Same with rhythm games like Guitar Hero and Elite Beat Agents, it feels good to than go back to easier modes and beat the levels you struggled with so easily.Īs for the thread question, I think a lot of times the devs don't mean that you have to start at the hard difficulty, but to go there once you're ready and check it. Mario Kart does this more explicitly, or at least that's how I always played it: finish 50cc first, then move on to 100cc and so on.
Platinum games are supposed to be like this: the first time you play just to get the hang of it, the second one is the one that counts.
You play it on easy first and then advance to higher difficulties on the next playthrough. I was thinking about doing a thread for it but might just use this one since it's related: What do you guys think about using the easy mode as some sort of tutorial? So by that point you know exactly what you're getting into. If you go to the menus when preparing for a mission, you can switch difficulties and the game offers a detailed explanation of why they are different. The tutorial and introductory missions don't give you a choice and then the rest of the game will be on Normal. One game that I feel handles difficulty settings well is Hitman and Hitman 2. And if they are going to offer difficulties higher than intended, they should probably put some thought into them instead of just turning enemies into HP sponges, which reeks of harder difficulties being and afterthought. I feel that in general difficulty settings shouldn't be handled that way videogames should default to the intended difficulty the game was designed around, and then give you the option of lowering it in settings once you have learned what that entails. Is "normal" not the way the developers intended you to play the game? "Normal" or "Hard" or "give me X" are meaningless without context and knowledge of the game mechanics.Īnd if a certain difficulty is the one "recommended" by the developers, why isn't that default? It usually tends to be the difficulty above normal which seems to be strange. I found that the modern Deus Ex approach was very smart (Tell Me a Story, Give Me a Challenge, Give Me Deus Ex) rather than couching the tiers in skill terminology, the levels are presented as a matter of accessibility and preference.ĭo you feel that the notion of such difficulty labels are outdated or inadequate in the context of certain genres/designs or those aforementioned circumstances?ĭo you find those traditional labels informative or are more preferential approaches such as Deus Ex’s more useful?Ī problem I always have with difficulty settings in games is that you don't even know what those difficulties mean if you haven't played the game. The Easy/Normal/Hard designations comes across as judgements of skill, but don’t seem to often translate well when games and gameplay aren’t purely skill/score-based or modeled after that arcade fashion.
I wonder if those naming conventions are part of the problem, an artifact from the arcade era where being able to earn higher scores on higher difficulties was half social competition, half means to get players to keep spending quarters.Īt least to me, if certain parameters are their ideal vision, it seems counterintuitive to label something else as “normal.” Maybe something like Basic (Easy), Accessible (Normal), Recommended (Hard) would be better. I always find it interesting when devs say that a Hard or harder difficulty is the recommended one or reflects their vision, but then have a different level labeled as Normal.