Games

I might get this just to support that they’re doing this. Been abused by “git gud” bros and their gatekeeping for far too long when it comes to difficulty.

Game is too hard, so I want to beat the game at a more comfortable difficulty level. If I like the game enough, I will then try to beat it at the harder level. Why is this such an abominable concept to those people?

The dodging on this game was frustratingly buggy.

My favorite souls like.... Excited for more content!

I might actually give this a try now!

I love me some ambience and story, but I'm not masochist enough to grind through a souls-like.

Bloodborne almost got me though

Accessibility options are good. Not everyone is a god gamer with the reflexes of a 14-year old hopped up on Adderall and Red Bull. Some people just want to enjoy the story and the atmosphere of a game and it should be normal for us to let them.

There are only two ways a difficulty setting has ever been used, and only one would be good for a game like this.

Either the health and damage (and possibly speed) is going to be adjusted so easier difficulty means you take less damage and deal more, while harder difficulties turn enemies into sponges that absolutely destroy you in 1 or 2 hits.

Or they re-do every encounter, 3 times, adding, removing, or re-arranging the mobs so they are easier or more difficult by actually tweaking the challenge and not the just the "numbers."

Almost every game chooses to do the former and not the latter because it's cheap and easy to do. Takes literally no effort to adjust some numbers by a percentage. It actually takes some thought and planning and time to actually present different tiers of challenge, naturally.

Im of two minds on this.

On one hand difficulty settings seem good because it gives players choices.

But on the other this genre is meant to challenge you. And for me if Dark Souls hadn’t been one difficulty only and hard was the way it is now I probably would have never beaten it on the hard difficulty. But I persevered and did something that felt great because of that design choice.

Absolutely amazing decision. Difficulty settings make games more accessible - period. And gating accessibility behind "artistic intent" and "vision" is just stupid. Sure, not every game has to meet everyone's idea of a good time, but come on - it can't be that hard, and it would only be a net positive for everyone.

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Works for me. I got stuck on the puppet king second phase and gave up. Not like rage quit, I just never went back to the game after like a dozen attempts, uninstalled it months later to free up space.

I love difficulty adjustments. Tuning a game to be right for every audience is impossible, better to let the end client have some control over fine tuning their experience.

Control is an excellent example of this for me. My GOTY when it came out, still an all time fav. I love the story and setting, but the combat is tedious after a while. In that case, lowering enemy health made the game less boring without being substantially easier, giving me the kind of experience I could enjoy.

I want to appreciate the additions, but...this is also not a good way of doing it.

The difficulty is often the point in Soulslikes, but quite often it feels like these games are hard in 17 different ways, and a player may only have trouble with 1 of them.

Maybe that's navigation, and finding the next path forward. Maybe that's working out how to put together a functioning build, and realizing what each weapon does. Maybe it's that the parry window is just a few frames too tight because they're playing with an input delay.

That's why the games I've liked have varied accessibility options to let you change just one thing, like getting your souls back on dying, slowing down the game, slightly decreasing damage values - or increasing them on both sides.

I appreciate difficulty options for other people and I think everyone should agree it's a good thing to make games more accessible or more challenging depending on what a player is seeking.

My only caution is maintaining the vision for the expected experience. I imagine we've all played games where the normal difficulty or the default experience feels bad or improperly tuned. Multiple difficulty options can, I imagine, lead to less tuning on the default experience. I have no doubt I disliked games I would have liked if they'd encouraged me to play at a different difficulty or spent more time tuning their preferred difficulty. I have no doubt I liked games that if they'd provided difficulty options I may have changed the default experience to my detriment without realizing it.

This is that Pinocchio game right?

Interesting. I've heard good things about this game from a friend who is way better at games than I am.

I hope it's clear which option is the original difficulty. I plan on playing it and honestly I'm worried how they'll implement it. Difficulty settings are great but hard to pull off