omarct said:
I agree with you. My experience with difficulty setting has never been very pleasant. I enjoy learning how to play the game so I tend go for higher difficulties as I know that nowdays "normal difficulty" just means stroll through the game without ever dying. The problem is that games are never really balanced around the Hard difficulty, so what ends up happening is you have games like Skyrim, where any difficulty lower than legendary is piss easy, but when you set it to legendary you are pretty much forced to use a bow or magic as meele combat will almost always get you instant killed by any somewhat strong monster. So because the games are not balanced around higher difficulties, these difficulties ttend to force the player to play a certain way such as using gimmicks or a certain overpowered item or weapon and are usually more frustrating than difficult. Yet lower difficulties are just as silly, if you see any casual gamer play games you will see how there is no thought process behind any of their actions, they just stroll forward and bash their head against whatever pops up. As far as the souls games goes I think they shouldn't have any difficulty setting. If anything maybe they could add a "never die" setting which would be as easy as turning a switch and your character can never die. Yet I feel like what the hell is the point of playing the game then? This is what I dont understand from these "easy" difficulty people who want to play Souls games, the whole point of that game is dying and overcoming the odds by learning and getting better. There is no great story, or great social interactions or anything like that. The games are purely about the gameplay so why would the gamers who dont care about gameplay want to play it? Other than to make themselves feel like they can do it too or something. Not much different than the players who dont want to lower the difficulty because the feel it is an achievement to have beat the games and it shouldnt be handed down to others who didnt want to put in any effort. SO basically I think this debate is about the whole movement nowadays where people think they deserve everything and everything should be given to them without any effort on their part. It is why micro-transactions are rampant, it is why world of warcraft was ruined years ago and also one of many factors that are responsible for the terrible state of the game industry today. |
Yeah, I couldn't agree more, that's precisely what I was getting at. IMO it's impossible for many games (or even genres) to balance wide difficulty scaling, and these days one that is most balanced is usually developers normal - and that in current AAA climate translates to piss easy. That's why I will always take one set difficulty approach, cause that is what dev had in mind creating their game - honestly, I don't give a toss for any entitled player whining that everything needs to be suited to their needs. so I'm happy that there are still devs that think the same way.
To make comparison to boardgaming, I wouldn't touch something like Advanced Squad Leader with a ten foot pole - but I'm very happy that it exists and that it is what it is.
| Alby_da_Wolf said: Some people fear that once they start adding optional helps, devs won't stop and they'll go far beyond them and dumb the whole game down. |
Unfortunately, I'd say that already happens on regular bases, to the point that even whole genres have been dumbed down.
