| curl-6 said: You can still make it hard for yourself by opting out of meals the same way you'd opt out of heart containers, while players like me would still have the choice to bolster ourselves with dozens of dishes so we don't have to go through the frustration of dying. Alternatively, you could not upgrade your armour, or use the starting clothes. Personally, I didn't find there was a "significant drop in difficulty" in final act at all. |
Again, that goes back to the issue of forcing the player to balance the game for themselves. If the previous segment of the game has been challenging, then there's no reason for the player to think that they should take additional steps to boost the difficulty level. If the last boss I fought killed me several times, then I'm not going to walk into the next fight expecting a boss so easy that I should intentionally handicap myself to make it a challenge. And if the bosses have been all over the place, then, well, I have no idea how to approach it. Personally, I would argue this is stuff that a player shouldn't have to worry about, at least on their first playthrough. The onus should be on the developers to create a consistently challenging experience; it shouldn't be up to the players to essentially balance the game for themselves because the difficulty curve wobbles all over the place. The responsibility for the player should be to prepare for a fight as well as they possibly can, and the developer's task is to create a fight that effectively challenges the player's preparedness and skill. When you place the responsibility for balancing the game on the player, it becomes an imperfect game of hit or miss, because the player has imperfect information about the enemies coming up. They don't know what they'll be going up against, and thus their ability to fine tune a challenge is severely hampered on an initial playthrough.
As for the significant drop in difficulty, I can't say a lot objectively there, since difficulty is, well, subjective. However, I can say that I know quite a few people that have played Breath of the Wild, and based on past conversations, I'm reasonably confident that if I asked, every single one of them would say that Thunderblight is by far a more difficult boss than Fireblight, Windblight, or Calamity (I ran it by 5 people quickly before posting this, and none of them disagreed). I think that, at the very least, should say something about a notable drop in the difficulty of bosses, and given that bosses are usually the major tests of skill in video games that include them, I don't think it's a stretch to say that there was a noticeable drop for most people I know.
