No worries ❤

Wish I could be better. But your voice helps.

As always, take as much time as you need. Gonna watch whenever you upload. Happy Halloween!

Likewise hope things are well for yourself and family.

I’m doing good thanks for asking man

Good old Bullet sponge 1-shot enemies really make it challenging 😐

i think the issue that makes this approach seem cheap is when it is done to a game that is already lacking. if the normal difficulty means you can kill an enemy before even seeing its full range of abilities/moves, then increasing its health means you get more gameplay, and more challenge. but if at normal difficulty you already see everything that enemy has to offer, increasing its health doesnt lead to anything new or interesting happening. instead youre just stuck seeing the same stuff for longer. the same goes for damage. if at normal difficulty enemies aren't always threatening enough to make you engage in the games mechanics fully (for example, knowing you can just ignore an attack because it wont do enough damage to matter for the encounter, or never concerning yourself with elemental resistance since the elemental damage of enemies attacks is negligible.), then an increase that makes you consider changing your build to survive specific, difficult attacks, or forces you to learn to avoid damage instead of ignoring the smaller enemies entirely will make you engage with the game more. where this fails is when there isnt more of the game to engage in. in that case it just makes the game less forgiving. for some people, that isnt a problem, but most gamers arent trying to play the game like a "no hit challenge run" in dark souls. being allowed to make a few mistakes is good, because it gives the player a chance to respond and adapt to the challenge instead of just sending them to a loading screen repeatedly until they've memorized the correct sequence of button presses to pass the first enemy. so yeah, tl;dr i totally agree but there definitely are reasons those values get changed sometimes

Difficulty modes have been reified to exactly that, unfortunately.

Unfortunately I’ve always had that mindset. I’ve never bothered with anything higher then normal because of the whole dmg sponge and double dmg.

In a lot of games it would be better to leave those numbers alone, and to just slow down certain attacks so that players have more time to react.

I wish more developers told us which difficulty was play tested and balanced. Sometimes Easy and Normal are just not fun due to lack of challenge, but sometimes Hard is just unfair with no difference to AI.

​@@MrConredsXor just didn't have those settings to begin with

When that option is available I pick it 100% of the time on a first playthrough.

Except in Pathologic 2, that game's intended difficulty can go fuck itself

is there a game that ever had the easy difficulty be called the "intended experiance"? it makes me curious what kind of reputation it would have in the community.

For one mechanic of one game? At what cost cost? Losing immersion and burning out?

Yes! I hate when enemies "evolve" with you, so they never get easier to take down. I've gotten better weapons and leveled up 40 times, why do I still have to spend time on you?!

@@jaye2997 Git gud noobie

Not really an issue, because there is a ceiling. If you cap out the difficulty cieling early, you can enjoy progressing against enemies that are as hard as they can be.

That was soo me - on the second play-through of Elden Ring, beating the Tree Sentinel knight outside the starting cave. I was like - how did I ever think this guy was hard?! :D

Adaptive difficulty is the worst.I hate with passion.I don't want your pity,I play game to develop skill,to cross a hurdle and I am not alone look at the successes of hard and punishing games.

what game was it?

@@TheK0rs3 It was Resident Evil 4, if I recall correctly. There was a room where you have to fight through several enemies that are more powerful than average. Not quite a boss fight, but harder than usual. I lost a few times, figuring out how best to deal with them, and then suddenly one of the attempts the enemies barely put up any fight at all...

You'll be still losing that level to this date then

@@AugustCrossroads You do realize that you get better at a game as you play it, right? Failure is part of the path to learning.

yeah, Far Cry 3 was like this

@@alfistibrasilianiI want to play that copy of Far Cry 3

@@alfistibrasiliani huh?

Reminds me of Mr. Freeze’s boss fight in Arkham City where the player must damage him with a different method ever time since Mr. Freeze, being a smart guy, will adjust his suit on the fly to cover every weakness you expose

I meant that Far Cry 3 enemies will also adapt to your gameplay and strategies

Though outside of horror, I hate adaptive difficulty.

great point

horror is different for everyone though, in truth, no one should be scared at all by horror because you cannot die in real life when playing horror games, therefore all fear is gone immediately. also i think horror has that affect only once and then it's like "whatever", jump scares aren't really horror either, cheap trick for the mechanism of the body, they can be done well though.

Yeah, When you repeatedly get destroyed by the same roadblock in a horror game it starts feeling frustrating instead of tense/scary. Leads to becoming desensitfied much faster, so the best balance keeps things near the brink as much as possible where you feel like you COULD die often, but never actuall do so too frequently.

​@@Psycho1343It's less about the fear of death and more about maintaining the tension. A good horror game will attempt to keep the tension going for as long as possible. You want the player to be constantly on edge, fearing that the game will suddenly force them in an uncomfortable situation that they may have to face again if they fail. But what if they _do_ fail? Well then they're sent to the game over screen. The scares are gone. There is no danger. They are given an opportunity to catch a breath in peace. The tension is lost and the player is forced to revisit the section knowing what's up ahead. And do it enough times and the feeling of dread will be replaced with the feeling of frustration, which is the number one way of undermining the horror. Things stop being scary when the illusion breaks and you're simply annoyed you can't get a move on. Of course everyone finds different things scary but for those scared by the game, it's best to make sure the game is not too challenging for them for the aforementioned reasons.

yes, if anyone ever thought what this junks of item or Crafting is used for, it's often very important in a very hard game mode. but because people play it in normal mode, they're often can finish the game without using any of the mechanics, often, blasting thing randomly will solve the problem. i also agree, that game like Dark Soul and Monster Hunter is really good, because you've to use everything to be able to win, use every items and trick to our advantage, and it was very rewarding. some game like starfield even become an entirely completely new game when you change from normal to hard, because instead of only relying to looting, you're forced to crafting & Modification, and creating your own buff, seeing that your weapon finally effective against the enemy is one of the most rewarding moment. i think game should scale the Enemy, let people learn the rope, the techniques on the go, not the difficulty.

Well even in souls this is flawed as some people say, actually LEARNED Malenia and beat her sword vs sword whereas many likely did mimic tear comet azure instant kill for both phases. You'll have skilled player A who learned Malenia say she was a challenge but one that felt very good to beat. Whereas unskilled player B will say he felt nothing upon killing her and that she was easy. Even under one global difficulty the cheese available ruins that "we all faced the same challenge" thing. Sekiro is the closest to that. As it has the least amount of cheese and doesn't even have stat grinding. And even there some think x is harder than y and vice versa. One example being fire cracker spamming into mortal blade to cheese some enemies. You'd need a game like sekiro but without ANY cheese. So sekiro with just the grapple to get around and katana. That's it. Then players would have a identical challenge no matter what. Then you know most people who fought say, Isshin for the first time likely struggled a similar amount to you. And you wouldn't have these "I beat this boss by using this cheese haha so easy"

It’s just a shame for older games where you can’t change your difficulty whilst playing (Arkham asylum and Arkham city)

@thedoomslayer5863 by definition it doesn't really "ruin" facing the same challenge at all- it just means overcoming a challenge in a different way, regardless of how cheesy it can feel to other players

But not doesn't help everybody relate. My girlfriend playing No Mans Sky on the same difficulty as me doesn't relate, because it's too hard for her but easy for me. When she makes it easier, then we relate, because it feels equally difficult for both of us. You act like everybody subjectively feels the same difficulty.

reminds me of the additional conditions you could take on per-mission in assassin's creed, though some of them were extremely unfair and i stopped having fun because I felt like my gamer cred required me to fulfill them no matter how many times i failed.

Dying light does nightmare mode really well too, rewarding you with more recourses for playing on the hardest difficulty, my only argument is that it’s too easy. Cause you can grind stuffed turtle and grind the prison and have OP weapons by level 15 smh

Reminds me of Terraria - High difficulties unlock unique rewards

❤ TWEWY's awesome for that. I struggled A LOT with the hardest Leo Cantus in NEO 😂

This is an extremely good point. It’s something I noticed while playing Super Meat Boy, Hotline Miami, Celeste, etc. I normally do not enjoy difficult games, but these games became my favorite despite being harder than most of the other games I played. And then I realized that the punishment for failing is a more significant factor in how frustrating the game feels than the actual gameplay difficulty itself.

I noticed this in Slime Rancher. Those games are super chill and breezy to play, but if you miss the drop and run off a cliff? You lose everything in your vac-pac. And that kinda sucks.. especially in 2, there are way too many blind drops to warrant that amount of punishment. You can turn off tar and the angry slimes, why not this?

This is why I think the difficulty of Souls games are exaggerated some. Death is likely, but the cost of death is negligible and even what is lost can usually be regained.

This comment made me realize that I like games with high punishment and games with almost no punishment. I hate having to redo the same sections of a game over and over, I hate grinding. If I have to redo something, it better be highly variable during playthroughs, so that on the next playthrough I don't feel like I have to repeat stuff, and if that's the case, reloading an earlier state of my current run seems less interesting than just starting a new run entirely. So I play roguelikes, which are made for permadeath, modern Paradox titles which are mostly about simulation and which will punish you with you losing options but hardly ever with ending the game and stuff like Disco Elysium, which doesn't ever end the game until you've reached The End, but will give you lots of options inbetween on how to get there.

Something that rubs me the wrong way is a game taking away your abilities because of mistakes you’ve made. For example, if in the depths of dark souls you become cursed, your health is halved until you collect a rare item, a devastating punishment which makes the following areas much harder.

That was the moment where I was really like "okay, we really gotta pay attention to shit now"

Don't you get less xp on higher difficulties? It seems like it would be better if it were the opposite.

Ngl Death March made me love Witcher 3 all over again.

@@eneco3965 Huh, it does give less EXP. Didn't realize. Even so, there's enough EXP in the game to be well above EXP requirements, you just have to do more sidequests, so there's no problem for completionist types, and there was already EXP scaling, so this more tries to avoid excessive overleveling. Definitely not a "beat the game quickly" mode.

I find the Witcher 3 combat too clunky for DM to be enjoyable, especially at early levels. Great game though.

My young sister definitely would not have played Celeste had she not been able to turn on unlimited dashes. i definitely agree

I prefer Mario odyssey and Kirby game approaches. It allows an adult to assist a child. With a very young person they can be the helper. Since the adult doesn’t need help it doesn’t matter how good they are and they still get to play. The helper usually is invincible. Then when a child is older / more skilled, you play the helper character. Then the game is over when they die but you can add in extra help. Usually those games have options to swap out and in. It does require multiplayer so might not be best for the scope of some developers

@@SimonWoodburyForget I agree that having that many options can be overwhelming. But while the player is encouraged to play with the settings, this is not absolutely necessary. Also, not all permutations need to be checked. I see it more as the game providing the player with options to increase difficulty to their taste. E.g., I never really liked the addition of a time limit, so I hardly ever played with that option enabled. But having more enemies spawn and giving them additional buffs can be quite fun. If it becomes too much, I can simply dial down some of the settings in my next run. You can think of this approach more like gradient descent (i.e. taking small steps until you find a setting you like), rather than exhaustive grid search (i.e. trying out all options and then choose the one you like best)

@@SimonWoodburyForget Sort of, but you're encouraged to only turn on 1 at a time, win a run, add another/swap it out for one higher value, and so on until you clear 20 heat with each weapon. So considering it only unlocks once you clear a run, I think it's as much complexity as a winning player can handle & ramps up in complexity very, very slowly. Also, the Fates encouraage you to try each one once, which further narrows choice (like, "oh I need to turn _this_ one on to get the in-game cheevo").

I don't know what you guy's opinions are, but I think that a difficulty system based on removing the player's abilities is a really bad way of doing it.

one of the greatest games of all time

@@SimonWoodburyForget That's why in Hades those options aren't there right away.

The other thing that hades does which is cool is just the whole rogue like style in general. Its supposed to be insanely hard and you are supposed to die and fail over and over but make small progress with each attempt that helps you eventually succeed. For some people they will rely more on skill and succeed faster while others can organically rely more on powering up from each fail. This way its still fun for everyone despite your skill and despite the difficulty and no one thinks about the difficulty but instead focuses on just doing there personal best and mastering the gameplay and builds. Great game design overall.

Sniper elite 4 and 5. Totally customizable

.... ive had that game for nearly 3 years and I'm only now learning that there's difficulty settings... i haven't been able to get past thesus and the minotur (I'm not bitter about not finishing any runs I really love the game play loop so it dosen bother me but I would love for the chance to finish it one day)

Not just Hades but all 4 games from Super Giant have that sort of system and they all work so well in making the game as much of a challenge as you can take.

@@crowsandcryptids if you want a couple tips, i'd say go for killing the minotaur first, and then theseus once he's dead. you don't want both of them in their second phase at once, and at least without extreme measures 3 on, theseus' second phase is a lot harder than asterius'! also don't forget to use your cast with boiling blood to make him take 50% more damage, and if you can survive to there without dying more than twice use death defiance instead of stubborn defiance :) also, athena's call is super great for dealing with theseus, since when he first uses his call he stops using his shield, and if you're invincible while it's happening you can just beat him tf up while he's vulnerable instead of dodging. i actually save my greater call if i have it until theseus' second phase even if it is fully charged before then!

This is why I would never ever, ever, ever, ever, ever recommend a FromSoftware game at full price to someone who's never played one. Or at least give someone a disclaimer.

Very well put

you can extend that issue into real life and make it something that's worth mentioning

What if they never care to access higher difficulties

That was mentioned multiple times

It's actually much worse than that. Think of God of War 2016. On the easiest difficulty, your axe attack accomplishes everything. Will you ever do combos or weapon skills or powers? Combat will get quite repetitive then. Players will just smash the light attack button, forget the heavy attack even exists, or vice versa. 2016's combat itself isn't even much to write home about, but at least it has more to it than just spamming the attack button. At least they didn't do a Bethesda approach. Horizon Forbidden West is another example. I have come across those who didn't know that weapon skills or valor surges were a thing, or at least never use them, because at lower difficulties it was honestly more work to read the tooltips on the valor surges and weapon skills, than it was to just fire the bow. It was more work to learn the button to activate a weapon skill, than just to just spam melee or just fire your bow semi-blindly at the enemy, not even utilizing weak points. "Well I'm not an avid gamer, and these are new modern titles, so they must have advanced in player accessibility and streamlining the average experience that even I can't possibly mess it up!" Wrong. Especially on the accessibility front. Horizon Forbidden West's hud on large widescreen TVs is so miniscule, and you can't even scale it. And the subtitles are microscopic even on the largest setting. But at least there is an "easy loot" accessibility option that goes completely against the core gameplay loop and combat system and decentivizes playing the game in one of the few ways that actually makes it worth playing. It's probably no coincidence that those who didn't even focus on weak points or even know remotely how to also had easy loot turned on. And when the game introduced stronger enemies, the solution wasn't to learn how to counter them, it was to turn down enemy health so that basic arrows did enough damage to easily kill the giant boss enemy. Watching the gameplay was little more than watching someone play a choose your own adventure game/movie hybrid (but with no narrative choice.) A pretty bad movie IMO. And I checked, the tutorial and teaching systems in that game are quite awful. It just brushes over everything. Half Life 2, what if ammo in Ravenholm was so plentiful or guns did so much damage, that you never actually were incentivized to use the gravity gun? Thankfully the game didn't give you the accessibility option to just give you infinite ammo. A lot of players will take the path of least resistance if it is offered.

Well.... That's kinda already been shown really. Just no one likes to look at it. There is a reason dark souls ... was given it's title... and it's not because it really is that hard, but because the normal was just that 'easy' before to the point that it was unthinkable that a game 'mostly' follow it's own rules & not just let you to the end if you couldn't do it.

How is that interesting. You just described learning.

@@zeosummers3984 lol true, i believe that players have some responsibility to "learn" a game (in addition to developers designing a fair challenge)

@@Eksratu "fair" should just be replaced with "fun", fair isn't necessarily fun and unfair isn't necessarily unfun.

@@Ghorda9 Eh.. Yes I agree that unfair and unfun aren't necessarily the same thing even if they can be related. But I'm not sure I like the word fun either. Because when I am first banging my head against a really difficult boss fight dying over and over in that moment I'm not really having fun per se. Rather I'm actually getting a little frustrated but it's the release of all that build up frustration that creates for such a satisfying moment when I finally do overcome the challenge. That FUCK YESS moment. Fair in that sense works a little better for me. Because when the difficulty is coming in part from the game being poorly designed that moment doesn't always happen.

@@zeosummers3984It’s interesting because it’s clear that devs don’t take this into account and force you to keep learning. Difficulty should scale dynamically depending on how easy you’ve progressed through the game.

Like heroic on Halo

Fromsoft does it right.

​@@emperorborgpalpatine Yes. Their intended difficulty is "stop being shit at the game" as it should be in damn near every game.

@@emperorborgpalpatineI think it’s right for their game. I don’t think an immersive rpg like Skyrim is made better by being made difficult.

skyrim difficulty scaling is so horrid getting insta killed with a custcene attack by a dragon on legendary even though your 70% hp ;c@@ungabungacaveman9021

Without loosing your mind you say?

Sometimes you bump into a host who just doesn't even try to touch the boss and it's incredibly sad to see. When that happens I try my best to remind them they should at least accept the challenge by directing the boss's attention to the host, using less effective weapons etcetc because... where's the fun in watching your summon defeat the boss? Like, I don't care if you're a bad player, at least punch the annoying shit in the face when it's staggered!

@@danieladamczyk4024 I think he might have missed the point of the game ***pops insight skull***

Hades heat in particular works really well to give the game lasting playability for genre veterans (or people who want to just keep for ages). It incrementally increases the challenge pretty nicely from "difficult for a beginner" all the way to "impossible for an expert", and in a way that forces you to adapt how you play as well, rather than just having to perform the same moves more accurately.

Yeah I hate that like just why

@@SalmanKhan-ez7no because it's progression and it ensures youre equipped to tackle a higher difficulty mode by making you beat a baseline difficulty first. RE7 does this, starting you out on either assisted or standard and clearing the game on standard unlocks madhouse difficulty, which doesn't just make enemies faster and deal more damage, but also changes up things like item placement and spawning more enemies in places where there aren't any on the base difficulty. I think if madhouse was just unlocked at the start, the player wouldn't be able to appreciate these changes nearly as much as they can after playing through the game beforehand and it makes madhouse a fun piece of post game content.

@@itsrainingcats9968 So I can't play the game the way I want because it might make a programmer feel less appreciated? I paid money for the game, I don't feel like I need to prove myself to play how I want

Ah yes, the gatekeeping of "you must grind your way through entire game in normal (easy for any experienced gamer) to get to unlocking actual difficult gameplay".

I thought the way FF7 remake did it was alright. At that point you have all your gear choices and you have to optimize it to overcome much harder progression.

Not enough people talk about that absolutely amazing aspect of the game design. Also, if you headshot a lot in that game, you can still do it, you just gotta knock the helmets off first with another shot

but if I'm not mistaken, if you explode some specific cargo and storage places, enemies would not be able to wear helmets. Far Cry 3 enemies also adapt like this, I feel that Far Cry 3 is harder than MGSV

@@lankyGiganticor bypass the helmet by hitting the lower part of their nog

That reminds me of how in the batman arkham games, if thugs see you retreating up to gargoyles or down into vents, they'll make it a point to ruin those escape routes when they can Cool stuff and it makes the enemies feel more dynamic and lively

@@roseflows6585 Bypass the helmet by running in with an LMG You might die but y'know, it is what it is

Gg

Carpio g2.0

It’s honestly a very realistic approach to RPGs in general. You suffer now to thrive later. I see it as an absolute win lol

Couldn't have said it better myself. Ppl forget Elden is not Dark souls. you are meant to become powerful in this game. Its literally in the story but I digress.

One thing I appreciate is that besides Elden Ring, none of the games really have a particularly “easy” mode. No matter what weapon you use, you will have to learn the core mechanics of the game if you want to beat the bosses. There’s no way to get pampered through it. If anything, there are extra hard modes, like under leveling, using a trash weapon, or in Sekiro’s case, Kuro’s Charm+Demon Bell. If you don’t use these features, you will still have to learn how to engage with the game mechanics, and it won’t be easy at all. But these features are there for expert players or repeat runs to add difficulty for replay value. Elden Ring’s summons undoubtedly jeopardize this system to an extent, but I’m also fine with it. The summons make bosses so easy to the point where it’s boring, so many hardcore players would forego using these because they want the full experience.

Or vice versa, one might think they want a challenge but actually end up having more fun just enjoying the story :D And to make things more complicated, one might feel like a challenge one night, and another might just want to sit back and relax (or, ya know, maybe plow through some enemies)

@@greatday19 That's become me with the years. I used to be a "I want the hardest challenge" type of guy but then I set Deus Ex: Mankind divided in hard mode... And I dropped it. I didn't drop it becase I physically couldn't make it (I could) but because any single level/mission was a really terrible chore so I just lost interest in the game. And I'm a bit sad because I did like Deus Ex: Human Revolution and if I only had set the game to "normal" I would have possibly make it to the end instead of dropping it. Nowadays I either look on the internet for opinions or just go to whatever the game hints as the default option. I usually like to complete the game with a challenge but without it being a chore. I can die/lose several times on hardest sections but if I'm not dying at all or I'm dying at "easy" sections I just lose interest

Yeah, as great as configurability options are, we as players are often idiots: optimizing the fun out of a game, pushing ourselves to the absolute limits when that might not actually be the most enjoyable, or turning the difficulty too far down just because it’s the path of least resistance. I do find myself more and more appreciating when a dev has the confidence to just set a single difficulty that helps better shape the player experience. (That certainly is not a universal solution tho)

that is why I believe the best way to do it if you really need to is to have the basic difficulty options, with the game balanced for normal, but have all of them being mechanically identical, and then just give the player the option to enable or disable mechanics in the difficulty menu. for example in Witcher 3, I hated the damage sponge enemies, but I wanted to play without auto-healing on rest, but I couldn't change it without also making the enemies harder to kill.

I feel the same way, and I think a big factor with this is having a solid enough idea of what's actually expected of you. Walking up to a boss and finding yourself unable to win at the moment could be affected by a number of significant factors, such as the enemy's power level (relative to your character's stats, if any), gear, intended player experience/developed skills, and on top of all that, the enemy's relative challenge level, meaning how difficult they're 'supposed' to be for your current level of power/gear/experience playing. All this can make a big difference in how you react to the challenge presented, and in how you may need to solve it. If you're fighting a boss and losing, you may be spurred on to eventual victory if you know you're fighting it much earlier than 'intended'. Or you may be more likely to accept that 'it's okay I can't win this right now', leave it for later. You may also have a better idea of what you need to work on to bridge the gap. However, if you have no information on where this enemy rests on the 'challenge' spectrum, you may find yourself badly discouraged, never realizing how far you're actually pushing yourself, thinking you're bad because you're 'expected' to be able to do this right here and now. Even a rough idea of power scaling can help a lot with this, I think, and a more accurate system could help even more.

Curious, how would a platformer have more than one difficulty?

@@Spectrum0122 Enemies could move faster. You could have less health. Some platforms could be removed to easier jumps aren't available and you have to make trickier ones.

Yeah, I often find when people assume that if you want difficulty levels, you need to get good. It's just so frustrating, when more often than not, the people who do need difficulty levels are going to be disabled people. No matter how disabled they are. I more often times will go for an easier mode, while I don't currently have motor issues, I'm still disabled and can find harder and sometimes even normal difficulties ... well ... difficult. But a lot of my issues with that are similar to abled-bodied/non-disabled folks! That is, no one testing to see if difficulty levels are balanced enough. There are times where easy is just, too easy for me. But normal could be like pulling teeth. But like I said, it's frustrating when disabled people want to talk about difficulty levels, and then get told to get good. Like, buddy, you may as well have just told me to stop being disabled, if that's how you really feel.

There's a big difference between difficulty settings and accessibility settings.

@@JohnOren64 There is. But sometimes and more often then not, they can go hand in hand. Take games like Celeste for example. It's a platformer by design, sure there are some platformers that are piss easy, and some that are hard. The thing with platformers is that it's about timing. You have to time your jump, so you either land on the platform or fall. Some people might not have the motor functions to be able to press a button, or some might not have the mental functions to be able to know how to make the jump. It's why the assist mode is perfect, and it's not like it's just a base "easy mode", but people can customise the level of accessibility they need. So yes, most of the time it's not about accessibility. Some people like playing "easy" games because they work long hours and don't have the time or energy to dedicate it towards a harder game or difficulty. For others, they might find it challenging to play the game due to a disability they have, because most of the time, if a game is in easy mode, it can still be challenging for that person! I played BG3 in the easy difficulty, and I still found it to be difficult in some areas (most of the time it was due to being underlevelled or I screwed up).

@@mxmissy That's what I'm saying. Accessibility settings include specific options for people who struggle in certain areas, while difficulty settings make the game generally easier for people to progress through.

@mxmissy I guess I probably shouldn't have said 'big' difference but I still feel like many people don't differentiate the two. Also, using Celeste as an example, the assist settings kinda show which options are made for accessibility and the ones there to ease the general difficulty of the game. (Sorry I kinda did a lot of yapping in both of my replies)

Ah, most bosses in DS2

some bosses in god of war

My least favorite boss trope is a fairly standard move set but an unreasonable amount of status affect affliction on most attacks

Sending in minions during a boss fight can ruin its flow imo.

Twin gargoyles 💀

I agree with you, also I prefer not having too high of a difficulty in horror games, because encounters will stop having any impact to me if I already done them like 10 times because I died to something.

Dying Light suffers from this MASSIVELY. That game is just straight up not fun on its highest difficulty due to how durable EVERYTHING becomes.

Be careful not to call them bullet sponges too quickly. Sometimes it's to incentivize combos or to push you to learn about the game's combat mechanics or to utilize skills or weapons you otherwise wouldn't. But yes, sadly a lot of games don't use it as a teaching tool, but more of a... I'm not exactly sure what the intention is really. I guess, a quick mandatory setting for the "hardcore gamers" out there. Added right before shipping. The ultra super easy modes tend to be added post-production as well for the game journalists. And sometimes hard mode just does become... Longer mode. Fun may or may not be included. Enter at your own risk.

@@GarrulousHerald Nah, in Dying Light it's absolutely a problem of some enemies being TOO durable.

people who have played S.T.A.L.K.E.R are tumbling on their beds reading this lol

I think it depends on the game. Some games like mayber Baldurs gate 3 yes, but for many other games I dont see why I should need to do a second playthrough just to experience the game in a way that actually challenges me after the first hour

If a game's world isn't interesting enough to make me want to play it again on a higher difficulty, then I would have been happy I started on the lower difficultly and not wasted the effort. But also, if difficulty wasn't the appeal in the first place, same conclusion but the opposite reason: the world was interesting enough as it was.

@@almicc the problem with that approach is that sometimes games just arent good enough for a second run, but way too easy on the first one if you decide to go the "give me absolutely no challenge, I want to have a I win everything button" difficulty. Or maybe you will feel so bored by the easy approach that you dont really feel like trying again in a more difficult setting

In some games I find a higher difficulty improves immersion. Walking though a world that is supposed to convey a feeling of danger and fragility but you are not scratched by anything is at odds with each other.

a problem with that would be that especially in Open world games, you just start being overpowered so insanely fast i played horizon zero dawn on second hardest difficulty and everything was straight up a joke because at some point you find out stuff that makes Fights laughably easy

No games are definitely easier now. But I don't think that's a bad thing. For example, arcade games were made to be purposely impossible to force you to pump in quarter after quarter. Also back in the old days movement was limited by the crappy equipment so a lot of it was less intuitive. You can't play Ghosts and Goblins or Contra and tell me it feels natural and smooth. So not only were you overcoming the obstacles you were overcoming the game itself. That being said, the original Halo is stupidly easy and then when they made the second one they said, fk you nobody gets to beat Legendary now lol. Make games accessible to a wider audience isn't a bad thing necessarily

I can't remember who said it but I think there is truth to the idea that back in the old NES/SNES days they couldn't put much game into a cartridge, so they just made them crazy hard to ensure you got your 40-50 hours of play time out of them. Now open world landscapes are so cheap I routinely find areas I assume were for some encounter or side quest that didn't make it into the final game because there's a big open side area that looks interesting/intentionally designed but doesn't have anything in it.

Imo if 3 difficulty options go hard, if 5 go hard not very hard

That's so true! I was thinking that during the whole intro section. Razbuten felt underwhelmed by Normal because he has a baseline ability to play games similar to the Witcher 3 already. And he's right about how it's weird we have to guess what difficulty we'll like based on if we've played similar games before (and that's a guess based on info we have before we even play). So many online conversations around difficulty are about the same types of games (action games with elements like live combat, large open worlds, etc), and so many of the people talking about it ONLY play those games (or mostly those games), and are super used to them. Is "normal" meant for someone who's used to those mechanics? How familiar do you have to be? It makes sense that the guy who does a whole series where his non-gamer partner tries different titles would have so many nuanced things to say about this topic. I can say it gets a little frustrating whenever this conversation comes up, as someone who IS a gamer but not "that" type of gamer, so I rely on easy mode in most action games just to experience them at all. I sometimes even get stuck in the easiest "cinematic" modes, like the one for death stranding.

There is also another option. I've found that the way I select games to play have changed. It used to be more on ratings and now it is more on the gameplay but this change is only possible after playing a bunch of different games and figuring out what I like and don't like. The feeling of difficulty is also tied to how much you are enjoying the experience. It's like someone working at a job that they really like not feeling like it is a job versus working at a job where you just show up for the paycheck.

cuz you always play on easy mode

Literally how was this not your immediate inference?

Was it more or less fun to play this way?

Could also bank all your items in the item crate and the game will give you more ammo and health pickups, which makes it easier and less items to manage. You could see this also as the game compensating for those who are badly prepared, big part of survival horror was managing what you take out of the safe room with you but this is now gone, with dynamic drops based on what's in your inventory you don't need to try. When I watched most streamers playing the modern REmakes, they almost all "failed" their way through the game but the game kept them alive barely, so for first playthrough tension I guess it does it's job.

I think it took away part of the anxiety that is appropriate for the setting of not knowing whether I'd have enough to continue, knowing that I always would. I stopped caring about missed shots because I knew they'd be replaced. The thing is, the game is quite easy (even on professional) when this decision becomes less important. Without that pressure, good shots don't matter as much - and therefore you can let loose much more than you would without that knowledge. It's not at all like having infinite ammo, but it sometimes feels close to it.@@ookiemand

Thank you Underdog for your elaborate explanation!@@underdog353777

This is pretty much what I do too. And also the main reason I refuse to touch any Souls game and hate when people call newly difficult games "the dark souls of " because if, for example, Pokemon Legends: Arceus REALLY was "the dark souls of pokemon," I wouldn't have beaten it so easily??? Or at all???

@@SnoFitzroy Well if you refuse to touch any Souls game you will never know if you are actually good at them lol. Souls games are hard but fair, there are no 100% hit attacks or anything like that so you are guaranteed to succeed if you spend enough time learning the attack patterns. But I'm also the kind of guy who enjoys fighting a boss 20 times and is kinda disappointed when I finally defeat them because I want to fight them a little longer so if you don't like to feel challenged then just ignore my recommendations. The cool thing about From Software Games in my opinion is that you always know why you died. You can immediately identify your mistakes and improve, try a different approach or timing there is always something for you to try.

Same for me. Sometimes my pride is the hardest boss fight. I've played a lot of games on story or easy and I couldn't care less about the difficulty. I just remember the story, the characters, the world. Nowadays I play on normal if I know I'm "comfortable" with the genre, but I won't hesitate to bump it down immediately if I get frustrated. Always remember, the point of videogames is to have fun. If the game is too easy, bump it up, if it's too hard, bump it down. If someone judges you for playing on a specific difficulty, just ignore them and move on.

​@@SnoFitzroySimply being "difficult" is an enormously reductive way to view that series. And you're greatly limiting yourself if you refuse to touch it because of that viewpoint

@@SnoFitzroy Sorry bud, you've activated the souls game sleeper agents, they will not rest until you say that learning to be good at Dark Souls opened your third eye and cured your medical anxiety.

I felt the same way as her, I wanted to see the progress of the story. But that's why I love Hades so much, you still get most story dialogue after a failed attempt! I did a second playthrough where I won a lot very early on, and I had to die a bunch over and over just to get the stories going

@stevhen42 and unfortunately most gamers take their skill for granted... I've been trying to introduce my wife to video games, but I've had to be very selective about what i suggest (something with a minimal barrier of entry, low skill level, and that's aligned with her interest so that she is internally motivated to play during her free time) and very careful about how i react to her struggles (not taking things for granted, not being patronizing, putting her down, getting exasperated)... I loved Razbuten's Games for Non Gamers series because of how eye opening it was. Most recently, I've been trying to teach her to use a controller (a input method a lot of gamers prefer because of how comfortable it fits in your hand), but it's a completely foreign tool for her, constantly having to look at it to see what buttons are where... I tried introducing her to smash, and quickly realized first she needs to get comfortable with a controller before even considering approaching a fighting game...

@@rinzen9976 that's actually sth that's been on my mind a lot: why are the majority of games centered on combat? When looking at MMOs (or, well, any RPG), the first thing that gets reviewed is the combat... I was recently looking into introducing my wife to Skyrim, a game which i love because of it's quests, npc interactions, exploration, and breadth of life skills. However, when i pulled up the trailer to show it to her to see if she'd be interested, all that was showcased was combat, something which is part of the core gameplay loop... We see this even in Minecraft... If you want to play pure survival, you need monsters enabled for resources like slime balls, string, and bone meal, resources which are needed to craft tools like leads, fishing rods, bow and arrow, and for wolf taming... (Basically, you need these ingredients for a farming play style). Sure, technically they're all obtainable in peaceful, i do appreciate that it is possible, but a bamboo forest is one of the rarest biomes in the game (which is where pandas live that produce slime balls)...

There are a lot of open world games you might enjoy that don’t focus on combat, especially in the indie scene. They might be smaller in scope than the massive AAA maps but they make up for it in quality and detail. Off the top of my head: - Outer Wilds - A Short Hike - Firewatch - Subnautica - Astroneer - Slime Rancher (more of a farm sim but you do a lot of exploration)

I did a similar thing with my little sister when breath of the wild first came out

yes one thing fabout difficulty options isn't just that it makes it more accessible to people with disabilities/less skill/slower reactions. It makes it so we can go back and play it on a harder mode giving us a reason to play it again when we've gotten really good at it and its just a cakewalk. I played the first two mass effects over and over when I couldn't work due to a broken clavicle and therefore had no money to buy new games. each time I beat it I started on a higher difficulty that I would not have been able to do previously, my skill at that game getting better and better each time.

I just stick to normal difficulty because that's how the devs intended the game to be played.

​@@Karlach_that is a wild statement to make and very untrue lmao

There CAN'T be

@@Karlach_ about normal bief the intended difficulty, it may have been true in the past but nowadays easy mode has been renamed normal and normal become hard and etc, anyway unless the game directly specifies it I don’t think there will be a intended difficulty but personally I like too play in hard but not the hardest difficulty because these is where I am challenged, you want something that isn’t enraging nor that takes away the stakes of the story by being too easy and the latter is especially true in games that should feel hard by their stories or world like most post-apo game or really any stories that talks about you facing impossible odds

It's a nice change from seeing everyone complain constantly about videogames

Totally agree. Razbuten talks a lot about enjoying overcoming obstacles but if I am playing a puzzle game with a puzzle way above my level, I don't feel satisfied when I finally figure it out - I just feel kind of stupid.

Same. I’m honestly more in the “power fantasy lover” group they mentioned near the end of the video. But I love just taking in a new world and testing what I can do with it. It’s a lot easier to do that when the enemies don’t do 6 times your normal damage lol

Absolutely. I can't relate to this "sense of achievement" constantly spouted by the people who can only get enjoyment from challenging difficulty. To me it's just a feeling of "I'm glad that's over" more than anything. Challenging gameplay often gets in the way of my enjoyment of a game. I play every game on easy/story mode for this reason and I don't have to justify myself to others why. I enjoy the game far more as I'm looking for a different experience, and on a single player game, why does that even matter? I'm not trying to prove anything, I'm trying to have fun.

I do think for that reason even in fromsoft games and other set-difficulty games I wish there were the options of "power trip" and "intended difficulty" That being said I'm disappointed in the way some games have made difficulty choice feel like a personal attack that "intended difficulty" even as I wrote it felt like some attack on those who would choose power trip, even though I don't think it had to be that way.

@@loucam08 I hate how games have left people feeling the need to justify themselves why they choose an easier difficulty. One of the most common statements I hear when I walk in on my mother playing Horizon: Zero Dawn is she'll make some comment about the challenge of enemies after beating them and then clarify something like: "Of course I know I'm playing on an easy difficulty, I'm just so exhausted after work that I want to come home and have fun playing the game, not have a challenge"

I think the most blatant example I have experienced when my neurodivergence has completely fucked up a gand for me was cuphead I’ve ADHD myself but generally I don’t think it’s too bad in a lot of places but I know for a fact that u literally cannot see most of the screen because I have to focus on my character Currently I’ve gotten past most of the game I’ve rage quit a few times but I eventually got through until I found Dr Kahls robot It’s the hardest base boss in the game abd it’s obvious why I can get to the third stage (even if u require a speed run strat gif the second phase) but I literally cannot see anything in the third stage and end up dying constantly I can barely avoid the emerald sparks but the electrified gates are basically unavoidable

This also gatekeeps younger players from playing certain games, as typically you have less fine motor control until you start to reach adulthood. Not to mention it keeps less skilled players from playing titles they think look fun. As someone with no physical disabilities but who just sucks at video games, it really sucks when I pay 80 dollars for a game just to find out I can't actually play it because of the skill requirements. Also, some games don't seem to know what "easy" is. I genuinely struggled in some spots in certain games, on the games designated "easy mode". To top it off, games that lock the "good ending" off to higher difficulties? Just.. no. That's really shitty.

I feel like not enough people take this into consideration when talking about difficulty options. The souls games aren't much of a challenge for me but I have neurodivergent friends that literally can't play them and no amount of telling them to get good is going to change their physical limitations

This!! Absolutely this.

My brain can't always react fast enough to what I see. So extremely aggressive enemies are going to wipe the floor with me because I'm trying to parse what I'm even seeing... as the sword is coming down. I have a similar issue with games that ask you to move and aim and shoot, all at once. With the camera moving, I'll often struggle to recognize what I need to be aiming at. That makes most action games impossible for me if it's based on reactive combat, lacks auto aim features, or even just incorporates a camera bob when the character moves.

To me this is kind of the only argument that matters. Easy mode is necessary for some people not just to enjoy a game but to play it at all. Games not having an easy mode (like the souls games) is indefensible for this exact reason and people who say otherwise are deliberately excluding certain people from certain games because of a disability or a neurodifference and that's not ok. Especially when the level of difficulty someone plays at is nobody's business but their own and it has no impact on people who choose to play on diamond bastard hard that story mode exists.

​@@rosiescott1531it's perfectly fine to exclude anyone you want from anything for any reason :)

I think outsidexbox covered this system in one of their videos, mentioned some tricky think that can end up happening if you combo too hard

As good as God Hand is, this approach has plenty of problems as well. Enemy damage scales far to harshly with the dynamic difficulty, and it often feels like the game is punishing you for doing well. It's to the extent that many players strategically choose to sandbag their performance in order to keep the difficulty in check. I know I basically felt as though I had to, as I dropped the game multiple times due to sitting in the exact skill window in which I would reach the highest level and immediately get killed for it. The number of times I had to repeat segments because I was good enough to reach the highest difficulty, but not good enough to beat the highest difficulty, was such that I just gave up entirely. The fact that I had to make the strategic choice to eat hits at certain points in order to succeed felt artificial, cheap, and unintuitive on a level that was just blatantly unfun. I think the game is great, but my first playthrough was anything but.

@@tyrant-thanatos These are all honestly great points that I just never ran into. I was so terrible during my first playthrough that I basically never got out of level 1. After that, chasing higher levels became the name of the game so I never really ran into that frustration. I can totally see how it could ruin a first playthrough if you grasp the mechanics more quickly than I did lol.

On a similarish vein I really enjoyed Furi. It doesn't have a dynamic difficulty but the default choice is appropriately challenging. Yet the entire game feels like it's training you to get better. One of the bosses is focused solely on a specific part of the combat. While that's a cool boss fight it also forces you to engage with a system you might've been largely avoiding. But that also means it's making you better and more confident at using it on every other boss fight in the game. By the time you have beaten the game it feels like the entire game has been preparing you for the harder difficulty option (that I think only unlocks after playing through it?) It also has one of my favorite boss fights in any game I have ever played. And that is Bernard an untextured dummy they used to test boss mechanics on. A 9 stage boss fight that has some of the best elements from every other boss combined into one single challenge. It was thrown in as a bonus alongside the one more fight dlc alongside a boss fight that i belief was an xbox exclusive at first? Which is a little unfortunate but apparently it's now included with the base game.

OMG I just wrote about GOD HAND the best forgotten PS2 fighting game that is basically resident evil 4 but with punches instead of guns and that leans even more on its combat system resulting the in most chad and stylish fighting game EVER ( not even kidding its that GOOD) and with EPIC soundtack IT ROCKS DUDE.

The drawback is that they will have no challenge so they will not learn how to face higuer difficulties. Every approach has its downsides: more accessible then less improvement

@@lluisg.8578 invincible mode doesn't necessarily imply 'no challenge'. For my daughter (and I'm sure for other kids or disabled people), the movement and gameplay itself without enemies may be challenging enough. My daughter struggles with any games that require timing of button presses (mario, pong, etc) nevermind the enemies. Naturally when she gets older and this mode no longer poses a challenge to her, I can change it.

Great comment! People can enjoy games for very different things. When I was little I loved playing games like Kirby Air Ride and Sonic Adventure 2, not for the story or any of the main quests, but just because I loved interacting with the world. I also liked games with invincibility options (GoldenEye & Guitar Hero come to mind) but these options were always locked behind "cheat" menus. It's nice to see more accessibility options being implemented as part of the base game experience.

the assist tools in celeste were intended as an accessibility tool, but it's good that it ALSO functions as a difficulty slider. You can make the game a bit more forgiving if you cannot physically move fast enough for certain segments , have a hard time seeing certain things, or just don't wanna bang your head against a wall when you're playing a highly emotional game about defeating depression and finding yourself.

I loved it. i couldn't beat the ending of the final part of farewell and was frustrated and was about to look it up on youtube and I heard someone say the assisstance options so I just turned them on and cheesed the final room so I could finally see the ending. I don't think games without a story need assistance options, but if you put such a meaningful story behind an extreme difficulty wall people are going to never see the ending and maybe even resent the story because it made them frustrated.

@@Zectifin I was the same, I gave up on the very last B-Side and the last part of farewell. But see for me, if I feel like I cheesed it, I think, why am I wasting my time on this? I love how the achievement for getting every strawberry was literally a sarcastic "impress your friends." I honestly found the strawberries really rewarding, but choosing between another 3000 deaths or turning on a cheese mode? I picked neither, just didn't finish the game

​​@@Zectifinditto. I grided the last room for a few hours before turning on invincibility, but have subsequently beat farewell over a dozen times without it. Instead of dropping it and never coming back which is close to where I was, assist mode let me get closure, and then later git gud

@@SnoFitzroy I'm in the "physically cannot move fast enough for certain segments" camp, to where it's actually random whether I nailed the timing for even a single input in one of the more demanding sections, even after I learned the rhythm. I only ever had to slow down the game speed by a max of 30% (so 70% speed) to get to a point where it felt -- and was -- doable for me, though. Could still be really hard, but there's a colossal difference between 'hard' and 'beyond my ability to even control whether I succeed.'

You definitely not alone in this, the thing is word "fun" is hard to define and measure so it will differ from person to person. That's why there is so many books and science work on the topic. For some one concept of "fun" as you described - just to relax, but some people find that boring and "fun" for them is overcoming difficult games.

There is a massive chasm in what constitutes enjoyment and skill levels for different people though. Comparing games to movies will forever be a fallacy because they are two very different things. If you had to stop a movie and fill out a test or write an essay on what you've seen so far, that's somewhat similar.

You can relax while improving though. If the game has like no resistance at all, I'd rather just watch a movie than be forced to interact with the game.

I 100% agree. There's nothing wrong with challenging games that some people find rewarding to overcome, but I often just roll my eyes when some of them start preaching about how rewarding it was for them and will be for me too if I just spend hours or days of my free time grinding through frustrating gameplay loops to perfect my skills. Games like the Witcher I mostly play for the story, with the gameplay just being the loop I jump through for the next cutscene. I'm not interested in being forced to learn all the mechanics or utilize all the oils and potions in my kit, so I usually just play on the easiest difficulty to save myself the time and frustration.

Your last point is exactly how I felt with the Witcher 3. At the beginning, the game looked like it was going to give me a real challenge and by the end I was having such an easy time I fought the final boss bare-fisted for a while because they just weren't a threat.

I've seen people with this mentality on reddit, except they ignore the fact that the hardest difficulty isn't meant for beginners. So they retry like 30 times and then have to give up because they played the entire day away instead of just inviting an experienced player who can teach them and carry the noob.

​​@@Phoenix.Sparkles- I started going for the max difficulty years ago to avoid multiple playthroughs when going for platinum trophies, but later I discovered it enhances the immersion of games like the Witcher (all 3 of them) or The Last of Us or even Horizon (Zero Dawn/Forbidden West). Hell, I even started Dragon's Dogma on Hard, a clearly NG+ difficulty, but it was _so_ immersive for my glass canon assassin character! Same for Horizon on Ultra Hard: in the beginning it makes you _feel_ like a human fighting huge killer robots. Sure, by the end you can easily kill scores of them without breaking a sweat, but if you don't mind the switch to power fantasy, then _that_ effect is heightened even more by three sheer difference in power level, going from 11 dmg with your starter bow to 3500+ with a triple Powershot on a frozen enemy's weak spot!

I've also adopted that mentality, and honestly, it works.

Back in the day the hardest difficulty setting had to be unlocked by completing the game

Another big advantage of Hades is that you apply before each run, and you only engage with it after being already familiar with the game. But that sort of brings the issue of difficulty to when you start Hades for the first time, with there being only 2 options.

in principle yes, but i think it could still be improved. For example, i wanted to be challenged by Hades, becase even the lower heat levels didnt really do it for me. However, i need to actually grind the heat levels 1 by 1 for every weapon to actually get the rewards. Which just made me give up because its tedious, grinding through multiple dozens of fairly easy runs just to get to the fun part. If they instead just let you choose whataver heat level you wanted, and gave you all lower heat rewards you havent gotten yet, it'd be better imo.

Difficulty sliders and Roguelikes tend to go hand in hand, since you're encouraged to play through the game multiple times. Games like Dead Cells do a mix of both difficulty sliders in the form of upgrades/passive skills and Boss Cells which are basically the game's gradual difficulty options.

I remember being determined to beat the game without God Mode. Once I achieved that, I did all I could to attain full Godhood. Zagreus shall forever be ~80% god.

Yeah, my favourite way to do adjustable difficulty is in roguelikes like Hades and Slay the Spire where it starts out pretty managable and then once you beat your first run you can increase the difficulty at your own pace. Hades even has an easy mode that explicitly framed as something you can turn on if you're struggling too much, rather than just one option in a list of difficulty modes.

This is not universally true. Because the difficulty of a game should be determined by the intentions of the developer, not the desire of gamers. Generally, difficulty comes in two favors. Either the player must meet a difficulty check to complete an objective to the developer's satisfaction, or the game must meet the skill level of the player. Is the concept or the completion of a game its core goal? Is the vehicle of that challenge or immersion?

Have difficulty options does hurt some players though. This is one of the many reasons Souls fans are so adamant about not having them and appreciative of the one difficulty for all philosophy. How does it hurt players having these options? Because people get frustrated, rage and in a hissy fit they lower the difficulty and cheat themselves of the "Git Gud" moments Souls fans love. Even people who know they want these challenging have moments of weakness and will take the easy road if it's there when they're pissed off. This philosophy isn't for every game or even every genre. Most games and I'm talking 90 plus percent, cater to the difficulty option philosophy. Part of the reason Fromsoft basically started a Souls genre is because their base philosophy was extremely missed and lacking in the video game world. Souls fans can be as cringe and ridiculous as any other fans but a lot of what Souls fans are fighting back against, is the idea that Fromsoft should stop being the one small corner of the game world where this philosophy can be found and comform.

@@SaintKines If you get mad because you chose to use a completely optional option, that's not the optional option's fault, that's your fault. Also you're forcing your own view onto everyone else. You are not the god king, your view is not everyone else's.

@@Purpletrident Fromsoft isn't forcing anything on anyone. And at this point nobody could realistically claim that they didn't know either. Considering "Soulslike" is a full on genre at this point. Not every game is for every person and that's ok. Demanding that every single game follow a certain difficulty option rule is forcing your views on everyone else. 90 plus percent of games already cater to you and you still can't accept and understand that at least a small minority group appreciate and believe in a different way. Whos the one forcing their opinions here? It's well known Souls games don't have those options and are designed to be a reasonable challenge, if that's not your thing then you're still in luck because most of the industry is pandering directly to you. And yes, the options are optional, kind of in the name. But you can look at thousands and thousands of Fromsoft testimonials where people admit that not having the option to just switch off all challenge when frustrated saved from ruining rewarding Git Gud moments when they finally overcame the challenge. It's what keeps Souls fans going and coming back. Some people just want to put a game in and chill and not be challenged. There is nothing wrong with that. Some people just want to engage in a power fantasy where they get to pretend and experience what it's like to be powerful and skillful. Some people want to spend the time and rage to earn that.

Don’t know Thomas Sowell, but yes, I agree. Correct take.

@@razbuten Sowell is an African-American economics pundit. He can explain basic economic concepts well, but has a history of being a talking head for rich white conservatives.

But there IS a solution. It just may not be the one all players are gonna love. The developers need to ask themselves, "What is the intended experience of my (or our) video game, and how should we handle difficulty in a way that best reflects that?"

@@Orange_Swirl Yeah, that's what I meant by "make games good." Whatever experience developers want players to have for their game should dictate how they develop their game.

​@@marchmelloow The problem I had with your statement "make games good" is that it was too subjective, so I wanted to come up with something more specific. You may have meant that, but I didn't like how vague it was imo.

Then again easy game may instead "close" experience of accessing a mechanic. Like what he said about Witcher 3 where it's possible to never even consider maybe enjoyable gameplay like potion. Designing really is hard.

@@HazhMcMoor When developing a slew of mechanics, one thing I developer must consider is how many of them an individual player is going to access. There can be good reasons that every tool must be used to its fullest, or that different people will only utilize certain tools, depending on a game's core themes and objectives.

I definitely understand difficulty options, I just prefer the Fromsoft approach, there are different gameplay options but the challenge is measured and set.

The main downside is you are playing a game in which the rules are constantly changing, which can be unsatisfying to someone who feels they have mastered their current difficulty, only for it to suddenly change and they are now failing, or for deaths to be required before the game starts easy enough for lower skilled. The game is learning and changing the difficulty dynamically every time you succeed or fail, but a series of failures will still always lead to death and constantly changing combat rules can make understanding that combat harder. Also making a horror game dynamically easier does take away some of the fear factor and the whole overcoming your fear aspect to horror.

@@cattysplat as he said in the video, there's not a great way to make a game work for everyone. Though maybe it would be good to have the difficulty settings and adaptive difficulty (such as with RE) but with an option to turn ad off. I guess I don't really see RE as a game that's really meant to scare you or make you face fears so not being as scary wasn't even a consideration, but again, everyone is different. I'm sure a lot of people don't think fatal fame is scary, but that creeped me out more than dead space or resident evil. As far as adaptive difficulty goes, I don't see how it really changes combat at all. You don't have to adapt to playing differently, the enemies just die easier and there are more ammo drops and stuff like that. You aren't having to adjust to a different combat style...granted I'm a noob so maybe I just don't see it.

The Djinn is also really hard if you turn level scaling on.

It decrease the difficult but I still die at the same spike , I think king of thief's does it better by removing the spikes if you die to it for 3 times in a row

unless the developer changes the difficulty, Witcher 3 Death March is Witcher 2 Normal))

I mean if you want to play the game like a slightly interactive movie that's your decision. I do know a lot of people who get personally insulted when dying in single player games, and I go "okay, well, so running in the middle of the enemies with guns clearly didn't work the first 5 times, maybe try a somewhat different strategy?" More often than not, they just need to turn their brains on. They need to enter in the mindset that this is not a movie, this is an interactive medium that will challenge them and their problem solving skills. This isn't a movie where you get to move the invincible protagonist and press x to shoot enemies only if and when you want to, and then get to the next cutscene. This isn't solely background noise or pretty colors. Don't be fooled by the animated environments and pretty graphics. Treat it a bit more like a board game or a sport, or something that requires input to be fun and engaging. The ball doesn't move itself. The board doesn't play itself. Usually these are chronic movie and TV watchers that expect drama and excitement, but are confused when it isn't served up on an effortless platter. They go in expecting a movie or TV show, and find it cool they can control the character and interact with the environment, but as soon as there is a challenge, anger ensues. "Why can't I beat it right away? I don't understand why I am dying!" But they haven't even begun to think why. They just expect to walk in and win. Maybe that partially speaks to how mind-numbing modern TV and shows are today. Or how TV today doesn't really provide enough mental stimulation to engage critical thinking skills.

@@GarrulousHerald i think you're just looking too much into something that just isnt there, and i highly doubt you really know THAT many people who are like that, like be serious. all you're doing is being elitist by connecting dots that arent there and claiming that people who don't like having to repeatedly die in game are people who don't have critical thinking skills. i actually have 3 friends who play games on the easiest modes made available to them, and they're nothing remotely like how youre describing people who get frustrated when dying in games, and theyre not chronic movie or tv watchers, either. they're just average people who dont spend every day playing video games but still like them! rather than people needing to "turn their brains on" the truth is that they just need to have a history of playing games and have developed the gaming sense that those kind of games require, and many people will enjoy videos but NOT have the time or the interest to dedicate their lives to gaming, and THATS OKAY. they should still be able to play video games, and video games should continue to make efforts to be playable by as many people as possible! you have gotta get off your high horse of making it seem like playing video games makes you a better, more critical thinker than people with other interests, because it doesnt. i see the way other gamers are often completely lacking media literacy, some of the dumbest most mind bendingly stupid people ive ever had the displeasure of talking with have been avid gamers, and that's because, believe it or not, your interests alone actually dont make you a more intelligent and balanced person. like what games are you playing that makes you think like that? and to begin with it's already clear that your literacy skills aren't that great anyway because you're conflating the skills of people who by your own admission aren't gamers to the skills gamers would naturally develop. perhaps you should watch another razbuten video "What Elden Ring is Like For Someone Who Doesn't Play Games" to hear about how it's actually GAMES faults that you apparently know a lot of people who clearly dont play certain kinds of video games yet youre expecting them to play like someone who does.

@@savannah4019 Well uh, I'm the one who has had said experiences I claimed to have so I guess I ought to know. But maybe you're right. Maybe it was all a figment of my imagination. When I said chronic TV watchers, I meant that most of all of their leisure time is spent watching TV or KZfaq. That's not entirely uncommon today. I've seen them play. Playing on the easiest difficulty of games. "Story mode" of God of War 2016. You want to know what happens? The light attack button is good enough to carry them through THE ENTIRE GAME. They NEVER use weapon combos or powers. Because they forget, there's no reason to. Horizon Forbidden West? Well that's partially because of a lack of teaching on the game's part, but people completely forget weapon skills or valor surges are even a thing. Because the mindset is "well I'm not a super duper amazing lifelong gamer... So super easy seems like it would be for me." And then they play the entire game using the basic attack and maybe a few other mechanics, but completely ignore like 90% of the game's features. And they don't tend to enjoy it. At least not as much as they could. They might enjoy the graphics and the cutscenes, but you can tell they just play the game wanting to get from point A to point B because the game fails to grab their attention. Because of how mind-numbingly simple it is. One of these people I reference I am actually quite close to. He is middle aged, and it took him a while to develop the muscle memory required to play various popular titles. After he was playing games adequately, I asked him if he thought it was time to bump up the difficulty. The response? "I'm not very good at games. I don't want to die a bunch." We are talking about bumping the difficulty from story mode, to super easy. Small increments. But modern titles had already drilled into his brain that he wasn't a gamer, he probably never would be, so no use to try. And after reaching this state of good cognitive control of the controller, I saw how much he lost interest in the game. He still played it, but... It wasn't as fun anymore. There was nothing to learn. No challenge. And humans in general love learning and they love overcoming challenges. Over time I did sly underhanded tactics like changing the difficulty without him noticing, and he performed perfectly well. When I revealed the news, he was surprised. Over time, I tutored him and helped him explore everything from games settings to general UI. I taught him to be perceptive, put thought into the skill tree. Look at these skills you can unlock. There's more to the game than you realize. He learned surprisingly quickly, he just needed a little push. SOMETHING to motivate him and show faith in him. Soon enough, instead of choosing the easiest difficulty on every single game, he has enough confidence to actually put thought into what difficulties he is actually capable of pulling off. And he's had more fun with games than ever. He went from playing the easiest difficulty all the time, to trying normal or higher difficulties just to test the waters. And he is more engaged in the games, he uses his head more. He even solves non-difficulty related puzzles better because he is more attentive and doesn't expect it to just be handed to him. Now he only looks up walkthroughs for puzzles if it's either repetitive (like the catalysts in H:FW) or if he already gives it a try. He still sometimes gets mad if he dies a bit too often, but he's much more willing to take some responsibility and adapt his strategies. Changing difficulty at hard spots is now a last resort, he usually gives it a couple tries first and a lot of the time he comes out on top, feeling accomplished by overcoming the challenge. And most importantly, he has more fun. He's more confident in himself and his capabilities, and I'm proud of him. Humans of all ages and skill sets are capable of learning if you just give them the chance. Yes, a lot of the time, it is the game's fault. For trying to appeal to more mainstream audiences while not putting in the effort to engage them and inspire confidence. Not pushing them to try to be their best in a supportive manner. Instead, there are poorly cobbled together difficulty changes meant to allow anyone to beat the game with zero effort involved. Having trouble with a boss? Give him 0.1x health. Having a small hiccup understanding this integral mechanic to the core gameplay loop? Well just disable it! Players will often take the path of least resistance. That does not mean they will have fun doing so. And more and more modern titles are refusing to acknowledge this integral aspect of game design. They say it's to be more accessible, but the same games that introduced super duper easy mode press one button to win... Many of them DON'T EVEN HAVE SCALABLE UI OR SUBTITLES (H:FW, looking at you.) How can you claim to be accessible if you don't even attempt to tackle one of the most common disabilities, which is imperfect vision? If it's to become 'more accessible' for 'game journalists,' I think we are better off gatekeeping those kinds of people from the product. They either need to get better at the game so they can get by on easy difficulty, or they shouldn't focus their careers off of writing about games they barely even play. I think everyone should be able to enjoy games. Keyword, ENJOY. Not just play, ENJOY. This isn't some rite of passage to show how modern you are. This is for you to have a good and fun time, and all these claims of accessibility are just that, claims. I want non-gamers to have fun. And the unfortunate reality is... If you give people an option of an easier time which they don't need at the cost of fun... They'll tend to pick it. It's why options in difficulty and gaming aren't so clear cut of an implementation. It's more complicated than that. Not every game needs to cater to an audience that expects an effortless joyride. In fact, including such options, when the game isn't optimized or play-tested for such, it negatively impacts the experience of many casual gamers. Because how does the casual gamer even perceive "easy" mode vs "story" mode? It's subjective. It's not often conveyed well. "Well I think I like stories..." You have to hold the hand of casual gamers. They don't have the experience or knowledge of the medium to make educated decisions. And modern gaming has become so patronizing to casual gamers and newcomers. More options does not mean better. You need to actually look at it from the perspective of a non-gamer, and see the flaws in this supposed rise of "accessibility." Some of the results have been good, don't get me wrong. I like some of the accessibility options. But if you aren't careful, "accessibility" and "appealing to everyone" has the potential of simply making things convoluted and confusing, rather than actually widening the audience. Because if your product becomes TOO accessible, TOO mainstream, TOO "for everyone," more often than not, without a target audience, your game ends up becoming for no one instead. The veteran gamers are the ones who roughly know which difficulty to choose. It's the casual ones and newcomers who suffer.

​​@@savannah4019 So I'm returning to this comment to analyze it a bit more based on what it actually presents instead of just justifying myself... And wow... I kind of overlooked how uh... Hostile and aggressive it is. It starts out attempting to gaslight. Not a great start. +There is a difference between dying twice or three times to a major boss or encounter, and dying 28 times to basic enemies. It then sets up a strawman. I didn't say they didn't have critical thinking skills, I implied they weren't used to exercising them within their entertainment. I mean I'm not pulling this out of nowhere I know what TV is like lol. And I know plenty of people who do almost nothing in their free time other than watch TV. Don't read books, don't play games, board games, physical, digital... And unfortunately I would have to say that it does describe the average person. Particularly older aged individuals more than newer. People we would consider to be middle aged or older. I don't know what "those games" are, but uh, no really I don't know what you are talking about. Game sense? I mean sure it can take a day or two to get used to the controls, they might not have the reaction time or experience with certain genres to pull off hard or super hard difficulty, but I believe they are typically more capable than modern games and their "ultra accessible easy easy extra easy" modes give them credit for. You then... Talk about... dedicate lives to gaming? I'm not preparing them to enter E-Sports "or else they aren't real gamers." I myself don't care for ultra competitiveness or super duper hardcore. I tend to play on hard or one or two difficulties below the hardest difficulty. I care more about the quality of the experience than the challenge, though challenges are an integral part of the experience sometimes, it's just some harder difficulties aren't geared towards newcomers and prefer you play the game through at least once, while others are labeled hard for those experiences with the genre or quick to learn on this medium or have existing skills. Sometimes difficulty can certainly overshadow the quality of the experience if it is too frustrating or poorly constructed. "Playable by as many people as possible." I agree. Which is why it is strange why modern games tend to offer these... Challenge-less difficulties that a goldfish hooked up to the controller could beat, while they tend to neglect things like scalable UI or a variety of accessibility or QoL options. They're newcomers or casuals, not idiots. And I don't find it particularly preferable to treat them like they can't do anything right. I don't know where you got the idea I thought I was better than anyone else. I thought I was quite clear in my original post that I was considering the experience of others, not myself. Then there's this strange rant about gamers and media literacy? Like it's as if you strawmanned what I was saying just to build up to this moment to complain about something completely unrelated so it wouldn't be completely out of place? It also just seems to be an attempt to try and roast me out of nowhere. There's then uh... Another strawman. I never... Conflated the skills of gamers vs non gamers. "Skills gamers would naturally develop." Like what? Being open to trial and error, learning, challenges, and exploring your capabilities is not solely a gamer skill. My point was that games are not TV and many get caught up trying to conflate two very different mediums. Which ends up causing trouble for everyone involved. Games are interactive mediums which naturally mean they will have different priorities than TV which is primarily only a visual medium. Most modern games that include super duper easy modes, the interactive medium sucks under these poorly thrown together difficulties because they are clearly not designed for them, and the casual, or less than casual gamer misses way more than you may realize. And I don't want them to miss out. Did you even read my comment? Or did you read someone else's, read part of mine, and then just assume you knew everything I said based on some faulty correlation skills? This is quite bizarre.

@@GarrulousHerald "More options does not mean better." is something quite uncomfortable that doesn't just apply to video games, but sometimes to real life as well.

LMAO BURNNNN

Agreed

Especially since most games are very aware that a lot of exploration will make you over leveled for the bosses and so usually there's a choke-point boss that'll bring things back up to speed, or if you haven't explored at all, will force you to.

That's completely right, specially when RPGs, since even tabletops and the isometric style, rewards you with a stronger character and stronger tools the more experienced you are. That's part of the point.

I'm actually kinda against that. I really enjoy exploring and seeing everything an area has to offer, but also I do like a challenge. Having my exploration be *punished* by the game no longer being a challenge kinda takes the fun out of exploration entirely.

@@CiromBreeze explore but dont grind if ya dont want the reward of grinding.

@@Kris-wo4pj Here's the thing - I don't grind. At least, not by the typical definition of grind, anyway. But I still find myself becoming far more powerful than expected in exploration-focused games anyway to the point where combat became trivial. (Was actually one of my main issues with Breath of the Wild!)