On Difficulty Levels

[captain underpants]

Here's one from the racer fan's perspective:

I like the way Codemasters are doing it lately. You can select the difficulty level prior to each race, and you get more prize money and XP (why the fuck you need XP in a racing game is beyond me, but whatever). You also get fewer replays.

Hardcore racing sims let you select the skill level of the AI on a percentage scale. (They go up to 110% for some reason, which makes it an odd place for a Spinal Tap reference.) rFactor even has a separate slider for AI aggression, which is cool.

NFS: Shift had an different take. It made you do a quick race on starting the game to determine your skill level, and offered difficulty settings based on that. Only problem was that when you fired up the game, after sitting through a bunch of unskippable intro movies, you were forced straight into the event without a chance to set up your controller, so you end up having to drive it with the keyboard. Utter fail. Good thing you could set it to whatever you wanted afterwards anyway, but it kind of rendered the event pointless.

Personally I reckon all games should have a configuration routine outside of the actual game so you can set everything up before starting it. Especially when they're so lazily programmed that you have to restart the frigging game when you change the resolution.

 

[Deacon Cole]

Maybe changing the difficulty setting doesn't add anything to you personally (which i find hard to believe if you claim it never does, no matter the game), but it does to a lot of other players, so you can't really "disagree" with Yahtzee on this point, even if it still doesn't apply to you.

Appeal to majority.

And I did not say that changing the difficulty adds nothing. I just said that the way most, if not all developers add to the difficulty is by just padding out the same basic gameplay, that doing so is lazy on their part and that tis increase in difficulty is not so much a challenge to the player's skills as a test of their endurance.

You and "a lot of other players" apparently enjoy endurance tests. Good for you.

 

[ArmorArmadillo]

Difficulty scales in games is useless, so the enemies have a few extra hp and you get a few less ammo and med pack drops. That is not an indicator of difficulty. You know what would be? Scaling the AI. At the very easiest you get absolute morons you don't react very often when the guard standing next to them is hit in the face with a rocket, conversely at the very hardest setting you are fighting Professor X (you know, "psychic" guards who can spot you through walls clear across the map).

Um...it isn't harder to fight enemies when they have more hp, do more damage, and you have less resources? Hell, it almost has the effect of scaling the AI, since guards rushing you head on makes a lot more sense when they're tougher, can take more hits, and do more damage.

 

[captain underpants]

Some games take it a little too far, and do it wrong, like DiRT 2 for example. There were 6 difficulty levels (easy, casual, hard, serious, savage, extreme) for the career mode with the only difference in reward between them being the amount of credits you won for a particular event.

The fact you could almost complete the career mode with the default cars you were given, on most of the difficulty levels, meant the amount of credits you were awarded for winning events was practically meaningless. By the time I finished the career mode I probably had enough credits to purchase the entire showroom of cars, plus all the upgrades, 10 times over.

In addition, the lowest 3 difficulty levels were so ridiculously easy that I kinda felt cheated completing the game on serious. There was no seperation on the leaderboards for those that played on higher difficulty, leading people in the forums at codemasters to proudly display their "700 race, 698 wins, 2 losses" ratio in their sigs, no realizing how totally inane it was, since you could literally drive the cars in reverse and win on the easy setting.

I agree on a lot of that. I've been paying it on Extreme with all the aids off, and find it an adequate challenge ie. I can win most races with maybe 2 or 3 retries. There are far better drivers than me on sim forums saying they found even that too easy, and I can understand that. I haven't even bothered trying anything below 'savage'. Maybe the problem is that the diffuculty is just too low overall.

On the credits thing - I'd rather have too much than not enough. I prefer not having to grind lower tier races just to afford a car to progress through the levels, so being flush with cash is a plus in my view.

I avoid online play like the plague, so fortunately I've missed all that other stuff you mentioned.

 

[MikailCaboose]

I know the "Tales of" series (well, at least Symphonia and it's sequel/spin-off Dawn of the New World) you could change the setting. Unfortunately, the awesome names were MIA.

 

[ALPHATT]

I was actually scared at times while playing the DeFoe quadrilogy. So yeah, I trust he knows what scray is.

 

[Z(ombie)fan]

art of theft sequal...

DID I HEAR THAT RIGHT!?

*Fanboy implosion*

is it, like, the same gameplay, only trilby is now in Ministry of occultism? so hes stealing "banish the demon" talismans? or something? TELL ME YAHTZEE!! I MUST KNOW THE AWESOMENESS OF IT!!!

Boy, I loved the trilby games...

I dont care about challenge. frustration ain't fun, so I pick easy.

 

[Z(ombie)fan]

Not to sound like a fanboy, but didn't Yahtzee already make Actually Scary Game: The Game, like 4 times already?

5 actually.

Chzo mythos + 1213.

 

[Twinmill5000]

There's a mumorpuger that should be out soon that will might give you what you were trying to make with FSG:TG but with grinding and levels and stuff: Black Prophecy.

... but it's a mumorpuger.

 

[Egillswordguy]

I wonder if anyone has done anything with the Eternal Darkness thing?

You know what im talking about...

 

[Grahav]

I think fighting games would benefit the most from this dynamic difficult setting..

Heck, I couldn't kill a lot of KOF bosses without setting their life bar to 1/3. And the fuckers were still hard.

Idea for fighting games:

White belt

School brawl

Cheating judge

Bloody sport

Your no-more virgin girlfriend's dad

 

[Kazyan]

Wow. I came to a similar conclusion about switching difficult mid-way, but didn't think about that potential for abuse. As usual, Yahtzee comes out with a well-thought out column.

 

[SenseOfTumour]

Here's one from the racer fan's perspective:

I like the way Codemasters are doing it lately. You can select the difficulty level prior to each race, and you get more prize money and XP (why the fuck you need XP in a racing game is beyond me, but whatever). You also get fewer replays.

I was going to post about GRID as I was recently playing it on Steam and I'd heard the final races are ridiculously tough, so started out on easy. After a couple of races getting used to it, I started getting some firsts, sometimes with big gaps between me and second. The voiceover girl kicked in before I started the next race, and said something like 'hey there, you're finding this a breeze, why not crank up the difficulty for bonus points?'

Not a forced change, just a nudge that I'm robbing myself and could probably challenge myself better.

 

[Andronicus]

I should probably have stuck to my usual policy of not telling anyone when I'm working on a game...

...so that's what I've been playing around with of late: Actually Scary Game: The Game. A simple first-person adventure like a mix of Tex Murphy and System Shock with an emphasis on simple but effective scares.

Well that was a little silly.

OT: I must admit, I'm not the most focused of people when it comes to games; I could easily be happily playing a game one day, and then pick up another the next, leaving yesterday's game half finished and collecting dust. That said, I like putting it on the highest difficulty possible for the challenge.

 

[tamerman]

You probably don?t care for suggestions on games, especially ones made by people who have never made a video game or anything close to a video game in the entirety of their existence, but in my honest opinion, the scariest thing that can ever be, is a simple pair of eyes, staring at you from behind a veil of darkness.

Say for example your swimming in the ocean, and you look below into a pitch-black ravine. all you would need is a giant pair of eyes to open up and stare at you and BAM! Shaking in your (meaning my) boots.

Whatever FSG:TG is about, you should consider hiding a pair of eyeballs somewhere the player can see, possibly blocked by bullet-proof glass or something to the player doesn?t try to shoot at them or something. Then program them to follow the player, and maybe set up a few more pairs up ahead so it looks like whoever is watching you is following you while keeping his/its identity anonymous by hiding behind a veil of darkness or something. Its small, its simple, its subtle, its downright terrifying.

However it is also a suggestion made by a fan, so I don?t blame you if that automatically makes it a bad suggestion in your eyes.

 

[drummond13]

Actually, before Devil May Cry did it, Onimusha 2 did it. Seriously, dare to die a whopping two times in that game and it thinks you need training wheels.

Game: "Would you like to switch to Easy mode?"

Me: "Um, no."

Game: ".....are you SURE you don't want to change to Easy mode?"

Me: "................... @#$%. You."

I'm not kidding about this back and forth. It's the first time a game has ever directly insulted me.

 

[Yoshi-Pop]

Not to sound like a fanboy, but didn't Yahtzee already make Actually Scary Game: The Game, like 4 times already?

5 actually.

Chzo mythos + 1213.

Damn.

 

[SideburnsPuppy]

A brief flash game a friend of mine made has difficulty levels which ascend thusly:

Easy - The Kiddy Pool. Doesn't even go up past your knees and is mostly urine.

Medium - The shallow end of the pool. Makes great training for the deep end.

Hard - THE DEEP END!!! This is why lifeguards are needed.

Insane - AN UNSUPERVISED BEACH. BEWARE OF HIGH TIDES, SEAWEED, SHARKS, AND PEDOPHILES.

 

[spacecowboy86]

i always finish a game on normal difficulty first, then i might ramp it up on the second playthrough. I'm just like that, i've never used a mid-game difficulty change unless it was to make it harder after beating the story on a sandbox game.

 

[WhiteTigerShiro]

My main problem is that every developer has their own idea of "hard". I'll play one game through twice on normal and hard and not notice the difference, then I'll go play another game through twice and barely make it out of the hard mode alive. The latter case is always refreshing. After-all, I picked "Hard" for a reason. The former case though makes me wonder if maybe it's a game that I just happen to be that good at, or if it's a case where the developer missed the point of having a difficulty setting in the first place.

I totally get that they want the game to be beatable, hence why games tend to get easier lately, but difficulty settings kinda eliminate that. You don't have to pander to anyone when you have 3 difficulty settings. "What's that? Hard is too Hard? Then play on normal!" Having an easy "Hard" mode makes me think that they're trying to pander to lesser-skilled players by letting them feel good about beating a game on "Hard", but it kinda defeats the point when it's hard in name only. :/