Difficulty is Weird

been a bit of time between videos, but I hope you are well.

I hate when hard difficult just means that enemies deal more damage and have more health.

I appreciate so much when a game just says "this is the intended experience difficulty"

Another thing about adaptive difficulty and games that get harder as you get better - it also takes away from the sweet feeling of "these guys used to be hard and now I can wreck them because I got better"

I recall the first time I encountered adaptive difficulty. It really took the joy out of the game. I had played against a difficult spot several times and lost, and then one of the times, the game decided to downgrade the difficulty level and I could immediately tell the difference. The enemies weren't as aggressive, they didn't use some of their attacks and it felt like the game just let me win out of pity. It robbed me of the chance to actually win at the encounter.

I really liked how in MGSV enemies on the world map would adapt to your play style . If you focus on headshots, they’ll start wearing helmets, wearing night vision goggles if you only approach at night, etc. It forces you to be agile with your tactics and has a very believable in-universe explanation - the camps and bases communicate with each other about what’s happened to their fallen allies.

Adaptive difficulty is great in horror. A lot of people don't realize this but you don't want a horror game to be too hard. This might seem counterintuitive but it's true in most cases. The moment the game gets too hard and you start dying a lot is the moment the game stops being scary. If you see death is just an annoyance, you stop fearing it. It becomes familiar at that point. Good horror is all about making you feel helpless, like death lurks around every corner. It's an illusion though. And a great way to break that illusion is to change the difficulty too much. I hope I didn't spoil the magic for a lot you. I just find it fascinating.

I just go for whatever the normal mode is and then increase it to make it a thoughtful game if need be. I stopped caring about playing on the highest difficulty ages ago, found out I was having less fun for no purpose. One other massive benefit for 1 difficulty that is set, is you can really discuss games with friends under the same lens. It helps the Souls communities really relate, because everyone deals with the same challenge.

I like The World Ends With You, where increasing difficulty gives you bonus rewards so you never feel too pressured to play it on hard but you get better rewards for completing fights on a harder difficulty.

the only thing this video lacks is a brief explanation on the difficulty / punishment thematic. Celeste for example can be very difficult, but its punishment is nearly nonexistant, there is no downtime, you just get reset to the beginning of the screen/levelpart. you can also have games that are mostly a cakewalk and still feel unfairly difficult because in case you die you need to replay the last hour.

So i started playing the witcher 3 recently for the first time, and i decided to start on death march (because why not). "Certain enemies are impossible to beat without specific game mechanics" and the werewolf on screen hits hard

I like the way control and others do it. One definitive difficulty level and if people can't get through it treat it like accessibility features. At least for smaller studios it makes sense to focus on one experience.

One of my favorite approaches to difficulty is The World Ends With You. It starts you off on Easy, and you unlock the other difficulties as you go. The game changes which enemies you fight and how difficult they are to beat by difficulty, but it also affects what drops these enemies have. You also unlock the ability to lower your maximum health in exchange for higher drop rates. This essentially incentivizes the player to experiment with difficulty, and feel free to change it up and down as it benefits your experience. Also gives replayability, since you can replay each section with difficulties unlocked later in the game.

I like how Hades deals with difficulty. Once you have enough skill and upgrades to get to and defeat the final boss reliably, you can enable options to make the game more difficult, spawning more enemies, giving them armor or buffs, limiting upgrades, adding time limits, new boss move sets, etc. The fact that each run can be quite short makes it particularly fun to experiment with those options and finding a challenge you enjoy

I found the notion that "player skill" is at some set level to be interesting. In my experience, my own "skill level" is wildly malleable, fluctuating up and down with my mood, my energy level, and the situation at hand. And by just playing a game and gradually accumulating knowledge, my skill level's "baseline" also goes up over time. Not slowly, either--that baseline goes up fast.

I always feel like the conversation about difficulty in games is held mostly between good or professional gamers and often leaves those of us who are more casual or just bad at it behind. I have notoriously bad reaction times and have pretty much failed to get out of the tutorial for every first person shooter I've ever attempted to do. My first open world game was Skyrim. I really enjoy exploring and doing the side quests. I have done seven playthroughs of Skyrim getting up into the '80s and '90s for my character level and even maxing out multiple skill trees. But I have never beaten the main game and gotten all the way to Auldwin. Recently my little brother was staying with us during a covid lockdown and I got to play Elden Ring using his Steam account. It was the only dark souls game I have ever played. Before he moved out to his own apartment, I logged over 300 hours on the game. Made it all the way up to the 150s for levels and only just made it to Lindell. I hadn't exceedingly large amount of fun playing it, and only haven't gotten my own copy because I have neither computer nor game system capable of running it since I normally game on a switch. I did have to do a lot of grinding and over leveling to get the game to a point where I was comfortable, but I am aware of my inadequacies with gaming enough to have been knowledgeable to do that. On games with hard difficulty settings that you have to select. I typically go for the one above easy and give the game a try on that. If I find the game to be far too easy within the first 6 to 8 hours of gameplay, I restart on a higher difficulty. I think a lot of the discussion about difficulty needs to acknowledge that you are responsible for your own actions. If you're unwilling when you're not having fun with the game to think about what that issue is and take strides towards fixing it, then you are kind of shooting yourself in your own foot. I'm also one of the people who requires accessibility features. I have learning disability and I'm slowly going deaf. I need subtitles in my games to be able to play. I'm very glad that recently subtitles have become a common option in games. Their older games I used to play as a child that I can no longer revisit unless I have someone sitting there to clarify what they're saying to me. I feel that in the last two decades the video game industry has made some fantastic strides towards accessibility. I'm irate at certain choices like Xbox planning to prevent use of third-party controllers and then charging an arm and a leg for their own accessibility controller. However, on a whole, I think that the video game industry has made fantastic forward movement on this. They're absolutely some games that I am never going to be able to beat, even on the easiest difficulty. I have an issue with my hand. I coordination that makes all shooters pretty much impossible for me to make any decent strides in, but that just means that those games aren't for me. Something that people need to remember is just because you can purchase. It doesn't mean you're going to be able to play or beat it. In some ways I feel that people look at video games and feel that since they are consumer who paid for it, they should be able to get absolutely everything out of it and that's not always going to be possible. I bought Hollow Knight on the switch at one point when it was on sale. I have put about 25 hours into that game and still never beaten the first boss. This is not a fault of the game company but a skill issue on my end 🤷🏻‍♀️ I think it's important that people be honest with themselves about what isn't isn't within their capabilities on certain video games. 😅 My inability to beat this boss does not remove the fun I have had trying. Or the fund my little siblings have had watching me fail and then turning around and beating it for me. I just think it's important that people remember that will accessibility and ease of use is valuable. Not everything is for everyone and sometimes you just have to accept the fact that you're not good enough to do something.

A really good game to me allows for me to play through it once on normal. Enjoy every bit of the story. Make some mistakes but still absolutely crush everything. Then if the game is good enough and I found it engaging I’ll play it a second time. Hardest difficulty with a play style that I found intriguing after my first play through. Grind it out, do every side quest, use the wiki to find all the best gear and experience all the depth the developers added. The games that can keep me engaged and happy for hundreds of hours through both those styles of play I think are 10/10’s. That’s why I think games like Skyrim and the Witcher have so many fans. There’s enough depth, story and challenge to keep you entertained on multiple play throughs over years.

The customizable difficulty settings part reminded me of Hades. It's amazing how you can customize your runs to achieve the perfect challenge.

I like it when games have a “this is our intended difficulty” marker on one of them, regardless of if it is the “normal” difficulty mode

After watching the video, I've come to realize the solution to the difficulty problem in games is to not play games anymore. Thank you.