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Patrol1985

Difficulty levels of computer games

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Quite an interesting conversation emerged as off-topic of a thread regarding modern FPS games (located here: http://www.doomworld.com/vb/showthread.php?s=&postid=1255404#post1255404). So continuing where we left off:

Antroid said:

This might just be the notion that helps me overcome my habit. I admit I never thought of it like this


Neither had I, up until recently when I took interest in the "Serious Sam" series. The very first "Serious Sam" has short descriptions accompanying difficulty level and NORMAL gives you information that it's meant for experienced players of other FPS games, whereas more difficult levels are meant for experienced players of "Serious Sam". I decided to choose "normal" and I had a really good fun playing the game. It was challenging for me, but not to the point of frustration. Thumbs up for the dev team for good balancing of difficulty!

Antroid said:

Although some games ARE good to play on the hardest difficulty right of the bat, like the thief games. Those aren't really becoming unfair, they just genuinely add objectives that you'd otherwise miss out on.


That's true, but unfortunately it's a hit or miss. You can't really guess beforehand what a harder difficulty level encompasses and sometimes it's more than just "increase HP and damage of enemies, while decreasing yours". I believe I played Half-life for the first time no more than 2 years ago and before I did I read that "it's a game which really justifies choosing the highest difficulty setting" so I did that and it felt great. I assume the A.I. is better, and at least one thing is different - the black ops soldiers use some camouflage technology which renders them invisible. It really adds to the atmosphere and gives you this sense of being stalked and hunted. It just isn't the same when they're wearing their plain black uniforms.

The same I find true for Doom 2. Consider "The Crusher" (map06). On ultra-violence and up, there is a Spider Mastermind under the crusher, which was a slight shock for me when I first saw it (the boss?! On map SIX?!). This section is what really justifies the name of the map. It just isn't the same with hell knights there (on hurt me plenty). Even a hell baron wouldn't give this effect, it has to be the spider in my opinion :D

Antroid said:

Plus old console games have often had premature or incomplete endings if you pick a lower difficulty. Those fuckers may have conditioned me.


I absolutely hate this bullshit. I have nothing against additional endings or cut-scenes as rewards for completing the game on higher difficulties, but make it EXTRA footage and not something inherently NECESSARY to see to grasp the plot as a whole. "Painkiller" comes to my mind as a recent culprit. The "real" ending is often revealed only when you complete the game on "trauma" (the highest difficulty). I did it for "PK: Black Edition", because I really enjoyed it. Truth be told, the "real" ending was a let down and it wasn't real at all :D The game states that it's "real" but the sequels follow the "non-real" ending's storyline :D

However, that was "PK:Black Edition", which was cool. The same stunt was pulled for "PK: Resurrection" and "PK: Recurring Evil", which were HORRIBLE. I finished them on normal which was as boring and tedious as one can imagine and I did it all just to see that "real" endings would appear only after I finished those games on trauma OR collected all cards to boot (which means you have to complete levels meeting an additional requirement). I thought "that's bullshit" and decided to pass. Not so much because of the difficulty as of a memory of BOREDOM which accompanied me all the time when playing those. Currently I don't want to go through this again. I decided to watch alternate endings on youtube. They're there for "PK: Resurrection", but I found none for "PK: Recurring Evil". This means that not ONE person decided that it was worth it to finish the game on trauma and upload the ending :D

Antroid said:

Speaking of RAGE again, quickslot items might help, but I really wanted to play that game like an arcade shooter and not a cover shooter, and it seemed pretty impossible on the difficulty that I picked back then, whatever it was. But then if I pick a lower one and can survive running in the open with enemies shooting at me, it will definitely feel like I've cheated and turned the game into some sort of terrible modern shooter where the player is a bullet sponge and the enemies only pretend to try to kill you. :(


In that case, go for "hard" or "nightmare" difficulties and you should be fine. Unfortunately, I think it's impossible to complete "ultra-nightmare" without hiding often. Enemies cause too much damage and 90% of enemy attacks in this game are hitscan, so dodging won't help you. Do you own the Scorchers DLC? If you do, then the highest difficulty is "ultra-nightmare" and that's probably what you had chosen. If you don't own the DLC, then "nightmare" is the highest one and if that's what you had played, go for "hard".

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I tend to see difficulty as replay-ability, so if I go for the hardest setting first I'm cheating myself of future playthroughs.

Depends though, some games on Hard+ just make the enemy's health bar bigger, I don't see the point in those. Others like Stalker and Metro kind of deserve to be played on brutal levels even on the first playthrough.

I think Halo had more potty mouthed marines if you played it on Legendary, that difficulty was too hard for me when I was a kid though.

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I actually like how the Doom series handled its highest difficulty settings. I mean, in general you're at a tremendous disadvantage, but you're given some "small bonus" as well, namely double ammo in Doom/Doom2 or the Soul Cube/Artifact in Doom 3. That's more interesting than making the game "a little easier, but without any bonuses for the player".

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I don't like games which lazily make difficulty only affect the amount of health of the player, although that only really happens when a game has regen-health.

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I like to go for the hardest reasonable difficulty in most games (Hard, UV, Serious, etc.), but for stuff like CoD I often find that going for a middle difficulty is much better as they just become exercises in frustration otherwise. The major exception is RTS games, where I do tend to go Normal or even Easy as battling AI in campaigns often feels very unfair otherwise and, at the end of the day, I want to enjoy a game, not be destroyed by it.

If I'm new to a thing (like back with my first GH game or racing sim) I start Easy and work my way up to Expert, although I do tend to drop down to the second hardest if I start struggling or find that I'm constantly only just scraping through after a few poor attempts. Experience tells me I can get very good at something, but I'll never perform consistently... Not sure why, but that's how it is.

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What difficulty I choose is correlative to how much I'm enjoying said game. If I'm not enjoying myself - yet I'm enjoying myself enough to not stop playing it completely - I'll breeze through it on easy or medium just to see what happens. Games I derive more pleasure from usually warrant a higher difficulty setting being chosen, because I've got hooked on it and consequently become quite good at it.

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I like when the difficulty settings can be customized. I usually play Serious Sam on "Half-Serious" setting.. monsters do Normal damage, but otherwise it's like Serious. Occassionally I try if I've improved and don't change the damage. But I don't think I'll ever be so good I could get through Moon Mountains without saves. The witch harpy mountain is so very difficult, even with the lesser damage settings.

I tried Unreal with patches that add Godlike difficulty. It basically added every thing into the level, made them all use the best AI, and increased their health a whole lot. It could have been more fun if it was possible to customize. Someone suggested to turn off the AI completely, but maybe that would have made them a bit too dumb.

Deus Ex I've always played with Realistic difficulty. It just feels like a game that shouldn't even have any other difficulty levels. Maybe the first time I played a few levels with Hard.

SOF1 has nice customization.. and I've never played it on any of the "preset" difficulties.

Dead Space 1 I played so many times that I was able to survive some 7 levels on Impossible without taking any damage... but usually I like to play it on Hard, so I don't need to play it so carefully. But even then I let the health meter go to red and then use the bench to upgrade/restore the health.

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I'm pretty sure I've played Max Payne 1 and 2 on all of the difficulty levels. I think in the first one enemies aim better, have more ammo and health, while Max is pretty much unchanged. Max Payne 2 I think the AI is simply smarter (Less running out in the open to get shot and more taking cover, thus making further use of shootdodging around corners). MP2 also has an alternate ending for hard difficulties, though it was always considered non-canon.

In both games, though, beating one difficulty would unlock another difficulty, and so and so forth. They reward you with harder difficulty settings.

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Ideally games should be way more open about what the difficulty settings change. Pretty much tell you when you pick a difficulty, like "enemies have less/normal/more health", "there is less/more enemies", "enemies are less/more/unfairly accurate", "items are extremely sparse/reasonably sparse/fucking everywhere", etc.

It's also great when games allow you to customize these things independently, but that is rare.
I also like locking the harder difficulties until slightly lesser are completed, but that might be irritating for players upon reinstalls.

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Honestly, a large selection of difficulty settings is the one thing that always annoys me about most of the FPS games that I've ever seen and played.
Just divide the gameplay into "beginner experience" and "seasonal addict experience" and be done with it. Why torture the mappers into making 5 different layouts of the same map? That's very annoying.

Back when I built my WADs then I didn't even implement any difficulty settings at all. I just kept thoroughly playtesting each of my maps with every new increment that was made. (Hence why it took me so long just to release something that isn't a full-blown megawad.)

So yeah. Basically whenever I play a WAD then I just use either "Hurt Me Plenty" or "Ultraviolence", even if it's a totally new WAD which I am seeing for the first time in my life.
If it's a megawad then I'm usually able to survive without cheating until map20+. Afterwards I'm forced to start cheating a bit.
Perfect examples of the megawads where I need to be doing this are Alien Vendetta and Scythe.

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If Doom had 5 settings for thing placement, then I might not bother with it at all. 3 settings seems enough and not too difficult to do, though I never bother with using 3 settings for the items. People who aren't very good at Doom, might need all the items in the easier difficulties anyway.

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I tend to play the hardest difficulty in the game, or somewhere between hardest and normal (UV for Doom II and Ep2-4 of Ultimate Doom, Ep1 on NM). Serious Sam is the only exception where I must play on Normal. It's crazy in the later ones (Invisible enemies on Mental, really?).

More recently is Torchlight II: where I could beat the first game fine on Very Hard, the second is very difficult even on Hard (Veteran as it's called in game).

I like how Quake 1 and 2 hid Nightmare mode too because it made me feel like I was playing some super secret difficulty that only a select few could try. Now I'm sure almost everyone here knows how to get to it...or at least in Quake 1 for certain.

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MegaTurtleRex said:

I tend to see difficulty as replay-ability, so if I go for the hardest setting first I'm cheating myself of future playthroughs.

Depends though, some games on Hard+ just make the enemy's health bar bigger, I don't see the point in those. Others like Stalker and Metro kind of deserve to be played on brutal levels even on the first playthrough.

I think Halo had more potty mouthed marines if you played it on Legendary, that difficulty was too hard for me when I was a kid though.

Same here, I will usually start a game on normal or something then once I beat it I go on to the hardest difficulty. So most of the time I just play 2 playthroughs of a game.

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Serious Sam on Mental isn't that hard since you always more or less know where the enemies are and the crosshair changes color when you aim at them.

I always play FPS games on the hardest difficulty with a single exception started by Redneck Rampage - disabling saves. Recently Hard Reset has done this and while I enjoyed playing it that way too, I'm not going to waste time attempting to beat the Atlas for a 100th time.

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Belial said:

Serious Sam on Mental isn't that hard since you always more or less know where the enemies are and the crosshair changes color when you aim at them.

I always play FPS games on the hardest difficulty with a single exception started by Redneck Rampage - disabling saves. Recently Hard Reset has done this and while I enjoyed playing it that way too, I'm not going to waste time attempting to beat the Atlas for a 100th time.


Disabling saves... that should be a choice different from difficulty.

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geo said:

Disabling saves... that should be a choice different from difficulty.


I like it if it were a game that had a checkpoint system rather than a manual save system (IE I Wanna Be the Guy has less checkpoints in higher difficulties, and in Impossible they are flat out gone).

But disabling the manual save system is just...unfair and cruel.

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Infirnex said:

But disabling the manual save system is just...unfair and cruel.


Not so much as long as it's a choice. You know what you're in for when you select such an option :D (think "hardcore mode" in Diablo II, that one was nasty)

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Infirnex said:

I like it if it were a game that had a checkpoint system rather than a manual save system (IE I Wanna Be the Guy has less checkpoints in higher difficulties, and in Impossible they are flat out gone).

But disabling the manual save system is just...unfair and cruel.

Redneck Rampage Psychobilly disables saves, Hard Reset Heroic disables the checkpoint system, forcing map restart on death.

It's a good challenge up to the Atlas fight, which is just retarded.

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Infirnex said:

I like it if it were a game that had a checkpoint system rather than a manual save system


If this were the case then I would have never been able to enjoy WADs in "Ultraviolence" or "Hurt Me Plenty" without resorting to cheatcodes.

The quicksave/quickload feature is my best friend! It is very unobtrusive to the interface of the game, since it is directly bound to two buttons on the keyboard and doesn't require any navigation through a menu screen.
I often find myself quicksaving tons while I'm on the run and evading adversaries such as Revenants. And then I feel so good when I realize that I've finally succeeded without using any invincibility cheat and that all the running and quicksaving has paid off!

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I actually don't like the quicksave/quickload mechanic in games at all. It makes you feel totally safe and removes any sort of risk. Not challenge, obviously, but you can safely do stupid things until you happen to pass the current obstacle. I like checkpoints much more, but they should be more frequent than they usually are in games - if it's a linear game with permadeath like Doom or many other shooters. Because, I mean, look how wonderful checkpoints worked for Dark Souls. Your position and everything gets saved when you quit anyway, but when you die you get deposited to the last checkpoint you've been at, and finding them is incredibly satisfying, and being far from one creates such a sense of tension that is unparalelled by any game with quicksaves available. I love that.

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Yeah I really dislike quicksave, kills any tension the game might have for me. Growing up with console games I'm used to pretty bad checkpoints, or in Resident Evil's case sparse save options.

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Just finished playing Earthworm Jim on PC... I was going to go through on Normal, but with the dodgy controls and immensely frustrating challenges they have, I opted for Practice. As far as I'm aware the difference is mostly in that godawful Peter Puppy mission and the ending speech, so I don't feel like I've missed much. Seems rare for a performer to have difficulty settings though!

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i tend to go for easy the first time i play something new, even though my brother prompts me to go for normal if it is a well-established series (like say Fire Emblem). i feel that the first run through a game should not be a frustrating shitfest for me like Doom can be now, because i so foolishly select the hard difficulty and then gets ambushed by all kinds of shit.

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Belial said:

I always play FPS games on the hardest difficulty


same here. Play on hardest, if you can't take it, nudge it down a little.

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Antroid said:

I actually don't like the quicksave/quickload mechanic in games at all. It makes you feel totally safe and removes any sort of risk.

I look at it this way: each time that I press the quickload button to respawn then I automatically risk being killed all over again unless I take a new dodging manuever from the one that I used previously.
So the quickloading actually motivates me to think of new solutions on the fly. It teaches me to adapt and conquer, while also teaching me to be very patient.
Killing a pair of Cyberdemons along with a horde of Revenants in a wide open arena while being low on ammo and confined to the double-barrel shotgun and having no healing items in sight is a challenge which requires a great amount of effort and patience. But fortunately, it is not impossible. Where there's a will there's a way. :)

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When playing DooM, I would never go below Ultra-Violence difficulty, and the only time I save the game is when I turn it off. Should I die, I must start over from the beginning (not the same level, but the entire WAD. The character bought it, after all). I consider saving / loading to get past difficult areas equal to typing in IDDQD, IDKFA or IDCLIP, which also won't happen when I'm playing.


Why?

Maximum suspense and dread, and the feeling of having accomplished something when I've finally beat the game.


Isn't it frustrating to start over when I die?

Sometimes, but it is well worth it. Cheating is a sign of weakness, as it won't force me to become better at the game. It breeds inefficiency.


This behaviour of mine also extends to games other than DooM (I've beaten Fallout 1 this way, for instance).
However, there are quite a few games that are not good enough to warrant this behaviour.
I must say that most modern games would fall into this category. Many would only be good for for a single playthrough, due to design or otherwise.

I would still pick the highest hardest skill level, though, but as written above, the more difficult settings are often just the lazy "increase enemy health and damage potential" (Instead of as in DooM, where a higher difficulty setting generally means that there are more enemies present, or that harder types replace easier ones, thus making it harder).

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This may have been said already, but modern games are hard as fuck to disguise their two-hour length. A bit like NES games.

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Olroda said:

I consider saving / loading to get past difficult areas equal to typing in IDDQD, IDKFA or IDCLIP

By my logic, saving & loading isn't considered cheating because the developers of the game have not taken any effort to deliberately conceal these features from the eyes of the player. Access to these features is always visible whenever the player pulls up the main menu. And the use of these features is explicitly presented in all of the official printed manuals on the very first pages.
Unlike the cheat codes, the use of these features is encouraged and shamelessly promoted by the people who designed the game.
Therefore, based on these observations, it is safe for us to conclude that by using these features we are indeed playing their game the way that they wanted us to be playing it.

As far as "suspense" is concerned, I get to feel plenty of that if I am playing a particular WAD for the very first time, regardless of how I play it.

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If it's too easy, raise the difficulty. If it's too hard, lower the difficulty. That's what difficulty levels are for.

Trudging through the highest possible setting is stupid. Get rid of that bloated ego and enjoy the experience.

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You know what I really liked? In Sin Episodes: Emergence, there was an automatic difficulty adjuster. If you started kicking ass, the game would send in more and tougher enemies. You started getting your ass kicked, though, and the game would ease up, so the challenge level was always just right. Shame the Sin Episodes series didn't make it past the first one, I really enjoyed that game and was looking forward to later installments.

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