this post was submitted on 03 Sep 2024
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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games that don't even have difficulty settings, I've started to believe in the idea that difficulty selection is just outdated game design and that having a single difficulty but optional areas/content that is more difficult is the way to do it.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.
Larian had to dumb the AI down to make normal mode for dos2.
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
AI will also save up abilities with side effects until armor or magic resistance has been depleted. Such as knockdown on a battering ram ability.
Idk if I noticed that explicitly but I would believe it. The grenade throws early game are also disgusting. Pixel perfect hit your whole team lol
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.
point is, there's other options.
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.
Aggressiveness and pathing are trivial.
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.
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.
Leveling is a normal thing in any game. You level up in most games.
Also you don't need to level up in most FromSoft games. The bosses usually have a gimmick or movement patterns that are easy to learn.
Sounds like you just suck at the games. No shame in that but don't say something is harder than it is.
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)
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?
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.
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?
Because that's incredibly difficult.