Greentext

Yeah, nobody should ask clerks about their product anymore, that time is over. Most chains don't give a fuck about returning happy customers.

Vanilla Cyberpunk 2077 is like that on higher dificulties and it sucks. Luckily there are mods to fix that.

Post game of borderlands 3 is stupid in this regard. Normal enemies becomes a question whether full ammo in all weapons deal enough damage combined, given that they are all headshots.

Anon doesn't even get called by tech scammers

In a market plagued by generic survival crafting games, valheims devs wondered "what if we were the most generic of all?"

Valheim is absolutely numbers. Every fucking thing you do in that game is determined by your skill level in said thing. Running, attacking, crafting, even sleeping. It's all fucking numbers.

Some games test your skills. Other games test your patience. Both are hard, but the latter is a lot less fun.

It's the difference between a zombie only dying from a carefully aimed headset, vs only dying after smacking it with a stick 274 times.

There's precision, complexity, timing, punishment, and resource consumption.

With precision, you have to do things in a certain amount of space. To make something more difficult with precision, you shrink the spaces that the player has to fit through. Think of having a smaller road with for a racing game, having a boss with bigger attack hitboxes so the player has less space to dodge to, or having a smaller keypress window in a rhythm game.

With timing, you have to do things in a certain time window. You make games more difficult timing-wise by shrinking the time window. Think shorter time frames for a race, faster attacks from a boss, or tighter keypress requirements in a rhythm game.

Precision and timing are closely tied to one another so they are often treated as the same thing. In Rhythm games, for example, they are near-inseparable.

With complexity, you have to do a certain number of things. you increase difficulty with complexity by increasing the number of things you have to do. Think More turns back-to-back on a racetrack, more unique attacks you need to memorize from a boss, or longer rhythm game courses.

With punishment, you have to do things while only failing a certain number of times. To increase difficulty with punishment, you shrink the number of times you can fail before losing. Think of racing games where your car degrades from collisions or where there's cliffs on the track sides, where the boss attacks do more damage, or where you get fewer miss allowances in a rhythm game.

With resource consumption, you have to do things with access to a limited amount of time, energy, items, etc. to increase difficulty with resource consumption, you shrink the amount of resources available and/or how long resources last during use. Think giving a player less health, a boss more health so each attack is worth less, giving a player fewer health potions, make the player have to fight more enemies total (not necessarily more per fight).

All games shift difficulty with any number of these. a mechanics game will increase difficulty by demanding better precision and timing, increasing complexity, etc, usually a combination of all methods I mentioned. a numbers game will change difficulty almost exclusively by increasing resource consumption, usually by increasing enemy health pools and nothing else. It's also common for difficulty to increase by just making good items more scarce.

Like in Elden Ring you can beat late game bosses with a low stat character if you are really good. So basically you rely on your own gaming skills rather than on big number defeats smaller number. Sure Elden Ring is a mix between mechanical and numbers difficulty, bosses are hard because of high HP (numbers difficulty) but their difficulty also comes from their attack patterns (mechanical difficulty) which you have to dodge at the right moment and attack when there is an opening, so it’s also relies on the mechanical skill level of the player.

While in turnbased RPGs like Final Fantasy 7 you rely purely on the character stats to defeat enemies. Sure there is tactics involved but it’s impossible to defeat a late stage boss with a low stat character in those type of games. Since it is purely a big number defeats small number type of game. So that’s numbers difficulty. Of course you can defeat bosses that a low stat character shouldn’t defeat if you load up with a ridiculous amount of items like potions. But that’s still numbers difficulty. There is no mechanical skill involved from the player.

(edit: spelling)

I've never heard it phrased this way, but from context I'm guessing it's the difference between big bosses that have arbitrarily high HP, or if the game mechanics themselves are difficult.

Tetris is difficult because you need to be good to play it, mechanics. WoW is numbers difficult because you can buy the best equipment and then pwn the noobs even if you don't really know how to play your character.

I can't stand when retail cash-register workers can't engage with my obscure philosophical analysis of niche media details.

Remnant 2 is all just numbers until the final boss, who is a bigger load of bullshit than Promised Consort Radahn.