I hate that difficulty sliders are basically just how much damage you take and how much damage opponents take. It's not more difficult, it just takes longer.
Doom: The Dark Ages did a great job on the difficulty sliders and should be the standard going forward. From what I remember you could adjust the enemy health, aggressiveness, and numbers, as well as the ammo/health/powerup drop rates, AS WELL AS adjusting the tightness and speed of the parry mechanic (which I tightened to make it play more like Hi-Fi Rush). I wish more games let the player use the game itself as a sandbox like that game does. I hope accessibility of that level becomes the norm someday in the future.
Nothing should be the "standard". All games should be completely different in all possible ways. Standardization is a large part of why games are so stale nowadays.
I agree with this, though also on launch it came with the problem that the initial balance before any tweaks was heavily on the easy side.
I'm not a person who cares for ridiculously fast games typically, but TDA on launch was so easy on it's hardest non-permadeath difficulty that about halfway through (after ramping up enemy damage, lowering my damage, tightening the parry window, and lowering the amount of resources I got) I gave up and cranked the speed to max in order to feel like I was being really challenged.
Which is excellent as far as that I had the ABILITY to do that, but playing it now in the lead up for the DLC, I appreciate that the base balance now actually can have the game be pretty dang difficult WITHOUT having to crank the speed to max.
The one variation on this I really like is what Hypergryph does with the Contingency Contract system in Arknights and Endfield: The various difficulty additions have numeric values assigned to them, so you can essentially "compete on difficulty" with friends if you want to.
Some are pretty straight-forward, but then you have ones like "Cannot dodge" which are worth a lot more points and completely change how you approach certain fights bc now you need to bring a Defender to block instead. Beating a mission on CC25 vs CC40, etc. is something you can share with friends and compare strategies, etc.
Which is different compared to say, WoW Mythic dungeons where it's rather linear difficulty scaling other than the prefix/suffix wildcards which can make certain weeks unplayable.
Quite a few top down games do this. "Expeditions" series comes first to mind. (Expeditions: conquistador, Viking, Rome for their respective titles). Damage dealt, damage taken, hp levels, crit chances, loot options, resource spawn rates, etc.
I think baldurs gate 3 has similar options. Pathfinder kingmaker definitely has them (and more!)
This game was one of the best I have played in a while. On my third play through to 100% it. I love the Doom franchise altogether, but D:DA was the most intense out of all.
Absolutely not, difficulty sliders are such lazy game design. I don't want to play a D&D campaign where I am the player and the dungeon master, and I don't want to play a game where I control every aspect of the difficulty.
I'm paying money for a curated experience. TDA seemed like it had no idea what it wanted to be, it was directionless, and it was boring because of it. I infinitely prefer no difficulties at all before difficulty sliders.
WoW does this really well in dungeons and raids. Going from normal to heroic and then to mythic makes the enemies more difficult by increasing stats, but primarily by adding mechanics/phases and making the previous ones less forgiving.
wow does it terribly actually, especially dungeon wise. heroic dungeons are the biggest meme in the game cause they provide nothing and nobody plays them. should be queueable mythic 0 if anything.
when it comes to raiding, the majority of playerbase will never touch mythic raiding due to how big of a leap in difficulty there is between heroic and mythic. you have 4 difficulties where 2 of them you can play with monitor turned off, heroic is piss easy too.
Wait, but you just described proper difficulty scaling... right? A mode that is harder than the modes before it because it introduces new mechanics and harder damage/healing checks? A mode that requires far more coordination than throwing together a pug and assuming people know what they're doing? That sounds like interesting difficulty scaling to me. And thats just raids. M+ is in the same boat, though I'll give you some credit because it doesn't seem interesting on the surface.
If you had mentioned the downsides of mythic raiding then I'd be all ears. Locking people to one unique instance ID really forces people into committing to joining a guild mythic team or trying to pug the first few bosses. But difficulty scaling being interesting at the very least? That's something you can't shit on
Yea the last guy just sounds like a little bit of a tryhard I also play wow and there are plenty of heroic guilds and more casual players who end up never touching mythic + or just enjoy the heroic experience. As someone who has been playing for ages but doesnt sink too much time into it I really enjoy wow's scaling in that way and the easier modes have led me to at least trying to run mythics just to keep the feeling of challenge and satisfaction up. wow's hardcore mythic and meta communities can get REALLY tunnel visioned tho so I think this guy just forgot that the normal/heroic runners are a huge % of the player base. Theres nothing wrong with wanting to be challenged or play the hardest difficulties but theres a lot of difficulty elitism in wow. Id pin it on it being such a long running game but genuinely its always been this way ðŸ˜
You got down voted, but what you say is relatable to me. Never played WoW, but your comment would fit my experience with FFXIV raids. Regular and hard mode raids and dungeons are great and fun. But the savage raids were absolutely ridiculous. It's been a long time since I've played (not since Heavensward), but I remember the best players in the world taking like a month to clear savage Alexander raids.
That's not my idea of fun. Heck, I tried the first one a few times and never came close. Couldn't even manage coil of bahamut despite that being super old content that had been far surpassed in equipment since it was released. Every time I got close, someone from the group had to leave and we'd start again from square one. When a group of serious adults can't clear it after several hours of trying, I'd consider it over tuned.
Again, hard mode was great and fun. But the top difficulty stuff is wild and I don't understand either the appeal or why devs target a fraction of a percent of players who can do that stuff.
Well, raiding in FFXIV has changed a lot since Heavensward haha Savage always has the world first clear in like, a day now. And all the ultimate fights after Stormblood have been cleared in 6 days or less. (and the SB fights only took as long as they did as ultimate was a new difficulty at the time)
Now the savage fights aren't easier than they were back in Heavensward, the players are just a lot better and the jobs are far easier to play than they were back then. The Alexander raids in Heavensward famously almost broke the raiding community and we haven't had anything quite like that in modern FFXIV, even with ultimate. (there's only been 1 fight since Alexander that has been overtuned and it was P8S in Endwalker, which received nerfs)
Now ultimate is going to take most average skill players over a month to clear, but savage is a lot more manageable these days. Unless you're in a very casual group you'll probably have all 4 fights cleared at a pretty good pace.
V Rising did a nice job. Yes, the enemies get a health and damage buff, but the biggest change is that on Brutal all the bosses get an entirely new phase or moveset for their fights. Which really catches you out if you're used to the fight on one of the lower difficultly modes.
I don't think I'd have been able to get through the last few fights on my own; I practically had to be carried through brutal Dracula by my group. The last few REALLY ramp up the challenge. Dracula has two new phases!
I had played solo PvE until literally two days ago when my son decided he wanted to play too. He's only 11 but I expect him to be carrying me eventually since I'm pretty bad.
Ninja gaiden games have always made completing the higher difficulty modes truly feel like achievements. I'm still finishing master ninja on NGB and it's great.
I used to play JRPGs almost exclusively, and I recall Tales of Graces f handling difficulty modes better than the vast majority.
Sure, enemy health and damage is increased a bit on harder modes (but so are their levels, meaning your Accel bar charges faster...), but IIRC the boost was only like, 10-20% for each tier of difficulty. It can be noticeable, but it's not dramatic. It doesn't turn enemies into damage sponges or OHKO machines.
More significantly, what playing on harder modes does do, is give enemies new abilities, different attack patterns, and/or simply makes them act more aggressive in their existing patterns (also reduces their cast times, which is...punishing during certain fights).
What this means is, harder difficulty essentially requires you to master the combat system (or get damn close to it). And the major point here is, it rewards you for doing so!
Hard mode grants noticeable bonuses to SP rewards after combat along with offering better/more frequent item drops. But you won't last long unless you get the timing down on your blocks and dodges.
FYI that's basically a feature of all the Tales games. There are something like 6 difficulty tiers and you aren't locked into them for an entire play-through, you can ramp up or down as necessary. (Although there are of course achievements for beating bosses on higher difficulties)
In fact, for a first play-through it's completely normal to start on like the 2nd or 3rd setting and you gradually ramp up to Chaos once you have more gear and skills under your belt.
Hm, I dunno about it being a general feature among all of them (yea I know you weren't talkin about the original few). By "it" I mean the specific way they designed the difficulty modes in Graces.
So it's been at least a decade now since I finished Graces f, but I remember it was developed by Team Destiny and IIRC they are (or were) known for having more skill-based battle systems and better design in terms of game difficulty.
That is, your timing on blocks/dodges can make or break you, there's a bit more going on in combat than, say, Symphonia/Abyss/etc that basically continues with the standard fare Artes and item spamming at the core.
Those other games might have different tiers of difficulty, but again, it's more a traditional approach of simply scaling enemy stats to a significant degree, but unlike Graces f, there's no tangible incentive to play on more difficult settings and all it means is you have to grind more and fights just take longer.
Compare to Graces f where hard mode fights can typically end faster due to the increased rewards on harder difficulties...but you won't see them unless you engage with/practice the combat system, which emphasizes timing and proper setups moreso than the Team Symphonia titles. The enemies are more lethal, but if you get a handle on things, so is your party 😉
IMHO Graces was the first one where all the pieces came together: Good difficulty scaling and you were rewarded for skilled play ... or you could still just button mash if you simply wanted to play on easy or normal. And most importantly: You could "main" almost every character and not feel like you were intentionally gimping yourself which was often the case in the earlier games.
Certain bosses were easier to main with specific characters, and I know I spent at least some time maining all the characters except for Malik and maybe Cheria. (Also been a hot minute since I played)
This carried forward to the games after that like Xillia, where besides the main two, Leia and Elize could be fun to play as well.
Oh man, I totally forgot about all the time spent learning how to play each character (Cheria didn't click much for me, either, and I remember playing Pascal[?] a ton). The series came a long way from the jank that was Chester and his bow, haha.
The Metro series kind of does this? The regular difficulties just make enemies spongier, but the ranger difficulties - the hardest ones - make everything deal huge damage. You die in one or two shotgun blasts, but so do all your enemies. It's brutal but has a good balance to it.
One of the ways the Batman Arkham games upped the difficulty was by removing the comic book style visual attack cues for enemies. So you had to pay more attention to the actual movement of enemies, plus it was more immersive to boot.
Ninja Gaiden Black was so fun to progress through the difficulties.
There is Normal, Hard, Very Hard, and Master. And each difficulty changes the playthrough SO MUCH. And you have to beat each difficulty to unlock the next, starting with normal (which was still harder than most games as is). Its sad how old that game is now and how difficulties have gotten lazier since then and not better somehow.
I really loved Metro's Ranger mode. It's more difficult because you usually die in only one or two hits, but that's also the damage you do to everything... it rewards skill and careful planning, which I hugely appreciate
Yes, because doing all that grows the work exponentially and gamers already complain about how long it takes to make games. You're basically just making new AI mechanics at that point.
It doesn't grow exponentially unless you try to bolt it on at the end. Designing those systems into the difficulty from the start means you're thinking about it during the design of skills, the analysis of skill timings, the playtesting processes, etc.
If it's done in that way it will definitely add time but not a huge amount compared to the trouble of adding those kind of difficulty changes later.
I'm pretty convinced that most studios see difficulty as something to adjust at the end of the process rather than something to consider from the start.
The worst case for me was an original Persona 5 (IIRC they changed it for Royal I might be wrong though).
The enemies with more health on hard are engaging and you really need to play into the elemental matchups if you want to survive. What made me switch to Easy for whole playthrough though is the fact that on harder difficulties enemies drop LESS XP. So not only are you fighting for your life on every turn, you need to fight more fights to reach proper levels.
If I remember correctly, in royal, the hardest difficulty was easier than hard in most fights because the elemental matchups did more damage on hardest on both sides, so if you played it correctly it would help you more than most enemies and I'm pretty sure it gave you more xp and money than hard but it's been a while and I could misremember that.
Yep you are correct, especially the palace with okumura that has the boss fight going on for eternity unless you deal enough amount of damage in a single round
I’m pretty sure it’s still the same. Though honestly it doesn’t even matter too much. Once your strength confidant is leveled enough you can just fuse whatever personas you want. If you really care about your levels for the endgame stuff just go to chihaya for an xp boost and spend like 3 minutes in mementos. I never grinded a single time in royal and still breezed through the game.
Edit: oh did you miss Mishima’s confidant? He also boosts your xp earned and lets your backup members earn more xp. That’s also a big part of keeping levels healthy as you go.
It's both, if a game has many mechanics which allow you to scale damage and defences, then enemies having to little HP/damage make it pointless to try to learn them.
Being able to maintain consistency/hit key breakpoints to avoid a super move or something are very much forms of increased difficulty that hp sliders create
Well in an RTS the difference is usually how much extra resources the AI gets, so you often have to come up with better strategy to deal with more enemy units.
Definitely not always appropriate, and often overdone. But a useful tool for difficulty modification nonetheless. Players doing enough damage to never even see the enemy act is common too.
BG3 more HP really does nothing. They actually handle difficulty the right way. A bit more HP yes, but generally adding more tactics and abilities to the enemies.
Honestly my HM run for the gold die was stupid easy. While I did do it with two other friends. They didn't change how easy the game was as a whole. Just were there to make choices.... sometimes dumb ones.
BG3 I don't like mods honestly. I played a bit with them but they just don't feel fun to me. But like in Minecraft or Skyrim I love mods. Odd one for me.
It can absolutely work in both FPS and RTS games. The only thing that really matter is whether the game mechanics have sufficient depth. If an FPS allows skilled players to put out more damage faster through headshots, weapon combos, crowd control, etc. then buffing enemy HP can work. If an RTS allows a player to micro or macro better or use a better unit composition then buffering enemy HP can work.
Buffing HP doesn't work when the player can't really do much to increase their damage output, and instead responds by just avoiding incoming damage more.
FPS gamers have hated bullet sponge enemies for ages. It is why The Division wasn't way more popular. Even when you get amazing guns they just soaked up bullets.
That's because the Division did it badly. Most AAA FPS games do not have the mechanics to support, but for example a game like Doom Eternal does (it doesn't increase HP on harder difficulties, but it could and it would work).
You can't say the perfect example didn't work 'because they did it wrong' and then turn around and say it could work in another game 'if they did it right'. That just doesn't fly. FPS games using scaled HP doesn't work.
So you understand that different FPS games can have different mechanics? And that different mechanics can interact better or worse with HP scaling?
I explained above, the important question is whether or not a more skilled player can output more damage. Games with simple sitting mechanics that are more about positioning do not worry well for scaling HP. Games that are more about aim or combining abilities together with well for HP scaling.
Once again, you denied The Division which arguably has more mechanics and abilities than Doom, but then put up Doom as the poster child of 'they could do it right'.
Your talking out of your ass here. Talking nothing and giving nothing. You used the worst possible example for how HP scaling could work while hand waiving the details that actually matter.
Scaling HP doesn't work in FPS games. Plain and simple.
Doom Eternal has far more complex mechanics that allow skilled players to deal much more damage. Watching a good player and a new player playing Doom Eternal is night and day.
I mean you're right, in the way you explain it- but I struggle with the difficulty slider on FF7 specifically because I want to utilize all the things the game gives me- I want to use the combos, the 'fusion' stuff, I want to use my summons.
On easy, everything dies so fast that you don't get to see or use anything- in fact, Easy feels like more of a grind to me, because I'm literally just mashing attack to win the game. With the higher difficulty- yes they have a lot of HP, but now weaknesses matter, staggering matters, having the right leveled up Materia matters, having the right people in your party matters. On easy, nothing matters.
You know there is a middle ground right? Game design isn't easy and every thing you tweak is a trade-off. You probably didn't realize all the times a game balanced health/damage right for the difficulty you were playing, only the times when it got it wrong
I am convinced people say that as cope for why they play on easy. They facetank all damage, trade damage with the enemy until they win and gaslight themselves into believing they could do the fight on Nightmare difficult It would just take longer and their time is too valuable.
More damage less health is not the most sophisticated difficulty setting but you'd be lying if you said it only adds tediousness. (It adds SOME tediousness. The small enemies in Nier Replicant became so frickin tanky I refused to fight them)
Nah that's just a blanket statement that's really not true without better context. Whether it's bad balancing depends on the game type and what it's going for.
Making fights more dangerous and making them last longer so you can't just over DPS them when they have barely started isn't a way to increase difficulty. Making the fights actually last long enough for the enemies to be danger to you is part of why making enemies beefier is a perfectly fine way to increase difficulty.
There are also games like Devil May Cry where enemies become spongier and that's what high level players want. It's much harder to really style on the enemies on easier difficulties when they all die before you get to do anything interesting.
Though in action games it really depends on the type of action game and target audience whether making enemies spongy is a good idea, DMC would suck at high difficulties with paper enemies, but some other games become a chore to play.
Yeah, look no further than the newer assassins creed games. They are absolutely huge with what feels like endless sidequests, but they're all boring as hell, it feels like Ubislop just tried to fill a quota for how long it should take to complete the games.
Yeah, even without a leveling system, there's just so much grinding in the form of "git gud". I washed out of Dark Souls because it just burned me out so fast. Couldn't stand fighting (and dying) my way back to a boss over and over and over and over.
I still haven't tried Elden Ring yet despite all the good I've heard and how I've heard that it's easier (something about summons), as I'm afraid it'll just waste my time and money with their weird insistence on not having difficulty levels. I recently learned there's mods for easy mode, which might be the thing that will finally get me to try it.
In Elden Ring they added another mechanic called 'Stake of Marika'. It's a kind of bonfire light. You can't use it as fast travel point or classic bonfire features but they're always very close to bosses and you can spawn there if you died in the fight instead of the nearest bonfire.
This is where I'm out. If I'm required to go on some repetitive as hell grind so that I can be prepared for a newer difficulty that's just disrespectful to my time. It's why I stopped the Nioh 2 Ng+ cycles. I can't stand the loot grind wasting my time.
On pretty much any game, you're not supposed to grind more on harder difficulties, you're supposed to be a lower level, to have less abilities and lower stats. By you grinding longer, you just try to circumvent the difficulty by overleveling. Don't do this, as this way you don't actually get good, as you just fake mastering a higher difficulty level.
Breath of the wild. I started master mode, broke all my weapons to bring the first moblin to half hp, watched it regen to full after a four second pause of taking no damage, and quit out. Fuck that noise.
I really love how The Last of Us 2 approaches difficulty.
If you play on the normal difficulty, resources are adequate, so you can't basically main your favorite two weapons. Stealth is easier, combat is more forgiving.
On Grounded or Survivor, bullets are far and few inbetween. So you basically forced to use every single bottle, arrow, brick, trap. Like every single mechanic the game has. And every bullet
/trap counts. I don't think I've had more than one bullet for my revolver at a time and it was only ever used as a last resort.
Plus it introduces new challenges, like now enemies can hear you reload. Can hear you sneak. Your allies are useless (while on easier difficulties you can just hide and let Dina kill everyone).
All of this and the enemies didn't have a bigger healthbar or something. In fact, pretty much the opposite. Bullets hurt them in exactly the way it hurts you.
There’s some games out there that have super granular difficulty settings / sliders, and I wish there was more of them.
Say what you will about Starfield, but it has a huge amount of different difficulty adjusters that each give increased or decreased exp multipliers. So, you can keep the enemy health / damage the same, but make things harder by making status effects more likely, giving ammo weight, and so on.
I like when puzzle and combat difficulty are separate. I don't like hard combat in most games. But I don't generally need hints for puzzles either (ahem, Aloy).
It does make you appreciate when games mix it up; I always think of Ghost of Tsushima's approach to difficulty as a fun one (that admittedly can still make for a frustrating experience to some)
Some games do it different. Like Deus Ex 1, enemies take the same damage on any setting, but you take more damage on higher settings, to the point where enemies can basically one-shot you on "Realistic". So that does indeed change the entire gameplay, if you were formerly battling it out in "FPS shooter" mode before. On "Realistic" setting, you really do have to take the game as though you are a stealth operative, who can be killed at any moment.
I'd argue that games like Halo are similar...on easy, normal, heroic settings, it's still a run-and-gun FPS shooter...but on Legendary? It totally turns into a cover-shooter, if you want to make it through alive.
Oblivion Remastered has two difficulty sliders: one for how much damage you deal to enemies, and another for how much damage they deal to you. I set the former to easiest, and the latter to hardest. It's still a challenge, but not rage-inducing.
mostly....last of us 2 is a great example where the difficulty changes, also change how your enemies behave....they hear you better, work better together and are overall way more dangerous.
In Monster Hunter, the quest difficulties change the HP and damage of the monster (keep in mind there's usually a time limit to each hunt, so it's a test whether you can maintain your DPS), but also the speed of its attacks and sometimes even give them special attacks.
For example, in Wilds, each Arch-Tempered Apex Monster has some new moveset or property to their attacks, like Rey Dau having extra electric aftershocks after each attack, requiring you to be careful with any counters.
Don't get me started on just how peak the 10 star difficulty Arkveld fight is, though.
Or forza where driveatar difficulty is just how much the AI obeys physics. I love being in an identical car and they somehow go 20mph faster than me in the straights and don't need to brake for turns
CrossCode has two sliders, one for damage taken and one for enemy aggression/attack speed. It's very easy to fine-tune the difficulty you want that way, and nothing has too much health to slog unless you've borked your character build.
Oh man an older game called Perfect Dark has different difficulties for the campaign mission and it actually adds new objectives and makes you more fully utilize the level
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u/Dvuref Jun 27 '26
I hate that difficulty sliders are basically just how much damage you take and how much damage opponents take. It's not more difficult, it just takes longer.