CCountZero said:
Loonyyy said:
...This whole thing plays both ways-modal difficulty allows players to choose the difficulty they want, and not including a variation of difficulty can either put off less, or more, skilled players.
It's not all about modal difficulty though. Or rather, it could be, but it would be a lot more work than any developer is gonna put into it.
No, it wouldn't. As you detail below.
Modal difficulty basically just scales numbers up or down,
False. What is meant here, is difficulty in modes. That can be accomplished by scaling damage or timings, which is in fact, quite easy (You could probably hack it in yourself), or by putting in some effort to make fundamental changes, particularly to AI. But you could just put in a scale, which would be easy. With proper access to the source, anyone with some experience with coding could do it in minutes.
and most of the time it results in a hard mode that feels cheap,
News flash: They always do. The hardest difficulty modes always feel cheap when you know you could be shrugging off all the damage. Halo on Legendary is vastly different to Halo on Normal. It doesn't cheapen the experience though. But, you'd rather the game with the cheap hard mode, and no lower mode. That's not an improvement. And, to the player who is less experienced, potentially with the controls, the lower difficulty may even be extremely difficult.
and an easy mode that often ruins the story, by making the enemy feel less dangerous than the game makes them out to be.
This is outright disingenuous. You choose the difficulty you want. If you think the enemy aren't hard enough, you increase the difficulty. There should be no narrative dissonance if there is the option to choose harder difficulties. If a player doesn't mind threat being undermined by difficulty, that's their choice. And, as above, an easier difficulty can be just as difficult for an unskilled player.
If you added an "easy mode" to Souls, people would still be complaining about not being able to find their way, and getting lost.
Sure. But those problems are relatively easily solved, and if you're lost, you can wonder around for a while, or even give up and look it up. You can't do that if your mastery of the controls or reflexes are not good enough. Hell, I still remember having to write down the pathings for the Lost Woods (Or whatever it was called) for Ocarina of Time.
That sort of challenge is far less frustrating than having the bar for entry set to high to begin with.
You know what, if they included in Souls and the like, the option for a player who cannot play due to the high difficulty to claim a refund, proportionate to the content unexperienced, then I wouldn't care. If they were willing to back up their supposed artistic expression with their wallets, I wouldn't care. They'd sell only to the hardcore, and everyone else would stay away, and there'd be no chance of grievance. But when someone buys an expensive product (And yes, it's advertised as difficult, but don't give me that), and is unable to experience it because the developer is lacking in the talent to make different difficulty modes, then they're entitled to recieve compensation for the game they didn't play. It's as bad as games that are too buggy to run.
