God I hate games that think "hard" means even the most basic enemy has a million hit points. Not only that makes the player feel like a toddler slapping the enemy. It is not challeging, as I continue to do the same thing over and over until that HP bar hits 0.
Games like dmc do it right because you ARE given a million ways to fight enemies and destroy them, but gameplay where you're just mashing the same attack suck
@@Megasuperq Nah. DMC is not the worst only because GoW exist. Just because you have lots of options on how your attacks LOOK does not mean the game is better. The only one that does it right is the Ninja Gaiden 1, because in that game, if you know what you are doing almost all enemies can be dismembered and have their heads chopped off, regardless of how spongy they are...
In The last of us, there was a new weapon near the start of a fight with a couple of infected in the beginning of the game. I remembered that when I played on normal difficulty, I used the weapon in the fight. On hard difficulty, it wasn’t there and it made the fight a lot *harder*. The environment should change, not the enemy’s stats or the player’s.
I feel like the main issue with having game difficulty settings is that most of the time there is a default difficulty that the game is balanced around, and the rest of the settings are either different enemy stats or more / less stuff thrown around in the game. Usually when I first play a game I want to play the difficulty the game was balanced around but even then choosing my difficulty as the start is a nightmare because its always something different. I haven't played God of War but I'm definitely the type of person to choose "Give me God of War" just wanting to play the game only to be completely obliterated
the worst thing ever is when games mock you, make fun of you, and generally see you as lesser when you pick low difficulties. this goes for the game itself and the communities. are are games who deadpan make your character look like a baby or some crap for playing on easy. this gets even worse when you realize there are people new to games or more tragically physically or mentally disabled people who get mercilessly mocked for trying to enjoy a game in the only way they can
"DIFFICULTY: TOURIST" "We didn't call this difficulty "baby Mode" because we don't want to shame players for wanting to experience the game without the stress of intense combat and failure looming over them. We made the game for everyone to enjoy any way they like." "But yeah, this difficulty is for teensy little babies." -Madness Project Nexus
Can we just start telling people to just Find a better hobby When you need 27 mods on your Xbox controller, maybe it's time to accept that you only have two fingers, and can't reach the big leagues
I agree with you; survival horror games are the best when it comes to implementing high difficulty in a functional way. For example, Resident Evil 7's Madhouse difficulty is very effective because it forces you to play differently and pursue items that you wouldn't care about in a normal playthrough. Additionally, there are games that increase enemy health and cause the player to deal only 2 damage to the weakest enemy, while that same enemy has an attack that instakills, making the experience extremely tedious and even turning a game that someone loves into the game they hate the most.
@ozt6503 I'm late to this, the same for Both The Last of Us games and, surprisingly, Skate 3. For The Last of Us Part 1 and 2, their hardest difficulty Grounded mode is a great difficulty system having the hud, health bar the crafting sound cue ammo count and listen mode is all out, having you to rely on sound cues on the infected and enemies having you realize that some encounters can be completely avoided. For Skate 3, black box got creative with its difficulty, instead of doing like a higher point count or certain tricks are used, Black Box changed the physics of each , it's hard to explain but a youtube That Boy Aqua made a great video on the Skate games.
The duality of hardest difficulties The one that make enemies massive sponges of damage The one with limited save/perma death (and enemies do infinite damage because why not)
If you want a great example of difficulty done right, take a look at timesplitters 2. Level difficulty didn't just effect spawn rates or damage, it turned on and off level objectives and shortened timers. TS2's first mission on easy just involves getting into a cave and blowing up a monster in a box, but on normal it also includes burning files and taking out coms dishes, with hard including a bunch more stuff along with a climactic fight with a helicopter on top of a dam, and that sort of design is carried across the whole game. On top of all that, beating higher difficulties unlocked more stuff for multiplayer, like characters, game modes, maps, and so on. It gave you a reason to push yourself to get good at the game, incentivizing you to do so with unlocks, and rewarding you with more cool stuff in each level when you finally stepped up and took a shot at it.
As a person with a job I play fromsoft games using mods to make my life easier so I can embrace everything on each game and pass through each game wihout dedicating mental hours of torture.
I personally think that it's great how Fromsoft doesn't use this stupid "difficulty pick" thing in their Souls series. Like, if you want a relaxed gameplay, just pick a class that represents your playstyle the best and level up into something good while carrying great weapons and (sometimes) armor, but if you want the opposite, just throw all the armor away and fight with a fricking sword hilt
I usually just want to play the game on the difficulty it was built around. And that can be hard because you would think that would be "normal" or "medium" but that isn't always the case. Sometimes devs will come out and say that "hard" is the true difficulty of the game. Like Halo for example, bungie devs always said that "heroic" was the true way to play Halo.
I believe mirror's edge has a good harder difficulty, since in normal and easy you have this thing called runners vision which highlights some objects in red sp you know where to go, but in hard mode they remove it
ULTRAKILL Violent/Brutal difficulty is a good example of a hard mode. Instead of the enemies having more hp or just deals more damage, they instead tweak functionality of enemies to make them feel more harder. Like for example: Allowing the filth to attack for times in a row or the Maurices and Mindflayers enter an enraged state when under a certain percentage of hp which the enemies will attack faster and the Maurice gains a second explosive beam that happens after the 1st one during the enraged state.
I don't think just making enemies have more heaöth and damage is always a bad thing. I've played both the horizon games, and have replayed them both on tge hardest difficulty, and I found that really fun. Choosing the right strategy became more important, and I had to play really good, which meant it also got really satisfying. I would either end up dead, or barely taking damage... however that kinda changes in the late game. Then I was already over-leveled enough to take some hits without dying instantly. Some enemies were still hard, but it didn’t get as tedious to kill tgem anymore either, and honestly it might be good that the game becomes easier as one goes along, cuz I would probably start to get mad after 60 hours. I don’t think it’s as tedious as gow, the enemies in horizon usually don’t go down in one hit when on equal level, and hp bars are removed in ultra hard, so you don’t see the progress in the same way. And I also think that in the first game one of the strategies, overriding machines, becomes stronger on higher difficulties. I think higher difficulty makes aloy weaker in terms of damage, and gives machines more damage, but everything has the same hp as on easier modes
1 of my favourite “ultra hard” difficulty’s is cry of fear’s nightmare mode yes it still has the more enemy hp bs but I like how morphine does less healing and how a save takes up a bag slot and you can only save 5 times it makes the game hard while having a challenge
I sorta just had this epiphany in HK after I finally beat the Radiance and her BS double damage asked myself "Was it worth it, did I feel fufilled" and the answer was... no I felt really angry after beating her, like it pissed me off, I was shaking with so much hate from the struggle this boss put me through. I felt so fucking mad and I just felt like my time was wasted. Even wrose is that I still struggled to have fun in other games, because they had literally gotten too easy for me. Beating souls games riuned other games for me, it just hardlocked me into this I-frame centric playstyle... then one day I played KH3 Remind and said "I;'ll play Critical Mode" the nobodies in Twilight town kicked my ass for a good few hours before I said "Fuck it" and made a Proud difficulty save and.... had fun? Turns out I was actually enjoying myself, building my team and giving Donald and Goofy some wacky item combos, seeing the story play out, and yeah sure I was melting through HP bars, yeah I was literally kicking everything in the ass... but also... I was having fun while kicking everything in the rear, I actually was able to play some unique playstyles due to me being literally too good as I could basically goof off and have fun. Turns out fun gameplay made for more fun than actual difficulty. To this day I play on normal 1st, and if the Hard Mode isn't just a "hurr hurr, number go up" and then I'll do it. I've sorta just given up on playing Souls likes for fun, and have embraced games with fun mechanics, and fun exploration. I actually now enjoy easier games because I've learned too love a game inspite of how easy it easy, because a good game is not good for its difficulty... its good because of its mechanics and how it is built
5:15 I was one of those masochists who beat it before NG+ was added in a future update. All you get for beating it is a skin change for Karatos' shield🤐
I'll never get the complaints about the existence of easy modes in 'hardcore' games. No one is forcing you to play it that way, there is no loss from beginner and disabled gamers also being able to enjoy your favorite games.
There is a right and wrong way to implement the difficulty settings. I'd argue Wolfenstein 3D did it right I mean in that game harder means more enemies to kill. Same with classic Doom and Quake. Yes, there is a nightmare difficulty in Doom but it's more of a joke difficulty that is meant to silence the people who complained that Doom is too easy even on Ultra-Violence difficulty. (Though some hardcore people made a nightmare run) In Quake 1 nightmare is kinda hidden and it does the same as hard but also makes enemies harder in ways other than raising damage and HP. The wrong way of making it hard is making enemies too damage spongy and too deadly.
There’s a difference between hard and annoying, raising the difficulty should increase the enemies health and damage not decrease your damage by 90% while increasing the damage and health and defense of the enemies by 1000%
I really dislike the resi 4 remake professional difficulty.They could make the enemies have more health while giving you less ammo making the game more of a survival horror rather than an action horror game ,but they should still have the enemies get staggered by one headshot rather than 2 or 3
Halfway through the video and im starting to think you dont understand achievements and difficulties, achievements are checkmarks for completion and achievements you gained in your favourite games and difficulties give you more options to challenge yourself or to make next playthroughs more interesting
The greatest “hard” difficulty I’ve played was Metro: Last Light. A single bullet could take you down, but a single bullet will also take down most enemies
@@light4299 It also changes some mechanics and things like wristwatch model Still I don't understand why can't you see your ammo EVEN in tab menu Like Artyom became so stupid he couldn't count how much mags he's carrying
@@DraganKKWCZ no wristwatches changes based on if you choose suvival mode or spartan mode. But the thing about ammo in tab menu. On ranger hardcore you check your ammo with your journal and thats my favorite immersive thing about first 2 metro games. Because it feels like realistic thing to do that you would write how much ammo you have in to your journal
I have beaten GoW on the Give me God of War difficulty. It was a pain in the ass and maybe that's why i didn't touch the game after that. The difficulty, it made me think the game was awful, which it isn't, but I'm still not a big fan of it. I regret it everytime, that I must choose the hardest difficulty in all of the games i play, even, if I don't even know what the game is about or anything.
I played GoW on the give me god of war difficulty and I loved the game. It was not very fun at the start but ones I got good at the game I started to enjoy it (and the game becomes a lot easier ones your past the early game)
I was like that, thinking that normal was "Too Easy" and started playing games on hard mode I stopped many months ago because I told myself "I play games not to feel pain, I play games to have fun" So since I moved to normal again and just had fun with games I think the only time I would try hard mode is a game I really love and that I best on normal many times
Sometimes I feel crazy cause unlike other people, when I do finally beat the one part in the game I was failing for hours at a time, I feel almost nothing. I don’t feel fulfilled, I don’t feel like I won. I feel like I wasted hours on all of that stress and for what? It ends up being entirely draining and debilitating, sometimes ruining the entire game for me if it’s bad enough. All it takes is one boss that I have to abuse the game mechanics in unintended ways to beat, and then I feel sour about everything afterwords. I don’t play normally again cause at that point I’ve already had to memorize how to break the game in order to win, so encounters don’t feel natural as my mindset shifts into doing what gives the enemy no chance as opposed to what’s fun. Happens the most with single player close quarters combat games I noticed, and usually way before the end of the game.
@@boltogen5416 That was my experience with Malenia in Elden Ring, and almost my entire experience with the ER DLC, which is why I stopped playing before getting very far.
It kinda reminded me of cruelty squad. You start at 2nd hardest difficulty, but if you die, you go on lower difficulty (and if you die a lot, you get downgraded again) - and this is a gameplay element too
About dead space remake: there were some guys trying to complete the game on impossible mode, got some stupid softlock bug in the end of the game right before the final boss and they had to just delete the saves because only that would fix the softlock.
Speedrunner Waifuruns basically had to beat his other save(difficulty below impossible) before the softlock in order to complete his challenge as impossible mode is the same except permadeath
Thank you for acknowledging "easy" mode's benefits for accessibility. In fact there's one other thing too; some people just don't like the gameplay of certain games and would rather experience the world it has to offer. I know the recent retro-shooter Selaco has a tourist-difficulty like this.
Danganronpa AE also has one that does 1 thing over Medium (Troubled/Komaru) and Hard (Despair) You can summon your invincible best friend at basically any time which makes sense since the prequel and rest of the series is a VN/Adventure game so a Third Person Shooter would be a jarring transition
The stuff I hate that some games do is just enemies that have more health and do more damage which isnt engaging at all. As of late, I just play the medium difficulty most of the time of any game. That way I have more freedom of choice in playstyle and put limits on myself which can still be engaging in ways that more health and damage isn't.
When I was younger I tried doing games on the second hardest difficulty. Now as an adult with barely enough time to play games I always play on easy mode to progress faster and I don't care what the rest of the community says.
I find me going down this road more often than not these days. I'm in my sixties and don't have the time/patience and am grateful for games that provide difficulty settings and the more options the better.
I especially have a problem with difficulty elitists in games like terraria, where if you don’t play game on the hardest difficulty they don’t consider you a true fan. And I’m saying this as a guy who always plays games on the hardest difficulty even if it’s my first play through
Didnt play Terraria but sounds similar to Payday 2 but in that game the hole game is balanced around the highest difficulty (DSOD) and if u go lower ur automatically way to overpowered.
@@TheRandom_Emu nah, master mode only adds trophies, pets and gives you additional accessory slot. Unlike expert mode it doesn't do any AI changes so enemies are just more tanky and damaging. Well, actually there is also an armor change, instead of protecting some percent of your health it just subtracts armor level from taken damage, as I know both for players and mobs
@sleepydudespillow lmao i used to be typa guy who played on hard or even hardest, but with time i started to not care and usually play on normal just to enjoy things, like for plot or characters, yea uts fun to get a challange but its more fun to actually enjoy the game, and some people want even just that dont care about fights wanna just consume story, its like acting "if you dont watch a show on your fridge screen through a plugged in 20 year old laptop youre not a true fan of the show grrr"
I'm really not a fan of 'director' dynamic difficulty systems, mostly as a result of experience with later games in the Homeworld series. Over-preparing is how I like to play games and manage difficulty for myself and punishing me for that sucks.
As much i love resident evil, i dislike how dynamic difficulty works here, like, come on, my maxed fucking shotgun need two for three shots blank range to kill a enemy ffs?
I don't know if I'm a masochist but I enjoy playing games with a difficult setting because it's really satisfying when you defeat a boss or complete a mission because of the thrill of the challenge compared to easy mode. But I don't judge what difficulty people choose because your experience is what matters when playing a video game
I have physical disabilities ( cerebral paralysis I can't use my legs, and my right hand is very slow ), and I still enjoy elden Ring now, garanted. I suck at it, but I am enjoying it. I could go where I want to fight. However, I want is fun and unique
I recently played a lot of Hades. It's a dungeon crawler roguelike. The game has a mechanic called The pact of punishment, which has a bunch of modifiers that make the game harder. One of those modifiers is called "Extreme measures", I think and it's my favorite way of making any game harder. What it does is it add additional attacks to a boss's move set. There are other modifiers that introduce a time limit, additional mechanics to the basic enemies, increased prices to the items in the shop, fewer choices to choosing upgrades and the classic - increased enemy damage and health. Hands down the best difficulty system in any game I have played in my life. Certainly hope the upcoming Hades 2 keeps that and hopefully improves that and I hope more games, not only roguelikes add similar features to their difficulty setting, sort of like in Legendary Halo with it's improved enemy AI.
One interesting thing about (most) yakuza games with legend mode is that it’s basically just hard mode with no retrying a fight if you lose just sending you back to your last save and on most of them the scaling from normal to hard isn’t very much
@@Janex-06 me when I'm in a game meat riding competition and my opponent is a Minecraft player (I play both games btw and I like both, just not the butthurt idiots using every opportunity to say one game is better than the other.)
Also minecraft hard diffculty does absolutely nothing but just increase enemy damage, terraria master mode makes the ai of the bosses better and allows access to items you otherwise dont get in other diffculties + there are seeds like "for the worthy" that gives an extra diffculty called legendary. (ftw also has other things in the seed itself, not just the extra diffculty.) diffculty counter: 4
a really good hard mode is Paper Mario TTYD's (unofficial) "Hero Mode", it doesn't just give enemies more hp, it gives the game a whole new story, redesigns characters, and adds new mechanics to keep even the most seasoned players on their toes!
I’m surprised that Left 4 Dead 2 wasn’t brought up. The game has 4 difficulties, easy, normal, advanced, and expert, as well as one modifier, realism, and it is super well balanced and the difficulty actually gives what you expect from it. In normal, friendly fire deals minimal damage, zombies hit you for either 2 or 1 damage depending on if you are hit in the front or the back respectively, and time between hordes is long enough to give players time to prepare while still making progress. Easy difficulty turns off friendly fire, zombies can do a max of 1 damage, hordes are very far apart, and The Tank has less health Advanced difficulty has friendly fire deal more damage than normal, zombies deal 5 or 3 damage, hordes are slightly more frequent, The Tank has 50% more health, and The Tank and special infected deal more damage. Finally with expert difficulty, friendly fire deals massive damage, zombie deal 20 or 10 damage, hordes are extremely common, Tanks have 100% more health and also its attack will instantly down survivors, special infected deal way more damage(like, 5 times as much) and finally, The Witch will instantly kill a survivor instead of just downing them. The realism modifier is there as an extra challenge/layer of difficulty. Player outlines through walls are hidden, respawn closets are disabled, zombies take less damage if not headshot, and the witch will instantly kill a player except on easy difficulty. This system of difficult is really well balanced with each one giving the players exactly what they asked for. Expert difficulty may be heartless and difficult to a player that isn’t an expert, but that’s the whole point, and it may be a good idea for that player to play Advanced instead until they have the skill to beat expert
I’m someone who prefers easy difficulty. Metro 2033/ Last Light is a series that after playing the hardest difficulty, i enjoyed it more. Because it’s not artificial difficulty. (I never played Exodus on the highest difficulty, but I imagine the open world makes this more frustrating) Sure, you take more damage. But so does every enemy. You can 1 shot almost every enemy with a well placed bullet, even mutants. But you can get overwhelmed if you’re not careful. Less ammo picked up? You don’t need as much ammo anyway. Stealth is encouraged so you can save your ammo for the mandatory gunfights. You need to think more tactically and use cover so you’re playing differently. I’d recommend the first two Metro games on Ranger Hardcore, as someone who always plays on easy.
As a video game dev student, this is a great indsight, I know I was aware of this but never really paid great attention to it thank you for bringing that subject up, I'll make sure to always pay attention to it in my own projects
Monster Hunter does this very well. You get a Low Rank, where you learn the monsters for the first time, a high rank and a G rank that are progressively more difficult. Monsters often have subspecies or variants that are different and more difficult, change the way you have to apporach them while retaining some moveset characteristics. The games have a steep learning curve and are hard throughout (pre-World), but your experiences build you up to the challenge. It is sort of a long, difficult, ongoing tutorial. You also have harder and easier weapon/monster matchups. With your healing items, you have a margin of error. Skills like mushroomancer, which turns very easy to obtain and stack mushrooms into valuable health items, can make this much more pronounced. I have played through MH4U, one of the hardest games in the series and imho the one with the best difficulty design, with a partially broken analog stick that was slow to react. Even that rarely became an issue with clever use of the camera and careful positioning.
accesibylity is more nuanced than "Easy mode" . like for example a blind guy beat the last of us because the game was accesible enough so that you could beat it while being unable to see ,while animal crossing, an "easy" game is very hard to play as a blind guy
All singleplayer games need to be piss easy, the player character more powerful than anyone else by the end of the story. Not to say that being OP is all of the fun, the first playthrough should always be a learning experience for both the player AND the character they're controlling. After that, new game plus ftw. Multiplayer is where actual competition comes into play, so the game needs to be balanced for all players. Games are meant to be fun, it just depends on what the player considers "fun"
For FPS i consider classic doom and halo best for me in terms of difficulty. Doom provides more enemies and some enemies replaced with high tier enemies , less ammo and take more damage. Halo is similar. Noticeable in halo CE is that spawns change and also adds more enemy waves i certain sections. You also take more damage and enemies are more often higher rank. Taking more damage isn't that bad but when developers do the lazy approach of making enemies take forever to kill, that's when i lose interest.
PS: Borderlands 2 as great as it is, has difficulty issues. Unless you go meta build with a character like Salvador, your experience won't be that enjoyable towards the end. It feels like you get instantly killed in some cases despite having a good build on paper, and at the same time you're shooting at the same person for 20 sec non stop.
I love "adjusting" difficulty as Resident Evil 4 made it. If you got tons of ammo and breeze trough the game, the game will throw more and harder enemies at you, but if you're all out of ammo, and barely surviving, you'll entcounter less enemies, said enemies dropping more ammo or herbs instead of money. I find this a lot more fun than having the entire game super hard for you. At the start the game will throw you a bone, but the better you get, the harder it becomes.
dear ultrakill elitists: i do NOT care if you think i'm a "wimp" for playing on harmless and not brutal. i'm here to have fun not crack my skull open trying to beat sisyphus
the first time i played god of war 2018 i didn't know that "Give me god of war " was a difficulty option, I thought that it was just a weird way of telling me that this is the actual game. I ended up finishing the game after 8 moths playing around 2 hours a day.
I really like hard games, there is something about beating something that pushes you to the limit. There have been times I have have though stuff being unfair and/or impossible, but I still managed to beat it. Like look at Call of duty world at war on veteran difficulty, its super hard and give you no chance to just hide away since you will get bombarded by grenades. Quake 1 on nightmare, there are parts where you pretty much die instantly in ambuses if you forgot they were there. I mean you can just save, but I think saving mid level takes away all the stress with playing on the hardest difficulty. One difficulty setting that I would say bad is in the elder scrolls and/or some of the fallout games where they just make the enemies tanky. God of war on give me god of war difficulty is fair in my opinion because just mindlessly hitting an enemy is not the intended way to get through the game on that setting, you should use combos and abilities especially investing in the Runic stat to get massive damage. Then we have games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R which has a unique difficulty setting making both you and the enemies take ridiculous damage. Headshots are usually lethal and you die in seconds, but same goes for your enemies with the exception of mutants. Max payne 3 had a unique system where if a bullet hits your head and you have no painkiller you're dead, even on some of the easier difficulties, but honestly Max payne is a powerfantasy game, the hardest difficulty is really fun.
Elder Scrolls/Fallout have the worst difficulty scaling by far because not only they make the enemies more tanky, but they also lower the damage you do and boost the damage the enemies do to you.
I hate adaptive difficulty. I don't get why everyone seems to love it so much. If I've picked difficulty X and I've been struggling with a certain part, I wanna beat it by getting better at the game. I don't want the game to get easier without telling me to give me the illusion of accomplishment. I would be ok with it if the game gave you the option to turn it off though
Adaptive difficulty isn't a good fit for most games. But what it does well is fit 'story heavy' games where gameplay is there to support the story, as the one thing it achieves by 'adapting' is letting the player continue the story more consistently. That said I still don't really like it and generally prefer games where the gameplay isn't playing second fiddle to other aspects.
I never go away from normal difficulty. If the game can't be beaten, I will either put it away and write an angry comment, or give myself some money with cheats. I would limit to one aspect of cheating. If it is money, I would be still restricted by the tech tree of unlocks or discoveries. Difficulties are simple multipliers to health and damage, and likely not hand-tweaked as much or at all. I feel skeptical towards an adaptive difficulty punishing me for playing too well.
From Software games arent hard. They are, so to say, realistic. They do not allow you to make your perfect world with anime girls. At least easily. Same as it is IRL. BESIDES how can a game with basically infinite retries be hard? Maybe for poossies
I think lazy difficulty settings are bad. Sure: I think every game should have an "easy" mode for people who just want to see the story and just changing numbers is completely fair in that regard. However, nothing feels worse than a "hard" difficulty setting just turning enemies into bullet sponges. It sucks. The best way to improve difficulty is enemy number and enemy behavior. Same goes for "special" enemies. Take Skyrim for example. Why does a "Bandit" die in 1 hit, but a "Bandit Highwayman" needs to wailed at for 2 minutes straight before you see the health-bar moving? It is stupid. Higher level enemies should be more challenging, because of their gear and behavior, not damage numbers. Make weaker enemies more likely to flee in terror, make stronger enemies better at blocking attacks, or use special equipment like grenades. There is ways to make difficulty mean something and very few games do it.
personal opinions on every difficulty easy: more checkpoints/save points, higher chance of getting better items, enemy AI/cooldowns nerfed. basically, it just makes it so dying is less of a complete setback and more a mild inconvenience. also, more rare shiny thing normal: bro this is just the base game hard: less checkpoints, enemy AI/moves buffed, new moves added to bosses/existing moves modified to be harder. essentially, this just makes boss fights and enemies more interesting, and makes it so dying sets you back further. anything beyond this is just "your choice, just don't make it bad". honestly, i HATE it when games have difficulties that either do NOTHING or are really just a pain to deal with. risk of rain 2 has a really interesting difficulty system IMO, it's simple and isn't too bad to get used to, but it's still unique. drizzle (easy) makes you regen more and lowers enemy difficulty scaling, rainstorm (normal) is the default, and monsoon (hard) just lowers your regen and boosts scaling. this basically causes the game to move way faster. not only that, but eclipse exists. personally, i'd rather have modifiers or extremely random/unique difficulty settings that genuinely *change* the gameplay instead of the stereotypical easy, normal and hard modes. why am i writing this-
I know this is a 5 month old vid that probably been forgotten but i feel like difficulty should be based on how well the player is doing. you know if your blazing through it you get less ammo drops, less healing items, and less repair items. and harder "unique" enemy's and if your struggling well its the opposite though on a lesser scale.
I'm late to the party, but KH2 has one of the best "Hardest" Difficulties I've ever played being critical mode. In Critical mode, your hp and mo is halved, but you start the game off with extra ap(ability slots) and do extra damage with a few abilities from the get go. And funny enough, a lot of the superbosses feel easier on critical than in proud for me, since it's less of an endurance battle
I personally feel like Terraria did alright I’m with difficulty. Not the best, but alright. Normal enemies are already hard on normal if you try just tanking it. You’re supposed to dodge. But you can still survive a few hits, especially with health potions, which are abundant enough to use them on normal enemies. And when the game difficulty goes up (to expert, mastermode is kind of bad) bosses and normal enemies gain new moves instead of only increasing damage and health. Then the challenge modes are mediumcore and hardcore.
You're invorrect about fromsoft games. They're hard because they try to make sure you don't get good at the game. Thats the reason for not explaining their mechanics well, strats to use, have terrible camera, etc. This isnopposite in doom eternal because ID knows even after they tell you everythijg doom eternal will still be a hard game. Also, ds2 sotfs literally has a hardmode you can select in game. Its ng+ does more than just buff enemies. Again, thats not you just becoming OP, which you still can do. You got the premise wrong mate. And picked the wrong examples. The only fromsoft game to difficulty even remotely right was ds2 sotfs due to its difficulty settings. distance, doom eternal, etc. all do difficulty much better than most games, including fromsoft because they're genuinely hard. Not pretending to be hard like fromsoft's souls games.
Playing The Division on challenging is like me walking right into a military base with mini guns, bombs, and whatever they have get thrown at me. I could run a build but I don’t find that fun and usually you rely on the build rather than your skill. I even matchmake on the final missions for each final section of the manhunts because I’d get shredded to bits and the enemies are just bullet sponges I’ll be out of ammo before I even get through half the mission.
I kinda liked Halo's difficulty, it was a genuine challenge to beat reach and 4 on higher difficulties for the achievements and armor unlocks (i miss those so fucking much please just bring back unlockables based on achievements and actual challenges) it was frustrating at times but doable and fun
Persona 5 Royal's Merciless has some balancing issues that a certain boss (Okumara) easier then on Hard (Or arguable easier then well Easy) Hitting a Weakness does 3X Damage and Crits do more damage the issue lies within that this goes both way and can be easily exploited there
Man, come to think of it, gamers legit like over complicating things for themselves. And also like to make life harder for themselves on purpose just to boost their messed up ego. Like bruh, I legit find this shit funny. 😂
Wait can we talk about marvels spiderman 2 difficulty!. I love it because it does actually show how the diffuclty is changed. And the health /enemy sliders. + You can modify certain difficulties like uour health and the enemys health. I love that seriously!
A solution I like is that the game is primarily designed around the developer difficulty. Being built and tested around the hard end that the developers would be playing at.
One of my favorite games has a mixed bag when it comes to difficulties: Megaman Zero. It's actual "hard" difficulty isn't much to write home about, as it just makes it so you can basically only use one slash of your sword weapon and all of your weapons are basically unable to be charged or leveled up, which to me sounds like a boring snoozefest. However, on the normal difficulty, where these restrictions don't apply, you will still see the rank system, which I really like. You see, depending on how fast you completed your previous missions, how many times you died, how many assists you used, and how many enemies you killed, you begin to get a "rank", which is based on the average of all the points of your previous missions in a run. If that rank goes high enough, bosses will gain an extra attack they can use against you to make boss fights tougher. I actually really like this, and in future installments you can actually get a form of this extra attack for beating them in this way (MMZ4 is a little different, but that's for a different day).
you forgot to mention how some games are more enjoyable on hard, either because the devs intended this to be the main mode or they just thought that dying once is a harsh enough punishment (it's not in most games)
People who say that they play on hard to make the game take longer There's a thing called "going easy on easy enemies" Where you sorta roleplay that if you die in the game You die in real life
Imo if souls ever get an easy mode it should be whenever you roll you go purple or some other bright colour when you have I frames and enemies weapons glow when they can be parried
There are a few games that gets it right, that said few. There is Horizon Zero Dawn, it make the game way too hard starting out. Prices are ludicrous, enemies can see you from a mile away. They are more aggressive, can almost one shot you, and there is no health bar. It makes the game that much harder than it needs to be. Remnant is better, but you basically die in 2 hits, sometimes in one and enemies way too beefy. Invest as much as you want in protection and everything, but it still doesn't do anything. A game that I have played that does get it right is Ghost of Tsushima. Most enemies go down in 2 hits, but so do you, meaning that there is at least some level of fairness when starting out. The Witcher 3 does it differently. The game literally makes you feel like witcher. You are supposed to use everything you have at your disposal, meaning that you can use every trick up your sleeve, no matter what. The bottom line is a game is supposed to be fair no matter what difficulty you play on. Playing on hard shouldn't feel like torture, it should make you think about what you do and give a fair challenge, not throw everything at you and only make you feel like you are powerless.
I think if they just change numbers then its better to have a slider rather then individual buttons, so the easy to normal/ normal to hard ect jump isnt too harsh!
I've been thinking about this whole thing for awhile myself like what's the point of difficulty settings in some games when sometimes the player can't even tell the difference between normal and hard or easy and normal? The souls series seems to have perfected what difficulty should be whether you have that perfect build for yourself and wreck the game or if you want it more difficult just use terrible weapons and go naked through the game, I don't understand at times how a lot of games I play(even for the first time) I have it set to easy difficulty and like I notice that I take some of the most bs damage even on that difficulty and it makes me think like "If this is easy difficulty I'd like to see what hard is like" but mostly as a joke you know? Even games like Skyrim right, okay I loved Morrowind and Oblivion, fair games and all but then I play Skyrim and I'm sitting there getting one tapped by bandit chiefs while rocking full daedric and that's with it set to novice difficulty so I thought "maybe that's hard difficulty" so I scrolled all the way to the right setting it to legendary thinking that's easy difficulty but...I noticed no difference in damage I was taking and I was baffled when yet in something like dark souls I can easily shrug off backstabs like they're nothing or even attacks from bosses. I'm kinda tired of difficulty settings in games honestly, not sure if anyone else is but yeah I totally get this video...
Don't have a console, and I'm useless at melee, so I'd never play a Fromsoft game - but I enjoy watching other people play them. And the thing that would really put me off is that when the player dies, they have to go way back and run across the map having loads of mini-fights before they can get to the fight that killed them. I can skip that when I'm watching a playthrough, but it would be tedious as an actual player. Tedious for me, anyway. ;-)
I feel like the main problem with Elden Ring is that the bosses move as fast as ones in Sekiro but the player has the movement speeds that of Dark Souls
I use to play normal on every game but one day my foster dad came in as I started cod infinte warfare, And he called me a pussy and i beleve i said something like "you dont even play games so you would not even stand easy mode" he proceed to beat the whole game in hard and just in spite of me also doing insane after he unlocked it for beating it in hard. I now have alway done the hardest difcullty possible.
Why don't you just play on easy? Difficulty settings shouldn't go. Nor should normal become easy. Hard is hard for a reason, and nightmare or impossible are called that for a reason. I will say that Halo 4's difficulty settings are bad.
Because difficulties can be ridiculous, take borderlands 2 for example, regular game is fine and gets really difficult by the end, then there's true vault hunter mode where all enemies are balanced to end game standards, that was really fun and a good new game plus. Then there's ultimate vault hunter mode, why? You basically need to use slag (an elemental effect that increases damage) all the time or you'll NEVER put a dent into even the most basic bandits, there's health regen so you can't leave enemies or they'll heal, and the player can drop from 20mil hp to 200k in one shot, did I also mention that enemies like bandits or raiders have MILLIONS of hp while guns at level 50 (UVHM level) deal 50 to 80k bass damage? I don't mind difficulty but I HATE one sided difficulty that favors the enemy, I shouldn't have to spend 50 minutes in a fight because some enemy has 100mil hp for no good reasons, and I shouldn't have to use gimmicks to fight them, borderlands is all about weapon variety and having to always carry a slag gun into fights is stupid, now apply this to the 100s of other games doing the same thing.
@@TheSurvivor-tv9jf There is a game that handled difficulty badly. Halo 4. Instead of making the enemies more smarter and dangerous, they just made them complete bullet sponges.
I dont know why this is a topic the whole point is to pick a difficulty you think is for you, some people just like easy games, some people like a challenge, and some people like games that are unfair, yes they do exist so no difficulty options dont suck you just suck at picking them
I don't like 'souls games. But I respect them a lot for being bold enough to just go «We maked a gaem. Play it.» and you have to play the game exactly as it is. Difficulties are a nightmare because every dev feels different and also normal to hard is often too much of a gap. And of course the main issue is «You want it hard? Here are lvl 1 rats that have 9999hp. Have fun, c*ks*er!.... wdym having to shoot an enemy 50 times more than before isn't hard and rather boring?»
My favorite difficulty setting is Project Wingman. Every difficulty just makes the NPCs smarter than the last. Even the hardest difficulty doesn’t make anything (except maybe like three bosses) more durable, it just spawns new enemies.
I absolutely love subtle difficulty via playing with different equipment combinations, collecting different items, and act tuning, I really don't like explicit difficulty settings that you pick from the beginning and have to commit to for the entire save
God I hate games that think "hard" means even the most basic enemy has a million hit points. Not only that makes the player feel like a toddler slapping the enemy. It is not challeging, as I continue to do the same thing over and over until that HP bar hits 0.
What about games like Doom Eternal ☠️
@@santinosmaldonisayed5977 it’s still a terrible “difficulty increase”
Games like dmc do it right because you ARE given a million ways to fight enemies and destroy them, but gameplay where you're just mashing the same attack suck
@@Megasuperq Nah. DMC is not the worst only because GoW exist. Just because you have lots of options on how your attacks LOOK does not mean the game is better. The only one that does it right is the Ninja Gaiden 1, because in that game, if you know what you are doing almost all enemies can be dismembered and have their heads chopped off, regardless of how spongy they are...
@@TheBrazilRules dmc is about showing off, ninja gaiden is about efficency.
In The last of us, there was a new weapon near the start of a fight with a couple of infected in the beginning of the game. I remembered that when I played on normal difficulty, I used the weapon in the fight. On hard difficulty, it wasn’t there and it made the fight a lot *harder*. The environment should change, not the enemy’s stats or the player’s.
I feel like the main issue with having game difficulty settings is that most of the time there is a default difficulty that the game is balanced around, and the rest of the settings are either different enemy stats or more / less stuff thrown around in the game. Usually when I first play a game I want to play the difficulty the game was balanced around but even then choosing my difficulty as the start is a nightmare because its always something different. I haven't played God of War but I'm definitely the type of person to choose "Give me God of War" just wanting to play the game only to be completely obliterated
the worst thing ever is when games mock you, make fun of you, and generally see you as lesser when you pick low difficulties. this goes for the game itself and the communities. are are games who deadpan make your character look like a baby or some crap for playing on easy. this gets even worse when you realize there are people new to games or more tragically physically or mentally disabled people who get mercilessly mocked for trying to enjoy a game in the only way they can
"DIFFICULTY: TOURIST"
"We didn't call this difficulty "baby Mode" because we don't want to shame players for wanting to experience the game without the stress of intense combat and failure looming over them. We made the game for everyone to enjoy any way they like."
"But yeah, this difficulty is for teensy little babies."
-Madness Project Nexus
Can we just start telling people to just
Find a better hobby
When you need 27 mods on your Xbox controller, maybe it's time to accept that you only have two fingers, and can't reach the big leagues
@@Bangbanggooberblat69 man I love this game humor honestly
I agree with you; survival horror games are the best when it comes to implementing high difficulty in a functional way. For example, Resident Evil 7's Madhouse difficulty is very effective because it forces you to play differently and pursue items that you wouldn't care about in a normal playthrough. Additionally, there are games that increase enemy health and cause the player to deal only 2 damage to the weakest enemy, while that same enemy has an attack that instakills, making the experience extremely tedious and even turning a game that someone loves into the game they hate the most.
@ozt6503 I'm late to this, the same for Both The Last of Us games and, surprisingly, Skate 3. For The Last of Us Part 1 and 2, their hardest difficulty Grounded mode is a great difficulty system having the hud, health bar the crafting sound cue ammo count and listen mode is all out, having you to rely on sound cues on the infected and enemies having you realize that some encounters can be completely avoided. For Skate 3, black box got creative with its difficulty, instead of doing like a higher point count or certain tricks are used, Black Box changed the physics of each , it's hard to explain but a youtube That Boy Aqua made a great video on the Skate games.
The duality of hardest difficulties
The one that make enemies massive sponges of damage
The one with limited save/perma death (and enemies do infinite damage because why not)
Honestly, I agree with most thing's here...except for Metro being an example of bad difficulty, I really dig Ranger Hardcore.
@@MegaMicah12 same
If you want a great example of difficulty done right, take a look at timesplitters 2.
Level difficulty didn't just effect spawn rates or damage, it turned on and off level objectives and shortened timers.
TS2's first mission on easy just involves getting into a cave and blowing up a monster in a box, but on normal it also includes burning files and taking out coms dishes, with hard including a bunch more stuff along with a climactic fight with a helicopter on top of a dam, and that sort of design is carried across the whole game.
On top of all that, beating higher difficulties unlocked more stuff for multiplayer, like characters, game modes, maps, and so on.
It gave you a reason to push yourself to get good at the game, incentivizing you to do so with unlocks, and rewarding you with more cool stuff in each level when you finally stepped up and took a shot at it.
As a person with a job I play fromsoft games using mods to make my life easier so I can embrace everything on each game and pass through each game wihout dedicating mental hours of torture.
I personally think that it's great how Fromsoft doesn't use this stupid "difficulty pick" thing in their Souls series. Like, if you want a relaxed gameplay, just pick a class that represents your playstyle the best and level up into something good while carrying great weapons and (sometimes) armor, but if you want the opposite, just throw all the armor away and fight with a fricking sword hilt
I usually just want to play the game on the difficulty it was built around. And that can be hard because you would think that would be "normal" or "medium" but that isn't always the case. Sometimes devs will come out and say that "hard" is the true difficulty of the game. Like Halo for example, bungie devs always said that "heroic" was the true way to play Halo.
I believe mirror's edge has a good harder difficulty, since in normal and easy you have this thing called runners vision which highlights some objects in red sp you know where to go, but in hard mode they remove it
ULTRAKILL Violent/Brutal difficulty is a good example of a hard mode. Instead of the enemies having more hp or just deals more damage, they instead tweak functionality of enemies to make them feel more harder. Like for example: Allowing the filth to attack for times in a row or the Maurices and Mindflayers enter an enraged state when under a certain percentage of hp which the enemies will attack faster and the Maurice gains a second explosive beam that happens after the 1st one during the enraged state.
I don't think just making enemies have more heaöth and damage is always a bad thing. I've played both the horizon games, and have replayed them both on tge hardest difficulty, and I found that really fun. Choosing the right strategy became more important, and I had to play really good, which meant it also got really satisfying. I would either end up dead, or barely taking damage... however that kinda changes in the late game. Then I was already over-leveled enough to take some hits without dying instantly. Some enemies were still hard, but it didn’t get as tedious to kill tgem anymore either, and honestly it might be good that the game becomes easier as one goes along, cuz I would probably start to get mad after 60 hours. I don’t think it’s as tedious as gow, the enemies in horizon usually don’t go down in one hit when on equal level, and hp bars are removed in ultra hard, so you don’t see the progress in the same way. And I also think that in the first game one of the strategies, overriding machines, becomes stronger on higher difficulties. I think higher difficulty makes aloy weaker in terms of damage, and gives machines more damage, but everything has the same hp as on easier modes
1 of my favourite “ultra hard” difficulty’s is cry of fear’s nightmare mode yes it still has the more enemy hp bs but I like how morphine does less healing and how a save takes up a bag slot and you can only save 5 times it makes the game hard while having a challenge
I sorta just had this epiphany in HK after I finally beat the Radiance and her BS double damage asked myself "Was it worth it, did I feel fufilled" and the answer was... no
I felt really angry after beating her, like it pissed me off, I was shaking with so much hate from the struggle this boss put me through. I felt so fucking mad and I just felt like my time was wasted. Even wrose is that I still struggled to have fun in other games, because they had literally gotten too easy for me. Beating souls games riuned other games for me, it just hardlocked me into this I-frame centric playstyle... then one day I played KH3 Remind and said "I;'ll play Critical Mode" the nobodies in Twilight town kicked my ass for a good few hours before I said "Fuck it" and made a Proud difficulty save and.... had fun? Turns out I was actually enjoying myself, building my team and giving Donald and Goofy some wacky item combos, seeing the story play out, and yeah sure I was melting through HP bars, yeah I was literally kicking everything in the ass... but also... I was having fun while kicking everything in the rear, I actually was able to play some unique playstyles due to me being literally too good as I could basically goof off and have fun.
Turns out fun gameplay made for more fun than actual difficulty. To this day I play on normal 1st, and if the Hard Mode isn't just a "hurr hurr, number go up" and then I'll do it. I've sorta just given up on playing Souls likes for fun, and have embraced games with fun mechanics, and fun exploration. I actually now enjoy easier games because I've learned too love a game inspite of how easy it easy, because a good game is not good for its difficulty... its good because of its mechanics and how it is built
5:15 I was one of those masochists who beat it before NG+ was added in a future update.
All you get for beating it is a skin change for Karatos' shield🤐
I'll never get the complaints about the existence of easy modes in 'hardcore' games. No one is forcing you to play it that way, there is no loss from beginner and disabled gamers also being able to enjoy your favorite games.
The Evil within's akumu mode was actually a lot of fun. I died 289 times, but it was still fun
There is a right and wrong way to implement the difficulty settings. I'd argue Wolfenstein 3D did it right I mean in that game harder means more enemies to kill. Same with classic Doom and Quake. Yes, there is a nightmare difficulty in Doom but it's more of a joke difficulty that is meant to silence the people who complained that Doom is too easy even on Ultra-Violence difficulty. (Though some hardcore people made a nightmare run) In Quake 1 nightmare is kinda hidden and it does the same as hard but also makes enemies harder in ways other than raising damage and HP.
The wrong way of making it hard is making enemies too damage spongy and too deadly.
I think your handsome
There’s a difference between hard and annoying, raising the difficulty should increase the enemies health and damage not decrease your damage by 90% while increasing the damage and health and defense of the enemies by 1000%
I really dislike the resi 4 remake professional difficulty.They could make the enemies have more health while giving you less ammo making the game more of a survival horror rather than an action horror game ,but they should still have the enemies get staggered by one headshot rather than 2 or 3
Sounds like that would make the game to easy.
@@skeley6776 I mean hardcore was like that and i enjoyed it very much.I think that's the definitive way to play the game
harder difficulty should mean smarter enemies
Halfway through the video and im starting to think you dont understand achievements and difficulties, achievements are checkmarks for completion and achievements you gained in your favourite games and difficulties give you more options to challenge yourself or to make next playthroughs more interesting
Not including heldivers 2 is a crime
Waste of time nothing interesting was said in this video just 10 minutes of yapping
The greatest “hard” difficulty I’ve played was Metro: Last Light.
A single bullet could take you down, but a single bullet will also take down most enemies
So heaven or hell from DMC.
you mean hardcore difficuly. If so i hope you know about the ranger hardcore difficulty. That thing is not unforgiving but sometimes close.
@@light4299 It also changes some mechanics and things like wristwatch model
Still I don't understand why can't you see your ammo EVEN in tab menu
Like Artyom became so stupid he couldn't count how much mags he's carrying
@@DraganKKWCZ no wristwatches changes based on if you choose suvival mode or spartan mode. But the thing about ammo in tab menu. On ranger hardcore you check your ammo with your journal and thats my favorite immersive thing about first 2 metro games. Because it feels like realistic thing to do that you would write how much ammo you have in to your journal
You got pass the mole cave level? Respect o7
I have beaten GoW on the Give me God of War difficulty. It was a pain in the ass and maybe that's why i didn't touch the game after that. The difficulty, it made me think the game was awful, which it isn't, but I'm still not a big fan of it. I regret it everytime, that I must choose the hardest difficulty in all of the games i play, even, if I don't even know what the game is about or anything.
I played GoW on the give me god of war difficulty and I loved the game. It was not very fun at the start but ones I got good at the game I started to enjoy it (and the game becomes a lot easier ones your past the early game)
I was like that, thinking that normal was "Too Easy" and started playing games on hard mode
I stopped many months ago because I told myself "I play games not to feel pain, I play games to have fun"
So since I moved to normal again and just had fun with games
I think the only time I would try hard mode is a game I really love and that I best on normal many times
It wasn't just the game, you were in the wrong, there were no winners here
Sometimes I feel crazy cause unlike other people, when I do finally beat the one part in the game I was failing for hours at a time, I feel almost nothing.
I don’t feel fulfilled, I don’t feel like I won. I feel like I wasted hours on all of that stress and for what? It ends up being entirely draining and debilitating, sometimes ruining the entire game for me if it’s bad enough. All it takes is one boss that I have to abuse the game mechanics in unintended ways to beat, and then I feel sour about everything afterwords. I don’t play normally again cause at that point I’ve already had to memorize how to break the game in order to win, so encounters don’t feel natural as my mindset shifts into doing what gives the enemy no chance as opposed to what’s fun. Happens the most with single player close quarters combat games I noticed, and usually way before the end of the game.
@@boltogen5416 That was my experience with Malenia in Elden Ring, and almost my entire experience with the ER DLC, which is why I stopped playing before getting very far.
Yep. It's more like: Fucking finally!
It kinda reminded me of cruelty squad. You start at 2nd hardest difficulty, but if you die, you go on lower difficulty (and if you die a lot, you get downgraded again) - and this is a gameplay element too
About dead space remake: there were some guys trying to complete the game on impossible mode, got some stupid softlock bug in the end of the game right before the final boss and they had to just delete the saves because only that would fix the softlock.
Speedrunner Waifuruns basically had to beat his other save(difficulty below impossible) before the softlock in order to complete his challenge as impossible mode is the same except permadeath
Thank you for acknowledging "easy" mode's benefits for accessibility. In fact there's one other thing too; some people just don't like the gameplay of certain games and would rather experience the world it has to offer. I know the recent retro-shooter Selaco has a tourist-difficulty like this.
Danganronpa AE also has one that does 1 thing over Medium (Troubled/Komaru) and Hard (Despair)
You can summon your invincible best friend at basically any time which makes sense since the prequel and rest of the series is a VN/Adventure game so a Third Person Shooter would be a jarring transition
The stuff I hate that some games do is just enemies that have more health and do more damage which isnt engaging at all. As of late, I just play the medium difficulty most of the time of any game. That way I have more freedom of choice in playstyle and put limits on myself which can still be engaging in ways that more health and damage isn't.
When I was younger I tried doing games on the second hardest difficulty. Now as an adult with barely enough time to play games I always play on easy mode to progress faster and I don't care what the rest of the community says.
Same, brother.
same, i just want to experience games when i have free time. i dont want to grinf 100 hours just to get good
Respect bro. Don't ever bend to their opinions of what it means to be a "real" gamer
I find me going down this road more often than not these days. I'm in my sixties and don't have the time/patience and am grateful for games that provide difficulty settings and the more options the better.
Same
I especially have a problem with difficulty elitists in games like terraria, where if you don’t play game on the hardest difficulty they don’t consider you a true fan. And I’m saying this as a guy who always plays games on the hardest difficulty even if it’s my first play through
Didnt play Terraria but sounds similar to Payday 2 but in that game the hole game is balanced around the highest difficulty (DSOD) and if u go lower ur automatically way to overpowered.
I think its because the harder the difficulty the more items/ content/ and weapons you get from it giving you a full experience
@@TheRandom_Emu nah, master mode only adds trophies, pets and gives you additional accessory slot. Unlike expert mode it doesn't do any AI changes so enemies are just more tanky and damaging. Well, actually there is also an armor change, instead of protecting some percent of your health it just subtracts armor level from taken damage, as I know both for players and mobs
@@Artyomann >as I know both for players and mobs
it is only for players.
@sleepydudespillow lmao i used to be typa guy who played on hard or even hardest, but with time i started to not care and usually play on normal just to enjoy things, like for plot or characters, yea uts fun to get a challange but its more fun to actually enjoy the game, and some people want even just that dont care about fights wanna just consume story, its like acting "if you dont watch a show on your fridge screen through a plugged in 20 year old laptop youre not a true fan of the show grrr"
I'm really not a fan of 'director' dynamic difficulty systems, mostly as a result of experience with later games in the Homeworld series. Over-preparing is how I like to play games and manage difficulty for myself and punishing me for that sucks.
As much i love resident evil, i dislike how dynamic difficulty works here, like, come on, my maxed fucking shotgun need two for three shots blank range to kill a enemy ffs?
I don't know if I'm a masochist but I enjoy playing games with a difficult setting because it's really satisfying when you defeat a boss or complete a mission because of the thrill of the challenge compared to easy mode.
But I don't judge what difficulty people choose because your experience is what matters when playing a video game
I have physical disabilities ( cerebral paralysis I can't use my legs, and my right hand is very slow ), and I still enjoy elden Ring now, garanted. I suck at it, but I am enjoying it. I could go where I want to fight. However, I want is
fun and unique
I recently played a lot of Hades. It's a dungeon crawler roguelike. The game has a mechanic called The pact of punishment, which has a bunch of modifiers that make the game harder. One of those modifiers is called "Extreme measures", I think and it's my favorite way of making any game harder. What it does is it add additional attacks to a boss's move set. There are other modifiers that introduce a time limit, additional mechanics to the basic enemies, increased prices to the items in the shop, fewer choices to choosing upgrades and the classic - increased enemy damage and health. Hands down the best difficulty system in any game I have played in my life. Certainly hope the upcoming Hades 2 keeps that and hopefully improves that and I hope more games, not only roguelikes add similar features to their difficulty setting, sort of like in Legendary Halo with it's improved enemy AI.
One interesting thing about (most) yakuza games with legend mode is that it’s basically just hard mode with no retrying a fight if you lose just sending you back to your last save and on most of them the scaling from normal to hard isn’t very much
Difficulty elitists in Minecraft are less worse than Terraria ones. Somehow, Keep Inventory's taboo.
Comparing minecraft and terraria is something only a butthurt minecraft elitist would do lmao.
@@Janex-06 me when I'm in a game meat riding competition and my opponent is a Minecraft player
(I play both games btw and I like both, just not the butthurt idiots using every opportunity to say one game is better than the other.)
Been a while since I played terraria but doesn't it have 2 difficulty types, one for the player character and another for the world?
Also minecraft hard diffculty does absolutely nothing but just increase enemy damage, terraria master mode makes the ai of the bosses better and allows access to items you otherwise dont get in other diffculties + there are seeds like "for the worthy" that gives an extra diffculty called legendary. (ftw also has other things in the seed itself, not just the extra diffculty.)
diffculty counter: 4
@@eclipsedninja1346 yep including seeds that make the game harder
Enemies numbers & placement > Enemies buff
a really good hard mode is Paper Mario TTYD's (unofficial) "Hero Mode", it doesn't just give enemies more hp, it gives the game a whole new story, redesigns characters, and adds new mechanics to keep even the most seasoned players on their toes!
if you think give me god of war was hard you should play metal gear solid 2 on European extreme and get the big boss rank it's real fun trust me
I’m surprised that Left 4 Dead 2 wasn’t brought up. The game has 4 difficulties, easy, normal, advanced, and expert, as well as one modifier, realism, and it is super well balanced and the difficulty actually gives what you expect from it.
In normal, friendly fire deals minimal damage, zombies hit you for either 2 or 1 damage depending on if you are hit in the front or the back respectively, and time between hordes is long enough to give players time to prepare while still making progress.
Easy difficulty turns off friendly fire, zombies can do a max of 1 damage, hordes are very far apart, and The Tank has less health
Advanced difficulty has friendly fire deal more damage than normal, zombies deal 5 or 3 damage, hordes are slightly more frequent, The Tank has 50% more health, and The Tank and special infected deal more damage.
Finally with expert difficulty, friendly fire deals massive damage, zombie deal 20 or 10 damage, hordes are extremely common, Tanks have 100% more health and also its attack will instantly down survivors, special infected deal way more damage(like, 5 times as much) and finally, The Witch will instantly kill a survivor instead of just downing them.
The realism modifier is there as an extra challenge/layer of difficulty. Player outlines through walls are hidden, respawn closets are disabled, zombies take less damage if not headshot, and the witch will instantly kill a player except on easy difficulty.
This system of difficult is really well balanced with each one giving the players exactly what they asked for. Expert difficulty may be heartless and difficult to a player that isn’t an expert, but that’s the whole point, and it may be a good idea for that player to play Advanced instead until they have the skill to beat expert
Also the director will adapt your game based on your skill. If you're getting your ass kicked you'll get more health items and less hordes.
I’m someone who prefers easy difficulty. Metro 2033/ Last Light is a series that after playing the hardest difficulty, i enjoyed it more. Because it’s not artificial difficulty. (I never played Exodus on the highest difficulty, but I imagine the open world makes this more frustrating)
Sure, you take more damage. But so does every enemy. You can 1 shot almost every enemy with a well placed bullet, even mutants. But you can get overwhelmed if you’re not careful.
Less ammo picked up? You don’t need as much ammo anyway. Stealth is encouraged so you can save your ammo for the mandatory gunfights. You need to think more tactically and use cover so you’re playing differently.
I’d recommend the first two Metro games on Ranger Hardcore, as someone who always plays on easy.
As a video game dev student, this is a great indsight, I know I was aware of this but never really paid great attention to it
thank you for bringing that subject up, I'll make sure to always pay attention to it in my own projects
Monster Hunter does this very well.
You get a Low Rank, where you learn the monsters for the first time, a high rank and a G rank that are progressively more difficult.
Monsters often have subspecies or variants that are different and more difficult, change the way you have to apporach them while retaining some moveset characteristics.
The games have a steep learning curve and are hard throughout (pre-World), but your experiences build you up to the challenge. It is sort of a long, difficult, ongoing tutorial.
You also have harder and easier weapon/monster matchups.
With your healing items, you have a margin of error. Skills like mushroomancer, which turns very easy to obtain and stack mushrooms into valuable health items, can make this much more pronounced.
I have played through MH4U, one of the hardest games in the series and imho the one with the best difficulty design, with a partially broken analog stick that was slow to react. Even that rarely became an issue with clever use of the camera and careful positioning.
accesibylity is more nuanced than "Easy mode" . like for example a blind guy beat the last of us because the game was accesible enough so that you could beat it while being unable to see ,while animal crossing, an "easy" game is very hard to play as a blind guy
Okay that's weird
Can he really not see?
I feel sorry for him cause of the graphics push
All singleplayer games need to be piss easy, the player character more powerful than anyone else by the end of the story.
Not to say that being OP is all of the fun, the first playthrough should always be a learning experience for both the player AND the character they're controlling. After that, new game plus ftw.
Multiplayer is where actual competition comes into play, so the game needs to be balanced for all players.
Games are meant to be fun, it just depends on what the player considers "fun"
For FPS i consider classic doom and halo best for me in terms of difficulty. Doom provides more enemies and some enemies replaced with high tier enemies , less ammo and take more damage. Halo is similar. Noticeable in halo CE is that spawns change and also adds more enemy waves i certain sections. You also take more damage and enemies are more often higher rank. Taking more damage isn't that bad but when developers do the lazy approach of making enemies take forever to kill, that's when i lose interest.
PS: Borderlands 2 as great as it is, has difficulty issues. Unless you go meta build with a character like Salvador, your experience won't be that enjoyable towards the end. It feels like you get instantly killed in some cases despite having a good build on paper, and at the same time you're shooting at the same person for 20 sec non stop.
I love "adjusting" difficulty as Resident Evil 4 made it.
If you got tons of ammo and breeze trough the game, the game will throw more and harder enemies at you, but if you're all out of ammo, and barely surviving, you'll entcounter less enemies, said enemies dropping more ammo or herbs instead of money.
I find this a lot more fun than having the entire game super hard for you.
At the start the game will throw you a bone, but the better you get, the harder it becomes.
dear ultrakill elitists: i do NOT care if you think i'm a "wimp" for playing on harmless and not brutal. i'm here to have fun not crack my skull open trying to beat sisyphus
the first time i played god of war 2018 i didn't know that "Give me god of war " was a difficulty option, I thought that it was just a weird way of telling me that this is the actual game. I ended up finishing the game after 8 moths playing around 2 hours a day.
I really like hard games, there is something about beating something that pushes you to the limit. There have been times I have have though stuff being unfair and/or impossible, but I still managed to beat it.
Like look at Call of duty world at war on veteran difficulty, its super hard and give you no chance to just hide away since you will get bombarded by grenades.
Quake 1 on nightmare, there are parts where you pretty much die instantly in ambuses if you forgot they were there. I mean you can just save, but I think saving mid level takes away all the stress with playing on the hardest difficulty.
One difficulty setting that I would say bad is in the elder scrolls and/or some of the fallout games where they just make the enemies tanky.
God of war on give me god of war difficulty is fair in my opinion because just mindlessly hitting an enemy is not the intended way to get through the game on that setting, you should use combos and abilities especially investing in the Runic stat to get massive damage.
Then we have games like S.T.A.L.K.E.R which has a unique difficulty setting making both you and the enemies take ridiculous damage. Headshots are usually lethal and you die in seconds, but same goes for your enemies with the exception of mutants.
Max payne 3 had a unique system where if a bullet hits your head and you have no painkiller you're dead, even on some of the easier difficulties, but honestly Max payne is a powerfantasy game, the hardest difficulty is really fun.
Elder Scrolls/Fallout have the worst difficulty scaling by far because not only they make the enemies more tanky, but they also lower the damage you do and boost the damage the enemies do to you.
I hate adaptive difficulty. I don't get why everyone seems to love it so much. If I've picked difficulty X and I've been struggling with a certain part, I wanna beat it by getting better at the game. I don't want the game to get easier without telling me to give me the illusion of accomplishment. I would be ok with it if the game gave you the option to turn it off though
I will never understand the appeal of Adapting Difficulty. All it does is punishing you for playing good and rewarding your for playing bad.
Adaptive difficulty isn't a good fit for most games.
But what it does well is fit 'story heavy' games where gameplay is there to support the story, as the one thing it achieves by 'adapting' is letting the player continue the story more consistently.
That said I still don't really like it and generally prefer games where the gameplay isn't playing second fiddle to other aspects.
It keeps a consistent difficulty
I never go away from normal difficulty. If the game can't be beaten, I will either put it away and write an angry comment, or give myself some money with cheats. I would limit to one aspect of cheating. If it is money, I would be still restricted by the tech tree of unlocks or discoveries. Difficulties are simple multipliers to health and damage, and likely not hand-tweaked as much or at all. I feel skeptical towards an adaptive difficulty punishing me for playing too well.
From Software games arent hard. They are, so to say, realistic.
They do not allow you to make your perfect world with anime girls.
At least easily. Same as it is IRL.
BESIDES how can a game with basically infinite retries be hard? Maybe for poossies
I think lazy difficulty settings are bad. Sure: I think every game should have an "easy" mode for people who just want to see the story and just changing numbers is completely fair in that regard. However, nothing feels worse than a "hard" difficulty setting just turning enemies into bullet sponges. It sucks. The best way to improve difficulty is enemy number and enemy behavior.
Same goes for "special" enemies. Take Skyrim for example. Why does a "Bandit" die in 1 hit, but a "Bandit Highwayman" needs to wailed at for 2 minutes straight before you see the health-bar moving? It is stupid. Higher level enemies should be more challenging, because of their gear and behavior, not damage numbers. Make weaker enemies more likely to flee in terror, make stronger enemies better at blocking attacks, or use special equipment like grenades.
There is ways to make difficulty mean something and very few games do it.
personal opinions on every difficulty
easy: more checkpoints/save points, higher chance of getting better items, enemy AI/cooldowns nerfed. basically, it just makes it so dying is less of a complete setback and more a mild inconvenience. also, more rare shiny thing
normal: bro this is just the base game
hard: less checkpoints, enemy AI/moves buffed, new moves added to bosses/existing moves modified to be harder. essentially, this just makes boss fights and enemies more interesting, and makes it so dying sets you back further.
anything beyond this is just "your choice, just don't make it bad". honestly, i HATE it when games have difficulties that either do NOTHING or are really just a pain to deal with.
risk of rain 2 has a really interesting difficulty system IMO, it's simple and isn't too bad to get used to, but it's still unique. drizzle (easy) makes you regen more and lowers enemy difficulty scaling, rainstorm (normal) is the default, and monsoon (hard) just lowers your regen and boosts scaling. this basically causes the game to move way faster.
not only that, but eclipse exists.
personally, i'd rather have modifiers or extremely random/unique difficulty settings that genuinely *change* the gameplay instead of the stereotypical easy, normal and hard modes.
why am i writing this-
I know this is a 5 month old vid that probably been forgotten but i feel like difficulty should be based on how well the player is doing.
you know if your blazing through it you get less ammo drops, less healing items, and less repair items. and harder "unique" enemy's
and if your struggling well its the opposite though on a lesser scale.
I'm late to the party, but KH2 has one of the best "Hardest" Difficulties I've ever played being critical mode.
In Critical mode, your hp and mo is halved, but you start the game off with extra ap(ability slots) and do extra damage with a few abilities from the get go.
And funny enough, a lot of the superbosses feel easier on critical than in proud for me, since it's less of an endurance battle
I personally feel like Terraria did alright I’m with difficulty. Not the best, but alright.
Normal enemies are already hard on normal if you try just tanking it. You’re supposed to dodge. But you can still survive a few hits, especially with health potions, which are abundant enough to use them on normal enemies.
And when the game difficulty goes up (to expert, mastermode is kind of bad) bosses and normal enemies gain new moves instead of only increasing damage and health.
Then the challenge modes are mediumcore and hardcore.
You're invorrect about fromsoft games. They're hard because they try to make sure you don't get good at the game. Thats the reason for not explaining their mechanics well, strats to use, have terrible camera, etc. This isnopposite in doom eternal because ID knows even after they tell you everythijg doom eternal will still be a hard game.
Also, ds2 sotfs literally has a hardmode you can select in game. Its ng+ does more than just buff enemies. Again, thats not you just becoming OP, which you still can do.
You got the premise wrong mate. And picked the wrong examples. The only fromsoft game to difficulty even remotely right was ds2 sotfs due to its difficulty settings. distance, doom eternal, etc. all do difficulty much better than most games, including fromsoft because they're genuinely hard. Not pretending to be hard like fromsoft's souls games.
Playing The Division on challenging is like me walking right into a military base with mini guns, bombs, and whatever they have get thrown at me. I could run a build but I don’t find that fun and usually you rely on the build rather than your skill.
I even matchmake on the final missions for each final section of the manhunts because I’d get shredded to bits and the enemies are just bullet sponges I’ll be out of ammo before I even get through half the mission.
I kinda liked Halo's difficulty, it was a genuine challenge to beat reach and 4 on higher difficulties for the achievements and armor unlocks (i miss those so fucking much please just bring back unlockables based on achievements and actual challenges) it was frustrating at times but doable and fun
Persona 5 Royal's Merciless has some balancing issues that a certain boss (Okumara) easier then on Hard (Or arguable easier then well Easy)
Hitting a Weakness does 3X Damage and Crits do more damage the issue lies within that this goes both way and can be easily exploited there
Man, come to think of it, gamers legit like over complicating things for themselves. And also like to make life harder for themselves on purpose just to boost their messed up ego. Like bruh, I legit find this shit funny. 😂
yeah hard difficulties suck sometimes
I like suffering so I always pick them from the start anyway if possible
Why? I dunno.
Wait can we talk about marvels spiderman 2 difficulty!. I love it because it does actually show how the diffuclty is changed. And the health /enemy sliders. + You can modify certain difficulties like uour health and the enemys health. I love that seriously!
A solution I like is that the game is primarily designed around the developer difficulty. Being built and tested around the hard end that the developers would be playing at.
One of my favorite games has a mixed bag when it comes to difficulties: Megaman Zero. It's actual "hard" difficulty isn't much to write home about, as it just makes it so you can basically only use one slash of your sword weapon and all of your weapons are basically unable to be charged or leveled up, which to me sounds like a boring snoozefest. However, on the normal difficulty, where these restrictions don't apply, you will still see the rank system, which I really like.
You see, depending on how fast you completed your previous missions, how many times you died, how many assists you used, and how many enemies you killed, you begin to get a "rank", which is based on the average of all the points of your previous missions in a run. If that rank goes high enough, bosses will gain an extra attack they can use against you to make boss fights tougher. I actually really like this, and in future installments you can actually get a form of this extra attack for beating them in this way (MMZ4 is a little different, but that's for a different day).
you forgot to mention how some games are more enjoyable on hard, either because the devs intended this to be the main mode or they just thought that dying once is a harsh enough punishment (it's not in most games)
People who say that they play on hard to make the game take longer
There's a thing called "going easy on easy enemies"
Where you sorta roleplay that if you die in the game
You die in real life
Imo if souls ever get an easy mode it should be whenever you roll you go purple or some other bright colour when you have I frames and enemies weapons glow when they can be parried
There are a few games that gets it right, that said few. There is Horizon Zero Dawn, it make the game way too hard starting out. Prices are ludicrous, enemies can see you from a mile away. They are more aggressive, can almost one shot you, and there is no health bar. It makes the game that much harder than it needs to be. Remnant is better, but you basically die in 2 hits, sometimes in one and enemies way too beefy. Invest as much as you want in protection and everything, but it still doesn't do anything. A game that I have played that does get it right is Ghost of Tsushima. Most enemies go down in 2 hits, but so do you, meaning that there is at least some level of fairness when starting out. The Witcher 3 does it differently. The game literally makes you feel like witcher. You are supposed to use everything you have at your disposal, meaning that you can use every trick up your sleeve, no matter what. The bottom line is a game is supposed to be fair no matter what difficulty you play on. Playing on hard shouldn't feel like torture, it should make you think about what you do and give a fair challenge, not throw everything at you and only make you feel like you are powerless.
I think if they just change numbers then its better to have a slider rather then individual buttons, so the easy to normal/ normal to hard ect jump isnt too harsh!
I've been thinking about this whole thing for awhile myself like what's the point of difficulty settings in some games when sometimes the player can't even tell the difference between normal and hard or easy and normal? The souls series seems to have perfected what difficulty should be whether you have that perfect build for yourself and wreck the game or if you want it more difficult just use terrible weapons and go naked through the game, I don't understand at times how a lot of games I play(even for the first time) I have it set to easy difficulty and like I notice that I take some of the most bs damage even on that difficulty and it makes me think like "If this is easy difficulty I'd like to see what hard is like" but mostly as a joke you know? Even games like Skyrim right, okay I loved Morrowind and Oblivion, fair games and all but then I play Skyrim and I'm sitting there getting one tapped by bandit chiefs while rocking full daedric and that's with it set to novice difficulty so I thought "maybe that's hard difficulty" so I scrolled all the way to the right setting it to legendary thinking that's easy difficulty but...I noticed no difference in damage I was taking and I was baffled when yet in something like dark souls I can easily shrug off backstabs like they're nothing or even attacks from bosses. I'm kinda tired of difficulty settings in games honestly, not sure if anyone else is but yeah I totally get this video...
Ultrakill might have the best difficulty changes. The changes are almost strictly aimed at based,
uncharted on crushing has to be the worst example ive experienced, even headshots wont save you.
Don't have a console, and I'm useless at melee, so I'd never play a Fromsoft game - but I enjoy watching other people play them. And the thing that would really put me off is that when the player dies, they have to go way back and run across the map having loads of mini-fights before they can get to the fight that killed them.
I can skip that when I'm watching a playthrough, but it would be tedious as an actual player. Tedious for me, anyway. ;-)
I feel like the main problem with Elden Ring is that the bosses move as fast as ones in Sekiro but the player has the movement speeds that of Dark Souls
Easy: too easy
Normal: still too easy
Hard: good
Harder: a little annoying
Those special difficulty modes: P A I N
To be fair: all games have an accessibility mode. It's called RUclips.
Sorry dude I'm not recoding my game's difficulty system :(
the last of us part 1 and 2 have an rly good "hard difficulty"
My dad beat God of War 2018 on Give Me God of War. He had such great patience.
I use to play normal on every game but one day my foster dad came in as I started cod infinte warfare, And he called me a pussy and i beleve i said something like "you dont even play games so you would not even stand easy mode" he proceed to beat the whole game in hard and just in spite of me also doing insane after he unlocked it for beating it in hard. I now have alway done the hardest difcullty possible.
Should've given him veteran, I bet he'd "enjoy" it way more
5:30 I want them to add new stuff 5:49 wait why are you adding new stuff?
You should try kingdom hearts 2 fm.
Why don't you just play on easy? Difficulty settings shouldn't go. Nor should normal become easy. Hard is hard for a reason, and nightmare or impossible are called that for a reason. I will say that Halo 4's difficulty settings are bad.
Because difficulties can be ridiculous, take borderlands 2 for example, regular game is fine and gets really difficult by the end, then there's true vault hunter mode where all enemies are balanced to end game standards, that was really fun and a good new game plus.
Then there's ultimate vault hunter mode, why? You basically need to use slag (an elemental effect that increases damage) all the time or you'll NEVER put a dent into even the most basic bandits, there's health regen so you can't leave enemies or they'll heal, and the player can drop from 20mil hp to 200k in one shot, did I also mention that enemies like bandits or raiders have MILLIONS of hp while guns at level 50 (UVHM level) deal 50 to 80k bass damage?
I don't mind difficulty but I HATE one sided difficulty that favors the enemy, I shouldn't have to spend 50 minutes in a fight because some enemy has 100mil hp for no good reasons, and I shouldn't have to use gimmicks to fight them, borderlands is all about weapon variety and having to always carry a slag gun into fights is stupid, now apply this to the 100s of other games doing the same thing.
@@TheSurvivor-tv9jf There is a game that handled difficulty badly. Halo 4. Instead of making the enemies more smarter and dangerous, they just made them complete bullet sponges.
I dont know why this is a topic the whole point is to pick a difficulty you think is for you, some people just like easy games, some people like a challenge, and some people like games that are unfair, yes they do exist so no difficulty options dont suck you just suck at picking them
does ultrakill do difficulty right?
Shout out to "will you snail?" difficulties that are all called variations of "easy" (it's a rage game)
Terraria get difficulty scaling right
Classic to expert to legendary mode
And uh.....get fixed boy
I don't like 'souls games. But I respect them a lot for being bold enough to just go «We maked a gaem. Play it.» and you have to play the game exactly as it is. Difficulties are a nightmare because every dev feels different and also normal to hard is often too much of a gap. And of course the main issue is «You want it hard? Here are lvl 1 rats that have 9999hp. Have fun, c*ks*er!.... wdym having to shoot an enemy 50 times more than before isn't hard and rather boring?»
My favorite difficulty setting is Project Wingman. Every difficulty just makes the NPCs smarter than the last. Even the hardest difficulty doesn’t make anything (except maybe like three bosses) more durable, it just spawns new enemies.
I absolutely love subtle difficulty via playing with different equipment combinations, collecting different items, and act tuning, I really don't like explicit difficulty settings that you pick from the beginning and have to commit to for the entire save