The Problem With Game Difficulty Settings

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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.

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

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

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

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

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.

Enemies numbers & placement > Enemies buff