I’m souring on difficulty options lately. How am I supposed to know the ideal difficulty of a game without having played it before? You’re the developer, you designed it and if you’re confident in your game balance you should pick the default difficulty. Better yet, get rid of discrete difficulties and add customizable assist mode instead.
Whilst I didn’t enjoy the mechanics of Control, I was very impressed at the settings it offered. I could essentially turn off combat if I wanted. Yes, it won’t be the same game experience, but if I choose to play that way - let me!
In the old days we had cheat codes for this stuff. I cheated my way through a lot of games and then revisited later without cheats. Some of those became my favourite games of all time (Theme Hospital and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 both spring to mind).
By playing the game and adjusting as needed to the experience you are having. That’s what difficulty options are there for. Only you can decide what that is. No one can or should dictate that for you.
While I do change them if I feel things are seriously off, I don’t think changing the settings mid-playthrough is the solution. It is normal for the same game to have different difficulties at different times so if you’re adjusting difficulty mid fly on a first playthrough you probably won’t get the same highs and lows as intended. It is impossible to know from the first stages how the difficulty ramps up, sometimes they are easier, sometimes they are just mechanically simpler and sometimes they are purposefully difficult so you have to learn key mechanics.
Difficulty options are like consumable potions to me if that makes sense
Gaming experience is subjective. The highs and lows are entirely dependent upon the player and their preferences/capabilities.
It’s your experience, no one else’s. The experience is either fun or frustrating. If it is frustrating, then adjust until it is fun. It’s just that simple. For some, a brick wall challenge is fun and enjoyable, for others, it is time consuming and tedious. Both players are valid and both should have the option to play a game the way they want
The “highs and lows” should come from the storytelling, not the gameplay loop. The gameplay loop should always be fun, engaging, and enjoyable for the player.
Games that refuse to let you change the difficulty once you begin a game. More broadly, single player games that worry too much about preserving some sort of honor associated with doing well and make it annoying to play. Like rougue likes that have no save and quit for fear of people save scumming.
I’m a “grown-up” these days, but I grew up with games and they’re part of my life, and I love them - but in the larger scale of things, they’re still toys. The requirements of a pet/partner/child/phone call/doorbell will always nearly always outrank them.
“We don’t let you pause because it’s a simulation and and you can’t pause real life so it means the game is more realistic” = piss off
Yeah, the Steam Deck is actually pretty good for this on most games.
On a computer, you can, I suppose, set up a keyboard shortcut to pause the process, but you still think “this should just be part of the game in the first place”.
During EA for Hades 2 if you paused while fighting the god of time he would say “I control time here!” And unpause the game. It was funny, but if I need to answer my door I don’t want to lose my run. Thankfully that has been changed.
The simulation part tbh makes little sense to me, at least if I pause by going on the menu. Unless it’s multiplayer there’s little reason for you to prevent me to pause on menu, even if your aim is to be as realistic as possible.
At the end of the day it’s still a game and if I feel overwhelmed or the need to pause for whatever reason give me the option to. The people who want absolutely 0 pause can simply not go on the menu or if you really want you can put an option to disable pause on menu IG. Or yk they could do whatever they’re simulating IRL, within reason.
I’d also make that complaint about adjustable difficulty, but to speak to the game progression, I have to agree.
Games should be teaching players what they’re getting into from the very beginning. The tutorial should be “When you do everything right, this is how easy the game is. When it’s not this easy, it means you’re doing something wrong”. That “wrong” thing could be messing up a mechanic, not upgrading your character enough, or you’re trying to go to a later area too early. It’s a teaching moment.
So many games today, at “Normal” difficulty, will throw players into combat encounters where they just basically kill everything in one hit. So players in the tutorial think “This is a bit too easy, I’m going to up the difficulty to Hard”, but then they don’t realize that everything gets harder when you exit the tutorial, and then over the course of the game the difficulty keeps outpacing your progression.
As far as the difficulty slider goes, I think it’s always better when harder modes just make you easier to kill, rather than enemies being more difficult to kill. There’s often a good balance that can be struck between the two, but too many games just opt for just making enemies tankier and tankier, which ends up turning the “difficulty” slider into a “time/resources waster” slider.
‘Puzzles’ that are just fetch quests for numbers or pieces of something.
It’s so boring and such a waste of my time.
Let me circle these four pillars to find the numbers on them and plug them into the whatever keypad. Wowie. What a head scratcher. I sure feel like I solved a thing, boy howdy.
Yea, if it’s a lock code or but you’re not gonna make me think or work out what those numbers are, like finding calendars dates or other info from the game world and needing to piece it together, then just make it a damn note to find instead of making me hunt around for each individual number or those lame “match the symbols” shit. Those are so lazy.
There are others but this is one I just can’t believe is a thing. It’s so fucking simple to fix. Just start the volume on the lower end and if it’s too quiet I can raise the volume or just give me a volume slider first thing on initial load before any sound is played and let me find the right levels with a test sound before playing any menu music or something.
This and full white dev/publisher logo screens. I have a pretty large HDR monitor and whenever I boot up a Bandai Namco game I’ll flashback myself if I don’t look away in time.
Isn’t this what the volume on your sound system is supposed to do? Master volume in a game should be pretty much maxed out by default and the volume on whatever you use to output the sound should be set so loud isn’t blowing your ears out.
Unless you are actually complaining about sound levels of stuff that shouldn’t be loud (like menu clicking or background music) but that’s relative sound levels of different categories in the game, not the master volume.
Nah, I get what they are saying; games are just unusually loud. I can have my sound system’s volume when streaming YouTube or something on my PS5 set to a decent level but when I switch to a game I have to cut the volume in half if I haven’t messed with the settings yet.
Yeah basically this. My system volume is exactly where it needs to be for anything else I’m doing. Videos, music, voice calls, etc. I shouldn’t have to basically mute my system to not go deaf when I launch a game for the first time.
Launching a new game shouldn’t shake the house. I shudder to think how loud it would be if my system volume was above 30%. I made the mistake of having a headset on when launching a new game, and the headset learned to fly.
A couple games are still loud even after setting game volume to less than 10%… They get the full mute treatment, I no longer care of they have the most amazing soundtrack, I value my ability to hear.
Reminds me of the first time I booted up Elden Ring. The title screen started up and I heard some music, but it was so quiet. I turned up the volume and then a second later thought I almost blew out the speakers on my headset.
No quick restart options for arcade-style games like shmups
Games that end up being too easy once you unlock of figure out one mechanic or technique like dash-dodge or iframe rolling and now the entire game is just the same loop
Unskippable or long intros or cutscenes (I sold Guilty Gear Strive because of that eagle thing…)
The spam garbage ripoffs on the Nintendo eShop that shouldn’t be there
Code in a box
When DLC characters are visible on character select even if you didn’t buy them (looking at those 10 greyed-out characters on SF6 are so annoying)
unpausable cutscenes. Nothing bugs me more than getting interrupted in the middle of a cutscene and not being able to press escape to pause the cutscene. You’re forced to try to split your attention between what interrupted you and the cutscene or restart and see the cutscene from the beginning again.
Extra annoyance points if escape immediately skips the cutscene without any indication it’s going to.
All this. Everyone focuses on not being able to skip a cutscene but not being able to pause it is even worse for me, especially when trying to pause actually does skip the cutscene.
omg yes, I loved when games gave a replay stories or replay core concepts section of the menu, it’s not that hard to add but it lets you recap as well!
Feel like that used to be more common for games to have a “Movie/Cinematics” option in the “Extras” menus, treating cutscenes like unlockables, where you could go back and rewatch everything.
Really disappointing that more games don’t do this. It’s not like it’s a hard thing to add to a game code wise. It’s just a menu to the mp4 files with a “yes/no” check against the save file for if the scene has been unlocked or not.
It’s a sign of the times. When I was a kid the cutscenes were the reward for winning the game, or a portion of the game for those bigger games that could afford more than two cutscenes.
But for my kids cutscenes are the boring things that keep you from playing.
For me, it’s cutscenes in general. I know there are people who do care in general, but for me a game where I care about the plot is very rare. And the examples I can think of (Outer Wilds, or Ico, for two examples) either have no cutscenes or very few brief ones, and tell the story in a different, more immersive way.
For me, a general rule is - if the game forces moments on me when I can put the controller down and wander into a different room, then that’s not what I’m interested in. I want to actually play the game.
Such clean lines and effective shading. I’m in grey scale mode on my phone so at first I thought this was a photo of a metallic miniature. Really impressive work.
I want to GIT GUD but I’m not the kind of person who can dodge and parry while managing a stamina bar. ER and DS games look awesome but I really can’t do much sightseeing in them. I tried Demon’s Souls, Dark Souls 3, and Elden Ring and in all of them I hit a wall against the first miniboss who I should be learning to parry on. I’ve always leaned toward dodging taking priority before parrying and a stamina bar limits that.
I recently played through Ghost of Tsushima and parried a thousand cuts. The game doesn’t have stamina though. I understand stamina as a game mechanic but find all it adds is tedium. There’s what I believe to be some good games hiding behind a stamina bar. I can enjoy the games until the stamina bar runs out and then I’ll be thinking about enjoying a different game.
Odd take. Resource management is key in a lot of games to the entire design of how they play.
I play heavy tank builds in those games and block/dodge instead of parrying. It’s just a different mindset I guess to enjoy that level of resource managing to know when to commit and when to back off and get defensive, especially when my attacks take a chunk of stamina and are slow to wind up. It forces the player to be strategic so you don’t leave yourself winded mid string.
I guess what I call strategic playing you call tedium. To each their own.
The thing I hate about parrying games is that there’s rarely ever any consistency about what you can and cannot parry and also never any way for you to learn if you’re parrying too early or too soon or what.
Lies of P did a great job of color coding things (and generally being more leinent/realistic with timing). It can still be a hard game, but the most approachable parrying based game of that ilk.
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