On Difficulty Levels

[sketchesofpayne]

I forget which game it was, but it had separate difficulty sliders for "action" and "puzzles." Something I wish more games had.

There was another one that had separate sliders for "items" and "enemies" so you could adjust how many health kits and ammo you got versus how tough the enemies were.

 

[ark123]

I like the idea of a game that suggests you should be playing on a harder difficulty. "What's the matter...pussy?"
Though some games have hard modes that are just bullshit, like doubling all the enemys defense and health so the game takes four times as long for no real reward.

 

[mad825]

I disagree on any system that allows you to choose a difficulty, I'm not thinking of FF "no difficulty setting" but like Unreal tournament where you get the option for the computer to decide how good you are depending on your performance through out the game (match) which will prevent those insanely difficult parts of the game where you either have to start all over on a lower setting or cheat to progress however the system would have to be perfected first before as it may make the game too easy a few deaths lowers or the difficulty takes a very long time to reach higher difficulties

 

[Cousin_IT]

Far from only giving the player the choice to change difficultly once, I think every game should come with the difficulty slider Bethseda put in their games. If you want to coast through a section, slide it down to easy but get less xp as a result. If you want to make a fight challanging, push it up to hard & get bonus xp if you pull it off.

When games have easy-normal-hard settings, I tend to find normal is easy & hard is just that little bit too impossible to be worth the time. But then i don't measure my self-worth by what difficulty setting I can beat games on, which frankly is the only reason I see for preset & labelled difficulty modes existing anymore, since very few change anything but buff enemy stats/reduce your own etc.

 

[TheGreenManalishi]

Maybe you should make Fun Space Game: The Actually Scary Fun 90s Shooter? Just a suggestion.

Cursed ninja!

 

[themanwithfournames]

hmmmmmmmmmmmm. yahtzee, you should go work for valve. i'm sure they'd love to have you. or if that doesent apeal to you, mabey get your long lost good twin brother to do it for you (you are the evil twin) I think he is calling himself Chess.

 

[sievr]

Silent Hill 2 is the game (or at least one of the games) that lets you separately adjust the difficulty of the puzzles and the action.

I'd also like to add Thief to the list of games that lets you choose the difficulty of each mission separately, and i am eternally grateful that they do. Haunted Cathedral...I'm looking at you.

And on the subject of difficulty levels, I'd like to add that the Thief series (not including the mostly irrelevant third title) had an approach to difficulty level that you don't see too often, but which is personally my favorite. In many games, Expert mode makes enemies retardedly strong, gigantic sacks of hit points that are as tedious as they are challenging. The real struggle of these types of games is overcoming the frustration of taking down endless waves of too-strong enemies, and restarting the mission over and over again. In Thief, normal mode is your standard video game mode where it takes about 4-10 hits to kill you, and one or two hits to take down an enemy. Expert mode, on the other hand, is basically like real life. Your enemies go down in one or two hits, and so do you. Everything else remains the same, but this simple re-balancing of hit points makes the game much harder, while at the same time forcing you to play much more like the game is designed to play. It makes you hide more carefully, run faster, sneak more quietly, and aim better. For me, I love playing this way as it makes an incredibly immersive game that much more immersive.

 

[Athinira]

I agree with basically everything except woth only changing the difficulty once during gameplay.

It should always be entirely up to the player himself to judge. I simply don't see the reason for an arbitrary restriction on how many times a player should be able to switch difficulty. If he chickens out and starts playing it easier than his capabilities allow, then it's his own loss.

The alternative is that a player could lock himself in a difficulty that ended up too hard for him (either because he misjudged his abilities, or because the difficulty curve of the game is a pile of poo, which ultimately isn't the players fault). And then instead of being able to go back to an easier difficulty, he will either resort to cheating or simply just lose interest because he keeps dying again and again and stop playing the game. Hell this could happen the other way around too, that a player locks himself in a difficulty that is too easy, and he also loses interest and simply stops playing because he can't go back to normal/hard mode.

You should remember those feeling yourself, based on your reviews of Demon's Soul (hard) and also Dante's Inferno where you went to easy-mode and were suddenly playing... what was it again? Baby's first vagina adventures?

I'm one of the players who appreciates playing games on easier difficulty settings (i never even played Half-Life 2 on anything than easy), mostly because I'm in it for the experience itself. But even i sometimes appreciate challenge and managed to beat Mass Effect 2 on Insanity without chickening out at any point, even though i did die quite a few times. One of the reasons i didn't chicken out was that the difficulty curve was "okay" (besides the fact that upgrades are too powerful, which makes insanity a pain in the ass in the early game, and actually too easy at the end of the game given it's the fifth and final difficulty setting). Most players who want a challenge can actually appreciate difficult games if designed well.

But at the end of the day, there simply are too many games out there who not only may have terrible difficulty curves, but also terrible difficulty tunings. One of them is Crysis. On Crysis you have 4 different difficulty settings, but in fact, for the most part they don't change the difficulty as much as they change the gameplay. The higher you put the difficulty setting in Crysis, the more it changes from "Shooter" to "Stealth Shooter" because the only way to survive is to snipe all the enemies from cloak mode, something which could have been quite fun, but in Crysis simply just reduces the pace of the game for the worse of it. Luckily you can modify the difficulty settings in the .ini files of the game, and that way make the game difficult while still maintaining it as a pulse-pounding action game, but it's really annoying the devs couldn't get that right from the start.

 

[Decabo]

Mass Effect 2 allowed you to change difficulty any time, so it seems strange that you called that game too easy.

 

[BehattedWanderer]

Infamous has the option to ramp up the difficulty if you're doing to well. I was playing the game on normal and the game seem to notice that I was impaling every challenge it threw at me on a gigantic lightning rod. It prompted me to play on Hard Mode instead, which I did. Sadly, the majority of the game was still piss easy.

Ninjas! I noticed that on my second playthrough, when the game quite courteously told me I was too awesome to be playing on that difficulty, and politely invited me to step it up. Whereupon I did, and had roughly the same experience as perfect-aiming enemies on any setting will allow, breezing through some parts and getting squashed by others. And then came the final boss fight, whereupon my reflexes were tested by something that felt like fighting an excitable teleporting orangutan with a sledgehammer in each hand.

 

[Siberian Relic]

I've been becoming less and less a fan of difficulty settings. Probably stems from my childhood hours (or months) playing the first Rogue Squadron. I don't remember there being any start-of-the-game decision to set the difficulty, but you did have to up the ante to grab that gold medal, which had a great amount of replay value without shuffling around how hard it was.

I don't mind it as much, however, on games like Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory. Basically any game that can creatively make things harder, rather than just giving the bad guys massive health and x-ray vision.

 

[mrmash]

I don't see why a limit should be kept on the number of times you can change the difficulty.
When I played played Bioshock on my second run, I kept the difficulty at normal, but pushed it up to survivor whenever I encountered a Big Daddy, becuase they were just too easy on normal. I thought the whole point of the Big Daddy fights were to have you on the edge of your couch and heart thumping like a horny 14 yea-nevermind, why bother if the fights only lasted a minute? I didn't want to stay on Survivor mode becuase I didn't want the experience to be spoiled by struggling through the rest of the game.

I've since gone back a third time and done the whole thing on survivor.

Edit: Hey I'm new, though I've been lurking for like a year, only checking the posts on the widget thing on the homepage and the articles.

 

[tscook]

I'm actually farely sure most Black Isle and/or BioWare games had the ability to change difficulty on the fly, and I am very sure it was in Baldur's Gate.

 

[Rack]

I think letting players change whenever they want is perfectly fair. What if the game has an obnoxious difficulty spike and one battle is far harder than the rest of the game? I don't want to have to play the rest of the game on easy just to get past a part that is no fun. And if I start on normal can I really risk ramping up to hard? What happens if the games difficulty curve catches up to me?

 

[Jared]

I have always agreed that a difficulty should be switched mid in the game and see no reason why you should have to be set. It just makes sections which might be frustratingly hard...real grinds to do, when people could just switch it down if they wanted to and get past that point...then enjoy the rest of the game.

I cant recount the number of times I wish I could have done it myself!

 

[Breaker deGodot]

The only game I can think of off the top of my head that lets you switch difficulties without starting a new game is Red Steel 2. I didn't use it though-I like to play a game all the way through on the same difficulty (I'm weird).

That bit about an NPC offering to weaken the enemys by poisoning their water could be a clever implementation-A bit 4th wall breaking, but it could definitely be useful to a struggling player or one that finds the game too easy.

Half-Life Source and HL2 let you do it, and it helps a lot.

 

[oktalist]

It would be fun to see a Super Mario game with a "wheelchair accessible" mode.

Yahtzee, please make Actually Scary Game be a Chzo game. Please.

 

[viking97]

too bad i was looking forward to fun space game:the game. although yahtzee certainly can make an incredibly scary game when he wants to.

 

[Steve the Pocket]

The use of difficulty level as a setting instead of an option you pick at the beginning is one of the things I like about the Half-Life series, but for a different reason than Yahtzee's: If I want to jump back into the game "already in progress" after I've already played through it, I can either load up an old save state or just jump to the chapter of my choosing, and pick what difficulty level I want. Whereas with other games every save state is stuck at the difficulty setting I was playing at at the time, and it doesn't even tell me what it is! If they just put a little "H"/"L"/"S" stamp on the save files, or even color coded them or something, I'd be satisfied. This is one thing Valve did right without even trying.

I disagree on any system that allows you to choose a difficulty, I'm not thinking of FF "no difficulty setting" but like Unreal tournament where you get the option for the computer to decide how good you are depending on your performance through out the game (match) which will prevent those insanely difficult parts of the game where you either have to start all over on a lower setting or cheat to progress

Speaking of Valve, their "AI Director" is designed to more or less work like this as well. At this point it's probably sophisticated enough that they could phase out difficulty levels entirely - at least for single-player games; the difficulty settings in Left 4 Dead are still helpful for ensuring you play with people who are roughly on the same skill level as you.