It’s pretty hard to make levels of difficulty that actually change things enough outside of either giving the enemies more damage and HP or simply adding more enemies, or in scored games having higher score thresholds for higher ranks (these can be anything from an actual score to the speed you finished and everything in between that’s basically just a number that you can compare to another number).
It certainly can be done, though. I can’t help but think about the bots in counter-strike. They range from braindead drooling moving targets to Terminator machines that can 1 tap you with a pistol from across the map. They actually have a difficulty scale that’s more than simply being tougher to kill and hurting you more. It affects how they move around, the speed they begin shooting, their accuracy, etc. I don’t know why these kind of bots do not extend to pretty much any game with enemies. Just give them 3 sets of behavior that makes them easier or harder to deal with.
How is this only blowing your mind now and not the entire past decade or so where this has become the norm for the giant corpo devs like Blizz, EA, and Ubisoft? This has been common long enough that I’ve become completely numb to it now.
Not to mention that if you’re already playing PS4 games, a PS5 isn’t opening up a lot more games for you and many PS4 ports to PS5 run worse than their PS4 counterparts.
There is a tech difference with a DualSense controller that other controllers don’t have, and that’s the adaptive triggers. As far as I am aware, they’re the only ones with that. It’s a cool effect. Makes shooting in games feel more like handling a gun than vibration effects do.
Other than something like that, button layout is a choice. Parallel sticks or off-set sticks. Off center buttons. The way the D-pad functions (rolling style like Xbox or just 4 buttons like PlayStation). Etc.
I’ve been thinking about this while I switch back and forth playing Elden Ring’s DLC and Infinite Wealth.
In Elden Ring my motivation is simply that they are in the way and I want to go through them. The excitement of defeating someone is only strengthened by how many times I didn’t before I finally do.
Infinite Wealth, on the other hand, introduces complete assholes you want to beat up and then you get to. Which is just way more cathartic and the build up is always going to be the same for nearly every player, because the bad guy is actually shown doing shit most people hate so you start to actually hate them and want to defeat them.
The only thing I can think of to make 6 even better is if it used 5’s job system. 5 single handedly killed having static classes for the characters for me. I want to be able to make anyone anything if they’re not going to straight up let me make my own character.
My hope is that Gabe actually gets direct brain connection technology off the ground and he uploads his consciousness into an everlasting machine so he never has to retire.
Civilization is like a board game. It’s over when you hit the turn limit.
Fighting games usually do have campaigns, of a sort. It’s each character’s story line. It can be over when you beat every character or if you go through every character’s story (ie run through the main mode all the way through with each character you can play as).
Racing games also have campaigns usually, and some even have progression systems. But the campaign is just going through progressively more difficult races. They’re complete when you’ve gotten the best rank on every track and/or collected every part.
They’re all meant to be played over and over again though; often against other humans. These are also the types of games that come with a lot of options, settings and modes to facilitate playing the same game slightly differently and keep things fun. So I guess the real answer is: whenever you want. If you’re playing then because they’re fun they never have to end. If you’re playing as a completionist, it’s over when you’ve gotten all the achievements/experienced every piece of content you can access.