I just want more granular difficulty/accessibility settings. Give me more sliders to tweak my experience. I know it might be greedy and asking for a lot but Easy/Normal/Hard or whatever is just so clumsy.
Imagine we had sliders to tweak dodge i-frames and parry window lengths? I might actually dare pickup Sekiro if that was the case.
i would kill for parry window length settings!
I’m usually a normal-difficulty gamer and usually don’t turn down the difficulty from there. However, as the article says, If I started on a higher difficulty, I’m more open to go back down to the default.
It’s not a pride thing, it’s just that I’m so used to not thinking about difficulty modes that they don’t occur to me as a solution in the moment. I straight up forget that the game is more than the version of it I’m currently experiencing.
The difficulty of a game I’ve found to be separate from whether it’s fun or not. I’ll play a game till it’s end if it’s fun, even if it takes me a long long time. If it’s just difficult, but a bore, dropped.
Games can’t be easy enough for me. I like playing with dolls essentially. pew pew. that being said I firmly believe elden ring leaves a lot of cheese to give folks an easy mode without having to put in an easy setting. Sorta a cake and eat it to or official deniability.
There are a few games/genres like this for me. Like the Anno games, whenever I play one, I just turn it down to the lowest difficulty, and just build and expand. I kinda treat it like an idle/incremental game. That’s also why I normally don’t play any of the survival city builders, like Banished or stuff like that, it’s just not what I’m looking for.
Eh, not really. If it’s not fun, I’ll lower the difficulty or refund if this is not an option, I don’t care.
I play all of my favorite games on the hardest difficulty because the challenges they throw my way are a big part of why I find them fun—why would I bother with higher difficulties if I’m not having fun?
Conversely, why should you bother with lower difficulties at all if you’re not having fun to begin with?
Hmm… I think of difficulty, or lack thereof, as integral part of the fun. I think they’re inseparable, essentially.
I don’t really enjoy the process of learning and getting better at 3rd person shooters, for example, so I don’t typically enjoy playing those on higher difficulties. If I pick one up, I know I’ll most likely have more fun playing on lower difficulties because it eliminates a process I don’t really enjoy. In other words, shooting shit is still fun, but I need the difficulty toned all the way down to enjoy it.
Conversely, I love learning the intricacies of combo systems of action games and figuring out how to exploit enemies and whatnot, so I have to play those on the highest difficulty to get the full experience and have the most fun.
Interesting, thanks! That’s not quite how I approach fun, or difficulty, in a game.
I’m happy playing on higher difficulties so long as the gameplay loop is interesting (to me), and that’s how I go about shmups for instance, gradually increasing difficulty as I start to “master” the game (as if), however if the “default” gameplay isn’t fun to me, lowering the difficulty is not going to help.
Yeah, I play shmups the same—still stuck on arrange in Crimzon Clover, haha. Gotta put more time into practicing the TLB.
What are your favorites shmups on Steam?
Some developers are kinda bad with balancing though, there are definitely instances where I lowered the difficulty and just went through the game.
@theangriestbird
In addition to ego (which I’m sure plays a role) I think I would find myself reticent to lower the difficultly to “Easy” for a couple reasons- The default difficultly, which is typically “normal” is often the intended experience, and if I can play like that, I see value in it.
- Related to (1), difficulty settings are often poorly thought-out; it’s quite common for hard mode to simply make enemies bullet sponges or for easy to turn them into cardboard cutouts, which is a disappointing experience.
I set every game to the bare minimum floor difficultly. If I find success at that difficulty for a full playthrough, I’ll up the difficultly on my second playthrough, if the game merits one.
My life is hard. I have very little free time. My games should be fun.
Edit: Also I proved my gaming prowess back when easy games had not been invented yet.
I’d definitely lower the difficulty first.
A game that comes to mind for me is Frostpunk. It has easy, medium, hard, and extreme. Naturally I selected normal at first.
Normal difficulty Frostpunk is not for beginners. I learned that very quickly. That game was basically the dark souls of city builders. It was a super fun game though, and probably near the top of my list of best games I’ve played.
They changed the difficulty names in FP2 to citizen, officer, steward, and captain. I believe the default is citizen there. I guess even they realized there is nothing easy about that game. FP2, while a drastically different game, was also hard.
In my experience, the really difficult part of frost punk is initially just understanding the shape of the situation the player is in.
Like, like most will fail on normal because they just don’t know what options are available to them and what pressures they’ll be put under over time.
After one successful play through I found the game a lot easier just because I knew what I was up against and what resources I had at my disposal to deal with it.
I stopped playing Remnant 2 because it wouldn’t let me change the difficulty. Played on the “normal” difficulty, whatever it was called, flew through the game with no problems, got to the final boss, and just died over and over and over again. The spike between everything else in that game and the 2nd stage of the last boss was unreal. Went to change the difficulty and it said lowering the difficulty will reset the campaign progress. Quit at that point, but I really would’ve rather been able to lower the difficulty.
i usually go with the default and rarely turn it up. Sometimes I turn it down. Some games are just brutal unless you turn down the difficulty.
Im playing WarTales right now and that game is unforgiving. Fuck your party. Not only are you going to have some deaths but it goes even further that your dead friend is now in your loot… you can even bury them and leave a gravestone which doesn’t go away!
You could always eat them if you take the cannibal trait
Not a matter of “dignity”, but for me it depends:
- If I’m really interested in a game, and the difficulty proves to be too high from the beginning, or can be changed at any time… then I would try a lower setting.
- If I had already invested some time into playing it, and the difficulty proved to be too high… then I would rather abandon the game rather than start from scratch with a lower setting.
Chances are though, that changing the difficulty after some time playing, would feel like a total nerf, and I would abandon it anyways.
Same way I feel about non-cosmetic purchases. I made the mistake of falling for some back in the day, and shortly after abandoned the games… because they felt much less like a challenge, and too much like a pointless money grab. My current limit on micro-transactions is either fewer than 3, or $1.
I usually set it to the hardest difficulty mode unless it’s really asinine like iron man or turning off the ui etc. Usually the challenge adds to the enjoyment if it’s done right so if I’m having trouble I’d rather just come back to it another time when I have more energy to throw at it or whatever.
