major bosses with both expanded and new attacks.....and one boss even get an entirely second form unique only to Extra Mode. Not only did it provide the challenge I desperately needed, it was also cool as hell seeing attacks be made more threatening.
Another Shinji Mikami game that utilizes adaptive difficulty like RE4 is God Hand. God Hand does also have your standard initial difficulty setting of easy, normal and hard (with hard only unlocking once you beat the game on normal) but once you're playing the game there's a dynamic difficulty system that changes based on your performance AND it's part of the UI of the game itself. When playing God Hand, you'll see a skeleton face in the bottom right corner, with a meter or a bar curving upwards around it. This meter will fill up or decreases as you either hit, dodge and defeat enemies or get hit/defeated yourself. This system starts out at Level 1 and caps out at level DIE (yes that is what it's called) with levels 2 and 3 inbetween (maybe there's a 4 as well i don't quite remember). Not only does this self adjusting difficulty ramp up the challenge if you're styling too hard, but it will also naturally get easier as you get your ass handed to you untill it reaches the appropriate level for you much like RE4 as mentioned in this video. These increases in level don't just increase the damage enemies deal though, it also changes the frequency with which they block/dodge your attacks but also how aggressive they are both on and off screen. Which means at lower levels you might not have to worry about getting jumped from off camera, but at higher levels you might and therefore have to be aware of and pay attention to and keep track of every enemy, not just the one in front of you. Increases in difficulty also ups the chance that a demon will spawn when you defeat an enemy, which are really challenging pseudo boss enemies. These demons also have different strengths, appearances and moves depending on what the level was at when they spawned. To offset all of this, at least partially, the game gives you the ability to enter the God Hand state in which you're completly invincible, all your moves are unblockable and you attack a lot faster. This state is temporary and can only be activated when your TP meter reaches certain thresholds. This state is obviously very desirable and as such if you want more TP you can taunt enemies which comes with the built in risk/reward of giving you some amount of TP but making the enemy you taunted angry at you (their face turns bright red) which temporarily makes them hit much harder. God Hand even goes a step further when it comes to difficulty management, as you have special moves that utilize a limited resource (most of which deal huge amounts of damage to help you clear rooms or severely damage bosses) and one of these special moves is called "Grovel" which does what it says on the tin and has the main character grovel at the feet of his enemies. This might just seem like a silly comical addition but it actually serves the purpose of resetting your adaptable difficulty back down to level 1. Given you're willing to face the shame/embarrassment of groveling. All in all, while God Hand is still a fairly difficult game, i really love how it at least tries to (and in my opinion mostly succeeds) at handling an in-game adaptive difficulty system. Side note: If you pick up health items in God Hand while you're at full hp you get money (which you can spend to buy moves or upgrade your health etc) and this is such a small mechanic but i wish almost every game did this. It's feels amazing to at least get something out of a resource that would otherwise just to go waste and it serves to work as an incentive to play better as well.
My favorite difficulty system was God Hand's dynamic scaling. It was an absolute rush to watch the meter rise and level up on the fly, but you could also beg for mercy to lower it in the middle of combat.
The dotted line boxes in Super Mario World act like difficulty settings for some platform sections. You probably could make a jump, but with the green dotted box filled it is easier.
But the problem there is that it isn't presented in a way that the players properly recognize. When you play the game, you are compelled to do everything, to beat all the levels and find all the secrets. The dotted line boxes feel more like a punishment because you failed to find this bonus.
@@zjzr08 But that's the point of the problem I'm addressing. Unlocking the switches "are necessary" in the player's mind. But the end result of meeting the challenge the game presented you is that you have made the game easier.
@@marscaleb It depends, because if your goal is to just get to beat Bowser, then the Switches aren't necessary; if you are to complete, then they are necessary.
Shoutout to the indie Gunvolt series using items to alter the diffuculty drastically. You start off with only the basics, being a dodge (prevasion) and a simple auto firing dart gun. You can outright turn the dodge off straight away for a challenge, and as you play the game you get equips that either make abilities like that better, add extra jumps, and more to help you in the story, as well as items that do things like cut down health for score boosts- and if you wanna compare the game to Mega Man Zero (its far more unique than that), you can indeed use an item to make spikes instant kill for a massive score bonus, making the challenges reward you immensely.
For me, the GoldenEye & Perfect Dark difficulty modes are the best implemented. Not only does the game get harder, but it changes the same level up in ways that encourages players to play through the game on every difficulty. Add to that the unlockable rewards for doing so and you have a great system that allows you to start on easy and just get better at the game. Once mastered, you then have the bonus difficulty mode so you can create your own LTK/DLTK challenge. It's really surprising we didn't see more of that style of difficulty in other games, as only a handful bothered to copy it.
And on top of being able to add you your own difficulty options, you could also earn cheats, and really customize it to be whatever you want. I think so many modern shooter campaigns would have so much more replay value if you could just pick whatever guns you wanted to use after you beat it. It wouldn't be hard to do!
I'm surprised you didn't mention The World Ends with You during the "challenged slider" section- one of my favourites, it lets you challenge at your comfortable difficulty level but at higher levels, rare item drop rate is higher and some equipment are only available at higher difficulty modes.
TWEWY is a master when it comes to difficulty balance. You have many enemies in the bestiary that have different item drops and shows the base drop rates per difficulty option that can be changed at any time before battle, along with being able to lower YOUR level to increase the drop rate. You can also choose how many fights to take on at once by chaining them, which will MULTIPLY your drop rate, leading you to be able to make a 1% drop into a 75+% if you chain and lower your level enough. Heck, there's even an AFK experience for leveling your pins, which can have them evolve in different ways. TWEWY is amazing, and NEO: TWEWY is pretty great too.
13:12 I think the simple mode is supposed to be a practice mode, where you can see certain parts of the boss and train on an easier level to prepare for the full thing.
Sure, it can be used as a practice mode, but since it removes phases of the bossfight, you essentially can't practice those parts. To make this system work, you should be able to play the full bossfight, and the setting should be renamed to "Practice" to clear up confusion as to why it doesn't count the fight as complete.
Ocarina of Time's Master Quest is a good example, remixing everything. I'd love to see more games get something like that. One problem I have with the Banjo-Kazooie games is that after the first playthrough, it's too easy. I did a run without collecting any health upgrades and it was fun, but there aren't many more ways to make the game challenging. If it had a Master Quest mode, it would be amazing.
It feels so incredible that just a few hours ago I was replaying through "Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back" on the PS1 for the first time in... 15 years? And I was so surprised when I realised for the first time ever that during some tough secret gem levels that in addition to a system that rewards you with a free "mask" (aka a power up that protects you from one hit) on respawn if you die a few too many time on the same level, *the game spawns additional checkpoints in the middle of the level* if you die even more times inside of it. The idea of discovering something like that after so many years already felt like a neat happenstance, and shortly after a Design Doc video about difficulty options is released? Magic!
While Hades gives some lore by using certain Heat options, prior SuperGiant Games more explicitly provide additional lore for using their predecessors to the Heat system.
A really interesting balancing act in stylish action games is how oftentimes many strategies to more smoothly get through hard fights will incentivize the player to get better at the game and possibly, counterintuitively, do something more risky and stylish. It's not just about the brilliant idea of ranking systems rewarding players for using more mechanics, avoiding damage and being fast at killing enemies - although that is a very blatant part of it. There also are frequently fights that say, "Yeah, you COULD do this in the same way you've been fighting everyone else, but if you get out of your comfort zone and try more advanced mechanics, the reward will be immediate and noticeable because it will also make the fight easier." To use an example, Agni and Rudra do this MULTIPLE times across MULTIPLE difficulties which is part of why their fight is so neat. In general, to calm down, pay attention to timing because if a player has been mashing through the game up until this point, that simply won't work against the brothers - they'll push you away if you attack into their blocks, attack you from behind, and hit you with attacks that require at least a basic knowledge of your defensive options in order to avoid. And of course there is the aspect where if you take one out too early without weakening the other first, he'll pick up his brother's sword and become way stronger. It's not a hard fight if you know what you're doing, but that's the key - you need to know what you're doing. The brothers telegraph their attacks like crazy and aren't particularly aggressive even on high difficulties, but if a player is being careless then they CAN get their ass kicked. On Normal difficulty, they likely will test the player into getting more comfortable with parrying. The only other Devil Arm you'll have at that point is the multi-hitting Cerberus, which is good for parrying. And if you parry one of Agni or Rudra's attacks - something that might happen accidentally - the demon will drop his weapon and be wide open for attacks for a LONG time. They'll also learn about elemental weaknesses if they didn't notice by now, since it is apparent, crystal clear, that Agni takes extra damage from Cerberus. You might even learn how to manipulate them into attacking into each other and getting both to drop their swords at the same time which is a more skillful move to make but also really funny and satisfying. On Hard, you likely will be able to realize how good Royal Guard is against Agni and Rudra since in particular their jump attacks are pretty easy to perfect guard and if you take advantage of jump i-frames, you won't be punished for screwing up. This CAN be something that is taught on Normal mode but most likely a first time player will be using Trickster or Swordmaster and won't have Royal Guard leveled up to have air block. On Very Hard, the brothers' larger health bars and damage will probably make a player realize that they really would like a reliable way to damage both of them at the same time to avoid a long dual-wielding phase... And thus, be rewarded if they get a taste of DTE, before it becomes a necessary mechanic for their DMD run.
And watching someone doing no damage dmd boss with styles is really satisfying. Really shows the full utilization of game's mechanic instead of cheesing it with one or two attack patterns only
Of the games I've played that are represented in this video, Bug Fables, Hades and Kid Icarus: Uprising are the games where I most enjoyed their take on difficulty. To start, I enjoy how Bug Fables feels clearly balanced with its hard mode in mind, around the assumption that the player who takes on this challenge will likely be open to engage with all the mechanics and systems the game offers to explore the depth of its combat. And when you do, it rewards you by further expanding its depth. When a game is balanced around a lower difficulty or has to assume many of its players will simply refuse to engage with more involved mechanics, strategic depth tends to erode and higher difficulties will often just be tedious instead of more challenging in a fun way. Hades's Pact of Punishment is a little too hardcore for my skill level and/or playstyle, but I do think it's a very good idea. Customiseable increases in challenge to counterbalance increased reward are a great way to suit various skill levels and invite players to push past their comfort zone. I just think the extensive list of options is pretty daunting and a lot of the choices seem really severe at first at each step. I beat a full Extreme Measures run once (somehow, barely) and I'm satisfied there. That's probably the worst I can handle and even then I kinda think I just got lucky. Uprising does kind of the same thing as Hades, in a way, but it simplifies the way difficulty is adjusted while adding tension via an initial cost. It's not as elaborate as Hades's Pact of Punishment, but it's much more approachable and is IMO the ideal way to create customiseable difficulty when it's based primarily on changing stats. As the intensity rises, enemies deal more damage, take more damage and most notably will move and attack faster. While what is effectively 100 difficulty levels appears excessive, I like that, as a result, you can adjust the level of challenge either by small or large steps as you prefer. You can pretty easily find your own sweet spot and then ramp up at whatever pace suits you best if you want to seek out challenge.
Uprising also adds special doors that can only be unlocked if you're on a high enough Intensity, which really made me want to go back and play the stages on a higher intensity in order to open those doors and get the sweet loot within.
I really appreciated how mila's turnwheel in fire emblem echoes (and similar mechanics in later fe games) works to create a kind of middle ground between the classic permadeath mode and casual mode. I like the challenge of classic mode, but I don't always want to have to restart an entire chapter just because a character died from unexpected reinforcements or something, so the ability to rewind a few turns is a great tool to have
I totally agree with you, though it is no excuse for the developers to place 4 wyvern lord same turn reinforcements with silver axes on a desert map just because the player can reset turns. Turnwheel should be used to mitigate unfair situations like bad timed misses or remediate a turn. Not to allow the developers to place ambush spawns
fire emblem should be designed around assuming the player will never reset, and fire emblem fan analysis should also not take resetting into the equation. treating save scumming like it's an intended feature of the game grandfathers in and normalizes a lot of terrible practices and shitty game design.
@@ryangallagher9723 While I agree that turnwheel mechanics shouldn't be used as an excuse for poor game design, I think there's a big difference between individual/personal experiences with the games vs broader analysis. Just because some players don't ever want to undo mistakes doesn't make that the only way to play the game. There will always be times where a unit dies and some players may want to go back to fix their mistake, and those players will certainly appreciate mechanics that make it less of a punishment to do so. Players who don't like those mechanics aren't forced to use them.
Though I’ve only ever played on Standard, the Kingdom Hearts series will make certain postgame content harder to unlock on easier difficulties, with the only requirement on the hardest difficulty being to beat the main story.
Only the secret movies afaik. The more interesting tidbit to mention is that Critical (hardest difficulty but isn't available in every game) usually also increases your damage output and gives you extra abilities and ap right at the start of the game. It also doubles the damage you take *and* halves your max hp. So uh, good luck. KH2 on crit is peak gaming.
I have a soft spot for adaptive difficulty in multiplayer games. The most recent update to Sea of Thieves just implemented this. World events in the game now increase or lower the difficulty based on how many players are present, offering a fair challenge to whomever is nearby. Gone are the days when only an experienced solo slooper could take on something like the Ashen Winds, locking out newer solo players from experiencing the full game.
Games with difficulty options like "easy / medium / hard" doesn't really say anything. Using creative names like "baby / tough / hell" isn't giving much help either. Worse is when I can't change the difficulty mid-game and have to start all over.
I was kind of hoping you would mention how Silent Hill allows for difficulty levels for combat AND puzzles as separate options. It's a really cool way to customize the two different main aspects of survival horror.
Would’ve liked for you to have included trophies/achievements in their own section as often times they add specific challenges and requirements that ramp up the difficulty of games. The reward is not only accomplishment, but branching out with different playstyles allowing you to engage with the game in new and exciting ways
He did talk about self-imposed challenges. There's no real difference between coming up with your own objectives, following a set of ironman rules from the community, and following the description text to get an extra cheevo. It's all the same principle of a self-imposed challenge, it just changes who is presenting you with the rule-set.
I only wish devs were more transparent about the "intended difficulty" difficulty, it's confusing when normal mode is basically just an extra easy mode. A case in point would be Halo where Heroic is considered as the intended difficulty. Another example is Iconoclast, I played the game on normal, but I had to start a new playthrough because the game was too easy and too forgiving, hard mode was basically the more balanced and challenging difficulty. Another similar experience I had was with the game "Phoenotopia awakening", seemingly the devs added "difficulty options" because people complained about it being too hard, I ended up choosing the normal difficulty, but then realized they labeled the "intended difficulty" as the hardest one, in this case was worst because the easier "difficulty options" straight removed mechanics from the game.
Problem is, some will disagree with what difficulty should have been "intended" anyway. I know one reviewer who hates that Infernax actually labels Classic Mode "Intended Difficulty" because it's not harder in an interesting way but just more tedious with the loss of progress that won't be as fun for newcomers as Casual Mode. Or like, "Why did you even make multiple difficulties if you didn't intend for all of them to be played?"
@@BagOfMagicFood Isnt Infernax supposed to be inspired/a homage to NES games such as Castlevania? So it makes sense Classic mode is the intended difficulty. Also, usually those games with Loss of progress are about mastering the journey from point A to point B, I havent played any classic NES game and enjoyed the intended difficulty. As for, "Why did you even make multiple difficulties if you didn't intend for all of them to be played?", difficulties are usually about making your game sell as many copies as possible. Also, one could say "Why did they make such a complex and deep gameplay if players will barely take advantage of it on easy mode"
Well, it was his opinion that just because you're copying an old game style doesn't mean you have to bring back all the unnecessary frustrations of that era.
@BagOfMagicFood it's often very clear which level is the intended difficulty based on how well the game flows. Its clear which version of the game enemies were tested on and which versions were afterthoughts.
@@percyblakeney5283 Is that like how someone supposedly deduced that most of Super Castlevania 4 wasn't designed to have the directional whip control?
Another thing about Hades' difficulty tweakablity is the optional God Mode, which, against the assumptions you might make based of of the name, doesn't make you invincible, but instead adds an adaptive difficulty function that increases your base damage resistance by 5% every time you die, maxing out at 80% Base DR. Gradually increasing your survivability without ever making you actually immune to damage, (as further increases to DR% gained during runs shaves off that remaining 20%, rather than adding to the 80%) Personally, I waited to turn it on until after my first successful run, to act as a sort of reward, Zagreus "earning" his Godhood. But having it available from the start lets people choose it if and when they want to alter their gameplay experience, if it will increase enjoyment for them.
CrossCode is one that did difficulty options great, I'd say. On starting a playthrough, you do not have to choose a difficulty. Instead, the game tells you it was intended to be hard, and makes you aware of the Assist Mode. Assist Mode consists of three sliders, that are at 100% by default but can be reduced. Those are enemy damage, enemy attack frequency, and, because CrossCode is a puzzle game as much as it is an action game, puzzle speed, that affects timers and the other time-based elements in puzzles
At first Darksouls 3 was not fun in my eyes but after I beat the first boss I got addicted to overcoming challenges lol. It didn't matter how hard the game was I would never quit even after getting stuck on bosses for days. Fav game of all time by far it literally changed my life.
Chicory: A Colorful Tale has some of the most amazing comfort settings and gives you such amazing difficulty control. Its a lovely lighthearted indie game, with moderate difficulty fights and bosses. To enjoy more of just the cozy, you can change how many hits you can take, make yourself unkillable, and remove bosses entirely. For my mother who isnt that big on video games, it allowed her to more thoroughly experience and enjoy the whole game
I feel like Nioh has an interesting approach to difficulty. Going through the base game is fairly challenging, being a souls-like, but the thing is that there is a ton of systems and you can beat the game using most of them on only a fairly rudimentary level. But once you beat the final boss it unlocks newgame, or way/dream of the strong as it calls it, which ups the rarity and level of gear, unlocks new modifiers for gear, and even adds a whole new gear type in the form of the scroll. The enemies in the levels are tougher, have subtly different move sets, and spawn in new locations. At this point you need to start to learn the more advanced mechanics to beat the game, you need to start making a proper build, and incorporate elemental damage, debuffs and combos. Beat newgame and you unlock newgame+, which adds more new stuff in the previously mentioned categories, allowing for even more specialized builds and even tougher enemies and levels to make it necessary. By the end, it's not enough to be intimately familiar with the games myriad complexities and nuances, you also need to be good enough at executing them, which to me is the real mark of a good difficulty system, it should allow the player to engage with the complexities of it's systems at a steady pace.
I never really played around with difficulty settings, but added personal bindings to make the game harder. For example, I beaten Yo-Kai Watch with only Yo-Kai you befriend from the story or non-post side quests. It was fun with trying more strategic teams and this tiny grandma I found. I even got through most of the Infinite Inferno - a post game area to test your metal on powered up bosses. Unfortunately, I stopped playing when I got to Wobblewok, the last boss in it.
I love extreme difficulty, but only when it challenges skill and strategy. Whether it's the cold face of Bennett's mountain or the heated P-rank attempts in Ultrakill's prime sanctums, there's something to be said about a bar that can only be cleared through mastery, even if it's the only option a game permits you to play it by.
In Rain World, difficulty is signified by the characters you play as. The Survivor is the normal difficulty, with competent wildlife and a good amount of it for your first playthrough ; the Monk is the easy mode, with enemies that ignore you most of the time and a reduced amount of them. Also, when you pass to a different region, the requirements to access it are removed. Lastly, when you beat any of these two, you unlock the Hunter. A hard mode where there are completely new and vicious enemies (one bird has a harpoon, for God's sake) and a time limit of 20 days to complete your mission and the game before your run is deleted.
I think it's safe to say most people start on the "Normal" difficulty for their first playthrough, and if they feel like it, play again on a harder one. Although, it often feels like harder difficulties go one of two ways. First one is, some games will have a description along the lines of harder difficulties being "If you're familiar with/good at *genre of game*". This likely implies the game expects you to learn and have pretty good knowledge of all the game mechanics and use them to nearly it's full potential; whereas easier difficulties might make encounters beatable even if you ignore certain mechanics. However, the second one is that some games see harder difficulties as being for second playthroughs only. This can feel like you're just flat out not able to get through the game because you're not intimately familiar with it on your first playthrough for obvious reasons. I think the first option is always the better one, because testing the limits of your knowledge of the game naturally will feel more rewarding.
I think a pretty good middle ground for this is to have the absolute hardest difficulty be unlockable and of type 2, but to have hardest difficulty you can start with be type 1. With the default highest difficulty being hard enough to where you have time to learn the systems, but you better figure it out and the unlockable hardest being hard enough to where you basically have to be playing close to optimally from the beginning to even get through the game.
@@SaberToothPortilla I also think this is the best way to do it in most cases. The Devil May Cry games have been built around multiple playthroughs and unlockable difficulties from the start, each one being balanced around your experience and the skills/upgrades you've accumulated.
My hardest challenge I completed would have to be doing the Bushido challenge on Death Sentence, in Payday 2 stealth mode. Doing so requires you get the most difficult to acquire item first, the Samurai Armor in a vault, which guards can trigger the alarm after seeing it's gone. You can't bag any other loot, can't even pick it up before getting the armor in the escape van. Normally, you can just get a friend to open the vault w/ you as it requires two keycards shortly after one another, bag the armor and move it w/ your team. Then you have to get 5 pieces of loot in addition to the 4 from the armor pieces. I had none of that. I ran it on the hardest difficulty, Solo. I had to get 12 pieces, 8 w/ armor, on Death Sentence (mayhem+ it's the same mostly tho). That meant memorizing 8 cash/coke placements, moving the armor one by one, only killing the cam guard (for their card to open the vault) and guards that patrolled into the vault to facilitate this slow process (as that meant they would trigger the alarm) as I was running this solo. Then, having used favors to place closer drop points, I would move the ones I memorized as being closest to each, depending on the randomization. The armor would always go through the sewers out the back, into one of two drop points depending on guard patrol randomization and camera placement, as I'm too slow to properly stealth but I need to be fast to outpace the possible 4th guard on rotation for the vault. The lengthiest part of this process, solo, was sometimes having to wait long amounts of time for the hardhat worker with the second keycard, besides the cam guard's, to idle in a specific spot close enough to reach before the vault timer ends after the first keycard is inserted. As I'm solo, I had to get the first kc from cams and use that with the vault initially, triggering the time lock, then make a mad dash for the second kc, which was placed just close enough to beat the timelock because I waited for the hardhat to go there, so their card would drop there when I killed them. Sometimes they could spawn in that spot initially, meaning by the time I get there, after cams are dead, they're only halfway through patrolling the entire map. Beating the challenge felt like a level of accomplishment I haven't ever felt in any other game before, past all the random chance that felt bad sometimes, but ultimately rewarding in terms of difficulty. Payday 2 is one of the better ones when it comes to randomization, but it still has times where it is much easier with a bit of luck. However, it's difficulty also comes with guaranteed changes on top, and challenge runs that make things harder in various ways. Crime Spree, however, sucks THOROUGHLY, if I'm being honest. At some point cops practically 1 shot you and you need unbelievably specialized builds to make it through at all. I'm not even talking about how it makes stealth completely and utterly impossible, either. In my opinion, they should've just increased the normal stealth difficulty, as opposed to making it so you can't use pagers, have a max civilians that can die, etc. as normal stealth is already incredibly precise with how difficult it is to find a full team of good players, conduct precise movement through max-difficulty guard patterns, and perform, often, multiple objectives across a map, all while not being able to kill more than 4 guards or let the alarm go off. Add randomized guard placement, camera rooms, objectives placement, and so on, and it makes it difficult to pull off a truly perfect or cheese-free run, especially multiple times in a row without losing ONCE. Ultimately, though, it's not a fault of the gameplay, but of the mode, as stealth's gameplay loop of failing and improving, similar to a roguelike in some aspects, just doesn't sync well with a flawless run. The two are antithetical to eachother for all but the top 5% of the playerbase. Even then, over dozens of runs? Nah, man. _There are no Stealth Crime Spree players._ There just aren't.
I love those kind of difficulties, heck I love doing self imposed challenges like 4 Job Fiesta and nuzlockes. And randomziers can also add some nice tweaks
I think that a really good example comes from the Co-op shooter Deep Rock Galactic. Basically, you and some other dwarves explore randomly generated caves and complete missions. You also fight swarms of alien bugs. Before a mission, you can choose a difficulty, or in this case, a hazard. It goes from 1 to 5, and multiple factors change throughout. The health and damage of alien bugs and swarm frequency scales with it, and friendly fire damage increases. Example, Hazard 1 has small and infrequent swarms with the enemies dealing less damage, and shooting teammates is like throwing pebbles at them. Hazard 5 though has constant swarms, tougher bugs and more variety of enemies and types. That’s just the basics, there are modifiers and biomes, too. Some modifiers make the bugs regenerate or have stronger bites, or makes certain enemy types infest the caves. Biomes differ, too. Want less of a challenge? Go to salt pits, the basic cave. Want something medium? Go to the glacial strata, there is snow that slows you down, occasional cracks in the floor appear and blizzards can occur. Want to die? Go to the magma core, everything wants to kill you, hot ground, earthquakes, even more cracks in the ground, exploding flowers and a lot of geysers. You can always switch between hazards and biomes how you feel like it. There’s no punishment for playing on easier difficulties, as each negative modifier, increase in hazard and cave length and complexity level grants you an exp/money boost. Even hazard 1 grants you a 10% boost. Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
The thing with Cuphead though, using simple allows you to progress with what the boss unlocks for you, allowing you to go into other isles to get more coins, and better weapons.
Breath of the Wild’s “Master Mode” was awesome. Giving enemies health regen if you leave them alone too long fundamentally changes how you have to approach combat and inventory management. It really squeezes everything you can get out of the system.
I've done 2 master mode playthroughs and tbh it's far from my favorite approach. It mostly ends up just making enemies too damage spongey and begins to show cracks in the weapon durability system which I think worked well otherwise. Taking out enemy camps is rarely worth it because you too often lose more than you get back. Though the health regen itself I don't hate. It makes it so you have to be more aggressive and get any kind of damage off before it kicks in. Other than that, there aren't really enough changes to make it a more interesting challenge.
@@DesignDoc I think part of what it’s designed to do is encourage you to actually experiment with the many possible ways of dispatching enemies in the game. I think a lot of people play BOTW like “find the strongest melee weapon I can and swing it to win” and they leave a ton of what the game actually offers on the table. Yes, if you charge into every encounter and swing your melee weapons until they break, Master Mode will frustrate you. If you really think about and utilize all of the tools at your disposal (weapons, arrows, runes, the environment, etc.), Master Mode adds tons of depth. It also actually forces you to use weapons and items. By the end of any regular playthrough, I was always carrying a million things and looking through my inventory every 10 minutes to see if something was worth throwing away for the shiny new thing I found. The “survival” element dissipated somewhere in the mid-game for me every time. Lots of games give you incredible tools (like the control of actual game physics you get in BOTW) but fail to provide a challenge deep enough to incentivize their full use. Master Mode hits that sweet spot for me, personally.
I'm reminded of Silent Hill 2's puzzle difficulty setting. Where they had a different setting for puzzles than fights. Maybe GOd of War could have used that?
The worst part about the whole difficulty debate is that proponents of "everything needs to be super difficult all the time" tend to forget two things. 1) A good, well designed, game, naturally tends towards a certain difficulty. Once a game has a solid core design, adding in more difficulty can only really be done by just bolting on random, unnecesary, mechanics, or by overtuning enemies. And that ends up undercutting the core design. 2) There's other things that are important, like power fantasy, logically coherent playstyles, etc. The proponents of "everything needs to be super difficult all the time" seem to often forget that a game isn't simply a set of abstract numbers and shapes that you manipulate until you get a "you won" message. Usually the game represents something, and simply adding nonsense to make the game more difficult quickly undercuts the core ideas its supposed to represent. Too many people want to just increase difficulty for difficulty's sake, and up advocating for designs that are a bloated convoluted mess of mechanics with overtuned enemies.Wasting what made the original core idea of the game appealing to begin with.
I've never seen any one push "Everything needs to be super difficult all the time". What I see much more commonly is people saying that every game needs to have difficulty options that allow things to be easy all the time, which comes up every single time a new fromsoft game is realeased. 1) That just makes the hard difficulty bad to play and harms its design, this isn't a solution this is a half baked attempt at best that barely pleases anyone. The main criticism of hard difficulty modes is often enemies becoming bullet sponges at higher difficulties and this does exactly that. 2) Difficulty is an integral aspect of a video game just as much as playstyles or power fantasy, ignoring the effect it can have and saying its strictly less important than other elements just shows a lack of understanding of game design. Difficulty can be less important to a particular game but its not a general statement. Look I don't think "Eveyrything needs to be super difficult all the time" far from it, but I really can't stand people denying the important role difficulty has in the gameplay experience and treating it as a secondary design element rather than the center front piece it is.
@@theresnothinghere1745 O the argument goes both ways. Those arguing for "everything always needs to be difficult" and those arguing for "everything always needs to be accesible to everyone" both make the same mistake. The core issue is that a well designed game will naturally develop a certain level of difficulty. While you can tweak this slightly, you can't really take it very far before you start messing with the core design and start undercutting gameplay/powerfantasy/etc. Difficulty isn't something you purposefully design for. It's something that happens organicly by making a good game with fun/interesting mechanics. If you purposefully start to design for difficulty (regardless of which difficulty you go for) you nearly always end up screwing up your core designs.
@@kakalukio "Difficulty isn't something you purposefully design for. It's something that happens organicly by making a good game with fun/interesting mechanics." But it is something you can purposefully deign for. There are several well recived games whose whole thematic center is structured by their difficulty and others that purposefully design difficulty into specific section. That would be much harder to do if difficulty was accidental rather than something designed into the game as they would have had to remake the entire game once they realized their gameplay was difficult. Or worse try many many different gameplay styles till they found one that fit their design vision. Difficulty at its core is a demand for mechanical mastery, the more you demand it the harder the game becomes. Bad difficulties stray from this by altering elements that move the gameplay way from the mechanical mastery its components would be used for. You can make a game from the ground up with the aim to demand a high amount of mechanical mastery and not cause it to fail. Undertale and Delata rune are great examples the hardest content in the games are sectioned off in a clearly optional manner. That is no accident that was purposeful design and its done by taking the gameplay and asking the player to perform to a higher level of mastery with more difficult objects to deal with, more focus on health management and menu management etc...
@@theresnothinghere1745 I'm not saying the entirety of difficulty is purely accidental. I'm saying that specific mechanics/playstyles/etc. naturally bring with them a certain level of difficulty. An experienced designer will then purposefully pick mechanics/playstyles/whatever to create the difficulty they are aiming for. My point is that once you've picked a certain core design, you're stuck with whatever difficulty it provides. And aside from some minor tweaks, you can't really do much without ruining the core game. A good bullet hell is never going to be "easy", a good pokemon game is never going to be "hard", and so on... These games committed to a certain core design, and adding (or removing) any significant amount of difficulty will undercut that core. And games like Undertale, which have relativly flexible difficulty, are exceedingly rare.
@@kakalukio But a good bullet hellgame can be easy (Undertale and Delta rune already show this outside of their optional content) so can a good pokemon game be hard (just look at pokemon showdown the mechanics are already in place). Just because they are committed to a design the difficulty isn't forced to be a certain way. All that it takes is asking for more mastery from the player. Which Undertale/Deltarune already shows is possible and Showdown shows the complexity is there, its just a matter of testing the players on it. "And games like Undertale, which have relativly flexible difficulty, are exceedingly rare." Not really there are quite a few games with such flexible difficulty, here another example Hollow Knight. Even if that wasn't the case the point remains that Undertale shows this idea that the type of game restricts what difficulty it can give is not really a general statement. It might be true for some very specific games but not for all or even most games.
One bonus point on the Hades example: there is a Minor Prophecy (in-game achievement) called Harsh Conditions which requires you to defeat Hades using every single Pact of Punishment condition at least once, which encourages the player to switch up and experiment with the ways in which the game can be made tougher.
Europa Universalis 4 is effectively an alt-history sandbox grand strategy game. There is a difficulty setting, but few players actually use it. Instead, with hundreds of playable nations, each reflecting their historical geopolitical situation at the time, difficulty is largely down to nation choice. Do you play as France, having few major threats and able to easily grow into a position of dominance? Or do you instead play as Granada, a small nation on the verge of being conquered historically, and try to claw your way to power from a position of disadvantage? Difficulty in EU4 largely boils down to starting position, and the aim of a run. Playing France may be easier, but for an intermediate or even somewhat advanced player, doing a world conquest on them will still take dedication and a degree of mastery. This massive variety in difficulty differentiation not through menu options or dynamic difficulty adjustment, but through the starting game-state and player-defined goals has lead to a form of difficulty I genuinely adore.
I've been a proponent of high difficulty since I fell in love with Dark Souls back in 2012. In 2020 I realized I would rather a game be too hard than too easy. I was fighting the Hell House in FFVIIR and it was brutal, I was pushed to the brink multiple times. It turns out I wasn't utilizing magic correctly to target his changing weaknesses and that's the main reason it was so difficult. The entire battle took like 45 minutes but I did pause a couple times to take a breather. And I didn't game over once but it almost happened multiple times and it was then I came to the realization that I would rather a game be too hard than too easy.
Difficulty in souls games is an interesting topic, despite the fights (the boss fights in particular) often being brutally hard you actually have a couple of ways to adjust the difficulty. Why not summon a friend to help? Level up more? Use a different weapon? Respec into magic or pyromancy? Even the music is a subtle hint (the bosses generally time their attacks to the rhythm of the music, giving you a subconscious tell of the right time to dodge)
@@tomoroboros Yeah I agree that's why I was perplexed at people calling Spirit Ashes in ER as an easy mode addition. That easy mode has always existed as Co-op summons. Now the Spirit Ashes offer some single player utility and most of them are not overpowered.
The problem is most games don't understand the difference between challenging but fair and hard for the sake of it. Demon's Souls never felt unfair, Dark Souls 1 had a particular inescapable death that was bs (unless you knee previously) but it was also pretty fair. But then 2 doubled down on bullshit to make it hard rather than be fair, which is why gameplay is super sluggish, s aren't universal but a level up, there's lots of ganks everywhere... And that's how most other series view difficulty too. By making it annoying. I just beat Code Vein and it was everything wrong with "lets make a hard game" mentality, same sluggish gameplay and bs enemies as DkS2
@@Walamonga1313 The problem is I think a lot of people were introduced to the the series with Dark Souls 2. I was, and I fell off it pretty quick. It wasn't until I got for free Bloodborne on PS Plus, and gave it a try, that I fell in love with the series. Not everyone will give a series that second chance. I hear some of the BS comes from the Scholar of the First Sin Edition, which is the most readily available version. I'm interested in looking into that, because there are somethings about DS2 I really like!... but god is it fatiguing!
Here are some things I think are important for designing a good difficulty selection, that I've seen plenty of games neglect: - Clear indication of who a difficulty is designed for. Indicators like "for people who just want to experience the story", "for people who have played a game before", and "for people who think they know everything about this game" are some good examples, and can make it clear to the player whether their first playthrough should be on normal or hard. Because it's really hard to tell sometimes. Some games really crank up the difficulty on normal, and it's the intended experience, while hard mode is a masochistic 1-hit-kill mode. Other games are still easy on hard mode. There's really no way to tell without some kind of descriptor for each difficulty option. - As stated above, the goddamn ability to adjust your difficulty mid-playthrough if it's the kind of game where having to start over completely isn't the intended experience. For run-based games like Touhou or any roguelike ever, you can just do 1 run to see how the difficulty feels, but a lot of story-based games don't even let you change the difficulty mid-playthrough, which can sometimes make me afraid to pick the hardest difficulty, because I'm worried about the idea of having to start over if I get stuck. Also something I forgot to say in my first comment is that I think it's really interesting the way Getting Over It discusses the problem you bring up at the start. That, as a developer, it can be impossible to tell whether something being too hard is a failure as a developer, or a failure as a player. Do you alter the challenge to make it easier? Or do you just persevere and beat it as hard as it currently is?
sekiro’s kuro’s charm is a great way to add difficulty, changing the entire way you play the game to promote using deflects instead of blocks. rain world’s system is also great in the sense that all 3 difficulties are their own stories, and make sense in the world of the game. Monk being further along has less enemies and different dialogue but also more of a certain enemy in a certain region, changing it completely, survivor needs more food and has more enemies, with its unique dialogue as well, and hunter is carnivorous, making fighting harder enemies worth the risk and almost a necessity with its high food bar, also the cycle timer makes it almost a speedrun to the end.
I think a good example of added difficulty with recycled content are the comets in super mario galaxy 1/2. They'd add tough challenges to a place you already explored, rewarding those that want a harder challenge while people that would prefer an easier time can skip these.
My favorite "difficulty option" in any recent game I've played has been with the Yune Fire Emblem Randomizer. You get a ton of fun options for how you want to retone the game, and it's fun to learn the rules of a new run each time. It's super easy to set to your exact level of difficulty, restarting if things don't feel right. I've played on a ton of different seeds, and while I usually restart halfway through, the ones that're fun enough to continue are really amazing. The furthest I got was three chapters before the final, where one of the infinitely respawning enemies on a defense chapter got a 50% crit weapon - they've since added an option to cap crit increases and change the weight on how often certain abilities appear. It was stupidly easy to set up on steam deck too. Playing with a controller instead of a keyboard feels so nice.
The part about cutting stuff in lower difficulties reminds me of Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn, where the Japanese version has a somewhat shorter script that also altered dialogue to be more expository for new players on its lowest difficulty while the two higher ones had the normal, much better script. This wound up creating a problem for the overseas fanbase, as those releases only got the shorter script localized, meaning non-Japanese players missed out on both characterization and plot that they HAVE to look up in order to know about as opposed to experiencing it themselves.
My favorite difficulty options come from South Park: The Fractured but Whole. There are two different difficulty settings, one that controls enemy health and damage (easy, medium, hard) and one that controls how much exp you're able to get and what items you can find while looting....... your race.
My favorite difficulty is by far an adaptable one. Resident Evil 4 really worked great for me. A clear no is mocking players for chosing easy like Wolfenstein does
I love the difficulty of Dead Cells. After each finish of a difficulty you gain a boss cell up to 5 and each difficulty adds things that makes the game harder like decrease how much you can heal. After playing the game for about 200 hours I finally managed to unlock the last difficulty. It’s a very satisfying game to play for me.
@@Liljinks for me the clock guy boss is one of the easier one. Probably just watch a guide how to beat him. I really like to play with a shield, cause if you get the hang of parry many enemies/ bosses are more manageable to beat
@@NekoSchlingel I can get past him, it’s the area afterwards that fck me up, and I’ve got every DLC so I’ve tried every path afterwards but I always die to something.
@@NekoSchlingel no, I’ll try that next time. I’m definitely more of a “run in, kill, run out” type of dude, so range isn’t always my strong suit, maybe that’s why I’m losing 🤔
There's another way to do dynamic difficulty which shown on screen but not expanded in the script: Level grinding. Hades, in addition to the optional Pact of Punishment difficulty level (which was covered), also has a dynamic difficulty where the game gets easier as the player progresses. Since the game's difficulty curve by zone is very steep, this means that up until the player beats the game, there will be a zone that falls into the sweet spot for the player's skill and unlocks, and this tail end where the difficulty is "just right" will move forward through the game as the player unlocks more powers and improves their skill. A self-balancing system like this has a some advantages over player-chosen difficulty levels, since the player might get their difficulty level wrong - especially since players choose what difficulty setting they're playing on before they know anything about the game. This same thing applies to classic JRPGs - Pokémon games don't need difficulty settings. If a player is having trouble with the game (and either lacks the skills to put together a competent team, or just would rather the role-play aspects of being a "water-type trainer" no matter how bad of an idea that is) they can run circles in tall grass until their team is strong enough to progress.
Really I think this is fascinating of a topic, because people always say about the Pokemon games that there needs to be a difficulty slider or options like in black 2 and white 2, but difficulty is not always handled well and the way it was handled and recieved in b2w2 is exactly why it wasn't done on future games, not to mention how choosing hard mode actually helps you instead of hurting you because of how exp works from gen 5 onwards while easy mode would make it harder to gain exp, in general I think difficulty options aren't always as easy to get right as people say they should be
Youre so right what a spectacular point. Players expect hard games to be hard sure, but difficulty matters just as FUNDAMENTALLY in easy kid-friendly games as it does in your resident evils and dark souls
Even discounting the level changes (which apparently didn't change the stats of the NPCs), I did B2W2 in Challenge Mode, and it was pretty challenging at the start mostly because of the extra Pokemon and more diverse movepool (and Hard Mode apparently still has better AI). I think difficulty sliders could still be done in Pokemon, but more on movesets (as they can vary in power) rather than level (which is the main factor plus the species for Exp Yield), and AI decisions plus what items they can use too.
A type of difficulty I really enjoyed was Madness Project Nexus 2's Madness difficulty, it made enemies way smarter, and also decreased the health of everyone, and yes I mean everyone, player and enemy alike, it lets you plow through hordes of weak but extremely intelligent enemies while being a single mistake away from death constantly, was a really good way to balance the rewarding feeling of plowing through everything due to pure skill and also keeping the game extremely difficult.
I like the analysis of how you can encourage players to play on higher difficulty, but I miss the focus on an enjoyable easy mode experience. Increasing the challenge in a fun way is well and good (especially with optional harder stages/bosses), but in my experience it's a lot harder to make easy mode a valid way to play. Usually, easy mode is a disappointing way to play since it skips what makes a game cool. Celeste is the example of the greatest easy mode, since you can adjust only the parts you struggle with and leave the rest intact (timing, game speed, stamina puzzles, dash puzzles, a specific screen). Even with dash assist, infinite stamina and a gamespeed of 50% you're still playing a cool game. But I haven't found another game where I feel similarly entertained by easy mode and not like I'm missing out on the "real" game
X com has a pretty good easy mode, but thats because it tells You the chances for EVERYTHING. Unit miss chance, defence bonuses and ai behavior all increase up from regular, but easy mode just adds aim to you and removes 1 layer of defence from late game enemies. Damage doesnt change between easy and hard mode, and only challenge modes add damage to enemy attacks. Add in optional changes such as double mission timer and or iron man challenge that can be implemented at any difficulty and the dificulty "feel" can be whatever you want, even when the community memes on 99% accuracy actually being 99% instead of 100%.
Yes! As someone who has played vidya her whole life but sucks at it, I hate the focus on making things super hard or get good loser. I want to have a fun experience without turning things into a literal chore or part time job
@@Spoonishpls Darkest Dungeon is a hard game, but since it doesn't punish you for losing units (it outright says this WILL happen multiple times), it's still extremely fun to play
2 unique examples of difficulty in games I'd like to mention are: In the old "I wanna be the guy" games, all that changed if you select Hard or Very Hard, is the amount of savepoints. On Easy, there's basically a savepoint after every 1-2 obstacles. On Very Hard however, there's only asavepoint after several rooms full of obstacles. The game itself doesn't change at all, it just means you have to memorize all the rooms perfectly since you'll have to clear many of them in one go. Then there's the rare case of games like "Wings of Vi". It's a really difficult platformer that also somewhat incorporates the same savepoint principles as the "I wanna be the guy" games but also adds a combination of other modifiers you mentioned in your video. The Normal difficulty is already hard enough but on Hard, in addition to a lack of savepoints, the enemies deal way more damage, they can take more punishment, some puzzles are harder, as well as some of the platforming segments, enemy placements are more devious and probably the best of all: the bossfights! All bosses are faster, have new attacks and sometimes even behave differently than normal! It sometimes feels like you're fighting a completely new boss, even though you've already beaten it on an easier difficulty level.
Excellent video! One thing I always say about game difficulty (which again can vary from game) is that it's better for a game to be slightly too easy than slightly too hard. A player can always add self imposed challenges to up a games difficulty beyond its hardest difficulty without relying on outside modification while on the otherside a player cannot *reduce* a game past its lowest difficulty without relying on outside modification.
Elden ring has some of the best difficulty sliders in my opinion. It’s all about the build you use. I did a no death run where the most hits it took to kill a boss was 6. I’ve also done runs where boss fights can take 15 mins. Since you get to control all of your stats and builds, the player is completely in control of how hard the game is
I'm surprised you haven't talked about how games can receive different difficulty options depending on the region. For instance, some of the DMC games were made HARDER in the US release. Here's another "option" that may be worth talking: fighting games adapting the Smash Bros control scheme. It's not the same as an option, but that could be considered as such :)
i absolutely love how ultrakill does its difficulty and its the main reason why i feel like i can recommend it to so many people. there's 6 difficulties (all but one are out currently- the hardest one is still being worked on) and they can completely change how the game feels. higher difficulties have more unique enemy attacks, enemies and projectiles are faster (which effect parry times), and bosses have more health- but none of the enemy placements are changed. higher difficulties also have increased hard damage, while lenient and harmless have no hard damage. lenient also allows you to heal up to 200 health after dying a few times, and harmless automatically gives you 200 health. not only that, but if you're playing one difficulty and you want to change to a lower one, you can do so without losing any progress. i remember when i first played 2-4 and 3-2, i really struggled on the boss fights on standard, so i went and completed them on lenient (which i could have continued on if i wanted to) before going back to standard and completing 2-4 and 3-2 there. you can even complete the secret super-hard levels p-1 and p-2 on lower difficulties as long as you already have it unlocked on a higher one! additionally, the game has both cheats and assists. cheats completely disregard whatever score you get on a level, while assists won't, but may display that you used assists. there's two types of assists- major and minor. minor assists include things like enemy silhouettes and aim assist, while major assists allow you to change how much damage you take (if any at all), the game's speed, the ability to have infinite wall jumps, and much more. levels completed using major assists will be marked as such, but i dont believe they stop you from being able to like, unlock the prime sanctums or anything. anyways. i love ultrakill and how much you can control its difficulty, and im so hyped for whenever ultrakill: must die comes out. the fact that im already getting pretty damn good at brutal difficulty is making me worry that ultrakill: must die might not be difficult enough for me to feel properly challenged
I've been playing Horizon Zero Dawn for the first time recently and after a little bit of playing I found the "normal" difficulty to feel just a *little* too easy. I found I wasn't using any of the various alternate weapons Aloy can get because my basic bow and arrow + spear was getting the job done for just about everything I was fighting. Simply setting it to Hard difficulty made me have to be a lot more thoughtful about encounters to take out enemies efficiently (though now that I'm later in the game even Hard is feeling like I have a few set combos that are really powerful). It was nice having the option to bump up the difficulty mid-game though, I know some games lock you into the difficulty you select and you're not allowed to change it, so I appreciate games that let you dynamically choose your difficulty even just moment to moment.
I also really appreciate this option, and I had experiences with the complete opposite. I like myself a challenge, but there are times where I got overconfident and thought I could handle picking hard the first time. If I'm not able to have that failsafe of lowering it, and I got pretty far into a game, then I essentially locked myself out of experiencing the rest.
I was a bit on the mad side and played the game on UH my first time around. SO many weapons that are great like the tearblast arrows becomes pretty useless in that difficulty. Ropecaster and triple notching becomes pretty essential.
@@SuspiciousScout Yeah I started out on Normal because I tend to like a fair challenge but not something where I'm just sitting there frustrated. Normal felt just that little bit too easy and Hard has felt like the sweet spot for me so far.
@@goldmemberpb Ehh, not really. Only the elemental ammo types before you get good coils, as UH reduces elemental buildup. Tearblast works just fine with the exception of thunderjaw disc launchers which curiously get an extra resistance against them on UH. Takes 4 blasts while it takes just one on every other difficulty regardless of upgrades. Rattlers and explosive slings work very well still, and well war bow/sling is how you freeze stuff so yea But I can't argue against triple notching being op. Not exclusive to UH though. Freeze + triple notch sharpshot bow is always really strong.
as a minecraft mapmaker, i usually do the following: at the start, keep everything relatively easy and simple, being generous with checkpoints n stuff then gradually increase difficulty and/or reduce checkpoint frequency (example: checkpoint every 25 jumps instead of every 10, and 3 to 4 block gaps instead of 2 to 3 block gaps) then near the end make one final difficult challenge put a few secrets here and there and then add a extreme mode replay, where checkpoints dont work at all and you must use every little inch of skill you have
Go to brilliant.org/DesignDoc to get a 30-day free trial + the first 200 people will get 20% off their annual subscription!
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Interesting take on the difficulty options!!
Design Doc:"Who is Gonna memorize bubsy"
Me: "Are you sure about that(I have over 6000 hours in original bubsy)
@@costcoRBLX Its actually a W sponsor, but im not paying for that lol, especially if theyre not even releasing actual certificates that are industry-recognized (if this is misinfo, pls feel free to prove me wrong).
My big problem with the intensity option in Smash Ultimate is that it increased every fight you won, and decreased if you died. This was a problem for me cause it was *impossible* to stay within the perfect sweetspot of difficulty for my skill level. I'd win too much, it would get too hard, I would die, then it would revert to being too easy. I really really wished there was a way to just lock it at the level I wanted.
That's something Smash 4 did right
3DS did it best actually feels satisfying to play. They even had color based difficulty paths:
Blue: Easier but less rewards
Green: Medium with moderate rewards
Red: Harder with more rewards
Black: Adds Crazy Hand (and beyond) to the final boss and of course, better rewards. Solo Master Hand is a blue path.
You mean Smash 4? I don't remember any systems like this in Ultimate
@@FireallyXTheories No, that's how Ultimate works. You can only set the slider as high as 5.0/9.9 at the start and it changes from there based on your performance.
If you complete a fight, it increases.
If you game over at any point, you need to spend gold or a classic mode ticket to continue. Spending gold lowers the difficulty. A classic mode ticket keeps it where it is.
*Almost like the game right before it-*
In terms of adaptive difficulty levels, what I really hate is when a game judges you at the very start, like the first encounter or even tutorial fight. You're still figuring out the controls, maybe remap buttons, see if you want to go controller or mouse and keyboard... and the game goes: "Oh, so you suck at games huh? No worries, I'm just going to treat you like a child from now on."
Even without that, i actually like myself trying to overcome a challenge. So dying a second time to something often mean to me that i won't be able to overcome that wall ever, the wall just lowered instead.
It's quite frustrating.
Similar flaw with Resident Evil 4’s dynamic difficulty. Minor spoilers ahead:
So during the Krauser fight near the end of the game, I had absolutely no clue that you’re actually supposed to fight him with your Knife instead of unloading lead into him (only discovered this maybe a year ago). So I’d go from several failed attempts due to the timer running out to suddenly defeating him almost instantly. I vividly remember on my first playthrough, where the first time I actually killed him with *less than 1 second remaining* only for the timer run out and give me a game over… then the next fight I finish him off in less than 40 seconds and it kind of pissed me off because it felt like the game was pitying me
While the game _sorta_ subtlety hints at using the knife, the rest of the game heavily disincentivizes using it unless for knocked down enemies or item boxes
Lmao bro its not exactly subtle
yeah im actually not a big fan of most adaptive difficulty in terms of scaling down the game.
i might have failed on my first try but i still want to confront your challenge instead of you just immediately turning it down!
i much prefer when the game asks you if you want it to do so such as in MGSV when you restart a checkpoint it leaves the same marks on.
it is still adaptive difficulty but the game tells you its doing it and if you restart the mission manually it will unmark them and allow you to do it the True way.
Just don’t encounter anything hard! You can’t lose if the game was never trying to make you lose.
I think 200cc in mario kart 8 is a good example of an increase in difficulty that leads to fundamentally changing how players have to interact with the game to be successful.
I agree, 200cc was the most I've felt challenged by a Mario Kart in a long time. Of course the faster speed is one thing (meaning getting hit will have enemies zoom past you faster), The fact that it requires you to brake while drifting in a lot of instances is quite novel, but also the fact that boosts from ramps and items can sometimes be detrimental if it just makes you hit a wall or fall off a ledge.
@@SuspiciousScout exactly *flashes back to dragon driftway and mk8 rainbow road*
Yeah, suddenly needing to brake was an adjustment. I love it personally, but I can see a lot people being turned off immediately.
@@bojordan64so that's how you're supposed to handle the ridiculous speed of 200cc, I've been trained to only press B to reverse and others hold A and drift.
My solution was to build a car with max acceleration and min speed and that mostly worked when combined with practicing the courses at those speeds. (I'm used to Double Dash where the small cars with max acceleration were the best so i decided to return to that mentality)
Irrelevant for anyone who isn't a child though
I think an important game series to point out is Kirby.
The usual trend with mainline Kirby games is that they'll be relatively easy on the surface, but beating all challenges or an Extra mode will get very difficult.
The extra modes will change the appearance of bosses, change their patterns or even replace enemies in levels.
It's crazy to me that this was a thing since the very first game too.
And not to mention that bosses always have a pattern where they spawn stars and you can use those to beat them without copy abilities, which can be a self-imposed challenge on its own.
I was thinking this exact thing! Return to Dreamland Deluxe’s Extra Mode is the best example in the series IMO; besides just halving your health and changing aspects of some enemies and all the bosses, it replaces almost every single healing item in stages with one star. It’s a massive improvement over the original, as it used to just feel like playing the story mode again with a bit of fresh paint. Now, the extra pressure brought on by the sheer infrequency of recovery items forces players to be much more careful; in the original you had wiggle room when it came to chip damage, but now that you can go multiple stages without finding any food it can add up significantly. If it’s too much for someone, you can still use Magoland items too!
Then, you have the True Arena… Not gonna get into spoilers but if you know, you know.
Its in the gameboy game? Kirbys dreamland?
@@anegwa Yeah, if you beat the game you unlock EX Mode.
@@cjrecio5702 thats actually really cool
true arena no copy abilities is always a fun challenge
I like difficulties where enemies gain new capablites.
Pizza tower was originally going to do that I think
[NIOH has entered the chat]
I can't get enough of that. :D Ninja Gaiden Black not only added new enemies to later settings, and threw stronger variants at you earlier and earlier in the game, but they had direct additions to some of their movesets too. There were even a couple of cases of an old enemy getting a new move that made them a lot more dangerous. All of them were carefully and attentively crafted to pinpoint natural weaknesses in a player's approach to dealing with them.
@@cosmicspacething3474 yeah with the heat meter
Devil May Cry, Ninja Gaiden, and Nioh all love to do that. My favorite being Devil May Cry. Dante Must Die mode remixes the types of enemies in each area and gives all enemies Devil Trigger which grants them super armor, health regeneration, faster speed, and new attacks. Then there is Legendary Dark Knight mode which changes enemy placement and increases the quantity to an absurd amount without giving enemies Devil Trigger. The best part about these games is that you must complete the game on each of the lower difficulties before you can unlock the higher ones; you must prove that you are ready.
For the original Doom the hardest difficulty was originally Ultra Violence but when people were complaining online that it wasn’t hard enough, the devs added a special difficulty mode specifically to troll those players: Nightmare. The enemies are faster and they gain the ability to respawn. Somehow it turned out to be a really interesting challenge for expert players, in large part because of how you almost have to speedrun to survive
Do you mean doom 1993 or 2016?
@@birdg4 probably 1993
@@birdg4original means first
@@birdg4I love the people who reply to you and don't realize that in 1993 there wasn't really an online marketplace to respond to devs nor a way for devs to patch the game...
@@LethalLuggage I love you fools that know nothing about the history of the internet or the software you're talking about.
Doom is famous for being the first game to heavily market via the internet (public ISPs like AOL, Prodigy, and Compuserve [actually serving businesses since 1979] have been a thing since the 80s thanks to standards like X.25), hell users downloading the shareware release of Doom from UW-Madison's FTP server crashed it, Carmack literally patched the netcode overnight as LAN games were causing massive headaches for university system admins. But yes we had "no way to respond to devs", I'd refer you to to the event called Eternal September and internet forums being a thing already and phone in BBSes being widespread even in places where we didn't yet have widespread general access to web 1.0.
Services like Steam made online purchasing and maintaining updates easier, they did not develop the frameworks for it.
The adaptive system in RE8 saved me when I killed a boss with the very last bullet. The game probably registered that in order to not have me die on purpose when the boss was nearly down they just gave the kill. Since surviving on your last shot is much more exciting than needing to restart the fight
I wish games did this more often. It always feels bad for an enemy, especially a boss, to survive by 1HP and even worse when they then kill you. Especially as it's usually because of RNG that they happened to narrowly survived.
A fun mechanic to this effect is how in Gears of War, the last bullet in a magazine in SP deals more damage for this exact purpose. Functionally, it results in the player doing vulnerable reloads less often and works as a neat little hidden difficulty modifier.
I had a similar thrill when I first beat Artorias e DS1
I couldn't survive any two hits, was running dex pyro and did the maths: I had to boost my damage to the max and hit nearly every spell so I could maybe finish him
I was down to one estus and healed - he started to power up but I hesitated to rush in, it was all over... But then I remembered he would jump and that I don't need to live, only to kill him. I cast chaos firestorm as he leaps at me, we both die. It felt awesome.
It didn't save you though, the only reason you were bad off in the first place was that adaptive system.
It is like someone breaks into your house and steals everything but returns tomorrow with everything and returns it.
They aren't a hero, they are a thief.
@@Buglin_Burger7878 sounds more like drunk Florida Man ™
A good idea I had for adaptive difficulty is a recurring villain. If you beat him, he learns from what you did last time and your strategy doesn't work the next time. If he beat you, or you failed to beat him before he ran away or something, then next time, he hasn't learned from the previous encounter and more tactics will be available. The basic idea is if you win, he levels up... if he wins, you "level up." Maybe if you beat him enough times, he tags out and his superior steps in to up the ante.
The concept sounds really great and quite unique however from a technical point its very difficult as the strategies depends on the game type so if we were to have a movement game, it would be extremely difficult to account for every strategy
Reminds me of the Alien in Alien: Isolation: if you repeatedly use the same tactic or tool, such as using the flamethrower to scare it away, it will slowly become less scared by it, which at best results in you burning (literally) through more of your fuel to scare it in late-game encounters with it, and at worst resulting in your death and having to have another attempt. A great way of having adaptive difficulty within the game's difficulty settings.
There is actually a game fully based on that idea. It is named "Echo". I think what was not said in the video is that it depends on the game. It was said we had options, we talked a bit about what makes a good difficulty level, though even the "perfect" system won't suit every game.
I really hate immortal enemies chasing us all the time(like in metroid or resident evil) and I think that your idea would be great alternation to that system. Instead of enemy you can't beat that just force you to move and put a time pressure, it would be better(for me at least) if they were not chasing us all over the place, but be occuring event that we can beat, but it can come stronger like in your example.
I like to go with my own pace in each game and as I understand a chasing sequence, having an enemy on my back all the time when I am just simply exploring normal region is something I see more as punishment. Like examples in video where they punish you for choosing lower difficulty, here I feel punished for choosing my own pace and the game puts unnecessary pressure on me to change that.
What is great about your idea is that it would require from us a different apporach because of the enemy learning, though we would be able to overcome it, instead of having to deal with it all the time.
@@mr_sauce_cooksit could be really simple, for example if you use a certain weapon type a lot, it is much more quick to dodge or block it
@@trancandy1 that might do the trick but i was thinking about more of a complex behaviour like you use a weapon too much, it uses a defence that counter it
But it all genuinely comes to the game we're talking about
The "intended difficulty" option really needs more telegraphing sometimes. Say, in Hi-Fi RUSH, the difficulty that has demand for good timing but doesn't shoot the damage up is Hard, not Normal (which lets you through duels if you miss one or two prompts). But if you choose Hard on, say, Bayonetta, you're getting your ass kicked. Or even when the difficulty labeling changes, like the problem with original DMC3 where _all_ difficulties were made harder during localization.
It is improving at least on being transparent about it tho - HFR as mentioned above, while not saying it's the intended difficulty, does have Rhythm Timing, Enemy Health and Recieved Damage on the same screen you pick them on the first time.
I think Capcom have been thinking about this more with their recent RE titles (come a long way from the infamous "yellow or gold" in DMC3, huh?) I like how every difficulty option comes with a description that often gives a small suggestion on what type of skill level should be tackling said difficulty!
Gaming would be a lot better if "normal" actually meant "normal". As in, the difficulty the game was clearly designed around for a normal playthrough. Instead, it is often mindnumbingly easy to the point where a good chunk of games don't bother having an easy-difficulty.
@@lpfan4491 That ends up being because people get easily insulted if told to play on easy, but then they go on normal and it's too difficult for them. It's a vicious cycle of first impressions and I don't blame the devs for making Normal the true easy; but that's why distinctions like "enjoy the story and won't challenge your skills too much" end up helping more.
@@FaelumbreProject It is the larger evil tho imo, because it is straight up false information at that point.
It's like if I made hard easier than normal and easy harder because I felt like it and I don't care about what these words mean anyways.
@@FaelumbreProject Yet I've seen the opposite happen - I know players who'll nope out of a game if Easy isn't an option. (Admittedly, one of them is ten years old, but still)
Having the difficulty options start from "Normal" can actually be pretty intimidating to those unfamiliar and show that the game's trying to be harder than your standard fare.
I love how Terraria's Expert Mode actually gives enemies entirely new attack patterns
Games like that are the best. Destiny 2 changes behavior in the legendary modes for campaigns.
Terraria also has different seeds which can change the experience or make it more or less difficult.
Then Master mode adds onto the risk=reward rule, then there's *Legendary* which is only used on a single seed, set to Master mode, for the most intense experience you can possibly have in the base game-
@@damienearl8302aster mode doesn’t really add to the risk=reward, the only special item is the relics and I believe legendary mode is also technically in for the worthy
Expert Mode is the sweet spot difficulty of the game. The rewards outweigh the risks in the form of increased drop rates and the cool exclusive items from treasure bags. Master is just Expert on steroids and the boss statues don't really mean much.
@@damienearl8302 I was honestly a bit disappointed with Master mode. Expert mode did a lot to make the difficulty interesting, most notably having all the new patterns different enemies have, while Master just increased enemy damage and health. In my opinion, the Calamity mod had a fantastic approach to the increase in difficulty with Revengeance. It did a lot of the same techniques that expert did and gave you more gameplay altering rewards like beating a boss in expert does
Hey, can we talk about how certain games handle variety? Like how some games can give too many options for a player, and others are way too simple
metal gear solid v is a great example of having too much options
When you have lots of different systems but you can just ignore them because game is so easy
Skill trees are the ultimate form of too many options from me. I end up not making an informed choice and just picking whatever is cheapest because there are too many things
@@dabmasterars i think it is good in this case because all the options relate to the same genre of the game, so you can get creative with it. My issue is when a game is so diverse to the point of lacking focus. That is why I dont enjoy Banjo Tooie. Kazooie was very tight in its platforming, Tooie dilutes that with giant maps and a lot of minigames sprinkled that cover a lot of genres.
Too much gameplay variety is what prevent me from playing nier
It is not advertised up front, but "overleveling" in games like Pokemon and Darksouls is a decent way to decrease the difficulty. It in turn allows players to do things like level 1 runs and such. Maybe something the implements these fan made kinds of challenges right into the game would be fun (level caps you can turn on, for example)
Also Dark Souls gives many options for weapons and spells that trivialize the game. Most of the time the main thing that makes the original dark souls difficult is the obtuseness and obscurity of its mechanics.
I remember watching a DJ Peach Cobbler video where he talked about how he basically beat his head against a brick wall of difficulty because hardcore Dark Souls fans at told him it was extremely difficult game, so he assumed the absurd challenge he faced was part of the game rather than the game telling him to go the other direction lol
@@NotLordAsshat DJ Peach Cobbler is an underrated gem in the RUclips landscape. He's so absurd that it cracks me up with every video
To expand on the level cap idea, the Bravely Default series (Final Fantasy spiritual/side games) lets you turn off xp gains, for both Jobs and character levels (independently, too, iirc). I know at least one YT channel used that to beat the game with lv1 characters (and max Job levels tbf), to prove to people that those levels aren't that important for beating the game.
And is the root of the complaints about modern Pokemon games. The games level curve and xp yields haven't been rebalanced around the permanent exp multiplier from the party-wide exp share, so if you aren't actively avoiding fights (or rotating your team, barf) you end up overleveled without trying.
This is a really good method of difficulty management. It's heavily player-controlled and doesn't change the fundamental mechanics of fights either.
I personally always like The World Ends with You's difficulty slider. Because you could basically set it at any time, try out a few random battles, and adjust it some more, it was easy to find that sweet spot instead of being locked into it for a whole stage. Dangling rare item drop rates/ unlocking certain rare items tied to difficulty level was a good incentive (which I hadnt seen previously).
Hardest difficulty I cleared was Lunatic + on Fire Emblem Awakening in Classic mode with all my characters alive at the end (without looking at any guides or external help). Never again... but it did end up meaning I created some really unique strats that I never used in any Fire Emblem game before or since.
I genuinely despise replaying awakening because of its difficulty options. Normal and hard are way too easy, but early game lunatic and like the walhart chapter exactly are the only hard parts of lunatic and everything else is still very easy in comparison. Lunatic + adding a bunch of resets didn't help that imo
Same re. TWEWY's difficulty, it helped that you also had the four standard difficulty modes, then the slider to decrease your level (and how much HP you had). Then it balanced out by being able to eat foods to increase stats so you could theoretically put the game on ultimate difficulty, reduce your level down to 1, but load up on attack and be a glass cannon
Just commenting here to support a TWEWY comment. Absolutely my favorite game ever.
I lived how TWEWY did difficulty. Being able to level down to increase your drop rate felt scary at first but as you got better and got better stats and pins you could even beat bosses at a low level and get their rare pin.
My personal favorite is the Rain World slugcats. Rain world is a speculative evolution survival game set in the far future, with you playing as a Slugcat, which, as its name suggests, plays a catlike role in the ecosystem. You start with the Survivor (classic rain world experience) and the Monk (herbivorous slugcat that needs less food and gets a bit of better PR from scavs). Instead of being dead-up weaker, the harder difficulties pose you in harder ecological niches. For example, the Spearmaster, one of the hardest slugcats, is purely carnivorous and plays a sort of hunting role. The creature lack a mouth and instead feeds by tubes attached to the spears it grows from its tail, so it’s forced to hunt the biggest of baddies daily to continue living. All of the slugcats also provide different perspectives, snippets of one collective lore across all the slugcats.
Interestingly, the generally easier option of Monk can actually be more punishing to the player and more difficult option of Hunter rewarding the player. Sure, as Monk it's easier to tame creatures or to survive in general, but you do (on average) 0.66 damage (not even enough to kill a pole plant with one hit) with spears, compared to Survivor's 1 and Hunter's 1.25, as well as a lung capacity of 1.2 (0.83x standard, higher values = less capacity), meaning you can't swim as long (assuming you don't use the Remix modifier that makes that number 0.8).
@@StiathirsYes, but that’s what makes it interesting. It’s both a different experience for seasoned players and a lowered difficulty for newbies.
I remember once celebrating a friend's birthday and we all took turns trying to defeat ghosts and goblins. We only made it past the first level. But it felt so satisfying even getting that far. But yeah......after that it got too difficult
I never got passed stage 1 in that game on EASY MODE and the SUPER version on the SNES could NOT beat ITS first stage on EASY MODE EITHER.
Oh... and remember that, at the end, it makes you play the entire game again with a specific weapon to unlock a 10 second long ending. Even with save states in an emulator that game is brutal.
A fair few games like Ghosts'n'Goblins are ports of arcade titles and those are MEANT to be unfairly hard so you'll dump quarters into them.
@Donhimesama Daifutari Uhm...Gengetsu *what* now?
@Donhimesama Daifutari I get why you're upset, but the part that caught me off guard was the name itself- (hence, Gengetsu *what* Time?)
Bethesda games tend to have a really... *blunt* way to adjust difficulty. They make enemies harder to kill and deal more damage. But really this only effectively changes how long you fight and how many healing items you have to carry around.
Luckily you can just mod a simple universal damage multiplier. So instead of the enemies taking 1/5th damage on legendary, everyone can take the full 5x. Or just keep enemy health unmodified I guess, my preference is influenced by using other mods at the same time.
It's cheap and lazy but I'm ok with it because they require basically no time or money to develop/impliment. So it's just a player option th at they can ignore if they like, or tweak if they think it's not set right to begin with. I know a few games where I just feel like I plow through all the enemies effortlessly, often killing them before they make a single attack, and wish I could make them a LITTLE bit tougher so that I'd actually have to worry about them attacking to provide SOME challenge.
Vanilla FO4 comes to mind. The bullet sponge motif gets on my nerves. When you face an enemy on the hardest difficulty and their health drops by the smallest of fractions, it gets annoying fast. It's one reason why I'm not fond of FPS games as of late. The whole idea with some of them is just increase enemy health, lower weapon damage, and the developers don't add any new mechanics into the game. It just feels so stale.
I’m glad bug fables got the shout, it’s difficulty system is pristine, those rewards are actually incredibly rewarding
I played through bug fables twice,
and hard mode let me experience it again with difficulty as if i was going in blind again!
Cant help but disagree, the difficulty curve in Bug Fables is entirely messed up
I can see someone complaining about certain bosses difficulty (fucking Devourer) but frankly I felt hardmode was handled really well balance wise
Granted I didn’t really play the base difficulty so maybe I can’t tell how much of a jump of difficulty it is from one to another, I just know hardmode felt rather fair at most all times (fuck you devourer)
@@TopCurls Not sure how it is in hard mode but basically
Normal mode is really easy, and I never had to strategize and do cool badge combos because I could sort of bruteforce my way through everything without any trouble, so I did because I mainly.played it as a spiritual successor to Paper Mario
However, the tank (and I imagine the final boss especially) is a massive difficulty leap and suddenly I couldnt get past it, leaving me to choose between going back, looking up/coming up with badge strategies, actually collecting them etc just to finish the game or just dropping it
In cuphead, I would think it would be cool if you were able to beat the game with only simple mode. However, after the devil fight, instead of winning the game, the devil is barely even scratched and the devil takes your soul by force (getting the bad ending) because you were too weak.
In theory that’s cool, but I spy 2 main problems
1. Unless explicitly told, it may be hard for players to understand the difficulty is what’s screwing them over, and may try to do something else (for instance, buying everything)
2. It can be discouraging to work and beat the devil and then be told “you wanted an easier time? Fck you bad ending!”
Find a way to squash those problems and it’d be a great idea
Personally I actually love the fact that the simple mode has a drawback. I got so frustrated while playing cuphead that I would have never put the work in to complete it if I could have just chickened out and picked simple. In that way, the game's systems helped with my lack of self control.
In other words, normally I would have picked the easier difficulty but I loved the game so much that I persevered in order to get the most out of the game.
I personally really liked the way Star Wars Fallen Order handled difficulty settings, since it didn't touch enemy health, but just the damage they deal, their aggressiveness and the precision required for timing blocks. I love difficult games, but when the higher difficulty settings makes enemies tankier, it just feels tedious rather than properly increasing the challenge.
Reminds me of a diablo game, I don't remember which one that gave bonus XP on higher difficulties so the game wasn't actually harder but just took longer since enemies had more health but still didn't do enough damage to hurt the player.
I feel like RPG's are a lot harder to balance, especially if they give you a lot of party members to choose from. It's hard for me to think of ways to hit that goldilocks zone with set stats and numerous unit combinations.
I think it comes down to 2 things:
First: Strategy. Can you immediately switch units? How much do you get from it?(like pokemon with type advantages nearly trivializing all fights with the right pokemon you can conveniently catch near the gym)
Second: exp. Most RPGs get easier with level ups and depending on how easy you get these, the game becomes easier the longer you take(assuming the game let's you keep all the exp when you die). I currently struggle with triangle strategy, but I can just retry the fight because the strong enemies give dozens of exp and I can keep them,so my 30min attempt was not worthless and brings me closer to beat the game
Valkyrie Profile do this very poorly. Hard is actually easier than easy, or to be precise, you can enhance your characters better in hard than easy since at hard everyone starts at level 1.
And you need to play hard + follow exact guidelines for true ending
@@MrNovascar Still in my first playthrough, and man Triangle Strategy's hard mode is brutal. I wouldn't even consider sticking with it if getting a game over forfeited the exp.
Games with a lot of party member options also end up with OP characters and Useless characters... Or when you know one of them will die and you don't get a replacement (eg Aerith from FF7 who is just gone vs Galuf from FF5 who is replaced by his granddaughter who keeps all his stats, exp & abilities)
And then there's my favourite difficulty slider, Pokemon. It tried it once, with the Key System in B2W2.
Aside from (most) bosses for Challenge Mode, the game only adjusts the *levels* of the Pokemon you fight. Pokemon has a complicated internal system of base stats, IVs and EVs. Somehow- I have absolutely no idea how- changing the levels *does not actually change the base stats of your opponents*.
Easy Mode drops the levels of Iris's level 59 Haxorus, but internally, it has the same stats- while your Pokemon's level *is* a factor in damage calculations, it only really counts at 4 levels out of 10 (0, 3, 5 and 8 levels). Thankfully, the game was merciful and reward EXP scaled to the original levels.
Challenge Mode gives you EXP scaled to the Pokemon's *new* levels, even if the stats haven't changed. The difficulty modes also boast the appropriate AI tweaks, although I'm not sure what form these take.
For Hades, I might even add the option to buy rare materials like Titan Blood and Diamonds in the last world: if you hoard a bunch of money that you'd otherwise use on buffs, healing, or upgrades, and make it near the end, you can buy a resource. So even if you're having trouble turning up the heat, there's another type of challenge you can pursue to get stronger instead
But it’s rng to get the material you want from the Styx temple shop.
@@birdg4if you dont get what you want, you can still trade items at the Broker
I also think it is also important the other way around. That you are able to tone down a game to prevent it from getting frustrating. For me I loved that Control and Dead Cells let me make it easier with a lot of granularity, as I simply don't have the time to play until I get better. I adjusted some settings, until it was still challenging but not frustrating. I really appreciate that.
It's the same for Don't Starve for me. I can't stand things like the random wildfires in Summer or the frog rains of Spring, so having the option to simply turn them off is an absolute blessing for me.
@@arogustus3984 quick tip in case you dont know, you can make a thing called an "ice-fling-o-matic" that automatically puts out fires when its turned on if you want to give wildfires being on a shot at some point. Of course you could already know this and just hate wildfires but better safe than sorry, right?
@@dinoaurus1 I know about it, yeah, but than I'd have to build my bases with the thing in mind. Turning off wildfires is mostly for the sake of giving myself freedom to design how I want.
I remember one version of _Cave Story_ having a difficulty mode, with "Hard" removing all the Life Capsules from the game, trapping you permanently at 3HP and forcing you to play the game as a no-hit run. HOWEVER, due to the structure of the game's weapon XP system, this also meant your weapons were permanently at maximum power level, too!
As someone who strives to be a game designer this channel is the absolute best
Same
Agreed he's the best
Give Masahiro Sakurai's channel a look as well.
@@HenshinFanatic it's also really cool
Richard Terrell at Critical-Gaming and Design Oriented would take this guy to school and make him look like he's never even heard of a video game. There's not another human being alive who has put as much time and effort studying game design, and who has as thorough and _objective_ an understanding of its principals as he does.
Actually extremely refreshing to see a difficulty video that doesn't spend half its runtime on only dark souls. I think the games are amazing and they handle difficulty well but different. They're good examples for built in difficulty solutions but I really enjoyed seeing other varied examples of this sort of difficulty!! Great video
Oh wow, I didn't realize there was a team of brothers behind this channel! I always wondered why the narrator referred to himself as "we"
I believe that Terraria has a both an excellent example of a higher difficulty and a terrible one in its Expert mode and Master modes respectively.
In Expert mode, the game adds in new attacks and AI changes to all the preexisting enemies in addition to increasing their hit points and damage. Even without the longer and less forgiving fights brought about with the stat increase, however, the difficulty provides the player with additional difficulty that feels natural and well-designed, as the AI changes provide new avenues through which you can explore the game -- you have new attacks to learn instead of needing to simply be better at the game's Classic difficulty. In addition, the difficulty provides you with incentives to play on this higher difficulty by making all bosses drop one new unique item. Many of these items are so helpful that they completely change how you play the game, like the Shield of Cthulhu's ram dash allowing you to dodge some boss' charge attacks simply by ramming into them at the right time or the Demon Heart expanding the amount of accessories you can equip at once. The higher difficulty provides the player with new content, both through how it buffs the enemies and the unique items it grants the player.
On the other hand, Master Mode is literally only a stat increase. While this worked in Expert because bosses had new attacks to learn in addition to the stats, so longer and less forgiving fights could still be fun because they allowed the boss to show off these new AI changes properly, Master does no such thing. The stat changes only make it so you're fighting a less balanced version of Expert mode, not necessarily more difficult because the enemies are harder to dodge but moreso because you just need to be better at those fights for longer. Even worse, Master doesn't provide many item incentives to choose it over Expert or Classic -- bosses will drop new fancy trophies and cute cosmetic-only pets, which despite looking cool are completely useless in-game. Instead of adding in any new creative or fun items, the developers just add on an extra accessory slot to your character -- and because the bosses aren't any more complicated, this extra slot that lets you add on an additional character-buffing accessory sometimes results in those bosses being actually *easier* than in Expert mode despite the higher stats! When a difficulty mode is making certain parts of your game easier than on difficulties beneath it, you've definitely done something wrong.
There is benefit to this approuch. First of all it's easier to make, the alternative would probably be that the master mode didn't exist rather than the mode being better. But having the highest difficulty be more about reward in the challenge itself and not the rewards themselves let you set the difficulty where you want without making the majority of the players feel like they're missing out on something.
I feel like both master mode _and_ expert mode both trivialize parts of the game. While master mode adds a new accessory slot to the player, expert mode goes a step farther by not only adding another accessory slot to the player, but also adding equipment which can trivialize entire parts of the game by existing, such as the soaring insignia, for a singular example. On classic mode, The only infinite flight you have is the UFO. With the soaring insignia or the Shrimpy Truffle, you no longer have to farm through events to get any infinite flight. If you get the Shrimpy Truffle early on in hard mode, that can further trivialize the rest of hard mode as you no longer have to build actual arenas to fight any of the bosses (except for Plantera). Other buffs given to the player in expert mode include enemies dropping more items, NPCs doing extra damage, the travelling merchant having a chance to sell an extra item, increased item drops for enemies, pots, fishing quests, Hard mode Dungeon enemies, buffed defense and banners, and more.
While master mode still can be easier than expert mode at times, expert mode can still be easier then normal mode as well, and is still easier than master mode most of the time. Then, if you create a master mode world with the getfixedboi/fortheworthy seed, it becomes legendary mode, which is definitely harder all around compared to expert mode.
@@orangetabby7122 wdym you dont have infinite flight theres the cosmic car key
@@ss3nm0dn4r8 completely forgot about that, I almost never do martian madness lol
however my point about being able to skip most of hardmode still stands, as martian madness can only be triggered after golem while you can fight duke fishron whenever (if you're good enough at the game) and the witch's broom can be obtained during the pumpkin moon which is around the same progression point as martian madness, I'm going to edit my comment to reflect this
@@orangetabby7122 yeah even with golems major buffs its still easier than plantera so the pumpkin moon and martian madness are unlocked back to back duke fishron has by far the best mount if you make an arena with water
I usually don't like it when difficulty settings amount to changes in numbers. More enemy health, more enemy damage; that sort of thing. Fundamental gameplay remains the same, it's just slower and less forgiving.
But there are exceptions to that. MGR:R did a great job, I think, by increasing EVERYONE'S damage, including yours. If you're good at the game, you burn through enemies. But if you slip up and get hit, you're pretty much dead.
What I usually prefer though is when something about the WAY you play changes. Requires you to THINK more, play better, and adapt to emergent situations, without making the game less fun.
Revengeance mode is not the hardest difficulties in MGR, everything died in second it's pretty easy to just restart and try again. It's a fun mode somewhat like Heaven orHell in DMC but more thoughtful. The best difficulties adjustment in MGR is going from Raiden to Sam DLC, a lot of thing you do with Raiden did not work for the same enemies in Sam DLC.
Heaven and hell mode from devil may cry 3 my beloved. You kill everything in one hit and everything kills you in one hit. It's dumb but oneshotting tough enemies with a single bullet is kinda fun.
Changing numbers will change gameplay if it requires you to play differently as you don't get away with as much. Fallout 4 survival difficulty made everything quite different despite me modding in two quality of life improvements like being able to save in beds without sleeping in them and the ability to travel between settlements by building vehicles and paying fuel for travelling. When you die easily and deaths aren't as cheap anymore you have to change up how you play.
(Bad) Example: minecraft, litterally just changed a few damage and loot numbers, most players don’t even notice!
The existence of Celeste and Crypt of the NecroDancer. I usually try to 100% every game, and it’s really nice that I proceeded to choose like 5 games that are the hardest to complete
i wish you could put the title of the game each time they are shown in your vids....
Something to watch out for with adaptive difficulty, is how you're judging how well a player is doing, and how you change the difficulty to accommodate them.
Some examples in roguelikes:
-In ADOM, monsters get stronger the more of a single type you kill, this system led to some enemies that would come at you in swarms have the potential to get incredibly powerful if you weren't careful, making normally weak monsters kill you in a few hits and there wasn't much warning about them becoming stronger.
-In IVAN, you can get polymorphed into a very strong form, which can make the game spawn very strong enemies which you will be unable to defeat when your polymorph runs out of time. In a guide I've also seen someone recommend not boosting your HP too high because you'll make the game spawn too difficult enemies.
Valkyrie Profile staight up says when turning it on "To see the true ending, you need to beat the game in hard mode".
A good way to scare off some players if nothing else lol
If a game clearly communicates this, I have less of a problem. I still don't like them gating off content, but at least they communicate the player at a time where they have not gotten emotionally invested, wasted time, and they can still refund the game.
@@dondashall I personally think gating an ending behind a difficulty is just something that should never be done. I guess I do agree that if the game is directly advertising itself as a hardcore experience that's one thing, but for the most part, difficulties are there so players of all skill levels can experience the main story at the very least. Hiding challenges or post-game stuff behind harder difficulties is fine, but not the main experience.
@@SuspiciousScout I agree, I just meant as a less bad, but still terribly thing. Both are still bad. Even Gucamelee! 1 & 2 which skill-gates the true endings behind challenges (in both I just barely didn't make it) annoyed me and those endings just amounted to slightly different flavour text to mostly the same ending images, I still would have liked to see it myself.
My philosophy with difficulty options like those in recent Metroid games is that, if you can simulate it yourself (less hp, no hit runs) then it's worthless to have as an option
Not necessarily, since by doing so you can add rewards for doing it. Plus it will help ripple since then you can determine if it’s reasonable, and can sort of “train line” the challenge, since anyone wanting extra difficulty can simply simulate it further through that already made difficulty
Oooh! Yes! Something i have thoughts on! Writing this before watching the video but ive come up with alternate words for Easy Medium Hard - being Casual/Relaxed, Intended, and Challenging, becahse it better represents the desires of the players without attaching a stigma to their decision. If they just want a casual or relaxed experience, go for it. This is how the game designer Intended the game to be played, but you're the player, you're in control. Likewise, if you want a more Challenging experience, this isnt what the developer intended, but it should give you that expert level satisfaction.
Secondly, if youre dealing with lets say a JRPG style combat system, Relaxed means you deal more damage and take less damage (so that its mlre forgiving of failure), whereas Challenging means you deal about the same amount of damage as intended, but you take way more damage (so that the stakes are higher, and you have to play perfectly, whilst avoiding bullet sponges)
I tried replaying kid icarus uprising recently because it used to be one of my childhood favorites, but I legitimately have no idea how left-handed kid me managed to beat even _some_ of the levels on 9.0 difficulty. The control scheme is outright hostile to us southpaws. Wish this game could get a remake already, it's in dire need of one.
I'm also left handed... but I never even tried 9.0.
Kirby Return to Dreamland has Extra Mode, unlocked after collecting enough of the games main macguffins. Half max health, EX version of all the mini and major bosses with both expanded and new attacks.....and one boss even get an entirely second form unique only to Extra Mode. Not only did it provide the challenge I desperately needed, it was also cool as hell seeing attacks be made more threatening.
Another Shinji Mikami game that utilizes adaptive difficulty like RE4 is God Hand. God Hand does also have your standard initial difficulty setting of easy, normal and hard (with hard only unlocking once you beat the game on normal) but once you're playing the game there's a dynamic difficulty system that changes based on your performance AND it's part of the UI of the game itself.
When playing God Hand, you'll see a skeleton face in the bottom right corner, with a meter or a bar curving upwards around it. This meter will fill up or decreases as you either hit, dodge and defeat enemies or get hit/defeated yourself. This system starts out at Level 1 and caps out at level DIE (yes that is what it's called) with levels 2 and 3 inbetween (maybe there's a 4 as well i don't quite remember). Not only does this self adjusting difficulty ramp up the challenge if you're styling too hard, but it will also naturally get easier as you get your ass handed to you untill it reaches the appropriate level for you much like RE4 as mentioned in this video. These increases in level don't just increase the damage enemies deal though, it also changes the frequency with which they block/dodge your attacks but also how aggressive they are both on and off screen. Which means at lower levels you might not have to worry about getting jumped from off camera, but at higher levels you might and therefore have to be aware of and pay attention to and keep track of every enemy, not just the one in front of you. Increases in difficulty also ups the chance that a demon will spawn when you defeat an enemy, which are really challenging pseudo boss enemies. These demons also have different strengths, appearances and moves depending on what the level was at when they spawned.
To offset all of this, at least partially, the game gives you the ability to enter the God Hand state in which you're completly invincible, all your moves are unblockable and you attack a lot faster. This state is temporary and can only be activated when your TP meter reaches certain thresholds. This state is obviously very desirable and as such if you want more TP you can taunt enemies which comes with the built in risk/reward of giving you some amount of TP but making the enemy you taunted angry at you (their face turns bright red) which temporarily makes them hit much harder.
God Hand even goes a step further when it comes to difficulty management, as you have special moves that utilize a limited resource (most of which deal huge amounts of damage to help you clear rooms or severely damage bosses) and one of these special moves is called "Grovel" which does what it says on the tin and has the main character grovel at the feet of his enemies. This might just seem like a silly comical addition but it actually serves the purpose of resetting your adaptable difficulty back down to level 1. Given you're willing to face the shame/embarrassment of groveling.
All in all, while God Hand is still a fairly difficult game, i really love how it at least tries to (and in my opinion mostly succeeds) at handling an in-game adaptive difficulty system.
Side note: If you pick up health items in God Hand while you're at full hp you get money (which you can spend to buy moves or upgrade your health etc) and this is such a small mechanic but i wish almost every game did this. It's feels amazing to at least get something out of a resource that would otherwise just to go waste and it serves to work as an incentive to play better as well.
That's true!
My favorite difficulty system was God Hand's dynamic scaling. It was an absolute rush to watch the meter rise and level up on the fly, but you could also beg for mercy to lower it in the middle of combat.
Hades is the gold standard of difficulty, you can make it harder but never get locked out of content, unlike Cuphead.
The dotted line boxes in Super Mario World act like difficulty settings for some platform sections. You probably could make a jump, but with the green dotted box filled it is easier.
In a way I agree especially when there was a time the only Switch Palaces I was able to go through are Yellow and Red I think.
But the problem there is that it isn't presented in a way that the players properly recognize. When you play the game, you are compelled to do everything, to beat all the levels and find all the secrets. The dotted line boxes feel more like a punishment because you failed to find this bonus.
@@marscaleb Isn't another point of view is that the dotted blocks aren't necessary and unlocking the Switches are bonuses here?
@@zjzr08 But that's the point of the problem I'm addressing. Unlocking the switches "are necessary" in the player's mind. But the end result of meeting the challenge the game presented you is that you have made the game easier.
@@marscaleb It depends, because if your goal is to just get to beat Bowser, then the Switches aren't necessary; if you are to complete, then they are necessary.
Shoutout to the indie Gunvolt series using items to alter the diffuculty drastically. You start off with only the basics, being a dodge (prevasion) and a simple auto firing dart gun. You can outright turn the dodge off straight away for a challenge, and as you play the game you get equips that either make abilities like that better, add extra jumps, and more to help you in the story, as well as items that do things like cut down health for score boosts- and if you wanna compare the game to Mega Man Zero (its far more unique than that), you can indeed use an item to make spikes instant kill for a massive score bonus, making the challenges reward you immensely.
For me, the GoldenEye & Perfect Dark difficulty modes are the best implemented. Not only does the game get harder, but it changes the same level up in ways that encourages players to play through the game on every difficulty. Add to that the unlockable rewards for doing so and you have a great system that allows you to start on easy and just get better at the game. Once mastered, you then have the bonus difficulty mode so you can create your own LTK/DLTK challenge. It's really surprising we didn't see more of that style of difficulty in other games, as only a handful bothered to copy it.
And on top of being able to add you your own difficulty options, you could also earn cheats, and really customize it to be whatever you want. I think so many modern shooter campaigns would have so much more replay value if you could just pick whatever guns you wanted to use after you beat it. It wouldn't be hard to do!
I'm surprised you didn't mention The World Ends with You during the "challenged slider" section- one of my favourites, it lets you challenge at your comfortable difficulty level but at higher levels, rare item drop rate is higher and some equipment are only available at higher difficulty modes.
TWEWY shoutout!! Hell yes!
You can also choose how much enemies to chain right?
TWEWY is a master when it comes to difficulty balance. You have many enemies in the bestiary that have different item drops and shows the base drop rates per difficulty option that can be changed at any time before battle, along with being able to lower YOUR level to increase the drop rate. You can also choose how many fights to take on at once by chaining them, which will MULTIPLY your drop rate, leading you to be able to make a 1% drop into a 75+% if you chain and lower your level enough. Heck, there's even an AFK experience for leveling your pins, which can have them evolve in different ways.
TWEWY is amazing, and NEO: TWEWY is pretty great too.
13:12 I think the simple mode is supposed to be a practice mode, where you can see certain parts of the boss and train on an easier level to prepare for the full thing.
I think that's fine, but if so, it needs to be sign posted better that it's a practice mode, not simply an easier difficulty.
Sure, it can be used as a practice mode, but since it removes phases of the bossfight, you essentially can't practice those parts. To make this system work, you should be able to play the full bossfight, and the setting should be renamed to "Practice" to clear up confusion as to why it doesn't count the fight as complete.
@@the_vine_queenthen it would be the exact same as the regular mode
Ocarina of Time's Master Quest is a good example, remixing everything. I'd love to see more games get something like that. One problem I have with the Banjo-Kazooie games is that after the first playthrough, it's too easy. I did a run without collecting any health upgrades and it was fun, but there aren't many more ways to make the game challenging. If it had a Master Quest mode, it would be amazing.
It feels so incredible that just a few hours ago I was replaying through "Crash Bandicoot 2: Cortex Strikes Back" on the PS1 for the first time in... 15 years? And I was so surprised when I realised for the first time ever that during some tough secret gem levels that in addition to a system that rewards you with a free "mask" (aka a power up that protects you from one hit) on respawn if you die a few too many time on the same level, *the game spawns additional checkpoints in the middle of the level* if you die even more times inside of it. The idea of discovering something like that after so many years already felt like a neat happenstance, and shortly after a Design Doc video about difficulty options is released? Magic!
Wake up babe new design doc vid just dropped
wait wha huh wha what’s going o-OH MY GOSH HOLY COW YOUR RIGHT!!!
Hollow Knight’s version of a difficulty option is how much punishment the player is willing to go through for lore
While Hades gives some lore by using certain Heat options, prior SuperGiant Games more explicitly provide additional lore for using their predecessors to the Heat system.
A really interesting balancing act in stylish action games is how oftentimes many strategies to more smoothly get through hard fights will incentivize the player to get better at the game and possibly, counterintuitively, do something more risky and stylish. It's not just about the brilliant idea of ranking systems rewarding players for using more mechanics, avoiding damage and being fast at killing enemies - although that is a very blatant part of it. There also are frequently fights that say, "Yeah, you COULD do this in the same way you've been fighting everyone else, but if you get out of your comfort zone and try more advanced mechanics, the reward will be immediate and noticeable because it will also make the fight easier."
To use an example, Agni and Rudra do this MULTIPLE times across MULTIPLE difficulties which is part of why their fight is so neat.
In general, to calm down, pay attention to timing because if a player has been mashing through the game up until this point, that simply won't work against the brothers - they'll push you away if you attack into their blocks, attack you from behind, and hit you with attacks that require at least a basic knowledge of your defensive options in order to avoid. And of course there is the aspect where if you take one out too early without weakening the other first, he'll pick up his brother's sword and become way stronger. It's not a hard fight if you know what you're doing, but that's the key - you need to know what you're doing. The brothers telegraph their attacks like crazy and aren't particularly aggressive even on high difficulties, but if a player is being careless then they CAN get their ass kicked.
On Normal difficulty, they likely will test the player into getting more comfortable with parrying. The only other Devil Arm you'll have at that point is the multi-hitting Cerberus, which is good for parrying. And if you parry one of Agni or Rudra's attacks - something that might happen accidentally - the demon will drop his weapon and be wide open for attacks for a LONG time. They'll also learn about elemental weaknesses if they didn't notice by now, since it is apparent, crystal clear, that Agni takes extra damage from Cerberus. You might even learn how to manipulate them into attacking into each other and getting both to drop their swords at the same time which is a more skillful move to make but also really funny and satisfying.
On Hard, you likely will be able to realize how good Royal Guard is against Agni and Rudra since in particular their jump attacks are pretty easy to perfect guard and if you take advantage of jump i-frames, you won't be punished for screwing up. This CAN be something that is taught on Normal mode but most likely a first time player will be using Trickster or Swordmaster and won't have Royal Guard leveled up to have air block.
On Very Hard, the brothers' larger health bars and damage will probably make a player realize that they really would like a reliable way to damage both of them at the same time to avoid a long dual-wielding phase... And thus, be rewarded if they get a taste of DTE, before it becomes a necessary mechanic for their DMD run.
And watching someone doing no damage dmd boss with styles is really satisfying. Really shows the full utilization of game's mechanic instead of cheesing it with one or two attack patterns only
Of the games I've played that are represented in this video, Bug Fables, Hades and Kid Icarus: Uprising are the games where I most enjoyed their take on difficulty.
To start, I enjoy how Bug Fables feels clearly balanced with its hard mode in mind, around the assumption that the player who takes on this challenge will likely be open to engage with all the mechanics and systems the game offers to explore the depth of its combat. And when you do, it rewards you by further expanding its depth. When a game is balanced around a lower difficulty or has to assume many of its players will simply refuse to engage with more involved mechanics, strategic depth tends to erode and higher difficulties will often just be tedious instead of more challenging in a fun way.
Hades's Pact of Punishment is a little too hardcore for my skill level and/or playstyle, but I do think it's a very good idea. Customiseable increases in challenge to counterbalance increased reward are a great way to suit various skill levels and invite players to push past their comfort zone. I just think the extensive list of options is pretty daunting and a lot of the choices seem really severe at first at each step. I beat a full Extreme Measures run once (somehow, barely) and I'm satisfied there. That's probably the worst I can handle and even then I kinda think I just got lucky.
Uprising does kind of the same thing as Hades, in a way, but it simplifies the way difficulty is adjusted while adding tension via an initial cost. It's not as elaborate as Hades's Pact of Punishment, but it's much more approachable and is IMO the ideal way to create customiseable difficulty when it's based primarily on changing stats. As the intensity rises, enemies deal more damage, take more damage and most notably will move and attack faster. While what is effectively 100 difficulty levels appears excessive, I like that, as a result, you can adjust the level of challenge either by small or large steps as you prefer. You can pretty easily find your own sweet spot and then ramp up at whatever pace suits you best if you want to seek out challenge.
Uprising also adds special doors that can only be unlocked if you're on a high enough Intensity, which really made me want to go back and play the stages on a higher intensity in order to open those doors and get the sweet loot within.
I really appreciated how mila's turnwheel in fire emblem echoes (and similar mechanics in later fe games) works to create a kind of middle ground between the classic permadeath mode and casual mode. I like the challenge of classic mode, but I don't always want to have to restart an entire chapter just because a character died from unexpected reinforcements or something, so the ability to rewind a few turns is a great tool to have
I totally agree with you, though it is no excuse for the developers to place 4 wyvern lord same turn reinforcements with silver axes on a desert map just because the player can reset turns.
Turnwheel should be used to mitigate unfair situations like bad timed misses or remediate a turn. Not to allow the developers to place ambush spawns
fire emblem should be designed around assuming the player will never reset, and fire emblem fan analysis should also not take resetting into the equation. treating save scumming like it's an intended feature of the game grandfathers in and normalizes a lot of terrible practices and shitty game design.
@@ryangallagher9723 While I agree that turnwheel mechanics shouldn't be used as an excuse for poor game design, I think there's a big difference between individual/personal experiences with the games vs broader analysis. Just because some players don't ever want to undo mistakes doesn't make that the only way to play the game. There will always be times where a unit dies and some players may want to go back to fix their mistake, and those players will certainly appreciate mechanics that make it less of a punishment to do so. Players who don't like those mechanics aren't forced to use them.
Though I’ve only ever played on Standard, the Kingdom Hearts series will make certain postgame content harder to unlock on easier difficulties, with the only requirement on the hardest difficulty being to beat the main story.
Only the secret movies afaik. The more interesting tidbit to mention is that Critical (hardest difficulty but isn't available in every game) usually also increases your damage output and gives you extra abilities and ap right at the start of the game.
It also doubles the damage you take *and* halves your max hp. So uh, good luck.
KH2 on crit is peak gaming.
I have a soft spot for adaptive difficulty in multiplayer games. The most recent update to Sea of Thieves just implemented this. World events in the game now increase or lower the difficulty based on how many players are present, offering a fair challenge to whomever is nearby. Gone are the days when only an experienced solo slooper could take on something like the Ashen Winds, locking out newer solo players from experiencing the full game.
Games with difficulty options like "easy / medium / hard" doesn't really say anything. Using creative names like "baby / tough / hell" isn't giving much help either. Worse is when I can't change the difficulty mid-game and have to start all over.
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@@Blanktester685 late reply but you havent played a game if you havent started it yet so you dont know the difficulty
I was kind of hoping you would mention how Silent Hill allows for difficulty levels for combat AND puzzles as separate options. It's a really cool way to customize the two different main aspects of survival horror.
Would’ve liked for you to have included trophies/achievements in their own section as often times they add specific challenges and requirements that ramp up the difficulty of games. The reward is not only accomplishment, but branching out with different playstyles allowing you to engage with the game in new and exciting ways
He did talk about self-imposed challenges. There's no real difference between coming up with your own objectives, following a set of ironman rules from the community, and following the description text to get an extra cheevo. It's all the same principle of a self-imposed challenge, it just changes who is presenting you with the rule-set.
@@DeliberateZero There is one difference: the effort required on your part to come up with the objectives.
I enjoy optional difficulty increases in games (skulls of Halo, Rampage Inducer in BOCW Zombies, Adventure mode in Minecraft, etc.)
I only wish devs were more transparent about the "intended difficulty" difficulty, it's confusing when normal mode is basically just an extra easy mode. A case in point would be Halo where Heroic is considered as the intended difficulty. Another example is Iconoclast, I played the game on normal, but I had to start a new playthrough because the game was too easy and too forgiving, hard mode was basically the more balanced and challenging difficulty. Another similar experience I had was with the game "Phoenotopia awakening", seemingly the devs added "difficulty options" because people complained about it being too hard, I ended up choosing the normal difficulty, but then realized they labeled the "intended difficulty" as the hardest one, in this case was worst because the easier "difficulty options" straight removed mechanics from the game.
Problem is, some will disagree with what difficulty should have been "intended" anyway. I know one reviewer who hates that Infernax actually labels Classic Mode "Intended Difficulty" because it's not harder in an interesting way but just more tedious with the loss of progress that won't be as fun for newcomers as Casual Mode. Or like, "Why did you even make multiple difficulties if you didn't intend for all of them to be played?"
@@BagOfMagicFood Isnt Infernax supposed to be inspired/a homage to NES games such as Castlevania? So it makes sense Classic mode is the intended difficulty. Also, usually those games with Loss of progress are about mastering the journey from point A to point B, I havent played any classic NES game and enjoyed the intended difficulty.
As for, "Why did you even make multiple difficulties if you didn't intend for all of them to be played?", difficulties are usually about making your game sell as many copies as possible. Also, one could say "Why did they make such a complex and deep gameplay if players will barely take advantage of it on easy mode"
Well, it was his opinion that just because you're copying an old game style doesn't mean you have to bring back all the unnecessary frustrations of that era.
@BagOfMagicFood it's often very clear which level is the intended difficulty based on how well the game flows. Its clear which version of the game enemies were tested on and which versions were afterthoughts.
@@percyblakeney5283 Is that like how someone supposedly deduced that most of Super Castlevania 4 wasn't designed to have the directional whip control?
Another thing about Hades' difficulty tweakablity is the optional God Mode, which, against the assumptions you might make based of of the name, doesn't make you invincible, but instead adds an adaptive difficulty function that increases your base damage resistance by 5% every time you die, maxing out at 80% Base DR. Gradually increasing your survivability without ever making you actually immune to damage, (as further increases to DR% gained during runs shaves off that remaining 20%, rather than adding to the 80%) Personally, I waited to turn it on until after my first successful run, to act as a sort of reward, Zagreus "earning" his Godhood. But having it available from the start lets people choose it if and when they want to alter their gameplay experience, if it will increase enjoyment for them.
CrossCode is one that did difficulty options great, I'd say.
On starting a playthrough, you do not have to choose a difficulty. Instead, the game tells you it was intended to be hard, and makes you aware of the Assist Mode.
Assist Mode consists of three sliders, that are at 100% by default but can be reduced. Those are enemy damage, enemy attack frequency, and, because CrossCode is a puzzle game as much as it is an action game, puzzle speed, that affects timers and the other time-based elements in puzzles
At first Darksouls 3 was not fun in my eyes but after I beat the first boss I got addicted to overcoming challenges lol. It didn't matter how hard the game was I would never quit even after getting stuck on bosses for days. Fav game of all time by far it literally changed my life.
Personally, I HATE when easy mode insults the player. It's just dickish.
Yes it is
Chicory: A Colorful Tale has some of the most amazing comfort settings and gives you such amazing difficulty control. Its a lovely lighthearted indie game, with moderate difficulty fights and bosses. To enjoy more of just the cozy, you can change how many hits you can take, make yourself unkillable, and remove bosses entirely. For my mother who isnt that big on video games, it allowed her to more thoroughly experience and enjoy the whole game
I feel like Nioh has an interesting approach to difficulty. Going through the base game is fairly challenging, being a souls-like, but the thing is that there is a ton of systems and you can beat the game using most of them on only a fairly rudimentary level. But once you beat the final boss it unlocks newgame, or way/dream of the strong as it calls it, which ups the rarity and level of gear, unlocks new modifiers for gear, and even adds a whole new gear type in the form of the scroll. The enemies in the levels are tougher, have subtly different move sets, and spawn in new locations. At this point you need to start to learn the more advanced mechanics to beat the game, you need to start making a proper build, and incorporate elemental damage, debuffs and combos. Beat newgame and you unlock newgame+, which adds more new stuff in the previously mentioned categories, allowing for even more specialized builds and even tougher enemies and levels to make it necessary. By the end, it's not enough to be intimately familiar with the games myriad complexities and nuances, you also need to be good enough at executing them, which to me is the real mark of a good difficulty system, it should allow the player to engage with the complexities of it's systems at a steady pace.
I never really played around with difficulty settings, but added personal bindings to make the game harder. For example, I beaten Yo-Kai Watch with only Yo-Kai you befriend from the story or non-post side quests.
It was fun with trying more strategic teams and this tiny grandma I found. I even got through most of the Infinite Inferno - a post game area to test your metal on powered up bosses. Unfortunately, I stopped playing when I got to Wobblewok, the last boss in it.
I love extreme difficulty, but only when it challenges skill and strategy. Whether it's the cold face of Bennett's mountain or the heated P-rank attempts in Ultrakill's prime sanctums, there's something to be said about a bar that can only be cleared through mastery, even if it's the only option a game permits you to play it by.
In Rain World, difficulty is signified by the characters you play as. The Survivor is the normal difficulty, with competent wildlife and a good amount of it for your first playthrough ; the Monk is the easy mode, with enemies that ignore you most of the time and a reduced amount of them. Also, when you pass to a different region, the requirements to access it are removed. Lastly, when you beat any of these two, you unlock the Hunter. A hard mode where there are completely new and vicious enemies (one bird has a harpoon, for God's sake) and a time limit of 20 days to complete your mission and the game before your run is deleted.
I think it's safe to say most people start on the "Normal" difficulty for their first playthrough, and if they feel like it, play again on a harder one. Although, it often feels like harder difficulties go one of two ways. First one is, some games will have a description along the lines of harder difficulties being "If you're familiar with/good at *genre of game*". This likely implies the game expects you to learn and have pretty good knowledge of all the game mechanics and use them to nearly it's full potential; whereas easier difficulties might make encounters beatable even if you ignore certain mechanics. However, the second one is that some games see harder difficulties as being for second playthroughs only. This can feel like you're just flat out not able to get through the game because you're not intimately familiar with it on your first playthrough for obvious reasons. I think the first option is always the better one, because testing the limits of your knowledge of the game naturally will feel more rewarding.
I think a pretty good middle ground for this is to have the absolute hardest difficulty be unlockable and of type 2, but to have hardest difficulty you can start with be type 1.
With the default highest difficulty being hard enough to where you have time to learn the systems, but you better figure it out and the unlockable hardest being hard enough to where you basically have to be playing close to optimally from the beginning to even get through the game.
@@SaberToothPortilla I also think this is the best way to do it in most cases. The Devil May Cry games have been built around multiple playthroughs and unlockable difficulties from the start, each one being balanced around your experience and the skills/upgrades you've accumulated.
My hardest challenge I completed would have to be doing the Bushido challenge on Death Sentence, in Payday 2 stealth mode. Doing so requires you get the most difficult to acquire item first, the Samurai Armor in a vault, which guards can trigger the alarm after seeing it's gone. You can't bag any other loot, can't even pick it up before getting the armor in the escape van.
Normally, you can just get a friend to open the vault w/ you as it requires two keycards shortly after one another, bag the armor and move it w/ your team. Then you have to get 5 pieces of loot in addition to the 4 from the armor pieces.
I had none of that.
I ran it on the hardest difficulty, Solo.
I had to get 12 pieces, 8 w/ armor, on Death Sentence (mayhem+ it's the same mostly tho). That meant memorizing 8 cash/coke placements, moving the armor one by one, only killing the cam guard (for their card to open the vault) and guards that patrolled into the vault to facilitate this slow process (as that meant they would trigger the alarm) as I was running this solo. Then, having used favors to place closer drop points, I would move the ones I memorized as being closest to each, depending on the randomization. The armor would always go through the sewers out the back, into one of two drop points depending on guard patrol randomization and camera placement, as I'm too slow to properly stealth but I need to be fast to outpace the possible 4th guard on rotation for the vault.
The lengthiest part of this process, solo, was sometimes having to wait long amounts of time for the hardhat worker with the second keycard, besides the cam guard's, to idle in a specific spot close enough to reach before the vault timer ends after the first keycard is inserted. As I'm solo, I had to get the first kc from cams and use that with the vault initially, triggering the time lock, then make a mad dash for the second kc, which was placed just close enough to beat the timelock because I waited for the hardhat to go there, so their card would drop there when I killed them. Sometimes they could spawn in that spot initially, meaning by the time I get there, after cams are dead, they're only halfway through patrolling the entire map.
Beating the challenge felt like a level of accomplishment I haven't ever felt in any other game before, past all the random chance that felt bad sometimes, but ultimately rewarding in terms of difficulty.
Payday 2 is one of the better ones when it comes to randomization, but it still has times where it is much easier with a bit of luck. However, it's difficulty also comes with guaranteed changes on top, and challenge runs that make things harder in various ways. Crime Spree, however, sucks THOROUGHLY, if I'm being honest. At some point cops practically 1 shot you and you need unbelievably specialized builds to make it through at all. I'm not even talking about how it makes stealth completely and utterly impossible, either.
In my opinion, they should've just increased the normal stealth difficulty, as opposed to making it so you can't use pagers, have a max civilians that can die, etc. as normal stealth is already incredibly precise with how difficult it is to find a full team of good players, conduct precise movement through max-difficulty guard patterns, and perform, often, multiple objectives across a map, all while not being able to kill more than 4 guards or let the alarm go off. Add randomized guard placement, camera rooms, objectives placement, and so on, and it makes it difficult to pull off a truly perfect or cheese-free run, especially multiple times in a row without losing ONCE.
Ultimately, though, it's not a fault of the gameplay, but of the mode, as stealth's gameplay loop of failing and improving, similar to a roguelike in some aspects, just doesn't sync well with a flawless run. The two are antithetical to eachother for all but the top 5% of the playerbase. Even then, over dozens of runs? Nah, man.
_There are no Stealth Crime Spree players._ There just aren't.
I love those kind of difficulties, heck I love doing self imposed challenges like 4 Job Fiesta and nuzlockes. And randomziers can also add some nice tweaks
I think that a really good example comes from the Co-op shooter Deep Rock Galactic. Basically, you and some other dwarves explore randomly generated caves and complete missions. You also fight swarms of alien bugs. Before a mission, you can choose a difficulty, or in this case, a hazard. It goes from 1 to 5, and multiple factors change throughout. The health and damage of alien bugs and swarm frequency scales with it, and friendly fire damage increases. Example, Hazard 1 has small and infrequent swarms with the enemies dealing less damage, and shooting teammates is like throwing pebbles at them. Hazard 5 though has constant swarms, tougher bugs and more variety of enemies and types. That’s just the basics, there are modifiers and biomes, too. Some modifiers make the bugs regenerate or have stronger bites, or makes certain enemy types infest the caves. Biomes differ, too. Want less of a challenge? Go to salt pits, the basic cave. Want something medium? Go to the glacial strata, there is snow that slows you down, occasional cracks in the floor appear and blizzards can occur. Want to die? Go to the magma core, everything wants to kill you, hot ground, earthquakes, even more cracks in the ground, exploding flowers and a lot of geysers. You can always switch between hazards and biomes how you feel like it. There’s no punishment for playing on easier difficulties, as each negative modifier, increase in hazard and cave length and complexity level grants you an exp/money boost. Even hazard 1 grants you a 10% boost.
Thanks for coming to my TED talk.
The thing with Cuphead though, using simple allows you to progress with what the boss unlocks for you, allowing you to go into other isles to get more coins, and better weapons.
Breath of the Wild’s “Master Mode” was awesome. Giving enemies health regen if you leave them alone too long fundamentally changes how you have to approach combat and inventory management. It really squeezes everything you can get out of the system.
I've done 2 master mode playthroughs and tbh it's far from my favorite approach. It mostly ends up just making enemies too damage spongey and begins to show cracks in the weapon durability system which I think worked well otherwise. Taking out enemy camps is rarely worth it because you too often lose more than you get back. Though the health regen itself I don't hate. It makes it so you have to be more aggressive and get any kind of damage off before it kicks in. Other than that, there aren't really enough changes to make it a more interesting challenge.
@@DesignDoc I think part of what it’s designed to do is encourage you to actually experiment with the many possible ways of dispatching enemies in the game. I think a lot of people play BOTW like “find the strongest melee weapon I can and swing it to win” and they leave a ton of what the game actually offers on the table.
Yes, if you charge into every encounter and swing your melee weapons until they break, Master Mode will frustrate you. If you really think about and utilize all of the tools at your disposal (weapons, arrows, runes, the environment, etc.), Master Mode adds tons of depth. It also actually forces you to use weapons and items. By the end of any regular playthrough, I was always carrying a million things and looking through my inventory every 10 minutes to see if something was worth throwing away for the shiny new thing I found. The “survival” element dissipated somewhere in the mid-game for me every time.
Lots of games give you incredible tools (like the control of actual game physics you get in BOTW) but fail to provide a challenge deep enough to incentivize their full use. Master Mode hits that sweet spot for me, personally.
Master Mode made Waterblight the hardest boss in the game for me, especially the illusionary realm version. It was harder than Maz Koshia.
I'm reminded of Silent Hill 2's puzzle difficulty setting. Where they had a different setting for puzzles than fights. Maybe GOd of War could have used that?
Seeing Bubsy reawakened deep memories from my brain of how unfair this game was lol.
The worst part about the whole difficulty debate is that proponents of "everything needs to be super difficult all the time" tend to forget two things.
1) A good, well designed, game, naturally tends towards a certain difficulty. Once a game has a solid core design, adding in more difficulty can only really be done by just bolting on random, unnecesary, mechanics, or by overtuning enemies. And that ends up undercutting the core design.
2) There's other things that are important, like power fantasy, logically coherent playstyles, etc. The proponents of "everything needs to be super difficult all the time" seem to often forget that a game isn't simply a set of abstract numbers and shapes that you manipulate until you get a "you won" message. Usually the game represents something, and simply adding nonsense to make the game more difficult quickly undercuts the core ideas its supposed to represent.
Too many people want to just increase difficulty for difficulty's sake, and up advocating for designs that are a bloated convoluted mess of mechanics with overtuned enemies.Wasting what made the original core idea of the game appealing to begin with.
I've never seen any one push "Everything needs to be super difficult all the time".
What I see much more commonly is people saying that every game needs to have difficulty options that allow things to be easy all the time, which comes up every single time a new fromsoft game is realeased.
1) That just makes the hard difficulty bad to play and harms its design, this isn't a solution this is a half baked attempt at best that barely pleases anyone. The main criticism of hard difficulty modes is often enemies becoming bullet sponges at higher difficulties and this does exactly that.
2) Difficulty is an integral aspect of a video game just as much as playstyles or power fantasy, ignoring the effect it can have and saying its strictly less important than other elements just shows a lack of understanding of game design. Difficulty can be less important to a particular game but its not a general statement.
Look I don't think "Eveyrything needs to be super difficult all the time" far from it, but I really can't stand people denying the important role difficulty has in the gameplay experience and treating it as a secondary design element rather than the center front piece it is.
@@theresnothinghere1745 O the argument goes both ways. Those arguing for "everything always needs to be difficult" and those arguing for "everything always needs to be accesible to everyone" both make the same mistake.
The core issue is that a well designed game will naturally develop a certain level of difficulty. While you can tweak this slightly, you can't really take it very far before you start messing with the core design and start undercutting gameplay/powerfantasy/etc.
Difficulty isn't something you purposefully design for. It's something that happens organicly by making a good game with fun/interesting mechanics.
If you purposefully start to design for difficulty (regardless of which difficulty you go for) you nearly always end up screwing up your core designs.
@@kakalukio "Difficulty isn't something you purposefully design for. It's something that happens organicly by making a good game with fun/interesting mechanics."
But it is something you can purposefully deign for.
There are several well recived games whose whole thematic center is structured by their difficulty and others that purposefully design difficulty into specific section.
That would be much harder to do if difficulty was accidental rather than something designed into the game as they would have had to remake the entire game once they realized their gameplay was difficult. Or worse try many many different gameplay styles till they found one that fit their design vision.
Difficulty at its core is a demand for mechanical mastery, the more you demand it the harder the game becomes.
Bad difficulties stray from this by altering elements that move the gameplay way from the mechanical mastery its components would be used for.
You can make a game from the ground up with the aim to demand a high amount of mechanical mastery and not cause it to fail.
Undertale and Delata rune are great examples the hardest content in the games are sectioned off in a clearly optional manner.
That is no accident that was purposeful design and its done by taking the gameplay and asking the player to perform to a higher level of mastery with more difficult objects to deal with, more focus on health management and menu management etc...
@@theresnothinghere1745 I'm not saying the entirety of difficulty is purely accidental. I'm saying that specific mechanics/playstyles/etc. naturally bring with them a certain level of difficulty. An experienced designer will then purposefully pick mechanics/playstyles/whatever to create the difficulty they are aiming for.
My point is that once you've picked a certain core design, you're stuck with whatever difficulty it provides. And aside from some minor tweaks, you can't really do much without ruining the core game. A good bullet hell is never going to be "easy", a good pokemon game is never going to be "hard", and so on... These games committed to a certain core design, and adding (or removing) any significant amount of difficulty will undercut that core.
And games like Undertale, which have relativly flexible difficulty, are exceedingly rare.
@@kakalukio But a good bullet hellgame can be easy (Undertale and Delta rune already show this outside of their optional content) so can a good pokemon game be hard (just look at pokemon showdown the mechanics are already in place).
Just because they are committed to a design the difficulty isn't forced to be a certain way. All that it takes is asking for more mastery from the player.
Which Undertale/Deltarune already shows is possible and Showdown shows the complexity is there, its just a matter of testing the players on it.
"And games like Undertale, which have relativly flexible difficulty, are exceedingly rare."
Not really there are quite a few games with such flexible difficulty, here another example Hollow Knight.
Even if that wasn't the case the point remains that Undertale shows this idea that the type of game restricts what difficulty it can give is not really a general statement.
It might be true for some very specific games but not for all or even most games.
One bonus point on the Hades example: there is a Minor Prophecy (in-game achievement) called Harsh Conditions which requires you to defeat Hades using every single Pact of Punishment condition at least once, which encourages the player to switch up and experiment with the ways in which the game can be made tougher.
Europa Universalis 4 is effectively an alt-history sandbox grand strategy game. There is a difficulty setting, but few players actually use it. Instead, with hundreds of playable nations, each reflecting their historical geopolitical situation at the time, difficulty is largely down to nation choice. Do you play as France, having few major threats and able to easily grow into a position of dominance? Or do you instead play as Granada, a small nation on the verge of being conquered historically, and try to claw your way to power from a position of disadvantage?
Difficulty in EU4 largely boils down to starting position, and the aim of a run. Playing France may be easier, but for an intermediate or even somewhat advanced player, doing a world conquest on them will still take dedication and a degree of mastery. This massive variety in difficulty differentiation not through menu options or dynamic difficulty adjustment, but through the starting game-state and player-defined goals has lead to a form of difficulty I genuinely adore.
I've been a proponent of high difficulty since I fell in love with Dark Souls back in 2012. In 2020 I realized I would rather a game be too hard than too easy. I was fighting the Hell House in FFVIIR and it was brutal, I was pushed to the brink multiple times. It turns out I wasn't utilizing magic correctly to target his changing weaknesses and that's the main reason it was so difficult. The entire battle took like 45 minutes but I did pause a couple times to take a breather. And I didn't game over once but it almost happened multiple times and it was then I came to the realization that I would rather a game be too hard than too easy.
Difficulty in souls games is an interesting topic, despite the fights (the boss fights in particular) often being brutally hard you actually have a couple of ways to adjust the difficulty. Why not summon a friend to help? Level up more? Use a different weapon? Respec into magic or pyromancy? Even the music is a subtle hint (the bosses generally time their attacks to the rhythm of the music, giving you a subconscious tell of the right time to dodge)
@@tomoroboros Yeah I agree that's why I was perplexed at people calling Spirit Ashes in ER as an easy mode addition. That easy mode has always existed as Co-op summons. Now the Spirit Ashes offer some single player utility and most of them are not overpowered.
The problem is most games don't understand the difference between challenging but fair and hard for the sake of it. Demon's Souls never felt unfair, Dark Souls 1 had a particular inescapable death that was bs (unless you knee previously) but it was also pretty fair. But then 2 doubled down on bullshit to make it hard rather than be fair, which is why gameplay is super sluggish, s aren't universal but a level up, there's lots of ganks everywhere... And that's how most other series view difficulty too. By making it annoying. I just beat Code Vein and it was everything wrong with "lets make a hard game" mentality, same sluggish gameplay and bs enemies as DkS2
@@Walamonga1313 The problem is I think a lot of people were introduced to the the series with Dark Souls 2. I was, and I fell off it pretty quick. It wasn't until I got for free Bloodborne on PS Plus, and gave it a try, that I fell in love with the series. Not everyone will give a series that second chance.
I hear some of the BS comes from the Scholar of the First Sin Edition, which is the most readily available version. I'm interested in looking into that, because there are somethings about DS2 I really like!... but god is it fatiguing!
@@Walamonga1313 Code Vein truly is an enigma. "Hey let's make Dark Souls but anime, but also make it slow and sluggish"
Here are some things I think are important for designing a good difficulty selection, that I've seen plenty of games neglect:
- Clear indication of who a difficulty is designed for. Indicators like "for people who just want to experience the story", "for people who have played a game before", and "for people who think they know everything about this game" are some good examples, and can make it clear to the player whether their first playthrough should be on normal or hard. Because it's really hard to tell sometimes. Some games really crank up the difficulty on normal, and it's the intended experience, while hard mode is a masochistic 1-hit-kill mode. Other games are still easy on hard mode. There's really no way to tell without some kind of descriptor for each difficulty option.
- As stated above, the goddamn ability to adjust your difficulty mid-playthrough if it's the kind of game where having to start over completely isn't the intended experience. For run-based games like Touhou or any roguelike ever, you can just do 1 run to see how the difficulty feels, but a lot of story-based games don't even let you change the difficulty mid-playthrough, which can sometimes make me afraid to pick the hardest difficulty, because I'm worried about the idea of having to start over if I get stuck.
Also something I forgot to say in my first comment is that I think it's really interesting the way Getting Over It discusses the problem you bring up at the start. That, as a developer, it can be impossible to tell whether something being too hard is a failure as a developer, or a failure as a player. Do you alter the challenge to make it easier? Or do you just persevere and beat it as hard as it currently is?
Fun fact: in pizza tower, you can get hit, multiple times, and still get an S and P rank. Also, you dont need a full combo for an S
There is room for error yeah but generally don't get hit if you don't wanna risk losing the combo.
sekiro’s kuro’s charm is a great way to add difficulty, changing the entire way you play the game to promote using deflects instead of blocks.
rain world’s system is also great in the sense that all 3 difficulties are their own stories, and make sense in the world of the game. Monk being further along has less enemies and different dialogue but also more of a certain enemy in a certain region, changing it completely, survivor needs more food and has more enemies, with its unique dialogue as well, and hunter is carnivorous, making fighting harder enemies worth the risk and almost a necessity with its high food bar, also the cycle timer makes it almost a speedrun to the end.
I think a good example of added difficulty with recycled content are the comets in super mario galaxy 1/2. They'd add tough challenges to a place you already explored, rewarding those that want a harder challenge while people that would prefer an easier time can skip these.
My favorite "difficulty option" in any recent game I've played has been with the Yune Fire Emblem Randomizer. You get a ton of fun options for how you want to retone the game, and it's fun to learn the rules of a new run each time. It's super easy to set to your exact level of difficulty, restarting if things don't feel right.
I've played on a ton of different seeds, and while I usually restart halfway through, the ones that're fun enough to continue are really amazing. The furthest I got was three chapters before the final, where one of the infinitely respawning enemies on a defense chapter got a 50% crit weapon - they've since added an option to cap crit increases and change the weight on how often certain abilities appear.
It was stupidly easy to set up on steam deck too. Playing with a controller instead of a keyboard feels so nice.
The part about cutting stuff in lower difficulties reminds me of Fire Emblem Radiant Dawn, where the Japanese version has a somewhat shorter script that also altered dialogue to be more expository for new players on its lowest difficulty while the two higher ones had the normal, much better script. This wound up creating a problem for the overseas fanbase, as those releases only got the shorter script localized, meaning non-Japanese players missed out on both characterization and plot that they HAVE to look up in order to know about as opposed to experiencing it themselves.
That's just stupid.
funny how you never hear about this sort of thing when fe fans whine about localization
My favorite difficulty options come from South Park: The Fractured but Whole. There are two different difficulty settings, one that controls enemy health and damage (easy, medium, hard) and one that controls how much exp you're able to get and what items you can find while looting....... your race.
My favorite difficulty is by far an adaptable one. Resident Evil 4 really worked great for me. A clear no is mocking players for chosing easy like Wolfenstein does
I love the difficulty of Dead Cells. After each finish of a difficulty you gain a boss cell up to 5 and each difficulty adds things that makes the game harder like decrease how much you can heal.
After playing the game for about 200 hours I finally managed to unlock the last difficulty.
It’s a very satisfying game to play for me.
I always die after the clock maker how are y’all doing this man, is it cause I’m on mobile? Is that why I suck a**?
@@Liljinks for me the clock guy boss is one of the easier one. Probably just watch a guide how to beat him. I really like to play with a shield, cause if you get the hang of parry many enemies/ bosses are more manageable to beat
@@NekoSchlingel I can get past him, it’s the area afterwards that fck me up, and I’ve got every DLC so I’ve tried every path afterwards but I always die to something.
@@Liljinks have you ever tried Baseball Bat with Throwable Objects? It’s pretty fun and pretty strong.
@@NekoSchlingel no, I’ll try that next time. I’m definitely more of a “run in, kill, run out” type of dude, so range isn’t always my strong suit, maybe that’s why I’m losing 🤔
There's another way to do dynamic difficulty which shown on screen but not expanded in the script: Level grinding.
Hades, in addition to the optional Pact of Punishment difficulty level (which was covered), also has a dynamic difficulty where the game gets easier as the player progresses. Since the game's difficulty curve by zone is very steep, this means that up until the player beats the game, there will be a zone that falls into the sweet spot for the player's skill and unlocks, and this tail end where the difficulty is "just right" will move forward through the game as the player unlocks more powers and improves their skill. A self-balancing system like this has a some advantages over player-chosen difficulty levels, since the player might get their difficulty level wrong - especially since players choose what difficulty setting they're playing on before they know anything about the game.
This same thing applies to classic JRPGs - Pokémon games don't need difficulty settings. If a player is having trouble with the game (and either lacks the skills to put together a competent team, or just would rather the role-play aspects of being a "water-type trainer" no matter how bad of an idea that is) they can run circles in tall grass until their team is strong enough to progress.
Really I think this is fascinating of a topic, because people always say about the Pokemon games that there needs to be a difficulty slider or options like in black 2 and white 2, but difficulty is not always handled well and the way it was handled and recieved in b2w2 is exactly why it wasn't done on future games, not to mention how choosing hard mode actually helps you instead of hurting you because of how exp works from gen 5 onwards while easy mode would make it harder to gain exp, in general I think difficulty options aren't always as easy to get right as people say they should be
Youre so right what a spectacular point. Players expect hard games to be hard sure, but difficulty matters just as FUNDAMENTALLY in easy kid-friendly games as it does in your resident evils and dark souls
Even discounting the level changes (which apparently didn't change the stats of the NPCs), I did B2W2 in Challenge Mode, and it was pretty challenging at the start mostly because of the extra Pokemon and more diverse movepool (and Hard Mode apparently still has better AI). I think difficulty sliders could still be done in Pokemon, but more on movesets (as they can vary in power) rather than level (which is the main factor plus the species for Exp Yield), and AI decisions plus what items they can use too.
@@krysc96"How dare people have options?"
A type of difficulty I really enjoyed was Madness Project Nexus 2's Madness difficulty, it made enemies way smarter, and also decreased the health of everyone, and yes I mean everyone, player and enemy alike, it lets you plow through hordes of weak but extremely intelligent enemies while being a single mistake away from death constantly, was a really good way to balance the rewarding feeling of plowing through everything due to pure skill and also keeping the game extremely difficult.
I like the analysis of how you can encourage players to play on higher difficulty, but I miss the focus on an enjoyable easy mode experience. Increasing the challenge in a fun way is well and good (especially with optional harder stages/bosses), but in my experience it's a lot harder to make easy mode a valid way to play. Usually, easy mode is a disappointing way to play since it skips what makes a game cool. Celeste is the example of the greatest easy mode, since you can adjust only the parts you struggle with and leave the rest intact (timing, game speed, stamina puzzles, dash puzzles, a specific screen). Even with dash assist, infinite stamina and a gamespeed of 50% you're still playing a cool game. But I haven't found another game where I feel similarly entertained by easy mode and not like I'm missing out on the "real" game
X com has a pretty good easy mode, but thats because it tells You the chances for EVERYTHING. Unit miss chance, defence bonuses and ai behavior all increase up from regular, but easy mode just adds aim to you and removes 1 layer of defence from late game enemies. Damage doesnt change between easy and hard mode, and only challenge modes add damage to enemy attacks. Add in optional changes such as double mission timer and or iron man challenge that can be implemented at any difficulty and the dificulty "feel" can be whatever you want, even when the community memes on 99% accuracy actually being 99% instead of 100%.
Yes! As someone who has played vidya her whole life but sucks at it, I hate the focus on making things super hard or get good loser. I want to have a fun experience without turning things into a literal chore or part time job
@@Spoonishpls Darkest Dungeon is a hard game, but since it doesn't punish you for losing units (it outright says this WILL happen multiple times), it's still extremely fun to play
2 unique examples of difficulty in games I'd like to mention are:
In the old "I wanna be the guy" games, all that changed if you select Hard or Very Hard, is the amount of savepoints. On Easy, there's basically a savepoint after every 1-2 obstacles. On Very Hard however, there's only asavepoint after several rooms full of obstacles. The game itself doesn't change at all, it just means you have to memorize all the rooms perfectly since you'll have to clear many of them in one go.
Then there's the rare case of games like "Wings of Vi". It's a really difficult platformer that also somewhat incorporates the same savepoint principles as the "I wanna be the guy" games but also adds a combination of other modifiers you mentioned in your video. The Normal difficulty is already hard enough but on Hard, in addition to a lack of savepoints, the enemies deal way more damage, they can take more punishment, some puzzles are harder, as well as some of the platforming segments, enemy placements are more devious and probably the best of all: the bossfights! All bosses are faster, have new attacks and sometimes even behave differently than normal! It sometimes feels like you're fighting a completely new boss, even though you've already beaten it on an easier difficulty level.
Excellent video! One thing I always say about game difficulty (which again can vary from game) is that it's better for a game to be slightly too easy than slightly too hard. A player can always add self imposed challenges to up a games difficulty beyond its hardest difficulty without relying on outside modification while on the otherside a player cannot *reduce* a game past its lowest difficulty without relying on outside modification.
Elden ring has some of the best difficulty sliders in my opinion. It’s all about the build you use. I did a no death run where the most hits it took to kill a boss was 6. I’ve also done runs where boss fights can take 15 mins. Since you get to control all of your stats and builds, the player is completely in control of how hard the game is
I'm surprised you haven't talked about how games can receive different difficulty options depending on the region. For instance, some of the DMC games were made HARDER in the US release. Here's another "option" that may be worth talking: fighting games adapting the Smash Bros control scheme. It's not the same as an option, but that could be considered as such :)
i absolutely love how ultrakill does its difficulty and its the main reason why i feel like i can recommend it to so many people. there's 6 difficulties (all but one are out currently- the hardest one is still being worked on) and they can completely change how the game feels. higher difficulties have more unique enemy attacks, enemies and projectiles are faster (which effect parry times), and bosses have more health- but none of the enemy placements are changed. higher difficulties also have increased hard damage, while lenient and harmless have no hard damage. lenient also allows you to heal up to 200 health after dying a few times, and harmless automatically gives you 200 health. not only that, but if you're playing one difficulty and you want to change to a lower one, you can do so without losing any progress. i remember when i first played 2-4 and 3-2, i really struggled on the boss fights on standard, so i went and completed them on lenient (which i could have continued on if i wanted to) before going back to standard and completing 2-4 and 3-2 there. you can even complete the secret super-hard levels p-1 and p-2 on lower difficulties as long as you already have it unlocked on a higher one!
additionally, the game has both cheats and assists. cheats completely disregard whatever score you get on a level, while assists won't, but may display that you used assists. there's two types of assists- major and minor. minor assists include things like enemy silhouettes and aim assist, while major assists allow you to change how much damage you take (if any at all), the game's speed, the ability to have infinite wall jumps, and much more. levels completed using major assists will be marked as such, but i dont believe they stop you from being able to like, unlock the prime sanctums or anything.
anyways. i love ultrakill and how much you can control its difficulty, and im so hyped for whenever ultrakill: must die comes out. the fact that im already getting pretty damn good at brutal difficulty is making me worry that ultrakill: must die might not be difficult enough for me to feel properly challenged
I've been playing Horizon Zero Dawn for the first time recently and after a little bit of playing I found the "normal" difficulty to feel just a *little* too easy. I found I wasn't using any of the various alternate weapons Aloy can get because my basic bow and arrow + spear was getting the job done for just about everything I was fighting. Simply setting it to Hard difficulty made me have to be a lot more thoughtful about encounters to take out enemies efficiently (though now that I'm later in the game even Hard is feeling like I have a few set combos that are really powerful). It was nice having the option to bump up the difficulty mid-game though, I know some games lock you into the difficulty you select and you're not allowed to change it, so I appreciate games that let you dynamically choose your difficulty even just moment to moment.
I also really appreciate this option, and I had experiences with the complete opposite. I like myself a challenge, but there are times where I got overconfident and thought I could handle picking hard the first time. If I'm not able to have that failsafe of lowering it, and I got pretty far into a game, then I essentially locked myself out of experiencing the rest.
I was a bit on the mad side and played the game on UH my first time around. SO many weapons that are great like the tearblast arrows becomes pretty useless in that difficulty. Ropecaster and triple notching becomes pretty essential.
@@SuspiciousScout Yeah I started out on Normal because I tend to like a fair challenge but not something where I'm just sitting there frustrated. Normal felt just that little bit too easy and Hard has felt like the sweet spot for me so far.
@@goldmemberpb Yeah playing on that high of a difficulty just sounds like everything is a bullet/arrow sponge, which is not fun for me.
@@goldmemberpb Ehh, not really. Only the elemental ammo types before you get good coils, as UH reduces elemental buildup. Tearblast works just fine with the exception of thunderjaw disc launchers which curiously get an extra resistance against them on UH. Takes 4 blasts while it takes just one on every other difficulty regardless of upgrades.
Rattlers and explosive slings work very well still, and well war bow/sling is how you freeze stuff so yea
But I can't argue against triple notching being op. Not exclusive to UH though. Freeze + triple notch sharpshot bow is always really strong.
as a minecraft mapmaker, i usually do the following:
at the start, keep everything relatively easy and simple, being generous with checkpoints n stuff
then gradually increase difficulty and/or reduce checkpoint frequency (example: checkpoint every 25 jumps instead of every 10, and 3 to 4 block gaps instead of 2 to 3 block gaps)
then near the end make one final difficult challenge
put a few secrets here and there
and then add a extreme mode replay, where checkpoints dont work at all and you must use every little inch of skill you have