Should Difficulty Options Even Exist? | Design Delve

To avoid giving Bloober Team too much credit -- the option to have different puzzle difficulty settings separate from combat difficulty options was not an original idea of theirs for the SH2 remake, it was directly lifted from the original Silent Hill 2. SH3 had those options, too!

You guys on SW mentioned it at the time, but before Blue Prince had been released and figured out by the online community you were playing it on a 'naturally occuring' hard mode with no outside help available. The intended hard mode is still present in the game if a user plays with determination (and lots of note-taking), but the dev knew that over time puzzle solutions would be made public knowledge and create a naturally occuring accessibility feature via the internet. This is probably a just niche situation with puzzle games. After beating the one-difficulty story mode in Inscryption there is the Kaycee's mod with difficulty adjusters via challenge skulls, but even these are unlocked cumulatively through repeated runs at lower challenge levels. The game is allowing you to replay the primary gameplay loop while also offering an increased challenge and making you 'git good' at the same time.

Something that was briefly mentioned is that there is a neat new trend customized difficulty. You do see this more frequently in big strategy games/CRPGs like Total War or Owlcat RPG's, but has been implemented in things like System Shock where it separates combat and puzzels. I personally really like those because, if they are mostly quantitative changes, you can fully adjust your experience. Owlcat RPGs are neat because, not you can not only adjust combat or dialog checks, you can adjust certain aspect of the combat or dialog checks (or hit the preset if you don't have time for all those numbers)

"Yeah, that's right. I bet when you thought you clicked on this video, I was going to say abolish all easy modes." Well, I wonder if that's because the title and thumbnail explicitly invite that conclusion? "Should Difficulty Options Even Exist? No." Not much room for nuance, there, JM8. Overall I enjoyed the video and largely agree with your conclusions. I do think quantitative difficulty scaling can sometimes work okay when it is very thoroughly playtested but as you point out, that's often not the case. But either way, it doesn't really take full advantage of the medium's strengths in terms of delivering different experiences for different people and if you're going to do all that playtesting anyway, why not attempt a more qualitative approach? I think developers have been putting more effort into accessibility in recent years, which is great, but it needs to remain an ongoing and evolving conversation.

My favorites are Hades/Hades 2, Baldur's Gate 3, and Shadow of Mordor/War. They all force interaction with a specific mechanic and inventivize planning and discovery to disrupt consolidation of a single all-powerful meta. That said, I really believe it's a matter of preference between thinking harder vs working harder. Some people feel very engaged by reading a bunch of stuff and preparing their loadout for a big fight, but lots of people would hate that and would far prefer a difficulty setting that simply tests their mastery of 200 consecutive frame-perfect dodge rolls. In a perfect world, a game would be able to accommodate both forms of difficulty advancement. But I am happy to simply accept that I'll never play some games on max difficulty (or at all, as is the case with many soulslikes).

But if the game is more accessible to players, how will I be able to feel superior to other people on reddit?

Galactic Civilizations II did a fun take on this - for some difficulty level increases (around the normal -> "slightly harder than normal" level), the AI didn't get any quantitative bonuses, but just straight up became smarter - they'd be more likely to recognise and respond to the human player building up a fleet on the border for example. They'd even poke fun of this at the lower difficulty levels - you'd get a message from your soon-to-be-enemy to the effect of "if I had smarter generals we'd probably be mighty suspicious of that Death Star 3000 currently in orbit"

I think pumping up the health of enemies is wrongheaded. Enemies should definitely do more damage, but giving enemies more health just makes fights last longer. I think the "right tool for the job" in the Witcher 3 example makes the most sense out of anything.

I actually don't think "easy mode" should be entirely collapsed into "accessibility options". I occasionally play on easy mode not for accessibility, but rather to reduce gameplay or repetition I don't care for. Big winner for me: Rain World easy mode, reduces number of creatures. Big loser: Control easy mode, made combat trivial but I was still annoyed how much combat interrupted exploration.

I'm absolutely fine with the idea of having a fixed story difficulty with accessibility options, it reminds me of PS1 era games with cheat codes. It should never be considered cheating though.

I think all games should have difficulty options, and while I agree that poorly implemented difficulty options are bad, I think that is easily dealt with by simply designing your game with adjustable difficulty in mind from the start. It could be as simple as giving players a pair of damage taken/dealt sliders and letting them decide. Or you could do some games and let the player customize dozens of little things. It doesn't have to be as blunt as "easy/normal/hard". Then you could increase the enemy damage without reducing your own to make it harder without turning into a slog. Or if it's a more puzzly game you could enable additional hints or more generous timers. It's not just about accessibility in terms of catering to disability, it's about broadening the audience for your game. Personally I would like an option in every game that has them to skip fishing minigames. I hate fishing minigames. :D

Preach! I put down Silksong because even if I pushed through this boss, there would just be more. That and Hades II dropped. 50% godhood, no shame.

Aaaaaaand with that I'm getting rid of my pledge. Real cool stance to take, guys.

What's the criteria for a video going into the ad-free playlist? I keep checking it after the last reminder, but very few videos seem to go there. I don't mind the sponsors, personally.