Nautilus said:
Honestly, Game difficulties shouldn't exist to begin with, for some of the reason you said.
Most games just deal with different difficulties as if its a slider that turn up or down and adjust enemy health/damage/defense, which in turn utterly unbalances most games, making them stupid easy(you can withstand most damage and not worry about dying) or unfairly hard( you die super fast, and enemies become hp sponges because the game needed them to ebcome harder without actually working on their moves, behavior, etc)
In order for games to actually have difficulties that actually represent their difficulty without making them cheap think Halo hardest difficulties in whic most enemies 1 hit kill you or cl;ose to it), you would have to rework so much of the game, like its level design, enemy behavior, attack patters, etc. that you would be basically putting in the same ammount of work and time as if you were doing a new game.
Maybe AI will be good enough in the future that this will not be a problem, but for now AI cant do all these stuff I just said. Even if they were to only handle enemy attack patterns to change betwenn difficulties, I would imagine that it would be alot of work(And I do mean alot) for something that, at the end of the day, its meaningless.
Carefully ahndcrafted experiences that doesn't compromise the vision is one of the reason that games like Dark Sould ands Cuphead became as famous as they did.
I talk more about this topic in this thread:
https://gamrconnect.vgchartz.com/thread.php?id=241866&page=1
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The problem with game difficulties not existing is it excludes millions of people with disabilities or who just aren't blessed with the best reflexes or fine motor control skills.
The only reason I can enjoy most of the games that I do is because they have an easy mode that allows me to relax and enjoy them without becoming stressed and unhappy because my impaired motor skills keep getting me killed, or just plain being locked out the whole experience because I'd come up against a section that was impossible for me to beat.
Never once in all my time as a gamer have I experienced a game's design feeling compromised by it offering multiple difficulty options.
Last edited by curl-6 - on 24 August 2021
