Something that hasn’t been mentioned: difficulty variations that only change stat penalty. These get really annoying for people who enjoy challenging gameplay…
Case in point, unmodded Skyrim’s legendary difficulty where the only difference is that you do 0.25x damage and take 300% damage. Instead of providing challenging gameplay that forces you to use gaming skills or think, it just makes the game more annoying to play & limits player build options (stealth is mandatory as any other playstyle deals no damage and results in you getting kill-animation’d…)
Or when you can’t beat the lvl1 monster easily because the scaling is so aggressive you never get to feel more powerful. Ohh look I spent 6hours on a side quest to get the legendary Sword that can cut anything from dragon scale to ghosts - yet it can’t get through thug#1’s leather shield?
The kill animations in Skyrim are the worst. Doesn’t matter how well you’ve done in the fight or how many potions you have, if the enemy manages to get you to a certain level of health you’re killed instantly with no way to stop it. It’s insulting to be killed like that by a random bandit that was lucky enough to drop you low enough before you could heal.
Atomfall was so good for its difficulty settings menu. They gave you soo many options. You could really tweak out a lot of parts you didn’t like in the game but make the difficulty whatever you wanted it to be.
Skyrim and Oblivion difficulty is very stupid. If you change difficulty after playing a character for 100hr it isn’t so bad, but if you want to start out on the hardest difficulty, I’d say it’s actually impossible to play unless you have some kind of cheese tactic. Shooting a barbarian for like 1/100th of their health bar? And they one-shot you? What the hell kind of design is this?
I’m speaking from experience, I have tried… To give them some benefit of the doubt, designing a good difficulty variation is difficult (pun not intended), even games like the original Hades which has a very extensive difficulty modification system still gets flack for it
I think it would be a relatively easy problem to solve, I think being one-shot on the highest difficulty is expected, but making every enemy a damage-sponge is both anti-fun and poor game design.
Just change the scaling - damage scaling is fine as-is, health scaling needs to be drastically reduced. If a barbarian gets one-shot on the easiest difficulty, having it take like, five shots whilst also increasing the risk should be fine.
Agreed. Everyone should take notes on how jedi: fallen order did difficulty. Sure, it did a bit of simple stat adjusting, but it also did things like increasing enemy aggression
For me it probably is. I do not like many of the live-service game mechanics (limited stamina, gambling, microtransactions) but at least I get why; the one I mentioned just feels lazy and would make otherwise good games feel unplayable
Something that hasn’t been mentioned: difficulty variations that only change stat penalty. These get really annoying for people who enjoy challenging gameplay…
Case in point, unmodded Skyrim’s legendary difficulty where the only difference is that you do 0.25x damage and take 300% damage. Instead of providing challenging gameplay that forces you to use gaming skills or think, it just makes the game more annoying to play & limits player build options (stealth is mandatory as any other playstyle deals no damage and results in you getting kill-animation’d…)
Or when you can’t beat the lvl1 monster easily because the scaling is so aggressive you never get to feel more powerful. Ohh look I spent 6hours on a side quest to get the legendary Sword that can cut anything from dragon scale to ghosts - yet it can’t get through thug#1’s leather shield?
The kill animations in Skyrim are the worst. Doesn’t matter how well you’ve done in the fight or how many potions you have, if the enemy manages to get you to a certain level of health you’re killed instantly with no way to stop it. It’s insulting to be killed like that by a random bandit that was lucky enough to drop you low enough before you could heal.
The borderland series is the worst for this. Boss fights just mean you have to continuously shoot the enemy for 10-15 mins.
Atomfall was so good for its difficulty settings menu. They gave you soo many options. You could really tweak out a lot of parts you didn’t like in the game but make the difficulty whatever you wanted it to be.
Skyrim and Oblivion difficulty is very stupid. If you change difficulty after playing a character for 100hr it isn’t so bad, but if you want to start out on the hardest difficulty, I’d say it’s actually impossible to play unless you have some kind of cheese tactic. Shooting a barbarian for like 1/100th of their health bar? And they one-shot you? What the hell kind of design is this?
I’m speaking from experience, I have tried… To give them some benefit of the doubt, designing a good difficulty variation is difficult (pun not intended), even games like the original Hades which has a very extensive difficulty modification system still gets flack for it
I think it would be a relatively easy problem to solve, I think being one-shot on the highest difficulty is expected, but making every enemy a damage-sponge is both anti-fun and poor game design.
Just change the scaling - damage scaling is fine as-is, health scaling needs to be drastically reduced. If a barbarian gets one-shot on the easiest difficulty, having it take like, five shots whilst also increasing the risk should be fine.
Agreed. Everyone should take notes on how jedi: fallen order did difficulty. Sure, it did a bit of simple stat adjusting, but it also did things like increasing enemy aggression
Removed by mod
For me it probably is. I do not like many of the live-service game mechanics (limited stamina, gambling, microtransactions) but at least I get why; the one I mentioned just feels lazy and would make otherwise good games feel unplayable
Yes.