i hate when games make you pick the difficulty, which is why game like Dark Souls rule. I think difficulty selection screens took something away from games because it makes you wonder if you're really playing the game the way it was intended to be played.

I also wrote a blog post about it:

https://blog.basementcommunity.com/difficulty-in-video-games/

I also realize some people really like to just play games for the story, so feel free to tell me i'm wrong!

If the developers added it, there is a chance the developers tested it, which means they consciously gave you that option. You are most likely playing the game as intended in that scenario no matter your choice. Unless you exploit some glitch that is somehow tied to difficulty, of course, then you're not. Your issue is finding what the 'default' should be, in which case just use Normal. It's most likely what the others were built around in post.

I disagree, but I also think that "difficulty" is too broad a category and generally belongs under the accessibility menu. This is something Final Fantasy XVI got mostly right. Instead of a single setting, you had a set of six in-game accessories that you could equip to make certain aspects of combat easier, like a ring that would prompt you to dodge. You could only equip three at a time, and each one you equipped used a slot that you could use for a different accessory, but you were allowed to decide for yourself.

Control was another title that got this right. Instead of a single difficulty setting you had a bunch of different sliders affecting your character's power and that of the enemies.

The 2018 God of War was one of the games I played for the story, and I turned the difficulty all the way down. Likewise every Devil May Cry title. If I want a grueling experience, I'll fire up Dark Souls or run a dungeon in FFXIV as a healer with newbies who don't know what the hell they're doing. Sometimes I just want a casual power fantasy, dammit.

PS for FFXIV: if you're playing the Dead Ends dungeon and you still don't know not to stand in AOE markers, I am going to judge you. Harshly. And so will my cats.

PS for Dark Souls and friends: One setting I'd like to see added is a "one hit kill" mode where you can kill any enemy, even bosses, with one hit. The catch is that if you take a hit, you die. Likewise, a per-character permadeath switch.

i mean that screenshot from Halo 1 should prove that some developers want you to play on hard mode. Judging from the "this is the way Halo is meant to be played" subtext.

that's funny I literally just read another blog where someone was talking about that new game Palworld because it had different sliders:

https://blog.geoffgirardin.com/on-palworld-and-difficulty-sliders/

before your post and that blog, I never heard of that idea. But that and the equipped item thing are neat ideas for sure. I still think though if I was working hard on developing a game, I'd want people to play it either in "story/easy mode" or the difficulty I intended, rather than give a wild amount of customization

Yeah, and it kind of pisses me off; why would you ever name it 'hard' if it's functionally normal and then clarify it in post like that? Just call it 'normal' you dingus. My post should still be applicable to most cases, I think... or I hope, rather.

I actually like multiple difficulty options, because I like more difficult games than the average consumer. Especially in stuff like Divinity or Baldur's Gate. On easier difficulties, you don't really need to strategize your moves at all. Just do whatever, and you'll probably come out on top.

At the same time though, plenty of people played those games for the story, and weren't really into tactical combat. It seems dumb to deny me my tactical combat game because other people only care about the story, and it seems similarly dumb to deny them their story just because I like strategy games.

I made a similar mistake with my game, but in reverse. I built the full game, testing everything myself, and when I got feedback from playtesters, they said it was too hard. So I made a new difficulty with half as many bullets, called it Easy Mode, and called the original Normal Mode.

When it finally released, a bunch of people went, "well, I'm not gonna play on easy mode," played Normal Mode, and complained that it was too hard.

I hate that my muse somehow managed to precognize that it was a danmaku just from these two lines. But yeah, never underestimate just how much worse your playerbase is going to be at your game. When it comes to my platfomer, I suffered plenty seeing people wildly flailing away at foxes and getting punished for it until they just go from fight- to flight-response. But it's one of the things I've become bullish about now. Can't coddle the players out of bad habits.

My game has no difficulty options (yet) but it is designed so that useful 'cheats' are to be discovered first, while fanciful ones are reserved for later stages. Depending on how the stages and the enemies end up though, I am not shying away from doing something like Shippu Senki Force Gear 2 where easier difficulties have extra platforms over insta-kill gaps and other high-risk things you can't mitigate easily.

My Touhou weebdom is a very poorly kept secret. The music is very good, and it's one of a small handful of games I've actually drawn fanart of. Although funny enough, I actually played Bullet Heaven on Kongregate before I played Touhou. I got into Touhou from other danmakus, not the other way around.

Maybe it's out of place for me to give advice as I only made a few hundred dollars. If you're working on your own game though, what advice I would give is to make something polished instead of something big. If you have 20 hours to spend drawing characters, don't make 4 decent looking sprites, make 1 good looking sprite. Same thing should apply to music, level design, everything. In 2024, no one is buying indie games based on how long they are, instead it's based on how exciting and polished the trailer and store page are.

I assume that like me, you're more interested in just having fun making a game than growing any sort of audience, but still. It's easier to be proud of something that looks really nice than something that takes 30 hours to beat.

Yeah, scope creep is a scary thing so I am keeping mine in check. If there is an advice I can give in return though, it's not to fall into tech debt like I did. My project was in total development hell until last year October or so when I decided to just cut the cord and made a fresh project file. Now that version has gone farther than the two years of me fixing bugs after every new addition in the patchwork of seven versions before it.

“If we complete it by fixing what we have now, it will take two years, if we start again from scratch, it can be done in a half year.” ~ Satoru Iwata, on Earthbound's development hell

Suddenly remembered that Space Rangers HD has a 500% difficulty and rewatched this absurdist horror of a guide today while remembering this thread: Everything about 500% ▪ Guide and Mechanics in Space Rangers HD A War Apart It's in Russian but has English subtitles too.

Already mentioned in this thread but I appreciate when difficulty options are treated as an optional accessibility thing.

When I start a new game and it directly asks me about difficulty I have no way to assess which one to go for because I won't know how hard the game is supposed to be unless I play normally.

I personally kinda like them, but I can understand why people don't. I think most of the time they're a problem of implementation, but it's also difficult to get a hang of what each difficulty mode actually entails, which is why most games these days that have them also have a massive text box description for each difficulty mode, but I dont mind that because I looooveee flavour text! One thing that I just like about difficulty selection modes is them having fun with naming them, but I can also understand that it might be difficult to grasp that "Hurt me Plenty" is easier than "Ultra-Violence". I just think they add a lot of personality to a game, but you gotta strike a balance between having a personality and being comprehensible if you wanna go down that route. On the actual balancing side of this, I think that making a game harder by majorly increasing enemy health is usually quite bad, and i'd prefer if games tried to not do that, though sometimes it can be hard to avoid. More enemies that deal more damage is the most fun way to go about this in my opinion, but that's most relevant to Old School Shooters, and might not work in other genres, especially if you go ham with it.

I still dislike that description for Heroic, playing any of the halo games on heroic for your first playthrough is a terrible idea, and it's not fun. Heroic is definitely balanced for a second playthrough. I honestly feel that Bungie's earlier FPS series, Marathon, did difficulty selection better than Halo, because it's not something you're immediately asked to do, and is instead an option you can change in the settings menu if you feel the game is too easy, or too hard. You have to go out of your way to change it off normal, which I think is a good way of doing it.

I feel like they tried this is Dark Souls 2, and it just didn't work out. I think all Souls games have this to some extent, but Dark Souls 2 especially felt like they would just put a lot of enemies on the screen and call it "difficicult." It felt like a cop out to me.

I'm not quite sure, but for some reason it works in a game like Doom, where movement is fast and rewards you skirting around the map, but just falls flat on its face in a game like Dark Souls, where movement is more meticulous and you have to react more precisely.

I haven't played Halo 1 in forever, but idk for some reason Heroic felt like a fair challenge to me, and didn't give me the same issue I saw in God of War that I mentioned in the OP

I haven't played the Souls games so I probably can't comment on it, but this approach definitely won't work for every game. "Good Difficulty" differs massively from game to game, unfortunately, and there's no one right way to go about it. I personally dislike enemies just given more health on higher difficulties, but that could be a genuine way to go about it for certain games, and can even work in First-Person Shooters, if done right. Simply adding more enemies would add to difficulty in certain sections but in already cramped, tight encounters, it could make everything way harder than the level designers intended. If your game is more horror-leaning then keeping the player intentionally dry on ammo is a good idea, which would make every encounter a balancing act of "Should I engage or save the ammo for a bigger threat?". When I was playing Half-Life: Alyx, I found the game a bit too easy at a point so I raised the difficulty, only for the next section to be leaning a lot more into horror elements than I expected, and I ended up having to run out of the area with zero bullets left, panicking. In VR, that was awesome, and not something I expected out of the game. Having to consider encounters more tactically on higher difficulties (or at least being encouraged to) is definitely a boon of higher difficulties, as it means players are considering their strategy and thus engaging with the game mechanics more.

i think this is mostly a bad thing. the first game that comes to mind is Destiny, which was soooooooo bad with this. bosses took entirely too long

god, yeah. i hate that kind of difficulty due to taking 8 years to kill kinda design. it sucks

The main reason i dislike this in older Boomshoot style FPSes is that it messes with the rhythm. When I play doom, i know a super shotgun to a face will kill a pinky on any difficulty, but if Doom had difficulty health scaling, that likely wouldn’t be the case, and the game would suffer in my opinion. Especially if ammo gain isn’t increased alongside a health jump.