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sundin13 on 23 August 2021
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ZyroXZ2 said:
sundin13 said:

I like the difficulty systems in Supergiant games a lot. They basically give you toggles which act as challenges which make the game harder, so you can turn them on to increase your rewards. In Pyre, there is an option to make enemy AI better, in addition to options which increase the enemy's stats and change various other toggles. To that extent, I don't really agree with you when you say that increasing numbers isn't the same as increasing difficulty. While it can make the game feel bad (bullet sponges are one of my least favorite things in games), it is something that can be done well. By increasing these various variables, it forces you to play with less room for error, which often requires greater skill or a change in tactics to react to.

So yeah, improving AI with difficulty could provide benefits, but it is far from the only good option when it comes to difficulty increases.

I mean, you're proving the problem exists, and I applaud Supergiant for simply giving you, the player, control over the metadata adjustment.  It's like they realized, "welp, we can't actually make the game more difficult, we can simply adjust the metadata, but we won't know what the player actually wants in their comfort zone, SO HERE YOU GO DO IT YOURSELF" lol

I'm not really sure why it is a problem though. I agree that it can be a problem if done poorly. If enemies start feeling like sponges and it subtracts from the experience, that is a problem. But, if a game is tuned to be enjoyable at every level on the scale (and even better, if that game gives you control over how the difficulty scales), I see no issue with that.

Also, I wanted to bring up another game that had some "interesting" difficulty scaling: Vermintide (and specifically Vermintide 2). With increased difficulty, different elite enemies and boss enemies spawn more frequently, and there are also more grunts, but I found it interesting at how once you reach a certain difficulty level, friendly fire turns on. Personally, I wish that this worked like a Supergiant game where you could tweak each of these settings individually, but I like the idea of "friendly fire" being considered a healthy way to increase difficulty without destroying the game's balance.