Sick of these entitled baby gamers - MAKE GAMES HARDER

SilentSpecter said:
Nah, it's not that simple. Sliders mess with the whole balance - enemy placement, attack patterns, risk/reward loops… all tuned for a specific challenge.

Lower HP or damage and suddenly fights feel like a wet noodle, and the game stops being what it was meant to be.

That's a misunderstanding of what these games are and why people love them. Challenge, no hand-holding, and overcoming your own limits are the core. Sliders erase that identity.

Elden Ring sold over 30 million copies without an easy mode (and the DLC cranked the challenge even higher). FromSoftware has stuck to a consistent vision for years – hard but rewarding games, and that's exactly why they're so respected.
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And it would sell more with difficulty options. What's the completion percentage like? In line with other games? No? So less people see your whole artistic vision. Got it.
 
Old games didn't have telemetry and stat tracking. They just didn't know or have any way of knowing how many people completed the games they bought or when they stopped playing. The fact is that many people just lack focus and are not humble at all when it comes working out what they are supposed to do when it isn't spelled out for them letter by letter.
 
Alpha Male Cringe GIF
 
Larxia said:
That's absolutely not what I said.
I even said in my message that it doesn't necessarily needs to be balanced toward the ultra hard part of the scale.
I just say I prefer when there is one properly balanced, well thought out difficulty, rather than letting the player pick between 5 difficulties with lame sliders.
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That's absolute what "I" said.

What is ultra hard for you may not be for others.

What is balanced for you may not be for others.

The world doesn't turn around you.
 
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Tg89 said:
And it's not even strictly about difficulty, there's a bunch of people that are too impatient to deal with any perceived inconvenience or friction in a game. "Why can't I save anywhere", "How come there's no map", "Why do my weapons break", etc. This isn't to say that you can't dislike these things, but deliberate design choices are being categorized by some as "bad design" or "not respecting my time" because it isn't convenient to them. The recent "corpse run" discussion is a good example - "why do I have to spend 45 seconds running back to the boss after I die", I'm sorry, I didn't realize this was a boss rush game? Do you not think the devs considered the full section when they placed the bench? They want the player to survive both that section and the boss to progress.
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This !
I never get the bad design complaint.
I already use the term but I am aware that it's maybe just me and I move on to another game if I can't stand its mechanics.

Silksong dev obviously designed a more challenging sequel. That was their vision.
If you can't stand it... well I understand it's a bit sad to not like a game you wanted to or with so much praise but it's like that.
Still thousands of other game to play.

It happened to me with NieR Automata, Death Stranding and many more... I think they have problems but don't ask the game to change their philosophy to please me. Either I adapt to it or move on.

Games with strong identity are rare and should be encourage, not shamed by a flow of complaint.
 
Dark Souls is only hard if you're an impatient button mashing fucko.
It strives to teach acceptance, self-control and resilience. Once you've gained enough zen, the game isn't so hard, and you can enjoy exploring the amazing interconnected world.

Most souls clones misunderstand that.
 
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I agree with the OP. The problem with a "hard mode" these days is that seldom the developer cares about level design, balancing and fine tuning the challenge. Death Stranding 2's "brutal" difficulty is the best example of how a hard mode is useless without good, well thought level design and gameplay mechanics.
 
Difficulty settings are fine. Everyone should be able to finetune a game to their own personal limits.My issue with difficulty settings isn't even the concept but the execution. Games will be designed for normal or even easy, then pump up the difficulty artificially with some bulletsponge enemies and harder hits. That's not doing anything other than making the same gameplay loop more frustrating.

A true hard mode, like Critical in KH2, truly rebalances the game to offer a greater challenge. The enemies are harder hitting sure, but the player likewise is given his own boosts over proud and normal to make the game more fun- you deal more damage, too. enemies die quicker than they do on proud, and you're encouraged to make more use of your magic, and come up with strategies around enemy spawns in order to take out rooms better. The game's numerous combat options which were ignored in favor of spamming X initially are now vital tools in order to survive the hordes of heartless and nobodies in each room

In my opinion, the best way to solve this- if not to patch in a hard mode later with actual rebalancing and additional content added- is to design the game around the hardest difficulty first and then scale down to lower difficulties. Not only this, but lock extra content behind the hardest difficulty. Tryhards get the intended experience and everyone else is lightly pushed into playing at the intended hard difficulty for the new stuff. (or if they don't care, can enjoy playing an overall easier version of the game)

People will probably hate me for that take though.
 
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Arsic said:
Lastly the current section of silksong I am in I have been unable to find a map, a checkpoint or quick travel spot. I start in the bile, work through the mist for 15 minutes, then through the organ to fight a boss. We are talking 20 minutes of your time for a boss attempt without any checkpoint I can find yet.

Yes games being challenging is rewarding.

Games intentionally pissing players off isn't how you do it. Silksong is the wrong way to do this.
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I never made it to the second Act, but the map vendor appears in the starting town, are you able to get the maps from her there?


Wildebeest said:
Old games didn't have telemetry and stat tracking. They just didn't know or have any way of knowing how many people completed the games they bought or when they stopped playing. The fact is that many people just lack focus and are not humble at all when it comes working out what they are supposed to do when it isn't spelled out for them letter by letter.
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Many of the old games were only 20 minutes long. The challenge was learning them. Modern games are generally design for people to complete and experience the whole thing.
 
SScorpio said:
I never made it to the second Act, but the map vendor appears in the starting town, are you able to get the maps from her there?



Many of the old games were only 20 minutes long. The challenge was learning them. Modern games are generally design for people to complete and experience the whole thing.
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Map vendor changes areas throughout the game. Currently not in either town, and she didn't offer maps for bile.

Luckily I found a checkpoint in organ thank god.
 
Arsic said:
Map vendor changes areas throughout the game. Currently not in either town, and she didn't offer maps for bile.

Luckily I found a checkpoint in organ thank god.
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There's supposedly a bell that calls her to you in town. I didn't run into her not being in town though.
 
Griffon said:
Dark Souls is only hard if you're an impatient button mashing fucko.
It strives to teach acceptance, self-control and resilience. Once you've gained enough zen, the game isn't so hard, and you can enjoy exploring the amazing interconnected world.

Most souls clones misunderstand that.
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Agreed if you are someone that excels at repetitive mundane generic ass boring as fuck work. Basically flipping burgers for a livin'

Yes dark souls is piss easy.
Just rinse and repeat 😏✌️
 
Tg89 said:
Streamlining of games isn't anything new and it's been happening year over year since the beginning. Many of these changes are a result of devs learning from previous game design "mistakes", some are a result of hardware evolving and previous limitations being gone (saves). Most of them have been for the better, but it feels like we've long reached a point where convenience and "quality of life" is prioritized over meaningful game design choices.

This thread is obviously brought on by Silksong, but it isn't even about "hard" games. The bar feels like it's been lowered across the industry, even things that were already easy are getting easier. The platforming genre has always been one of my favourites and I absolutely adore modern takes like Odyssey, Bananza and Astrobot but my love for them is diminished by them being effectively devoid of challenges. "But these are games for kids" - so were Super Mario 64, Donkey Kong Country, Crash Bandicoot, etc. And that's not to say that any of those games were hard, but they all had some level of challenge to them that no longer seems to exist. In fact, games in the 80s and 90s pretty much exclusively targetted kids and while there were some that were easier than others, it wasn't some expected standard.

And it's not even strictly about difficulty, there's a bunch of people that are too impatient to deal with any perceived inconvenience or friction in a game. "Why can't I save anywhere", "How come there's no map", "Why do my weapons break", etc. This isn't to say that you can't dislike these things, but deliberate design choices are being categorized by some as "bad design" or "not respecting my time" because it isn't convenient to them. The recent "corpse run" discussion is a good example - "why do I have to spend 45 seconds running back to the boss after I die", I'm sorry, I didn't realize this was a boss rush game? Do you not think the devs considered the full section when they placed the bench? They want the player to survive both that section and the boss to progress.

We've had entire genres become a shell of their former self because of streamlining and introduction of "Quality of Life" features. World of Warcraft slowly introduced so many of these features that it's barely recognizable as an MMO in many ways. It started with small things like "We'll introduce summon stones at the front of an instance", "Introduce Dual-Spec", "Reduce the cooldown on hearthstones", etc. Nowadays it's snowballed to the point where there's practically zero friction in the game whatsoever and the WORLD (you know, the main character of the game itself) is practically uninhabited because you can do everything from the comfort of a capital city.

I believe that friction has a place in the medium. The games that I look back fondly on are games that had friction that resulted in creating those memeories for me. Many games have reached a point of being such a passive experience of going through the motions that they're simply not memorable at all, pretty much every AAA game nowadays can be played on autopilot, following a map marker or arrow to your next destination and mashing some buttons when you get there.

Anyway, that's my rant. Make games hard again, they'll be better off.
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Why can't games just you know allow settings for those of us who are not nearly as good or manly as yourself, but want to enjoy the game world, and lore around it? Does it bother you that someone else can enjoy the game with easier settings than you? Does it hurt your pride or manhood? Im glad you enjoy hard games and it's what you like, but there are some of us who want to play and enjoy games as well just without having to dedicate 3 hours to a world boss or certain segment of the game. The developers clearly develop games for the sales and users to enjoy. If I drop your game and bad mouth it as an overly hard game for no reason how does that help with sales and your future projects?

Just either allow difficulty levels, or an automatic slider that after 4-5 attempts makes the level a little easier. than reset back to standard difficulty.

Where is the harm?
 
Sekiro is in my top 3 games of all time. It is very difficult, but the combat is the most wonderfully fleshed out and addictive system I have ever played.

Silksong, in contrast, is difficult but not fun. The systems are very simple. I can't be arsed to carry on as there is no meaningful sense of progression.

Difficulty does not equal better game design.
 
I'm a fan of games being designed around one difficulty like found in FromSoftware's Souls titles and just like I don't think people should beg for more difficulty options in those titles, I also think the inverse should be true. Seeing how Silksong is developed by such a small team and that let's authorial intent translate much easier than when huge teams are involved, I'm just going to assume the difficulty is as intended and people need to realize that every game isn't going to cater to you and that's okay. As much as I love the Souls series, Sekiro just kicked my ass and I've walked away from a half dozen times. The setting is right up my alley too, but it just isn't for me.
 
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SScorpio said:
Many of the old games were only 20 minutes long. The challenge was learning them. Modern games are generally design for people to complete and experience the whole thing.
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In they 8-bit era, yeah, because of memory constraints, but after that it wasn't normal to have a game that short. If you still want to play games more like that you could play things like 1001 spikes.
 
There's nothing wrong with difficulty options. I never understood why people care so much about how somebody else plays a game. If you beat a game on hard or just a hard game, good for you, but it's not like you cured cancer or won an olympic medal. And it somebody else beat the game on a lower difficulty than you, it doesn't affect you at all.

This doesn't even mean I don't welcome a challenge, btw. I just don't care about the way other people play single player games.
 
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There are literally thousands of baby games out there. Go play the easy ones.

I'm glad to have games that are hard even though my wife hears me cussing up a storm when I die to stupid shit. I know not everyone will get this, but I do feel some satisfaction when I beat a particularly hard level, puzzle or boss.

I'm also glad that not every game is hard af, because sometimes I do just want to just autopilot and chill.
 
Don't know about anyone else, but I don't enjoy games when they're too easy. I don't feel like I'm actually achieving anything; all my victories feel quite hollow, and I start to get bored.

Of course, I'm not a masochist, so I'm good to drop down to a lower difficulty if I'm really struggling.

Did all of Hi-Fi Rush on Hard from the start, and currently doing the same with Banishers.
 
rodrigolfp said:
That's absolute what "I" said.

What is ultra hard for you may not be for others.

What is balanced for you may not be for others.

The world doesn't turn around you.
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There can still be an objective part about what game is considered easy or hard for the average gamer.
And games difficulty don't have to adapt to everyone, the player can adapt to the game too. That's like if movies had options to be shorter in case the viewer is feeling too lazy to watch the whole thing.
If you just move sliders to make your own difficulty, it's just the best way to miss the intended experience, with nothing feeling properly designed.

Take the recent ubisoft games for example. I don't know about Shadows, but Assassin's Creed Valhalla was terrible at that. You can tweak absolutely EVERYTHING to change the "difficulty", you can at any time change the amount of damage, in %, that you take, that you deal, you can change the amount of experience % you get, you can even decide if you will kill ennemies in one hit or not.
That's absolutely awful, it feels like there just isn't any designed, intended experience. Like who is this even for? They try so much to make this for everyone, that it ends up being designed for no one really.
What's the point of the game being a "rpg", if you can change the % of damage you deal just by adjusting a slider at any time, your equipement and everything else doesn't even matter anymore.

Most of the games out there nowadays are way too easy, and people got used to that. Most of them also have lazy difficulty choices. These games you want already exist.
Games that decide to offer one specific experience with one unique difficulty should be allowed to exist too. That's creative freedom. Challenge can be part of the intended experience, if the game is designed around that.
 
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Hollow Knight is the craziest one. I read about how hard it was before I played it. Bruh.... For SilkSong, I'm hearing the same thing. i'm on a couple hours in (goty btw) and it's fine. I even saw a Youtube vid of a guy crushing the "hard parts" on Android with touch screen controls.

Here's what you guys have to do. ANYTIME you read an article about difficulty or anything that comes across sus, make sure and find a pic of the author. You'll be surprised about how little you'll be surprised.
 
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Seriously. I want harder modes added and unlocked. I love how RE7 and 8 did that. I was always annoyed RE2 never made anything harder than hard mode which was too easy.
 
JusticeForAll said:
There's nothing wrong with difficulty options. I never understood why people care so much about how somebody else plays a game. If you beat a game on hard or just a hard game, good for you, but it's not like you cured cancer or won an olympic medal. And it somebody else beat the game on a lower difficulty than you, it doesn't affect you at all.

This doesn't even mean I don't welcome a challenge, btw. I just don't care about the way other people play single player games.
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I disagree, because this isn't the way games work.
If you take a game that was designed around an average / easy difficulty, and you select the hardest mode because you want challenge, it most of the time will be a tedious experience, because the game wasn't designed around that.

Simply increasing the damages you get or the damage you deal is most of the time really not a good option. If what the hard mode does is just making combats longer, it can make the experience boring, instead of it being a fun challenge.

When a game has a unique difficulty, it being an average difficulty or a hard one, everything will be designed properly around that, giving the player the proper tools for that difficulty.

There are exceptions of course, the best one to me being Kingdom Hearts which I mentioned earlier. In critical mode, everything is harder, but it's not just that, everything is rebalanced, you get access to a lot more available skills, it's faster, it plays differently, to the point of almost being another game. The game give the players all the proper tools needed for that new experience / difficulty, instead of just being the same game but with longer and more tedious progression.
 
mckmas8808 said:
THANK YOU!!!! Why is this so hard for some people to understand?
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Easy answer to your question. Balancing is a fucking mess and 90% of the developers won't bother, in which the product ends up being a fucking casual paradise on easy/normal/hard and an absolute fucking imbalanced mess on the hardest ones. When you have one set difficulty, they can control how the gameplay flows + they dont have to waste a year on balancing every single gameplay mechanic for each difficulty.
 
I agree completely.

I loved difficult games when I was 12, and I still love them now, decades later.

No amount of story or graphics can match the satisfaction of progressing through a tightly balanced, challenging game.
 
I am already very picky with games. Every game thats promoted as a soulslike is dead to me or FROM software in general.
Same goes for games with no easy mode, like recently Cronos. Would have bought it, but the devs vision sucks so they dont get my money. Patch in a easy mode thats like Dead Space on easy or maybe normal, i will buy it (in a sale).
 
Spukc said:
Agreed if you are someone that excels at repetitive mundane generic ass boring as fuck work. Basically flipping burgers for a livin'

Yes dark souls is piss easy.
Just rinse and repeat 😏✌️
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Hey, if you made the best burger flipping game in existence, with various boss burgers and patty monsters, it could become a huge hit.
 
Modding and hacking games is a PC tradition. You will get mods make games easier or skip boring bits but you will also eventually get mods that make the games more challenging.
 
Any game can have a hard mode. Be creative!

Hold the controller upside down, play with your feet, face away from the TV. The customizable difficulty options are endless!
 
Griffon said:
Dark Souls is only hard if you're an impatient button mashing fucko.
It strives to teach acceptance, self-control and resilience. Once you've gained enough zen, the game isn't so hard, and you can enjoy exploring the amazing interconnected world.

Most souls clones misunderstand that.
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It's slow, stupid and clunky.
I much prefer SB/Wukong combat that are faster and more connected.

kur07 said:
No amount of story or graphics can match the satisfaction of progressing through a tightly balanced, challenging game.
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There is no challenge in SP games.
 
I'm with you OP. Generally can't stand easy games. They have their place, but when I sit down to play, I want a challenge.
There's something to be said for games that actually are poorly designed and thus frustrating, but that's not always the case, half the time it really is just gamers being crybabies. Get good or play a different game.
The moment I hear a game is easy, I almost always steer clear of it. DK Bananza is a recent example. I was already turned off by its hideous aesthetic, hearing how easy its normal mode is was the final nail in the coffin.
DOOM: The Dark Ages also let me down in this regard. They obviously caved to all the bitching online about Eternal's difficulty, because TDA's Nightmare difficulty at launch was way too easy, and Ultra-Violence was a joke. They've since made it a bit tougher with balance updates however.

I've found the whole "modern audiences" thing isn't just about woke bs, it's the reason why pussy shit like Funky Mode in DKC Tropical Freeze on Switch was added. It's not just for teh kidz (who most of the time are perfectly capable of completing such games without resorting to game-breaking baby modes), it's also for grown ass, weak-willed crybaby gamers who blame devs and seek out easy mode mods at the first real challenge a game throws at them.
 
Ainem Enamas said:
Maybe would be awesome if devs would make more advanced difficulty adjustments for players to select
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This is the answer. More options for people to tailor the experience to their own tastes. I'm a fan of sliders for accessibility, where you can increase or decrease certain aspects of the game. 99% of the time I just roll with the set difficulty or normal, but there are times that I like to be able to tweak some options, especially if it's a game I've gone through before.
 
Someone should come out with difficulty options in games. Have like easy, normal, and than hard (perhaps even higher!). Such a game would sell quite well I think.
 
Larxia said:
I disagree, because this isn't the way games work.
If you take a game that was designed around an average / easy difficulty, and you select the hardest mode because you want challenge, it most of the time will be a tedious experience, because the game wasn't designed around that.

Simply increasing the damages you get or the damage you deal is most of the time really not a good option. If what the hard mode does is just making combats longer, it can make the experience boring, instead of it being a fun challenge.

When a game has a unique difficulty, it being an average difficulty or a hard one, everything will be designed properly around that, giving the player the proper tools for that difficulty.

There are exceptions of course, the best one to me being Kingdom Hearts which I mentioned earlier. In critical mode, everything is harder, but it's not just that, everything is rebalanced, you get access to a lot more available skills, it's faster, it plays differently, to the point of almost being another game. The game give the players all the proper tools needed for that new experience / difficulty, instead of just being the same game but with longer and more tedious progression.
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I don't understand why it's so hard for some people to understand that, uuugggghhhh
 
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