How important is difficulty to you in games?

[tolu619]

the-pi-guy said:

I think this is tricky.

The core of my viewpoint is that it's all about whether a game is fun enough to sustain dealing with the difficulty.
That's kind of tricky, because a game that is too dumb easy, won't be fun anymore. But difficulty isn't a goal in and of itself.

If there were two similar games, one was way harder than it should be (say borderline impossible), and one was way easier than it should be, I'd rather play the one that is way easier. At least that way I might be able to have fun progressing/exploring.

Basically this. Sometimes, I'm in the mood for a challenge, sometimes I'm in the mood for a power trip, and sometimes I'm in the mood for some stressless, mindless fun. The best difficulty setting I've ever seen in an action game is in Hades. The difficulty is so granular that you can choose what specific types of challenges you want to deal with at the moment and what you're not in the mood for, and you can change it after each run. That means you're not stuck with your choices for the entirety of your playthrough.

The choices are things like number of enemies in a room, movement speed of enemies, how much damage enemies deal, whether or not you have a time limit to clear sections of the game, whether or not bosses have extra moves, how much health enemies have, and so on. I think all games should rip off this system going forward and it should become industry standard.