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LGN-76

Do you feel embarrassed playing on the easiest difficulty?

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Not just on DOOM, but on ANY first-person shooter?

I don't.

Why? Three reasons:

1. I've got too many shooters installed on my computer, and if I spend too much time trying to get through one shooter on a harder difficulty, I'll never be able to get around to the other shooters, and I really wanna beat most if not all of them.

2. I wanna try and get through the retro shooters without being tempted to level warp and mess around. Level warping and messing around in the later levels has been my fatal flaw when it comes to shooters ever since I started playing DOOM, and as fun as it's been all these years, if I'm gonna become a serious FPS fanatic, it has to stop.

3. I'm playing shooters on consoles now as well as on PC, but I'm nowhere near as accustomed to playing them with a controller as I am with a keyboard and mouse, and I probably never will be, so obviously I'll need to play on an easier difficulty since my reflexes aren't as quick.

Now I will say this: After I've played all the way through one shooter to death on easiest difficulty, I will make a conscious effort to get through the game on a harder difficulty, but again, only after I've gotten through a good majority of the shooters I have installed on my computer...

Go ahead and say that I suck. I don't care. I'd rather suck at DOOM for playing on the easiest difficulty (a rightful reason) than suck at Tekken for not being able to beat Tekken Force/Devil Within/Scenario Campaign mode (a wrongful reason since those modes aren't even how Tekken is meant to be played).

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It's not a problem. It's okay if you're playing on easier difficulties.

But if you need to get the real FPS experience, play it on normal or hard mode.
But anyway no one needs to make fun of you like that because it's YOUR decision. So you control it and make it useful. But at least TRY to play on a harder difficulty.

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Whether it's a bad thing: No, of course not. Ancalagon's short spoilered answer says it very well.
Whether I feel embarassed: Maybe slightly, but that's no reason to avoid it if said difficulty provides such a gameplay that I find more enjoyable than gameplay on higher difficulties.

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antares031 said:

But lowering the difficulty during the game is a totally different story for me.

If you ask me, i think thats bad game design.

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I play on the easiest difficulty a lot because that way I don't have to worry about a whole lot. With that said I've played lots of custom WADs on the easiest settings and not all of them are well-tested on the easy difficulties, sometimes people forget to flag a teleport destination or another thing on Easy and this could be a problem especially if the map is not finishable without it.

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I always felt like playing on the easiest difficulty is like cheating yourself from the full game. The reason being that many SNES and Genesis games I played when I was a kid (Which were on emulators but I was too young and too dumb to know what Piracy was) locked some levels away completely if they were played on easier difficulties.

I understand that modern games probably don't do this but playing on "Normal" despite being terrible at the game has become something I did for a long time. But it's your game and you can play however the hell you want.

tl;dr Yes but that's just me. Play however you want.

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i used to, til some people on this very board convinced me not to feel ashamed, and take it easy if you're not that good at the game

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I like to start on the easiest difficulty, and then choose harder difficulties whenever I replay it. That makes the game more replayable for me because it offers the feeling of a new experience.

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There is no reason to be embarrassed for playing on the easiest difficulty setting. Play on whichever setting suits you best, that's what they're for.

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Don't think of it like you are bad at the game, just think of it like you don't have the time to get good, because that is basically it.

Back in the days when I was a kid and games were tough as nails, I had time to play those games all day every day, and maybe only got a new one every birthday, and you would learn to beat those games so damn hard that you would have to invent your own handicaps just to get a challenge.

When you get older you don't have time for that, so just drop the difficulty and make your own fun. No one cares whether you walk to work or take a taxi.

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Typically, I go for Ultra Violence except under special circumstances. For instance, with Kate's Pokemon Doom, I'll go Medium (Which I assume is the equivalent of Hurt Me Plenty) because that mod is much harder to play through than Vanilla Doom, at least when you initially start out and your team levels are low.

I won't judge anyone who would rather go for the easier difficulty, though, since I myself CAN'T play through Nightmare.

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Nightmare isn't a serious difficulty level so I wouldn't even consider it when talking about difficulties. Otherwise I pretty much only play on UV.

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Some more recent mods are so hard, even on Hurt me Plenty that going lower is the only acceptable option to have fun for me. I rarely play on I'm too young to die, though, because only very few maps with insufficient ammo for those without perfect aim require it.

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Tbh i barely touch UV. When i load Doom, i keep smashing the enter key, thus passing by the menu in a blur. So HMP.

You see, i just want to kill demons.

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Going Down on I'm Too Young to Die is harder than Dead Perfect on Ultra-Violent.

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Wow. I truly, honestly thought I was gonna get utterly slammed for making this thread. How wrong I was.

I feel a LOT more comfortable now, and this proves to me that DOOMworld can be a really fun and great place to hang out and get help and talk about DOOM!

Thank you guys.

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dugan said:

Going Down on I'm Too Young to Die is harder than Dead Perfect on Ultra-Violent.


Yeah I've seen people struggle with GD and think I should have made the lower difficulties easier. Although I just had a go at Dead Perfect and it seems to be mainly shooting walls of meat from round corners, which is a different kind of challenge perhaps.

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Zulk-RS said:

I always felt like playing on the easiest difficulty is like cheating yourself from the full game.


That's actually why I start on the easier difficulties these days. Ultra-Violence is balanced for people who know where all the secrets are, even in the original games. I don't want to know where all the secrets are when I start.

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dugan said:

Ultra-Violence is balanced for people who know where all the secrets are,

In the majority of wads made after year 2000, no, secrets and their contents are always optional and unnecessary, and I've read many mappers claiming to test their maps while avoiding getting secrets to make sure it's done right.

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The difficulty settings are there to be used, another feature of the game intended to help each user customize the experience to his/her optimal level of enjoyment. So use them!

Speaking for myself (though I reckon lots of other folks feel similarly), I'd probably be far more likely to make cracks about someone's difficulty selection if they played a WAD on UV, struggled constantly, and as a result accused the WAD of categorically bad design/bad balance/whathaveyou than I would someone who picks HNTR or IITYD so that they can have a fun/enjoyable time. Priorities, you know.

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dugan said:

That's actually why I start on the easier difficulties these days. Ultra-Violence is balanced for people who know where all the secrets are, even in the original games. I don't want to know where all the secrets are when I start.


Generally speaking, I've only had to look for secrets to survive UV on certain level (Like on Doom 2) through a pistol start. By the time you get to them naturally, you're well equipped to deal with them already if you're skilled enough.

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MetroidJunkie said:

Generally speaking, I've only had to look for secrets to survive UV on certain level (Like on Doom 2) through a pistol start. By the time you get to them naturally, you're well equipped to deal with them already if you're skilled enough.


Even I play on UV because I've been playing on the normal ones and I wanted to give myself a challenge, and I beat the entire 2nd episode of doom 1! How cool is that?

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Pretty cool. I just wish I knew about the key binding setup when I was a kid. At one point, I thought I NEEDED mouse look but I realized I really didn't. I actually fired up Chocolate Doom, set movement to WADS and turning to the arrow keys, I actually managed just fine. Granted, relying on the auto-aim instead of aiming up/down myself is a bit of a pain but, other than that, it was very playable. I simply set up the rest of the keys as I do on (G)ZDoom.

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Use mouse look with a crosshair for better aiming when you're playing in GZDoom. And I strongly recommend that you use WSAD as movement controls

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I do, I only did this to prove to myself that I can function in Doom just fine even with the Vanilla Original. Had I been given knowledge of this kind of control scheme when I was kid, maybe I wouldn't have had to cheat to get through the levels.

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