4258ed No.16875872
There is no reason (except to appeal to the lowest common denominator) to not boil down difficulties into one cohesive and balanced difficulty. The most egregious examples are when you do less damage to enemies.
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52952e No.16875884
>dmc is bad
>doom is bad
>god hand is bad
>duke nukem is bad
>a lot of arcade games are bad
>this game is bad
>walking sims are the only acceptable form of gaming
yeah fuck you too pal
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57abec No.16875892
>>16875872
Having only one default difficulty would hurt replay value.
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8c4a3f No.16875898
>>16875872
>player numbers puny enemy numbers bloatmax
should be an offense that causes the game to be recalled in all copies, publishers fined, and developers sent to game design reeducation camp where they learn to code.
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7a043c No.16875901
>>16875872
>there is a one-size-fits-all difficulty
>this won't exacerbate the problem of companies targeting the specific demographic of 16-23 year old stoners who are a combination of (a) too dumb to not read game journo shit and (b) legitimate inexperience in video games.
>there is no such thing as actually getting good at the game, and needing a higher difficulty
I might have to spell out that the 16-23 years old demographic stays 16-23, not because these people never age, but because there's always going to be 15 year olds becoming 16 unless humanity is going extinct.
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e45210 No.16875903
I think you're complaining about bad difficulty settings instead of difficulty settings being bad overall. I was going to talk about this later but I guess I'll do it here since it fits better.
I really hate this since I see this in PC games a lot, is the difficulty setting where it deletes your save when you die once. This is a bad difficulty setting since shouldn't the game over screen be enough and you restart after that. This type of difficulty setting is usually seen in long RPGs so it can be prone to save scumming if they don't have protections against that. Having that placebo effect of being able to game save when it deletes itself if you lose by luck or bad placement is pointless to me. If you want a one life death run, it should only be self-done like speedrunners do or do for games that its possible to speedrun in less than 2 hours to complete. No fake saves required.
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c999c8 No.16875904
>>16875872
More gay armchair ideaguy shit from clueless niggers.
>when you do less damage to enemies
Why the fuck are you lowering the difficulty? It's there so people who are new to the game or genre or even videogames can get accustomed to it. The harder levels are for people who are experienced or very involved fans who want an extra challenge. There's no perfect ideal difficulty level. Almost all games would benefit from having difficulty settings, particularly extra challenging ones, though easier difficulties are questionable and wouldn't necessarily work for certain kind of games.
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4258ed No.16875934
>>16875904
>Why the fuck are you lowering the difficulty?
lol wut? I usually play on normal or hard since normal is usually way too easy and boring but there are also times when hard is attack sponge boring. It is apparent that you responded with the most low IQ illiterate generic emotional soy response that impulsively popped up in your little peanut brain.
>Almost all games would benefit from having difficulty settings
Like I said, lowest common denominator.
>>16875903
You are half right I suppose, even though I do believe it is a better when there are no difficulty settings and the game is balanced on its own. It might even be good for developers to add "difficulty settings" as part of development only to boil it down to 1 later.
>>16875898
It wouldn't even be as terrible if they simply left the player's numbers at its average.
>>16875892
Don't know what else to say other than that I completely disagree.
>>16875884
Didn't even say that they are bad and they can handle difficulty differently. Doom as I recall increases the numbers of enemies and their aggressiveness. I am still against the concept of difficulty settings but like I said, there are more egregious examples.
>>16875901
Yes, it would be one size by definition if there was only the difficulty the game is meant to present on its own. Doesn't matter how good you are at a game, banal artificial difficulty remains banal. When would it ever be easy enough for the lowest common denominator? Why not just play another game or watch a movie? Why should games have to be ruined because they could theoritically appeal to less "skilled" players? Even DSP manages to cheese Dark Souls through its own mechanics in a way that was not just changing a setting affecting the overall gameplay and balancing.
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2ce2d1 No.16875947
>>16875872
Agreed. Non-gamers shouldn't be allowed to play vidya.
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777474 No.16875949
Still waiting for a game with the balls to add "journo mode" right behind "baby mode".
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c999c8 No.16875960
>>16875934
>lol wut?
Why are you complaining about it if you're not doing it? It's an option for those who want or need it. This is like complaining when people play videogames that you don't like or that the game has graphics settings that makes things look ugly.
If I play a game that I'm not particularly into or genre I'm not good at, I might use an easier difficulty. I like RTS games but I like to play them in a very specific way, but some RTS games like Starcraft doesn't support that style well so it causes me trouble, I don't like being rushed too much so I'll pick a difficulty that doesn't rush me. There's only so many games that I "like" so I have to play other ones that I don't care to get very involved in. But when it comes to games that I really do like such as Terraria or Factorio, I can't increase the difficulty enough to satisfy me anymore, it's too easy even at all the difficulties cranked up and if I invent my own limitations on top of that, I want harder difficulties on those games.
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77fdd9 No.16875969
>not going back through on easy to toy with the physics/mechanics/features at your leisure
>no doing it with cheats either to see how hard you can fuck the game
I remember using godmode to turn 007 into a walking apocalypse during the silo "failure" in goldeneye among other things.
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49ed8e No.16876002
>>16875872
There are good ways of making difficulty levels, and there are bad ways.
The bad way is making a difficulty you can change whenever you want, since that just means they didn't care enough to balance the game and make you deal with it yourself.
The good way is making it so each Difficulty level has a clear purpose, Ideally a game really only needs 2 difficulty levels at the start, for first time players, Easy or Normal. Once you beat the game you should unlock a True difficulty setting that's intended for people who know all of the games mechanics rather then people playing for the first time.
Ninja Gaiden 2 has, acolyte (easy) and Warrior (Normal) at the start, Easy you can button mash your way though, Normal you can still kind of mash, but you need to at least learn a few things on how to Actually play well. upon beating the game, you will then unlock Path of the Mentor, in which the first fight is a wall, you either Learn how to deal with these insanely aggressive enemies or you don't move forward, and even if you mash your way past this first fight somehow, they are one of the most prevalent enemies in the game so learning over come them constantly is mandatory. Then once Mentor forces you to learn everything required, your are ready for Master Ninja mode to truly prove yourself.
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4258ed No.16876003
>>16875969
I don't consider in-game cheats or even extraneous cheats as being the same in which they alone would allow you to do so also without altering the base mechanics/features.
>>16875960
So you just wrote me a paragraph of vague anecdotes? Of course.
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497644 No.16876009
>RTS max difficulty
>enemy player gathers resources faster
>their resource spots never run out while yours do
>their military buildings train units much faster
>they have stronger units
>they don't need population buildings
>they can see through fog of war and know where everything is
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7a043c No.16876013
>>16876009
Play Zero-K, and the skirmish AI doesn't cheat there, or other modern RTS-like games.
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c999c8 No.16876032
>>16876003
>why don't you agree with me yet?
groanzone.jpg
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f698e8 No.16876124
>>16875872
>having more options is bad
Something new every day on /v/.
Listen here, jackanappe. The point of difficulty settings is to let everyone get the exact experience they want from the game without affecting each other.
Barring unlockable difficulty levels, there's nothing stopping you from starting every game on Hard and sticking with it. You just get the bonus that every casual has Easy Mode that they can fall on, instead of Devs having to compromise on Normal which satisfies neither you nor the casuals.
Please keep in mind that studios don't make videogames for you alone to play and you alone are not gonna be enough to finance their development.
>The most egregious examples are when you do less damage to enemies.
You mean Bethesda-difficulty, where it's literally a slider that sets a damage multiplier for you and your enemies. Thankfully they don't hear your criticism or there wouldn't even be a slider to shift, just boring normal all the way through, no need to even bother with that little amount of effort.
If anything Difficulty Settings are another area where you can see if a Dev team actually knows what the fuck they are doing or not.
Take Thief for example, where higher difficulty not only gives you less resources and makes the enemies far more resilient and aware but it also forces you to steal more loot and complete more secondary objectives to finish a level.
That shows they understand that it is not enough to buff your enemies, you need to give the player a good reason to risk his neck for longer in order for that to matter.
But on the other hand, if you just want to have some fun and explore the game, you're not required to complete what will feel like chores that have little to do with the main goal of the mission.
Take Serious Sam or Painkiller instead if you will, where higher difficulties don't just make enemies more resilient but also faster and spawns more of them because they understand very well that bullet sponges are boring but giving you more targets is far more fun while also increasing the difficulty.
Or just about any RTS games if will, where initial difficulty levels are good to explore the game, your units the maps and possible strategies, but later difficulty levels expect that you know damn well what the fuck you're doing. It wouldn't make sense to start you off at the highest levels since you're still learning the specific mechanics to that game but it also wouldn't make sense to keep the difficulty low after you figured out how the game works. You mandatorily need different difficulty levels for an RTS.
So if you say that "being capable of making a single difficulty settings is the hallmark of a good dev", you might as well say a restaurant deserves 5 stars because it can cook a single, well balanced soup.
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f09245 No.16876153
Not to suck From's cock any, not that they need it having achieved meme status, but I like the way they do difficulty.
They design the game with a very specific difficulty, and you can take it or leave it.
You can make it harder by not using their progression system at all if you like, and replay on a harder difficulty after you've beaten too.
Or you can grind if you're stuck and level up, but doing so won't guarantee victory of you're trash.
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c1ca1d No.16876159
Playing through the game on harder difficulties adds replay value and gives you new incentives to play the game again, OP. Not to mention the cathartic feeling of mastering a game so much that you can beat it on the hardest difficult and get access to the post-game content you earned as a result of your dedication.
What's it like being fucking retarded?
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01aceb No.16876162
>>16876159
Are you telling me you don't play games on the hardest difficulty only? All the other difficulty setting are for kids.
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cd08c6 No.16876165
>>16875872
t. Nigger who has never played anything but normalfaggot trash.
Difficulty settings are a great thing if done right. Just look at games like Touhou, DMC, Bayonetta, Doom, Old Hitman (nuHitman Pro Mode is fun but not very balanced), Half Life, God Hand etc.
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7b6c3e No.16876226
The only problem with difficulty is that it's all bundled into one setting instead of different parts being chosen separately.
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40c5dd No.16876230
Difficulty settings also allow developers to place in an extreme difficulty setting that the game was clearly not designed for. They also tend to cause butthurt amongst a type of gamer who uses video games to boost his ego and always plays on the hardest difficulty, but the normalfag games they play are still easy even on hardest, and the same tactics that work on normal would work on hardest. On extreme difficulties, tactics that work on normal will fail on hardest (sometimes the inverse is also true), many game mechanics become useless for you, and you often need to play in bizarre and unintuitive ways. Many gamers end up ragequitting because they aren't intelligent enough to figure this out and they continue trying to play the game normally.
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ebe485 No.16876250
>>16876230
Yeah thats a pretty huge reason to have good difficulty, not all difficulties are made to appeal to an actual denominator; stuff like nightmare in doom were just made for shits and giggles.
Thats awakening right? Even base Lunatic in that is clearly just slapped together with no regard to actual gameplay. A extra meme setting to make that worse always struck me as really ridiculous.
The only actual issue with difficulty is when done lazily it does neuter level design a lot of the time.
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18c354 No.16876251
Any game that just tweaks numbers for difficulty is bad at worst and lazy at best. Platinum (and to an extent their predecessors in the industry through Clover back the the first DMC and arguably even Resident Evil depending on how you feel about the different character choices) handle this very well by not only mixing up enemy layouts but occasionally changing core mechanics. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Mario Odyssey has a mode for small children and game journalists that changes core mechanics as well. Hell, the Genesis Sonic games left a debug mode in there, and that allows you to fuck around in a lot of fun ways. My brother might not be working on a video game if it weren't for the last example. I guess what I'm saying is that difficulty should arise not just from numerical changes, but mechanical ones as well.
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58a981 No.16876268
>>16876230
>tactics that work on normal will fail on hardest (sometimes the inverse is also true)
This is by far the biggest problem. If the difficulty is poorly made, the hardest setting isn't fun or challenging. It usually locks off entire ways to play the game. Shooter game has a cool melee/takedown system, or platforming you can use to your advantage? No, fuck off, get out of here faggot, if you attempt to close on a guy or leave cover for a split second, you fucking die. But if you stay in cover, the enemies spam retarded amounts of grenades to force you out, so the game becomes an exercise in breaking the AI. Game has an OPTIONAL stealth system? The hardest difficulty is 100% designed around you abusing the shit out of the stealth system and if you attempt combat you get assblasted instantly. Then you have bullshit like Ultra Nightmare in nuDoom, where it's the exact same game, no difference whatsoever in enemy placement or AI, but the goober-tier imps shave off 60+ health in one stray fireball and the game deletes your save if you die.
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31a720 No.16876291
>>16876162
Max difficulty in most games is Bethesdifficulty. "LOL you do less damage, enemies do more". So if you're actually good at not getting hit, the game just becomes more tedious. If you get damage multipliers for not sucking, that is alleviated, but most games don't go anywhere near that far.
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41a781 No.16876345
>>16876153
>They design the game with a very specific difficulty, and you can take it or leave it.
I was thinking the same thing. There are some people still upset over Sekiro.
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844473 No.16876364
Ys did higher difficulties right by making the game around the hardest and having the lower ones be easier.
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f58ad8 No.16876394
>>16876268
Ultra Nightmare was very obviously added for those tryhards that like attempting to beat bullshit like that, though.
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7d4286 No.16876413
>>16876009
Sounds exactly like Warhammer 2.
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fa25b6 No.16876663
>>16875884
OP literally said none of those things.
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254fb8 No.16876671
>>16876663
No, but he said games with difficulty settings are cancer. All of those games have difficulty settings.
This is called inference. It's a method of logically deducting conclusions from premises. Now that you know what it is, you can put it into practice. For example, if I said: "Posters whos IDs end in a25b6 are cunts." That means I'm calling you a cunt. But I literally never said "You are a cunt."
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07f4d4 No.16876674
What if you want the option to make it even harder than it already is?
>>16876003
>paragraph of anecdotes
You're waiting sort of mathematical equation or a difficulty setting manifesto? If you can't use examples then what kind of an answer are you even expecting?
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a30658 No.16876678
>>16875872
I'd rather just have two sliders, one for how much damage the enemies to do to me, and one for how much damage I do to them. Let me pick my own ratio.
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f698e8 No.16876692
>>16876663
I've re-read the OP, there's no "none of those things." OP did not literally say that, you're a liar and a scoundrel!
>>16876678
Wouldn't you prefer instead to have a slider for how many enemies will spawn?
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1e6fa3 No.16876931
OP is a faggot. There's no reason for any difficulty below normal to exist because whiney should play until they get good. Higher difficulty options should always exist for people that actually want a challenge. Only game journalist fucktards disagree.
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367e8d No.16876936
I'm skeptical of easy/medium/hard settings schemes, but I'm even more skeptical of letting new players customize game behavior, or worse: giving them a Lua console and just letting them fuck around however they want, since they're probably no more likely to have a rewarding experience if given the reins to DM themselves from the outset. You gotta hide it in an INI file!
I liked how Quake handled the selection of difficulties: to get into Nightmare difficulty required some exploration and maneuvering that won't even occur to you if you haven't grasped the mechanics well enough to actually play through Nightmare. This was implemented more or less diegetically instead of via menus.
Even with normal and easy, the difference was that the "normal" corridor was slightly elevated. You can tell just by looking that easy mode is for peasants. This seems well and good, and I played the shit out of Quake on each difficulty and had fun each time.
Above all, I wish games were more dynamic. Kind of like how in Godhand the difficulty escalates when you play well, and when that proves to be too much, you get hit and it drops back down. Having the meter in the corner showing you exactly where you're at can inspire the player to try and perform, or not, and it's fine either way. Godhand also had it's own weirdly reified self-imposed challenge in the "kick me" sign, which is pretty cool; suggest and reward an "extra hard" difficulty, but don't enforce.
>>16876251
All of this. I've often fantasized about making a JRPG where not only the difficulty, but also your role in the story vary according to your decisions. Because maybe you don't even want to be the sword-wielding, 17 year old shonen protagonist who ends up killing God, or you want to replay through the eyes of a different character.
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778862 No.16876967
>>16875872
There's nothing wrong with having a 'normal' difficulty, and an 'expert', where the game expects you to absolutely master its systems. Many games actually force you to unlock 'expert' mode anyway. The problem is with 'beginner' mode, where people who literally had the game played for them can now enter into the discourse. There should be no 'beginner' mode.
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44aa40 No.16877019
>>16876931
you realize if you do "normal hard harder" it will end up being the same as "easy normal hard" right? the only difference is the names. As soon as you have multple difficulty settings, there is always a easier difficulty and a harder difficulty. The only way this could be circumvented is if the difficulty settings change the gameplay dramatically (and not just change numbers)
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f58ad8 No.16877035
>>16877019
You misinterpret what he means. His point is to have a "normal" difficulty that the game is designed around. This is the minimum amount of difficulty the game should have, as its the standard that the devs expect to be the baseline for players. Any other difficulty will be added difficulty on top of this baseline standard.
This as opposed to how a lot of game difficulties work, at what he's opposed to, where the "normal" difficulty the game is designed around is considered the mid-range option, while there are difficulty options where the game is even easier for players that can't or don't want to play on normal.
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778862 No.16877048
>>16877035
Then he should complain about easy/beginner modes. There's literally nothing wrong with having a normal mode and an expert mode for tryhard spergs like OP.
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b499af No.16877049
>>16877035
>misinterpret OP
<There is no reason (except to appeal to the lowest common denominator) to not boil down difficulties into one cohesive and balanced difficulty.
<I do believe it is a better when there are no difficulty settings and the game is balanced on its own
OP is a fag stands.
Having a base mode, and a challenge mode is antithetical to his point.
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f58ad8 No.16877052
>>16877049
>>16877048
Did you actually read the post I replied to and the post it was replying to?
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778862 No.16877055
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b499af No.16877056
>>16877052
Yes. Chain of replies starts with >>16876931
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f58ad8 No.16877064
>>16877056
So why did you quote me as saying anon was misinterpreting OP, when OP wasn't a part of the conversation beyond the first anon calling him a faggot?
>>16877055
The how is
>There's no reason for any difficulty below normal to exist
not complaining about easy/beginner modes? And having a normal and expert mode were exactly what he was calling for.
Both of you are acting like OP had anything to do with the conversation, when he didn't beyond introducing a discussion of difficulty modes in general.
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ba8b39 No.16877131
Normal + Hard difficulty is the best implementation
Too bad most devs fag that up by locking the Hard difficulty from the beginning, forcing you to artificially replay the game
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