The problem with difficulties is that it’s much more difficult to design an AI system which you can tweak and make it smarter or dumber as opposed to just increasing damage and health values, so devs will just implement the best AI they can and leave difficulties as afterthought.
After playing a lot of games that don’t even have difficulty settings, I’ve started to believe in the idea that difficulty selection is just outdated game design and that having a single difficulty but optional areas/content that is more difficult is the way to do it. OSRS is one of my favorite examples - everyone plays the same game and going through levelling or whatever isn’t mechanically demanding. However, there are bosses and challenges (like Theatre of Blood which is an end-game raid or Inferno which is an end-game challenge) that are incredibly challenging and require weeks if not months of attempts to master and finally beat, but also are perfectly skippable and most casual players don’t even bother with them.
I’d like more games to be like FromSoft games. The difficulty is adjusted by what gear you have and what spells you use. None of that turning bosses into bullet sponges nonsense.
Yeah, Sekiro has a pretty adaptive way of making the game harder, if you start a replay and get rid of the charm item, you can’t almost parry, it has to be precise, and if you ring the demon bell everything gets higher life and damage, but drops much better loot.
Just going to ignore the hundreds of levels most players need to accumulate?
Sekiro was the only one that actually respected players time. Players bitched endlessly it was too hard.
If fromsoft actually gave a shit they’d add in adjustable parry windows and iframes and that works cover 90% of the people who weren’t good enough from sekiro. They won’t because they love to be gatekeepers.
I’ve beaten every day since 2 in addition to sekiro, the actual hard game. We’re talking about easing the game for the average population. So yeah if you are in the top .5% of players fromsoft gives a fuck about your time.
For everyone else your talking somewhere between 50 and 200. I mean for fucks sake for years the advice for hitting a wall in DS was explore and come back at a higher level.
Modern world of Warcraft has less leveling these days 🤦♂️
Yeah, but the point is that you aren’t just grinding levels. You literally said it yourself, you go explore a different area, you play more of the game (not just grind the same part of the game)
I mean for fucks sake for years the advice for hitting a wall in DS was explore and come back at a higher level.
Kind of like when you’re lower level in other games and have to level up to beat the boss? Do level 1 gnomes go straight to killing The Lich King in world of warcraft?
A lot of people say this and I don’t get it. What would be lost by having each playstyle be balanced properly and then adding difficulty scaling on top of that?
That’s not at all surprising. PvE game design is almost always about making the computer less competent in fun and/or believable ways. If you’ve got a computer that can simulate every item and skill in an enemy team’s arsenal and game out the best combination in milliseconds, the player is going to be dead by Turn 1 or stun-locked and dead by Turn 2.
I’ve been immensely impressed with DOS2 AI. If an enemy is sleeping, another enemy will use part of its turn to hit the enemy to wake it up. There were several instances where I paused and just stared awestruck
but there’s so many other ways to change difficulty.
change number of enemies and where they spawn change gear and abilities, the Witcher did that one with how the stamina system worked. it didn’t drain on the lower difficulties. horizon zero dawn made everything in the shops more expensive and made the enemies drop less money. honestly, that one also sucked. only served to make the game grindier.
I had fun with Zero Dawn but came out with a list of minor improvements that would make the game significantly better. Forbidden West had almost all the same problems, and added several more besides. The game really started to lose me when I was trying to upgrade a particular piece of equipment and just had to keep doing laps up and down a goddamn mountain with no nearby quick travel location, hoping that an elite version of an enemy would spawn, then laboriously killing it in the hopes that a particular resource would drop, only to get disappointed by the RNG and have to repeat the process, because that was the only place where that resource could be got, and that was the only place where that enemy would spawn.
The grind was appalling, and it took what was a moderately interesting fight the first couple of times and turned it into a monotonous chore.
Also the upgrade barely turned out to be worth the effort.
I finished the game more out of spite than anything else, and I did not purchase the DLC, nor do I have any plans of getting any sequels. Damn shame, because there’s an awful lot about both games to like.
My friend hosted a valheim server on idk hard or very hard. The parry mechanic didn’t work since it would let a percentage of damage through. So even with the current highest obtainable shield enemies we were not able to use parries (or blocking lol) at all and had to dodge everything. At boss 4 or so I BEGGED him to lower the difficulty, since the lingering damage would almost one-shot us and we just kept respawning over and over for an hour.
I was just about to comment exactly this. Complete with finally changing the difficulty back to normal while fighting Moder.
We also found that Moder’s health was so high that the fight was not doable in a day, leaving us fighting packs of wolves (which could two shot us while blocking) during the night as well.
Moder was so painful. Queen and Yagluth were so much easier in comparison.
Working our way through the Ashlands now and well, what a frustrating area as well. Had to campfire like crazy a kilometer out just to be able to breathe for two seconds without being swarmed. We ended up going kamikaze to siege a fortress for a base and suddenly I can actually play for more than 5 seconds without being attacked.
A lot of Valheim bosses are only difficult because of the massive amounts of health. Without the crazy high amounts of health, none of them seem to have difficult mechanics.
After I had gotten the hang of Hellblade’s combat on the adaptive difficulty I turned it to easy by the end because killing enemies had become just a slog. Funnily enough it coincided with her getting the new ultimate sword and made the game feel much more epic.
BTW, Baldur’s Gate 3 does difficulty very well. Enemies get better abilities and use the good ones more frequently.
I did this in persona 5 on the last boss, even if you know all the weaknesses it was still RNG and after 3 tries I said fuck it I have other shit to do
That would be great for me since what I hate about raiding in MMOs is precisely that bosses feel more like a puzzle than a skill check with various moments of instakill if you didn’t figure out what to do in under 30 seconds.
I think I will have to disagree somewhat. Difficultly should change how you play, not how long. Needing to Grind better gear is not respecting the players time.
That said there are games I did enjoy the grind, “the world ends with you” is one of them, but that is a case of earning new ways to play in most cases.
Yeah thats kinda what i meant. Because of the increase in required DPS you will need to unlock harder to obtain gear with higher DPS which will bring your total playtime back to previous levels. But its a difficult to balance thing for sure.
This plus constantly running out of ammo because apparently the inside of every enemy skull is just hammerspace for more ammunition than the US military budget could ever afford. God forbid a stray shot hits your porcelain character, Thanos snapping you to dust at so much as a stubbed toe.
I remember playing Max Payne. There was some battle in a bar against a guy with a shotgun. If you timed it right between reloads you could run up to the guy, stand on the bar so your guns were exactly level with his face and empty two Uzi clips point blank into his face before he could reload.
Then you would run out of ammo and he would one shot kill you.
Fallout 4 is the worst with this. I never found nished the game because of that. Multiple nukes square in the face of a supermutant and he's just at half health? I ain't got time for that.
Meanwhile i finished FO4 on hardest difficulty with just the Deliverer. 2 or 3 shots to the dome in VATS gets shit done. But i agree the difficulty is weird in that game. God Of War is pretty bad for this too.
I remember the hype around the division, it looked so cool and tactical. Then the game came out and every enemy was a bullet sponge. Instantly killed any interest I had in it.
Minus the pre release hype, this was how I felt about shadow warrior 2. The first one was so good with the retro updated FPS feel, and even made your starting sword relevant throughout the game. Then 2 came out and it was a bullet spongey, bad craft system crapfest. I didn’t even make it a couple hours after the dozens I spent in the first.
The old RainbowSix games (pre-Vegas) were absolutely brutal in difficulty. Enemies died in one or two shots, depending on what part you hit. Even a non-mortal wound would cripple them permanently. But the same rules applied to you.
the only real R6 games. when everyone was raving about Vegas i was excited to play it and… the intro mission was just a shooter level… i thought ok this is the intro to basic combat… then there was the next mission and no planning section there either. i was puzzled. i closed the game and went on some forum i don’t remember and asked whether i did something that made the game skip the one thing that set the series apart… nope. it doesn’t exist!
from the people who made a heroes game without the town screen, introducing a rainbow six game without planning! i cannot believe reviews i saw weren’t screaming that about the game.
fuck Ubisoft so much. who needs AI in games when we have Ubisoft the ultimate slop machine.
I never really cared for the planning myself but Vegas ruined it for my by introducing that stupid cover system to make it like Gears of War which was popular at the time. They completely removed the ability to lean. You couldn’t properly peek around a corner to take a shot without almost fully exposing yourself anymore. This meant you couldn’t avoid absorbing bullets all the time. This made the game unplayable so to counterbalance that, they’ve added regenerating health. But then it became too easy so they kept putting you in tactically completely unfair positions against hordes of extremely aggressive enemies that can see you and shoot you through walls. They also had a lot of visually busy environments where the enemies are difficult to spot even when they’re shooting at you because the sound mixing was so botched up that often you couldn’t even tell when you were being shot at.
They turned it into a mindless arcade shooter where you constantly absorb bullets like it’s normal and fight a whole army on your own. I wouldn’t be surprised if all of this is because some Corporate dipshit forced the inclusion of that cover system because Gears of War made money.
it’s mind boggling that it was so well received. 8s and 9s flying for the most forgettable hodgepodge.
it’s ok if you don’t like the planning but that was what made R6 what it was. you could just go in guns blazing and try to improvise but that wasn’t what the game was about. meticulously planning an infiltration, executing it in real time, communicating and coordinating with bots, and seeing all of it work out at the end was a uniquely satisfying experience that no other game provided, and made you feel like a tactical genius.
the tactical depth of Vegas was boiled down entirely to “go here” commands. tactical shooter gameplay was better implemented by games like mass effect 1 which wasn’t even primarily a shooter, let alone a tactical shooter.
I love this game because it feels like the game is actually playing by rules
Yeah you can cripple someone by shooting their legs, reduce accuracy by shooting arms, or go for a good ol headshot. You can really feel like a tactical badass. Oh by the way same goes for you
It just makes me really happy seeing that
Ofc in practice I am horrible so that sometimes undoes all my excitement
A) Increase damage falloff. For precision guns that means non precision shots do less. For short range weapons that means the penalty for working outside the effective range is higher.
B) Add more enemies. Especially if there’s any stealth element, you close windows and change how you approach encounters.
C) Depending on the game, increase the range enemies respond at. If that’s sound based, they have better hearing. If it’s enemies calling for help when alerted, they get assistance/raise alert levels from longer range.
Perfect play should be comparable. Mistakes should be punished harder.
I also agree with all that. That takes more work though.
Bullet sponges are usually companies who can’t be bothered, so I focused on the low cost options. But IMO you should be building for high difficulty, then simplifying by inverting the things I suggested and your removing moves/exposing themselves more, actually slowing movement speed and animations, etc, to make encounters more forgiving at lower levels.
I think even after cutting down, easier difficulties can tell the game is better crafted that way.
I’ll not cotton any slander against Doom of any stripe, be it I, II, Final, TNT, Plutonia, or 2016. (Note that we don’t talk about Doom 3 round these parts.)
Yes there was a doom 3 in the early 00s. It was atleast a good game great graphics fun gameplay etc. But it was more like a horror shooter instead of an action shooter like the other dooms
Metro also comes to mind. The highest difficulty level made both you and the enemies squishier, while also making ammo (which doubled as currency) much rarer. It played so much better that the community even recommended that difficulty level to complete newcomers.
… And then they made the Ranger difficulty a paid DLC in the sequel…
Everything about Cyberpunk was a big disappointment. The entire game is a glorified tech demo to show off your $1800 GPU. Which is ironic because it somehow manages to still have mediocre graphics, despite using all the latest path tracing tech to its fullest. RDR 2 looks more realistic than Cyberpunk, and it doesn’t use RT at all!
Borderlands 3 (don’t know about the others) had a brutal postgame of this. Even though new difficulty stuff was added, the real challenge seemed to be collecting enough ammo to actually finish fights. At some point, the sponginess was too much for me to care about continuing.
Because they spam low effort posts trying to get attention. They rarely interact in their own posts, or show gratitude when people help them. They don’t actually want answers, only attention
You refuse to take constructive criticism, you lashed out at me, and you have no etiquette. I don’t know what else I can tell you. If everyone is the ass hole, maybe you should do some self reflecting
I would just go for a PS5 controller. You get type c charging, great haptics and good compatibility (either via Steam or ds4windows). Only issue is the stick drift
I didn’t care too much about controllers until I used one of those. Fucking amazing controllers. I was playing Cyberpunk 2077 the other day on it and when driving you felt it shift gears on the R2. Fantastic use of the haptics.
Trigger haptics can work on PC but it is game by game/implementation by implementation. Returnal works when connected via USB but not wirelessly (unless you enable Steam Input for DualSense, but that completely removes haptic trigger capabilities, turns the touchpad into buttons, and switches to Xbox button glyphs), but Ratchet & Clank works wired or wirelessly (without Steam Input enabled for DualSense). The DualSense support on PC is kind of hit or miss, I wish they’d just standardize a library that offers the base features wirelessly – the controller is really nice.
Yeah I use a DS5E and it’s a really well engineered controller, and I’ve always preferred the DS ergonomics. Just gotta use DS4Windows tool for some games remapping. But basically really whatever design ergonomic you prefer and buy that, they all support Windows now even Switch Pro.
Watch the launch of @CopernicusEU#Sentinel2C on #VV24, the last Vega flight from Europe’s Spaceport, live on #ESAwebTV on 4 September from 02:30 BST/03:30 CEST (liftoff scheduled at 02:50 BST/03:50 CEST).
Flydigi Vader 3/4 Pro. Been using one for a couple months. Hands down best controller I have used. Hall effects, trigger locks, rear buttons, mechanical face buttons, glorious d pad. The not so fun is the crap software and joystick defaults. Once you update on pc it is great. Under $100 for either model.
Do you use it on Linux? I recently got a Vader 4, it works wireless on xbox mode (using the xpad linux module), but I was hopping to make use of the gyro (hopefully without losing the analog triggers), and it seems that the dinput mode (which does allow some gyro action + analog triggers and working extra buttons) does not really work with the wireless dongle for me (it works if I plug it via cable, but that’s also not optimal since it disconnects mid play sometimes for some reason).
For PC, I would personally suggest looking for a controller with two things. Number 1, Hall effect sensors. Eliminate stick drift entirely with that alone. Number 2, replaceable joysticks. If the sticks last a long time, then the controller is expected to last longer. I just think having a way to replace work rubber is a good thing. Personally, I have loved Gulikit. My controller also happens to work on switch as well. Here is a link of you are interested in checking it out. Note that that is the controller I have, but you should definitely look at the different models. My controller has lasted about 3 years now. I used to go through PS5 controllers in about 6 months.
That is a totally fair question and one that I simply overlooked. Technically you can buy Gulikit through Amazon. I personally appreciate that the cost of it doesn’t go up over like a regular controller. Scuf did me dirty, I had a scuf for all of two months before the lb button fell apart and they refused to repair it. That thing cost me $185. This controller cost me $70.90 and has lasted me about two years. Here is a link to the Gulikit store on Amazon. I do recommend making sure it is from that store. I don’t know anything about it, but there is a AKNES store which sells gulikt controllers. amazon.com/…/BCC8C06B-7BF5-4D6C-A9A0-6290B8091F02…
On an unrelated note, if you have joy cons with stick drift (who doesn’t have these) then Gulikit also sells just the stick modules so you can fix it for good.
Amazon still does that dumb shit where they allow them to sell a dozen different products on the same listing. And the names are all mislabeled so I don’t even know what product I’m looking at.
While others have answered your question, I just wanted to go on a tangent and add to some of the same frustration that you felt.
I hate hand holding in this game. I feel like missions trap you into playing a certain way. You have to treat the missions like they are an interactive movie experience. But otherwise, the open world exploration is fun.
For future, If you really like freedom but also need some goals and story and not just a sandbox, I would recommend trying either legend of zelda botw or totk. I think you can emulate BOTW on steamdeck.
If you can take some punishment then Elden Ring is also a great choice.
I’m personally looking for a Hall effect joystick, ps5 style layout, wireless capable, plays nice with Linux game controller. Seems like I’ve seen flydigi as a potential option, and maybe some 8bitdo ones. Maybe scuf?
One major issue I’ve had is my ps4 controller doesn’t have multipoint, meaning it will only Bluetooth pair to a single device at a time. Wanna use it on your phone? Gotta pair it. Wanna use it again on your pc — yep, gotta pair it again. Reaaaaallly annoying.
My PS4 controller doesn’t even pair to my Linux desktop, I’ve tried just about everything you can think of but it only works via USB cable. My Xbox 360 controller, Xbox One X, and Xbox Series X controllers all work on Linux just fine and work better on Linux than they would on Windows thanks to xpadneo.
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