Comments on: The Difficulty Of Difficulty.

By: hentzau

hentzau — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 18:13:11 +0000

Right yes hello. I kind of agree that there does need to be some kind of incentive behind playing on a harder difficulty level, but that incentive only needs to be something simple on the level of extra points or XP. The game has to acknowledge what you’re doing somehow. Past that as long as the difficulty is implemented correctly, the chances are I’ll take a crack at it.

(And yes Bastion was originally on my list but I write these things through the murky fog of sleep deprivation but I forgot. Anyway I think I mentioned it in the review so it would have been redundant anyway. NURR.)

By: jiiiiim

jiiiiim — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 09:37:34 +0000

It’s like playing sport, though, isn’t it? If it’s too easy or too hard then it loses a lot of its point, what you want are closely-contested matches and the more options that are available to make that happen, the better. Playing a perfectly-pitched difficulty is its own reward.

By: Josh, 7, from London

Josh, 7, from London — Sun, 26 Feb 2012 08:57:40 +0000

Oh, Bastion’s a good shout actually. The only problem with it is that there is very little incentive to make the game harder for you – the totems are essentially a customisable CoD difficulty scheme, and you don’t get any new content as a result of the challenge, making it entirely skippable (as I did).

By: jiiiiim

jiiiiim — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 18:08:08 +0000

I’m not sure about is whether the benchmark for “normal” has been steadily sliding, or whether I’m just older and better and wiser so it just feels like it has been.

Anyway I think you could include a callback to your Bastion review here – one of the best things about that game was that you could, essentially, set the difficulty yourself in lots of different ways and those ways went beyond “enemies fatter with bigger guns” to lots of little differences. I think that’s what I want from “difficulty”, lots of micro-challenges you can choose to have or not to have. My most memorable playthroughs of games recently have been doing just that, and if developers could make it easier by including such options as menu toggles rather than a test of my own will, it’d be even better.

By: innokenti

innokenti — Sat, 25 Feb 2012 10:50:47 +0000

Also the Thief games. Thankfully they kept up the scheme in Deadly Shadows as well, and can only hope they will do the same in Thi4f (I feel dirty even typing that).

I think that method also let the amount of work going into making levels a little easier. I mean, the level design was already very very good, but the difficulty level varied the objectives – from what you had to accomplish (a la Goldeneye) to how you could do it – without being spotted and without killing anyone.

Thus, depending on what your objectives were you may or may not visit the harder, tougher parts of the level and may have to use much more intricate and nail-biting plans to get past guards. The other benefit, I think, is that the challenge didn’t necessarily disappear on the lower levels of difficulty – you could set yourself the minimum plank you were certain of, and try to go one further if you could, setting personal limits.

Other than that – everything you said. Yes. That. Very much.