LogFAQs > #976279122

[LFAQs-redacted-quote]


CoyoteTheGreat posted...

Not every game is for every person. Like, if you want to play an easier game, play an easier game. There are plenty of fun, easy games, like all of the kirby games. There is no shame in that.

I honestly don't like difficulty settings in general. Games that have a ton of difficulty settings tend to have less polish, because all of a sudden you have to have your testers play the game three times to make sure it is balanced on all settings.

These. Standard difficulty settings are stupid and encourage lazy game design where higher difficulty just makes bosses have more health and hit harder. Like Tales of Arise on Hard is not hard at all, but by the end of the game, fights against basic mobs take multiple minutes because they have so much health. It just becomes tedious.

They also encourage incomplete experiences (e.g., if you want to see the real ending etc, you have to play in Normal or higher), and bullshit difficulty (e.g., pretty much any high difficulty in fighting games where the AI knows everything you do and reacts perfectly, modes where if you die you have to restart the whole level or the whole game in something thats not normally a roguelike, modes clearly meant for NG+, etc.). It also encourages time wasting playthrough, like FF7R not letting you play on Hard until youve beaten the game once.

Difficulty settings, if they exist, should be customizable where you can control different aspects of difficulty, but the only place Ive really seen this is strategy JRPGs like Fell Seal: Arbiters Mark.

Difficulty settings of any kind have no place in FromSoft games, as the intricately designed difficulty is the heart and soul of what they are. Besides, in basically all of them, its incredibly easy to break the game. For example, in DS1, if you start with the Master Key, you can get to Darkroot without fighting much of anything, and there are some high level spirits there that will gang up on you. You can kite them to a particular ledge, hunker down, and theyll jump off and kill themselves. You can repeat this infinitely, and after a pretty reasonable grinding time, for most of the game, you can kill any boss you run into in a few hits.