>>1228485 Alright.

Honestly, I find modular difficulty as a very welcome mod to games since they can make a game difficult while avoiding the typical pitfalls like enemy health bloat or damage taken goes up by 40% TLOU and TLOU2 are pretty good examples of this where my ideal "hard" experience has me never using the hearing" mode, having stereo speakers, low resouces securements, and reasonably tough enemies. Having all of those elements be variable makes an experience that is hard in all the right ways that I find enjoyable. (apologies if the image is a bit small)

>>1228485 > it's usually very hard to find the "intended" difficulty mode agreed upon to be what the developers designed he game around I always assumed the intended difficulty of a game is what it's being selected by default, usually referred as 'normal'.

>>1405961 >calling TLOU 1/2 good in any way Kill yourself.

I think your issue is just shitty developers, anon. The majority of games have shitty difficulty systems even without sliders because they're made by shitty developers, but decent developers manage to do either predefined difficulties or slider controllers well enough. To your point against slider controllers, there are ways to get slider difficulties that feel well done because the default values are already thought out as the intended experience, they usually have a few predefined values that work, and that's it. You can then customize as much as you want to remove shitty mechanics or improve what actually brings in tension, because, you know, you can customize your experience? Like a mod? Although I understand the gist that leaving this in the hands of the player, who is likely a fucking retard, seems like it would bring bad design and make the developers complacent in their development, but that usually doesn't happen in games made by decent people in the first place, and even then, the sliders are there as a bonus so you can fiddle with them yourself as the god gamer that you are to improve your experience even further. What is it there to dislike with more choice? >It's the player that should adapt to the game design to progress through the game This is correct, and it does bring the point that maybe we shouldn't even have difficulty options in the first place, but then, the current system is only broken when in the hands of shitty developers and shitty players. You can control how much both of these issues affect you by both being a better player and knowing what you want, and also just avoiding shit games in the first place, although I perfectly understand the fact that good games are becoming rarer by the year.

Difficulty sliders are essential for good players, as most types of games can't be realistically balanced around a competent player and a dumb bimbo grrrrl gamer both. The only ways you can have a one difficulty setting fits all game are: 1) if the game is super fucking easy (think Nintendo games) 2) Elden Ring style game difficulty where the good players have to severely nerf themselves in order not to obliterate the game (IE not using summon, not using spirits, not using Bleed builds, not spamming overpowered L2s) First one is ok for some casual fun, and two is frustrating because you always feel like you're holding back, and that the game never truly challenges you because "oh I can just use this legit, non-cheese tactic and delete the boss in 10 seconds".

I despise fiddling around in menus to modulate difficulty. I think FromSoft has the right idea with immersive adaptive difficulty, even if it's a bit difficult to get the game into your personal Goldilocks zone on a first playthrough. The only flaw is that it's so intuitive that you'll get a lot of people who don't even realize they made the game too easy or too difficult for themselves, yet insist on loudly criticizing its difficulty.

I think Oblivion was the first game I ever played that had a difficulty slider (or at least that I realized had one). It was the first time I ever felt disappointed by the developers of a game, because the scaling design sucked and once the game became unfathomably unbalanced I looked up advice online as a kid and everyone on gamefaqs basically said either dupe potions or change the difficulty because it was unfair. >>1407203 It'd at the very least be nice for the option to be given at the start of a game, that way you don't need to worry about losing the "pure experience" or what the developers intended just by playing the game. I think the idea of difficulty adapting to the player's failure to make things easy is a really strange development of, uh, game development, because it sort of insinuates that failure is bad rather than an intrinsic element of playing a game. Failure is a part of life, it's how you learn.

>>1228485 Sliders belong in 4X games and that's it. Difficulty toggles a la "hard>harder>harderer>Dante must wage" should only be reserved for repeat playthroughs. Modern Level scaling can fucking die in a ditch and any dev that use it should be shamed for life if not burned at the stake.

Custom difficulty sliders are kind of a double edged sword. They can salvage an unbalanced game, but it's the devs basically telling the player to balance the game for them. It 's also a sign of the devs lacking confidence in the game's design. Overall I do have a knack for balancing gameplay, so I do like to fiddle with custom difficulty sliders, but their presence is a bad sign for how the game was designed and balanced.

Falcom still had the best implementation of difficulty selection that wasn't completely different setups: Everything got balanced around a very hard max difficulty and everything else was just a nerf to it.

Thinking about it. Difficulty sliders are fine, but the game needs to have pre-set difficulties out of the box and it can't penalize you for using the sliders in place of them. Starfield, for a rather shit example, nerfs your XP and buffs your XP arbitrarily for altering the sliders. So if you want to get rid of the bullet sponges you cut your XP gain significantly even if you tune it to a glass cannon/heaven or hell difficulty. A good example is Beyond Citadel, which has well-tuned preset difficulties but lets you turn things up or down freely if you want ammo to be less scarce or other things like that.

>>1406964 You're not on 4/v/ shit for brains. You can have more nuance when discussing games than "game good game bad"

>>1407499 >because it sort of insinuates that failure is bad That's what psychological retention studies have shown, simple as that, and failure IS bad, it IS psychologically undesirable, you don't release dopamine when failing, you're not rewarded if you can't find anything to be rewarded by, it can't be more literal than this, it's just that some people gain more dopamine when they expect to eventually be rewarded as the effort builds up, and some don't. I think there might be some correlation to IQ and foresight, and it pays to remember that normalfags are on average fucking retarded. The majority of the population doesn't have a lot of grit to fail often and keep pushing for a reward, and the majority of the population is unskilled as fuck. Meaning that not just they will lose often on something that requires skill, they will give up far before improving enough to overcome the challenge. This by itself shouldn't be surprising to you, and the consequences are all around you because games are products and if people don't succeed in their fantasies they don't talk about the product to other people, majority attraction means money. Adaptative difficulty is the market's solution for the fact that normalfags also overestimate their own skills and grit (I.E the good old "more than 50% of drivers think they're above average") and hence game designers need to deceive players that they're skilled for retention. What the eyes don't see, the heart doesn't feel.

Difficulty sliders are shit because scaling is a stupid idea. It seems like a way for lazy devs to cheaply add difficulty selection, but the result sucks and the math autism to derive the scaling formulas takes far more time than adjusting some constants in a config file. A simple selection of normal/hard/nightmare works much better and is easier to balance. Bastion also had a neat idea: you increase difficulty by activating idols that give enemies some perks or buff them. Challenge runs that put restrictions on you can be pretty fun as well.

>>1406490 You'd think that, but I remember several games being designed/intended around hard(er) difficulty and the other difficulties thrown in later.

>>1228485 I agree most modern difficulty is shit. And to add insult to injury, some games auto adjust so if you're finally in a hard encounter that takes a lot of tries, it just scales it down with no way to prevet it. That is the worst thing they could do. IMHO the best difficulty options are the one where you get to improve the stuff you like or cut out the stuff you dont like. I.e. get the game style you enjoy. Map size, game length speed, tech level, disaster frequency and severity and such. Less to do with difficulty and more to do with preference.

>>1408563 To be fair, tlou is the landmark that ruined gaming pernamently so you have to understand the ragebrain of the other anon

Difficulty selection is fine - especially when one is explicitly referred to as the intended difficulty. Otherwise, for gameplay heavy games I usually just stick to the hardest difficulty Difficulty sliders are dumb though

>>1228485 Certified Very Autistic Post, but you know what? I kinda dig your 'tism OP. You're wrong of course, but i like the way you think. Have a bump, for free this time ;)

>>1228485 Difficulty sliders are fundamentally soulless because they contribute to video games becoming homogenized products. Same with "Quality of Life" features.

I don't mind difficulty sliders but I'm thinking like they would be for a second playthrough/secret hunting/screenshot hunting. I don't give a fuck about the enemies when I just want to take aesthetic screenshots. For instance I went for another go in Doom Eternal (looking for Daisy) with a bunch of the cheats and only using the unmaykr and it was fun to just tear through shit. I haven't played many games with the modern difficulty settings and I would just pick bog-standard normal if presented all the options. >picrel: devs letting the players turn off all enemies so that Hellen Keller can play

I hate difficulty sliders/modes. Everything OP said is correct. The only exception I make is for things like NG+ difficulties or if the game does something like >Easy = demo mode (let's you play a vertical slice of the game but can't really be compleated) >Normal = bad ending only >Hard = good ending >Very Hard = tryhard mode, maybe gives you a joke ending or unlocks some special weapon or something you can faff around with or other clever implementations of difficulty. Making different selectable characters different difficulties for example. SMB2 did it. So did several of the Castlevanias starting with III. Problem is most devs take the no brain route. For that reason I generally parse difficulty modes as them having no confidence in their own abilities to design and balance their game or no confidence in their customers ability to play their game. Neither of these things encourage me at all to want to play such games, let alone pay for them.

I agree that they're usually done lazily. Nobody likes a bullet sponge. That said, I'm currently playing through Tears of the Kingdom and the combat is so retardedly easy that I'm rapidly losing interest in an otherwise decent game. I wish there was a difficulty setting between normal baby mode and Super Hardcore Prepare To Die mode, like Master Mode was in Breath of the Wild.

>>1420738 >I wish there was a difficulty setting between normal baby mode and Super Hardcore Prepare To Die mode That's pretty much the inevitable of how difficulty modes shake out. Especially modern day ones. Easy feels like it's made for retarded babies. Then on the other hand anything harder than Easy feels like CBT penis flattening mode. And like why does everyone on every forum who complains about being >muh busy gamer working dad that has no time for difficult games GIB ME EASY MODE instead why do they never demand a no RNG mode? That's what's killing your fucking gaming time. It's not boss that's "too hard" it's that you have to spend 10 hours killing shits to get a pointy stick to drop that is VISIBLY PART OF THEIR CHARACTER MODEL. Anyone can git gud at a game (or anything else) that you actually care enough about to do so. What no one can git gud at is busy work in games.

Also my favorite thing is when the harder difficulty ends up being easier or at least less frustrating because of some aspect the developers didn't consider. All of which leads me to believe that difficulty modes are crutches for or indicators of developers who don't know what the hell they're doing and can't balance for shit.

todd should add an option so the difficulty slider lowers as more op you get so you feel like a badass by the end of the game. >>1228485 anon I cant believe you actually got filtered by oblivion's expert difficulty. git gud please. this reminds me of fallout 1. I started the game on easy and the raised the difficulty the more broken my build got. by the end I was on hardest difficulty. I did this for 2 and nv as well. on the topic of difficulty options, I think they should enable more ai routines, like more combo variety and different behavior. making you do less damage while increasing enemy health is bad. hard difficulty making both you and enemy die in one hit is fun though. the best way to experience stalker. >>1405961 starfield did something similar. you could enable lots of difficulty modifiers, and what they did was make the game give you more xp, like a couple percent more for each modifier with max 25%. >>1406490 halo was designed around hero difficulty. lots of games are built around hard difficulty and normal and easy thrown in without much thought to placate casuals and journos. and ultra difficulty with no proper chance to win just to shut up some masochists. >>1407015 whats the fourth picture, the one with the dark elf? probably v rising. >ftl the game only had easy, very hard and ultra difficulties. it skipped normal and hard. the jump from easy to "normal" was too big. >>1407016 old god of war had some fuck you difficult encounters, fuck those cyclops, and beating the game on hardest diff was a challenge. I always enjoyed beating the game on easy and then doing it again on each difficulty. beating god mode was very rewarding. I got so stressed thinking I had to go to the final boss without fully upgraded everything, only managed to fully upgrade in the room beforehand on the last diff. that boss fight was still a bitch to beat. had to do a perfect no hit run on the last boss of each game just to win. they kill you in 2 hits if I remember correctly. >>1407174 eh fiddling in menus is fine if everything is explained properly. another pain in the ass thing is when, like in owlcat games, all the options given to you are either too hard or too easy. they forgot to include the middleground. >>1407540 "dante must wage" hardest difficulty ones should be unlocked from the get go. I beat lords of shadow 2's base game three times, with last time on prince of darkness difficulty. but the dlc came out and that diff was locked behind new game plus. bitch I want to beat the game on max to get all the artworks. >>1420502 when I was a young kid, before learning english and during the time where I had to press each button to guess what they do, I used to barely beat action games on easiest difficulty, cause I didnt know about ANY of the mechanics and also never levelled up. not having a diff slider on final fantasy x, made me unable to beat that game past a certain point. I remember barely getting one star in time management games, actually the difficulty in them was greatly designed. everyone got the same difficulty but you got 1 star if you were a casual and you had to break your back if you wanted all those stars, which were only awarded on perfect runs. this was when I was in elementary or earlier though. I know english by the end of elementary, and sadly time management games went the way of the dodo by then. damn you mobile gaming. I hate you. >>1420644 most people design their games around normal and hard and just do some hackjob for the other difficulties. not all difficulties are afterthoughts. you sound like a snob who wants to hate on something popular to hate on with surface level remarks.

To add to this discussion with a question, does having the opition to change keybinds (excluding macros) also considered changing difficulty? I think the games I have to think of most when it comes to this are Doom and Fighting Games. Doom is made well enough and feels balanced around the speed of you being able to make turns with arrows and shift keys as opposed to a mouse. If you're using a mouse with the game, is that then a meta-modification to the game's intended experience? The second portion to this idea are fighting games. As we have transitioned from arcades to consoles, SSFIV's Juri was practically impossible on controller but feasible on stick. On the reverse, characters like Zangief were much easier to play since analog sticks could make 360 inputs so much faster than an arcade stick could. A pro player (pic related) even breaks open where the analog sticks are. Are those differences in control schemes ways we unknowingly make games easier or harder than intended?

>>1423984 >you sound like a snob who wants to hate on something popular to hate on with surface level remarks. Can you say that not in ESL because I can't quite parse your response or how you took (what I think you're saying) from my post.

>>1439831 Technically Doom supported Mice day one, it was just that DOS emulation in later Windows versions like 2000 and XP didn't support mice for whatever reason. also the Doom demo that plays at the beginning of Doom was played with a mouse so saying mice weren't intended as an option is pure foolishness.

>>1439831 >>1440154 >technically It wasn't "technical." Doom HAD mouse support from day one but wasd didn't exist as a standard back then so everyone was experimenting with unique keybindings or just playing on the keyboard like a troglodyte because it was "good enough." There were probably quite a few people who had a wasd or similar setup working but it would have been highly specific and reigonal. It wasn't really until Quake that wasd + mouse became standard. Keep in mind that prior to laser mice, most mice would get lint on the rollers and jump around or just be sort of shit anyway in terms of polling and movement accuracy, so it was never as precise as just using the keyboard as long as the gameplay was slow enough to allow it. Some people used (may still) trackballs but whenever I've tried them they felt awful. I never really liked mouse aiming and I didn't git gud at it until Half-Life was released and I had a laser mouse to complement it. >>1228485 You should be more annoyed that game design focuses so much on "number go bigger" that sliders can be implemented to easily to change the difficulty in such a standardized way. Good difficulty changes involve more difficult things like enemy AI, type/location of enemies and items on map, and easier/harder puzzles in the same locations. Having a huge variety of difficulty levels is similarly stupid, especially if plot/bonuses/easter eggs are hidden behind only the hardest. Players should always be able to customize the game and difficulty, because sometimes devs might create something with great art, story, even certain gameplay mechanics, but majorly fuck up in other ways that are immersion breaking or just not fun. This entire post might be wasted on social climbing zoomers but maybe not.

>>1440154 There's also the while confusion that comes from some older DOOM players not calling the original mouse support mouse look but mouse assist >>1440274 >mouse support from day one but wasd didn't exist as a standard back then so everyone No, regular DOOM bindings + mouse works just fine please don't be a retard, I've literally used only that in every single FPS for the past 25 years.

>>1440282 read nigger, read.

>>1440334 How do you know he's not white?

>>1440334 >It wasn't "technical." Doom HAD mouse support from day one but wasd didn't exist as a standard back then so everyone was experimenting with unique keybindings or just playing on the keyboard like a troglodyte because it was "good enough." This statement implies you either experimented with keybindings and used the mouse or played stock binds without the mouse, my statements indicates that stock binds with mouse was what some people used in direct contradiction to your statement, learn2read, learn2write and fuck off someplace else you double nigger.

>>1439831 Outside of very niche uses like you said, generally I wouldn't consider external controls to affect difficulty, rather I'd say it's more of a optimization thing

>>1439831 >>1440948 If you want to go down that road you can also consider whether playing original arcade games out of an arcade environment is a change in difficulty. After all they were designed to have quarters plugged into them to increase the credit count.

>>1440346 doom's stock binds sucked checkmate, faggot

>>1441430 Not as much as your mom triple fagget.