Game Difficulty- Do You Like it Hard? ;)

[FauxFurry]

On 3/30/2021 at 9:30 AM, LadySmoks said:

A totally different angle... as I primarily "play" Sims 3 (I know gamers may not consider that a game) and the way I sometimes play, it is not... more like a TV show... There are times when I set autonomy to high, and just watch them do stupid things! Although, with Kinky World installed, stupid often leads to woohoo in strange places.

How could anyone not consider The Sims a game? It has loss conditions and objectives which involve various degrees of challenge to complete so it passes the bare minimum necessary to be considered a game. For goodness sake, even Solitaire is widely acknowledged as a game. 

[Kitty]

On 4/1/2021 at 12:27 PM, FauxFurry said:

How could anyone not consider The Sims a game? It has loss conditions and objectives which involve various degrees of challenge to complete so it passes the bare minimum necessary to be considered a game. For goodness sake, even Solitaire is widely acknowledged as a game. 

Honestly even from the sims 1, it's more a "life simulator" than a game, but I mean... whether or not it's "a game" really depends on what you want from a game in the first place.

 

If you want stiff competition, hard opposition and big enemies....

Oh.. wait... I think it has all those things. 

 

lol  Sorry.. just me failing to be clever.  But, no one should care one way or another whether it's "a game" or not.  Makes no difference.  If you enjoy it and 'play' it, great.  If you don't.  Well, that's cool too. 

 

[landess]

9 hours ago, Kitty said:

whether or not it's "a game" really depends on what you want from a game in the first place

 

Being one of the most mod-able/tune-able games means people like me don't play it as a 'game'. I slow down the speed time passes, turn aging off, and frequently use so many cheats/mods that money is never an issue. Basically I use it as a 'TV Series' simulator - creating themed worlds, with custom families/Sims designed to fit those worlds. And top it off using adult themed scripting mods/objects and animations to keep my interest. Bart Simpson hasn't aged in 30 years, and that's how my Sims 3 experience works.

 

Where else can I have the Professor and Skipper from Gilligan's Is. boning Ginger?   Or Jeannie being more 'appreciative' of her master - Tony Nelson?    Batman, Superman, and Harley Quinn? No problem!

 

Without mods, playing it with the game speed (time) normal and no cheats to help fix/speed things up, it does feel like a game, as the player has limited amounts of time and playing households with multiple Sims means without constantly pausing the game to micro-manage (Total War anyone?), it can get pretty crazy, less than optimum results. Understanding this helps one to comprehend the 'challenges' associated with the title and why they are considered so.

[Kitty]

@landess Hey... who didn't wanna bang Ginger?  xD

 

More to the point, yeah.. like I was trying to say, play your shit your way.  And.. forgive me for saying but.. fuck anyone who doesn't like it  ^_^

[Just Checking]

Difficulty is a weird one.  Some games are difficult but in a good way, some are difficult in a frustrating way, bizarrely often games are both of those at once and it all just depends on how you like your difficulty.  Then some just don't even lend themselves to being difficult at all.  I like SOME of my games to be difficult, or at least pose some challenge.  My rpgs, for instance, I like to have close fights that might make me rethink my approach, but then simulators I'm usually pretty happy to just play on "standard" difficulties, or with maybe a tweak made here or there so there's still a little something to work against.

 

Understandably, lots of people don't like Fromsoft's Souls series.  The games are deliberately designed to kill you over and over and they're built around you just trial and erroring your way through the whole game until you know what's in every zone and how their attack patterns work.  If you're not a fan of playing what is effectively a very angry game of rock paper scissors where the game always throws the exact same thing in sequence each time and you just have to memorize the order they all come in, you won't have a great time, but for me Dark Souls has some good lessons in how to handle difficulty.  While the player is hobbled by low health and the dreaded stamina bar, they are provided plenty of tools most enemies don't have access to, namely a much greater range of mobility and, with timing and learning, far more effective use of blocks, parries and slower attacks or spells than any enemy is programmed with.  Even enemies that do have their own dodges or can parry you only do it so often, and it's heavily telegraphed so you know when to press the attack and when to just let them chill for a second.  The means of overcoming the difficulty of the game are right there, from the very beginning, and accessible to any build, and you just take those core components through the entire game.  You can build for super high damage and super high defence if you want to, plenty do and it's very satisfying watching the toughest bosses in the game lost a third of their health from a single hit, but the means of beating the entire game naked with your bare fists is there from the start, if you truly wish to torture yourself and can be that precise.  People get good enough at the game that they run the whole thing without ever taking a single hit and only fighting with a dagger and clown shoes.  In a series that's famous for being super hard and punishing, the fact that you have the means of doing that just through apt application of a couple buttons on your controller is, to me at least, a mark of clever game design and awareness of how to approach your own difficulty well, even if the gameplay loop itself makes people pull their hair out when it doesn't hit their wavelength.  I often wish Skyrim had been designed with a dodge system in mind, because I feel like it could have let the combat be more dynamic.  As much as I love Elder Scrolls games, I can't deny combat in them often feels kind of lackluster and static.

 

I can't really say much for a lot of other types of games, I don't have the amount of experience that would let me speak confidently on them.  Hell, I doubt I even said things well with what I did, and I've been playing games like that for about as long as I've been playing.  Shooters are probably a trick to balance because it's either "click on their head for an instant kill" or just a matter of finding the biggest number, at least in multiplayer, since single player difficulty is determined more by how often you program your AI to miss and how easy weak spots are to shoot.  Simulators by their nature often aren't really that difficult because unless what you're simulating is a high tension environment, the threat of losing often isn't the point of the game.  Farming and life simulators are a good example of that.  How do you handle difficulty in those games without detracting from the point of them?  Personally I just find mods to increase your taxes in Sims 3 and 4 and call it good there.  And of course, each game will be played when I feel like that level of challenge or lack thereof.

[KoolHndLuke]

So... recently saw a vid with Todd the tool saying that they have to nerf enemy A.I. so the player has a chance. He went on to say that if they "turned up" the A.I. difficulty as much as they could, the player would NEVER have a chance. Anyone agree with that assessment?

[coldheartzero]

Yes, HOWEVER, I like it hard tactically, not for instance, making alll the MoBs in a game bullet sponges.

 

Take Atomic Heart for instance. I really liked the idea of the game, watched a few videos and then I noticed that all the MoBs in it were bullet sponges, player was mag dumping into ONE common looking robot before it went down.

 

My idea for difficulty is MoBs that make use of terrain and cover like a player would.  Use tactics like ambushes, be able to choose the right weapon for the engagement

 

Instead of how it is now where they just run at you firing a rocket launcher at point blank range and killing themselves or just stand there and look around like idiots when their companions are getting sniped for instance.

 

More HP and mass rushes are just annoying, that's not hard, that's just stupid.

[KoolHndLuke]

17 hours ago, coldheartzero said:

More HP and mass rushes are just annoying, that's not hard, that's just stupid.

Which makes me wonder why they can't find a happy medium if the AI is so advanced? Surely they don't need to make the AI so smart we can never win (which would be fun I think)? But they also don't need to make it so dumb- like you say.

[Miauzi]

Vor 7 Minuten sagte KoolHndLuke:

Was mich wundert, warum sie keinen guten Mittelweg finden können, wenn die KI so fortgeschritten ist? Sicherlich müssen sie die KI nicht so schlau machen, dass wir niemals gewinnen können (was Spaß machen würde, denke ich)? Aber sie müssen es auch nicht so dumm machen, wie Sie sagen.

 

In the past, the tactical shortcomings of the AI were simply compensated for by enemy masses - i.e. the AI produced its units faster than you - or could let them appear randomly almost anywhere on the map
etc. etc.

Later, the AI got access to your skills or your inventory - so it knew down to the last detail what you were bringing with you and could always counter it perfectly
or
in fog you had a restricted view - but the enemy AI didn't

And today?
Well - in WoWS the AI can see two sides of their ship at the same time
and
For example, right at that moment, shoot the torpedoes on ship #1 on the left and aim the guns on ship #2 on the right in the citadel area (area for critical hits!!) and fire them.

If you don't get it as a player - the mechanics of the game don't give up.

So I would be very careful with the statements of the "lying Todd"

[KoolHndLuke]

Playing a new game (for me anyway) lately and I've got a few major complaints;

 

 A) The world leveling with the PC- I hate this! It completely destroys any sense of leveling and getting more powerful. I'm reminded once again of how BioWare (used) to handle things with fixed skills/attributes/levels for enemies. I liked that I could rarely pull off a victory against much higher level opponents and go back and stomp lower level ones later for fun. You're getting the same xp overall no matter how you do it really.

 

 B) Game economics- usually suck because the devs think a straight modifier across the board works and it simply doesn't. For instance, a shop owner can mark an item with a very low base cost up 400-500% and can reasonably expect it to sell and earn a tidy profit (depending on demand). But items that have much higher base value WOULDNT FUCKING SELL with that same markup! Few people can even afford and nobody in their right mind will pay 5000gp for an item worth 1000. "What the market will bear" is a thing, lol.

 

 What's worse are 'jobs' that barely pay enough wages to live on (which is all too much like reality, lol). They could at least make them fun/interesting. 

 

Edited June 11, 2023 by KoolHndLuke

[27X]

On 3/17/2023 at 10:36 AM, KoolHndLuke said:

So... recently saw a vid with Todd the tool saying that they have to nerf enemy A.I. so the player has a chance. He went on to say that if they "turned up" the A.I. difficulty as much as they could, the player would NEVER have a chance. Anyone agree with that assessment?

 

A chunk of modern AI is based on either state gambitting if it's good or input reading if it's not. An input reading AI (think MK) literally cheats to win.

[DocClox]

I tend to play games on the default difficulty, since I assume that's what the developers intended as balanced.

 

One thing I have noticed about ultra-hard settings is that they narrow the range of characters you can take. Crank Skyrim high enough and your build is going to have to be either a heavy armor sword and board type, or a stealth archer, because they are the most combat-efficient builds and you get to a point where anything else just gets shredded.

 

On the other hand, I like to play as alchemist/merchant types and sort of blend that into a magic build at high levels. I don't wear armor or use mage armor spells, and I don't use archery. I spend my first ten levels or so on magicka and alchemy or speech while The Draugr Are Training, as it were. I find combat quite challenging enough at default level, and I couldn't play a build like this at legendary with a couple of difficulty mods installed. And I quite like my merchant alchemist archetype.

 

The other thing I find is that playing at Master level gets boring. I was trying to test a DAYMOYL addon one time, so I set the diff to Master and wandered into a bandit fort with a starter character. Only, it's not in my nature to stand there and be beaten up, so I fought back. And much to my surpise won - it just took about five times as long because it took that long to wear away ll those bandit hitpoints. Better AI for the diff settings could probably fix this, but I've not seen one that got it right.

[RPGMaker2003]

I have 100+ hrs on La-Mulana, so I guess I like hard games lol

But if the game has a difficulty setting I'll definitely choose normal

[SlugMail12]

Depends on how the difficulty is implemented by the devs. I'm all for a good challenge, but if the only difference is adding a zero to their health bar, it can just turn the game into a slog. And that isn't to say that increasing the health should never be done, but most of the time it doesn't make the game much harder, just makes every enemy interaction take twice as long to get through.

[Guest]

For me, I like enough challenge to keep me immersed, but not so much that I want to send my controller through my wall. That's why I avoid games like Dark Souls. I play games to have fun, not get stressed out. So, moderate difficulty.

[RoninDog]

Most action and RPG games I've played did a good job with the difficulty settings. The ones I can remember from the top of my head being Baldur's Gate, Pathfinder, the Tomb Raider reboot series and Jedi - Fallen Order. Skyrim is one of the few games that didn't do it well imo. The problem is that most content is leveled and low damage combined with high health makes combat slow and boring. Even if the difficulty levels can improve that to a certain extent at higher levels where it's needed it's not enough.

 

That's why I always play with Requiem. Once I started to play with it there was no turning back. Combat is more challenging, feels much more exciting and you're rewarded for playing well instead of depening on stats.

Edited June 25, 2023 by RoninDog

[KoolHndLuke]

"Iron Man" mode. This never made any sense to me to even try. Why would I want to punish myself seeing how far I can make it with no saves to fall back on when the AI- either through design flaw or glitch- decides to fuck me over (i.e. that one enemy that spawns behind you and snipes you even though you cleared that area a minute ago or the wall you use for cover that's worked many times before suddenly doesn't)? Devs are some manipulative and evul fucks, lol. 

 

 

 

 

 

Edited June 30, 2023 by KoolHndLuke

[Wolfstorm321]

If you want difficulty, there is a roguelite I discovered recently, called Loopmancer. 

It is the first game with chromatic aberration which didn't make me dizzy, so I was able to play it (after reshading it). It is also a sidescroller, with mouse support. 

The game is from the roguelite genre, meaning you have permadeath, but each time you play, the levels are different (they are procedural). 

 

And the "lite" element means you retain attributes after each trying. The main character, a detective, is throw into a loop, where he remembers what happened and even talks about it with his handler. Something similar to the deja vu effect, but increased 1000x. Every time you die the game becomes a dream and the character wake up in his apartment. And as you play more, the character becomes more powerful, so each trying becomes easier. 

 

I don't know if I will be able to finish it, because after some time, it becomes tiresome, but I liked the idea. It kind reminded me of the quantum immortality concept. 

Edited July 1, 2023 by Wolfstorm321

[KoolHndLuke]

19 minutes ago, Wolfstorm321 said:

after some time, it becomes tiresome

Well that's another thing about do-overs I don't like- repetition of seeing the same areas, the same enemies in the same places and hearing the same dialogue and stuff. That can get old really quick. What's worse is the player is pretty frustrated doing things over and will probably rush and miss a lot of stuff they took the time to look for the first time around. But the game you mention at least tries to mix things up I guess.

 

Edited July 1, 2023 by KoolHndLuke

[FauxFurry]

2 hours ago, KoolHndLuke said:

"Iron Man" mode. This never made any sense to me to even try. Why would I want to punish myself seeing how far I can make it with no saves to fall back on when the AI- either through design flaw or glitch- decides to fuck me over (i.e. that one enemy that spawns behind you and snipes you even though you cleared that area a minute ago or the wall you use for cover that's worked many times before suddenly doesn't)? Devs are some manipulative and evul fucks, lol. 

 

 

 

 

 

That mode is why I will never earn all of the achievements for XCOM 2. I prefer challenge to come from things in the game itself, not from access to functionality of the game being restricted. That is why Bayonetta 2's hardest difficulty is vastly superior to the first game's Non-Stop Infinite Climax mode which de-activated Witch Time. It was doable but Witch Time made up much of the fun of the combat system. 

[Wolfstorm321]

On 6/30/2023 at 9:32 PM, KoolHndLuke said:

Well that's another thing about do-overs I don't like- repetition of seeing the same areas, the same enemies in the same places and hearing the same dialogue and stuff. That can get old really quick. What's worse is the player is pretty frustrated doing things over and will probably rush and miss a lot of stuff they took the time to look for the first time around. But the game you mention at least tries to mix things up I guess.

 

 

 

Nah, I just finished it. And I learned it have seven different endings, one of them being random. 
Just a matter of practice. 

 

Spoiler

The character commits suicide in the end, and the game starts again, but this time, you have the inventory intact, including the money.

 

Edited July 5, 2023 by Wolfstorm321

[KoolHndLuke]

Anybody ever solo games that were clearly meant for team/party combat? Tried it recently and made it pretty far, but there are just some boss battles that I can't get past. Have to say that it is highly challenging and forces you to use a lot of things/tactics that you might not otherwise since I normally ignore a lot of stuff because I don't need it.

 

Edited July 9, 2023 by KoolHndLuke

[Roll4Initiative]

Depends on my mood and how shit my day was, sometimes I want super difficult struggling mode, sometimes I want super casual easy games like VNs or life sims, sometimes both at the same time like Dwarf Fortress. 

[GodSmack]

Depends on the game and what it means by "hard" If it's just a one shot bargain sale that to me doesn't count as difficulty, even if I'm slightly under leveled. Damage should never be an indicator of difficulty, and I honestly wish triple A game Devs would realize this, The difficulty spike should be in layers of mechanics, reaction time, experience, and cunning similar to Horizon Zero dawns huge boss fights (but not completely face-rolly like HZD).

 

A great example of this is Sifu, even without the randomizer mod, its hard mode completely changed the bosses, they were not linear but not they had options, you had to worry about multiple things all at once instead of just their gimmick in the normal difficulty and their damage was more or less the same.

 

Then we got Patherfinder(wotr, I never played KM), while the game was amazing its difficulty really stood out, while it was a bit gimmicky at the start, it didn't rely solely on damage but, setting up a plethora of buffs and peeling apart the enemies buffs. You couldn't just face roll everything in ATB mode.

 

Another example is BG3 showcase and their reveal of the difficulty system they didn't just beef the numbers but changed the way the game is played: squishes are targeted more often, weapons are changed to enchanted variants like fire and the rolls won't be padded if you're on an unlucky streak.

 

Difficulty itself should be adding to the game, creating new mechanics, buffs/debuffs or situations that go outside the norm, a good example of this would be randomizer mods where nothing is written in stone and anything could be around the corner. Just making the same combat but "oh this time if you miss you die immediately" is bad but making it like "Oh but this time if you miss your arm is gone" either permanently or for the remainder of the fight is hype.

 

Honestly, some game studios shouldn't make a hard mode on release but add it later after getting data and player behavior, all they will do is tune some numbers and walk away.

 

But yeah I like hard games, just not BS-hard games and Diablo 4, stat check > mechanics/build, is not a good thing. Like, why even have a One shot boss other than to just admit you got nothing to do afterward.

[HentaiGnome]

My only issue with most games and how they implement harder difficulties is that it usually means the enemies and bosses get beefed up to the point of becoming bullet sponges and/or the player is nerfed as to pad the time it takes to kill things. The difficulty feels artificial and less challenging but more tedious and boring. Thus, I usually play games on the easiest difficulties. The ONLY games I've enjoyed playing on "hard" are FromSoft's Dark Souls games lol. I've beaten all of them (with multiple playthroughs) with the exception of Sekiro and Elden Ring only because I've never gotten around to those two games yet lol.