Easy Modes Aren't Easy - Designing Dynamic Difficulty - Extra Credits
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- čas přidán 21. 08. 2024
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As games become more and more popular as a past time, there's become a growing conversation about the difficulty of games. We've all had that experience where we've hit a wall in a game we otherwise loved or a game was so easy it couldn't engage us for more than 10 minutes. Most games attempt to answer this difficulty by offering different modes that usually tweak enemy & player health, or enemy & player damage. Which is... fine. It's fine. But what about games like Ghost of Tsushima, Control, and the new gold standard, The Last of Us Part 2?
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That "intended vision" visual pun is just *mwuah* beautiful.
I've never seen someone spell out the chef's kiss sound, but I immediately knew that's what it was.
@@hoodiesticks same
There is an irony in the fact that the only character who has sleeves is the only character who is lacking an arm.
?
@@fatpenguin0089 @1:47 the character only has 1 arm, but because these characters dont have arms they needed to pin up a sleeve to help show that they just didnt forget to draw a floating hand.
The presenting character also has sleeves.
@@Ggdivhjkjl my god. I am a fraud
Technically, no one has arms. It's just floating hands. Mabey some sleeves.
You guys touched on it a bit, but I hate the mentality that making opponents more bullet spongy makes them "harder." That's not a challenge to anything except my attention span. If that's the difference in easy moderate and hard, I'm turning it into easy because there's no intrinsic difference in actual difficulty.
That was kinda where Control lost me -- I hit a point where I was dying super easily and the enemies were just sponges for damage and would randomly spawn when I was trying to get back from the checkpoint to my objective and it ruined the fun for me and I never finished it.
Shadow Warrior Classic is usually speedrun on the easiest difficulty because all the harder modes do is make the faster times more luck dependent. And you can't accuse speedrunners of lacking in skill or dedication.
Honestly, I love how Ghost of Tsushima did it's Lethal difficulty. It's not just a difficulty increase, it's a whole different experience. I actually started on medium difficulty and struggled with the game, and then switched to Lethal and found that the choice to make it much closer to the reality of "one cut, one kill" actually made the game much more intuitive for me to play.
In NIER: Automata, each difficulty changes your stats, not enemies as much. Against equal level enemies, attacks do a % of your remaining HP. Each lowering from max difficulty increases your health by 1 point. Even on the lowest difficulty, you only have 4 hits before reaching an ending.
Yeah difficulty that increases lethality across the board I think is the best way to do it if done well. I usually never up the difficulty of a game if the answer to it is just making enemies spongier. I feel it more engaging when everyone is a glass canon.
@@furiouscorgi4812 Considering that game and the team's semi-trolling nature I wonder if that was intentional, to make fun of difficulty modes.
Is this like heaven or hell mode from the DMC games?
@@sharif47 Kind of. The combat isn't true one hit kill gameplay in Lethal. But you do massive damage to enemies and they do massive damage to you. Late game bosses truly can one or two shot you, but likewise, if you stagger them, you also deal more damage to them than in other difficulties, the game becomes much more precision and tactic based, as it's about breaking your enemies' guard or killing them before they can get their guard up.
How about a video on the opposite of this? You could call it "Hard Modes Are Hard".
I think it's worth talking about, because as someone who generally plays games on the highest difficulty, I can pretty confidently say that hard mode generally fucking sucks, as it's usually not so much hard as merely tedious. The standard method of increasing "difficulty" in games is still to increase enemy health and damage, but all that does is make them bullet sponges. Since their AI doesn't change, they're still just as stupid, still just as easily exploitable, it just takes longer to defeat them. A simple task isn't made more difficult by making you do it 10 times extra, it just makes it tedious.
I think doom2016 and doom eternal did a good job on the difficulty settings.
@@UyeGaming That may be true, but others don't have such an accolade.
I think thats why games like dark souls work so well - they are designed with only one intended difficulty in mind and therefore are much tighter experiences. Games that let you choose settings mostly only are satisfying on one of them while the rest feels tacked on and balanced in a lackluster way. Also combat is difficult to get right and while many games are fun, few have actually a good combat system that is nuanced enough to work properly on high difficulties. I think its telling when I beat Sekiro multible times but didnt have the nerves to play through the witcher 3 on its highest setting lmao
Other than dark souls the skulls in the halo series is another good example. My friends and I loved trying to beat ODST with all the skulls on. The bigger explosions combined with the grunt birthday party actually mixed up the game quite a bit, and because headshots are harder without a reticle it really felt like we were an elite squad of regular people fighting against the aliens.
Alien game bro
I can only blame myself for picking the hard mode in the first place, and then having a hard time beating the easiest mobs.
I was the one who decided to pick master mode and now I have to ether take extreme caution to fight them or *run like hell*
I feel you playing Hardcore Minecraft
One nice thing Ratchet Deadlocked did was allow you to choose difficulty every time on game startup. Feeling up for a challenge? Set it higher. Not so confident? Set it lower.
I am concerned that putting too many difficulty settings up front can make it feel like it's your responsibility to understand the complex interactions between game mechanics before you can find a combination of settings you enjoy, which can be off-putting. I think a selection of pre-designed difficulty settings, with the possibility of further tweaking, strikes a better balance between simplicity and control, like in Invisible Inc.
Agree - there is a point where leaving too many decisions to the player can veer into making them do your job, except they may ruin their own fun in the process.
There's one thing I've noticed is that gamers as a whole are getting older and I've heard some gamers complain that games are too fast today so accessibility could be something good for older gamers.
I've noticed similar alot more too, especially some people I watch mentioning "id enjoy if this difficult area was bonus instead of required to beat the game"
Exactly, our vision and reaction times aren't getting any better! My vision is terrible and surgery probably won't fix it even if it was financially feasible. The first thing I do turning on a new game is look for accessibility options because I need larger font and subtitles, and I also look to see if I can change the speed of camera motions. Any other accessibility options such as timing mechanics would be a godsend
I know my reactions are a little slower, but an even bigger factor is that I have less patience for spending hours developing muscle memory and memorising action sequences.
As I'm getting older I also choose to play easier difficulties because I just want to enjoy the game. I also don't have as much time as I used to, so I'd rather not get stuck in a difficult encounter for hours.
As far as the time issue I just wish more games would just let me save anywhere. I don't really care too much about difficulty (though the RSI in my wrists would tend to disagree), but save points were a necessity from a time where save files were either passwords or very limited in the amount you could reasonably store. Those are really not technical issues anymore. This is also why even though I own a lot of original hardware and software I use emulators to play almost any classic game I own. Savestates make a lot of classic RPG games far better to play, PS1 era squaresoft games were insane in the spacing of some of their save points.
I really appreciate developers changing the name of Easy Mode to Story Mode. As someone who is in a relationship with someone who just recently picked up gaming, the Story Mode verbiage really helps make the game more inclusive and feel more fun to play even from just the menu screen.
Also not having the game insult players for choosing an easy difficulty would be great.
I think it's dumb. At some point, even if accessibility is important, saying someone "passed away" might sound lighter but it's not going to change the fact that they died. In the end, wording just hides things until the wording itself s irrelevant. Ten years from now, story mode will be the same as easy mode is now.
Eh... the first time I picked up Halo, I took no offence to the likely most appropriate mode for me being labelled "Easy", with a description something like "your foes cower before you, but final victory may leave you wanting more".
All the easy/normal/heroic/legendary selection seeks to be is a lever for how much challenge you want the game to throw at you. If you use easy mode to experience the story while having a lack of proficiency in the game's genre, then the game may as well be honest and accurate in its description without being insulting.
Well, I'm a challenge runner so I'm not really the right person to talk about easy modes, but what I think allows for people to have an easy time yet still rewarding experience, is mechanics based difficulty adjustment like you guys talked about way back in your video about Dark Souls 2's difficulty. Things like extra powerful weapons, ranged weapons, mechanics swapping items and other types of gear that allow you to outsmart the enemies. Things that allow players to focus on "fighting clever" rather than "fighting hard". Also multiplayer options that allow other players to help you out.
Those certainly are good options too! Not to mention some of those options could be better for an Indie Game that has less resources to create a lot of specialized options.
I feel like the inverse is a good question to pose too: how many terrible hard modes are out there, *especially* for JRPGs, where they just turn your damage down, enemies health up and damage up?
I'm glad Celeste got at least a reference cause the assist mode in that game is great for helping out less skilled players.
I've never actually viewed easy modes as a way to save time.
Now I feel so dumb.
You shouldn't feel dumb. Different people have different values. Exposing yourself to different viewpoints means seeing the world in ways that you may have never considered. As someone who often plays on lower difficulties to experience more games in their life, I would hope that hearing about that viewpoint doesn't make anyone feel dumb. It's just another way of experiencing the world.
Sometimes we need an external influence to see things, it's just human nature :)
I started playing some games on easy mode after my son was born. It's a true time saver
it's kinda contradicting for some people, i also play pretty much only on easy to save time, yet for some people gaming is for passing time, but for me it's to relax and as an anti stress.
There's a couple of games where I really don't care too much about a combat challenge and I get frustrated having to repeat battles over and over again in something like Spider-Man PS4, so I'll play on the easier setting just to press through quickly for some light popcorn fun.
But on the other hand I love the Soulsborne games because of the specific mindset of repetitive death that they invoke because it's part of the ethos of the world. I would never want Bloodborne to have an easy mode, for example.
4x game difficulty normally just changes how much head start the AI has on you and how much they cheat
[Cuts to woman on couch]
“So, there you are, playing through a triple A action game.”
Me: Hey, I’ve seen this one befor- Oh no...
On a coach... Did you mean couch?
?
Its happeming again
@@Thecarianknight Its fine this is a good take
idgi
I always start off easy and work my way up in difficulty
You dont Always have the Option For Games that do need 40+ hours to Beat it. I usually Go normal or hard.
I always do the opposite, hardest first, forces you to learn. Ofc everyone has their own gaming-style
For me, it depends on the game. If it's a single campaign that's going to take 120 hours to complete, I'll start on normal and maybe bump it up a bit on my second playthrough. If it's a game like the Civilization series where the game takes a few hours, I'll start on easy mode to get a handle on the mechanics then bump the difficulty up until I find a good balance between challenge and fun.
If I really like a game, I absolutely will go back and try again on a harder setting. Some games, especially platformers, are perfect for starting easy and playing again with more difficulty.
@@Shrifbun exactly
Something I would consider:
To many different modes will lead to a choice paralysis.
Branched difficulty will kill the replay value since you can''t just hop the ladder upwards.
Branched difficulty still gives replay and the ability to increase difficulty. If settings a, b and c make the game harder then a + b should be harder than just a or b. Even if you can't compare just a with just b and can't really say if a+b is harder than c, adding more things will make a harder mode and a+b+c will be the hardest.
A mixed system that offers "easy", "normal" and "hard" packages while also letting those who wish to personalize the settings would be a good compromise. Say you pick easy mode because combat is too hard, but then you feel that stealth has also become too easy, so you can go back and boost enemy perception, while retaining the easier combat.
If you do a huge number of options to fine tune difficulty and play experience, you should probably still include presets for those who don't want to pick through everything before playing. These presets might not be exactly easy, medium, and hard, but they should be easy to choose at a glance. You may also want the option to save different set-ups in case more than one person will play the same game.
Being able to export and share would help if someone wants to play on another machine or set things up for someone looking for a particular experience.
Oh yeah. Especially since I am in that menu trying to figure out what settings I want before playing the game. Easy/normal/hard should be presets that can be optionally tweaked (for example, I usually play on what I think is the normal/default difficulty, but if there is an option, I always turn auto aim off). Or there should be an explanation on what the difficulty mode is for (that is, I want to play on normal difficulty, the game not being made artificially easier or harder)
The hardest part about an easy mode is the stigma that comes with it. I've known too many people who hit that wall and just quit rather than switch to an easier mode because they feel that choosing that option means they aren't a 'real' gamer and the reactions I've seen online from gamers towards people who choose easy mode just reinforces this idea..
Sadly this problem isn't one the developers can do anything to fix, this is entirely on us to fix.
Horizon Zero Dawn did an amazing job with dynamic difficulty.
Feels like they didnt describe how the existing dynamic difficulties even work.
@@635574 It's pretty clear, at Ultra Hard mobs have 2xHP and better AI and Damage. Simple yet elegant. Also everything costs more. Other then that, the characters stats don't change at all. I am 60th level and still get one shoot with 800hp.
I actually like the dynamic difficulty of Spyro 3. Aside from one specific boss, the entire game is balanced in such a way that you won't even notice there's a hidden difficulty option working in the background.
Holding down a button instead of spamming it? Is that you, Loaded Umbrella?
There you are, sacking every dungeon and doing every quest
And suddenly
You're underleveled
Good, kick my ass and make me come back later, makes the reward that much better.
Shadow Warrior 2 (the remake version) had a great way of putting it: Easy Mode is for when you want to feel like a goddamn superhero.
Alternate description for Halo Easy Mode: The in-canon Master Chief. Prove me wrong.
1:40 that drawing is adorable, I love it
I didn't see the baby until I checked your time stamp XD .
Honestly, the whole difficulty 'levels' seem to be something to give up on in favor of games like Last of Us or even Hades where you just have a bunch of levers to tweak the experience to your liking. This really shouldn't be too hard to implement as a lot of these levers are probably made as debug/tuning tools during game dev anyway; you just have to keep those tools in the options of the game open.
Sure, if such a method is compatible with the game. That's the thing though, as they said in the video, there are many types of games with so many variables at play that makes any single solution only a possibility for a very select set of games.
Presets/modes are there as partly a convenience for players, but also allow the devs to tune and refine the game experience. One reason they focused here on AAA studios is because they have the huge QA teams to test various combinations of those "levers" to make sure nothing is completely game-breaking. And even with $$$M and 100s of people, I'd wager that many of those levers are not actually tested at full min/max range, or in any but the most common combinations.
For instance, t's hard enough to get them to actually include accessible game features, let alone fully test the gameplay in that mode.
I spent the entirety of the Five Uncharted PS4 Games on easier than easy difficulty , I was having a blast and I say that with zero shame. Think about it- Raiders of the Lost Ark would NOT been improved by us watching Indy die at the enourmous hench-man boss fight eight times in a row Edge of Tomorrow-style.
Maybe not, but now I think someone should make a show about an adventurer who does that whenever he dies.
Easy modes that are just the same with different numbers drive me up a wall. If I'm playing on easy, it's because I suck at the game. That means I need gentler AI as well, not just different numbers. For example, my Dad barely ever plays games, but he loves star wars. Sadly he can't really play many of them because the AI are too brutal even at the start. I just him to feel like a superhero or jedi when I give him a controller.
It sucks the other way, too. Playing on hard means I want my skills tested. Having to do the same boss fights but with numbers adjusted usually just means the fights take too long and I have to repeat the whole thing after 1 or 2 mistakes. That doesn't test my skill, it tests my patience.
That's why the AI increase should be what the difficult adjusts, rather then hp and damage.
@@ZatoichiBattousai Well, tweaking enemy AI isn't as easy as it sounds. Like, how do you quantify "Easier" for a computer controlling a unit in an action/adventure game? Or less aggressive? How do you modify the unit's frame data so that it's slower, but its hitboxes aren't also out for a lot longer than they look like they should be (Which is what would happen if you just put a modifier on the animation speed) and also without just making a whole new moveset that's exclusive to the easier difficulty?
Challenges like that are why so many Easy Modes instead opt to make it so the player isn't punished as harshly for mistakes (Increasing their health, reducing enemy damage, giving them a certain amount of super armor, giving them more lives or other resources) and also don't have to not make mistakes for as long consecutively (Reducing enemy health and numbers).
has he played SW fallen order? Dunno about the AI, but the mechanics change as well
@@hoodiesticks What that generally means is that the developers didn't know how to actually make hard harder in the time allotted by the studio / publishers. And it's not just fighting games either. Some games have little point in playing at anything other than normal since all they do is make game shorter (easy) / longer (hard) on the margins by impacting the human's production rate while the AI stays constant.
Honestly one of the simplest solutions that most games these days generally offer is to allow changing the difficulty on the fly. I often do this if a particular fight is just too frustratingly hard, I change the settings for just that fight.
As a hobbyist baker I can tell you that is not what a cookie sounds like. What was that?...a celery?
Suspend your disbelief! :D
I've heard that's actually a very common one for crunchy noises.
While I personally enjoy my games to be challenging and disagree with the idea of difficulty settings being a requirement in most games, I do agree that accessibility settings are far too limited in most games and should be expanded moving forward.
Easy mode. The mode that is easy, till it’s not
Yeah. They could just up the difficulty
I would like to hear about 2 subjects concerning easy mode difficulty: limiting content based on the difficulty setting and the game itself mocking you for playing on easy mode. Are these acceptable to motivate the player to improve their skill? Will this discourage lesser players based on circumstances beyond their control? Does the easy mode mockery ruined self esteem?
Naming modes often makes people choose settings that they wouldn't enjoy. They should be as neutral as possible to convey exactly what they do rather than making value judgements about people who pick them (positive or negative).
@@PlatinumAltaria You’re preaching to the choir. As much as I love Wolfenstein, I felt somewhat disheartened to see the portrait of their easy difficulty: BJ dressed as a baby complete with a pacifier. I won’t last seconds on hard and especially Über, I got other things to do.
I don't think that it's necessarily a problem. Some games are made to be difficult and failing a lot is part of the experience the developers intended (see Cuphead, Dark Souls).
I also personally don't mind when the game jokes a bit about me playing on easy mode, that is definitely something I did a lot as a kid and that pushed me to improve. It can vary from game to game, but not so serious games or games like Doom/Wolfenstein get a pass imo, because they pride themselves on a certain tone (I.e. brutal boomer shooter where you have to wade through rows of enemies) and if the easy mode kinda betrays that tone, it's fair for the game to poke a little fun
@@ozwell1088 I would respectfully say not most games. There are players there who have physical and mental disabilities that would hinder their ability to enjoy the game at higher difficulties. Do you think it is okay to insult them for circumstances beyond their control?
Both can be especially problematic when presented to people who have physical barriers keeping them from harder difficulties, be they colorblindness, impaired motor skills, or lower reaction time, because then the game isn't simply ribbing you for not bringing your best, it's mocking you for literally not being good enough for it, which can be extremely demoralizing. doubly so when it also means sections of the game are permanently off limits to you.
besides, there's a lot of hubris to that sort of design philosophy, because no matter how good you are, there will come a day where you realize you're not as fast or as dexterous as you used to be, and that ultra-super-hard-mode-for-pros-only that you made will eventually become off limits to you as well.
The puns and imageries in this video is just (chef's kiss).
Eating a cake with Vision, yeah that'll be a fun way to spend an afternoon.
I’m pretty crunched for time sometimes, so this was pretty neat to listen to
I really appreciate that you guys don't treat easy mode like the baby setting or something new players should try to graduate from. I almost always play games on the easy setting because I want to enjoy the story of the game, and I don't find dying over and over again to be fun. It just frustrates me, and more often than not I'll drop the game entirely if it stymies me for too long. This is why I never finished Ori and the Blind Forest- I got to the ginso tree, switched from normal to easy while trying to complete the escape sequence, and still died 74 times. (I know exactly how many times I died because the game helpfully gives you a counter of how many times you've died on the menu screen, which honestly feels like a middle finger from the developers). I bulldogged my way through one more level, then got to an obstacle that I died on over 100 times. On EASY MODE. I quit the game and haven't gone back, and I was so irritated that despite how much I loved the story and the art direction of the game, I've never tried to go back and play again to find out how it ends.
When it feels like the game developers are sitting over your shoulder, laughing at you and saying "git gud", that makes me just never want to give them my money again.
Huh, in Celeste I viewed the deaths as a mark of pride. Damn straight I died 1000 times climbing that mountain. 100 death for one challenge seems ridiculous though.
Can a game incorporating several difficulties be as good as the same game after narrowing its target audience enough to polish to the limit a single difficulty setting? For every game I start to play with different difficulty settings I always go after reddit for some review on how numb and unfair they may be because you cannot possibly polish all difficulty settings. Perhaps we should make more "special purpose" games rather than "jack of all trades" games and be better aware of what we consumers want individually to specifically search either for "casual games", "hardcore games", or any of the many more possible categories we could have.
i dont usually play on easier than "normal", and i dont really need to utilize accessibility options, but i 100% support adding as many accessibility and difficulty options as possible. no one should be excluded from experiencing a great game just because we dont address whatever difficulties people have that we can.
Glad to see you guys redoing some of the topics of your older videos!
thing is that all the Effort that goes into making the Easy Mode also benefits the Hard Mode design, as learning how to help a player also tells you how to challenge them.
so it benefits both ends of the spectrum.
also for the people going "huehue dark souls fans be like" that's the point, Souls already has Dinamic difficulty so it doesn't need the toggle, could it have more accesibility options? absolutely
In Bloodborne, I beat every boss in the main game and DLC. It was incredible, and I "got good", but GETTING good was one of the most miserable experiences in my life. If there were an infinite Blood Vials mode, or story-focused route, I would have taken it.
I'm pretty sure the 'story route' for the Souls games is just watching youtube videos on it.
I've rarely found a game that does dynamic difficulty better than RE4. Good times.
Great Video! But what about the dynamic difficulty system from Resident Evil 4? If the game recognizes that you are struggling or doing too well it adjusts the item amounts and enemies on the fly in an attempt to make the game more enjoyable.
RE4 is a great example. The difficulty shifts are subtle enough you won't notice casually, and is locked to maximum in Professional for those who to bang their head against the wall or speed run the game.
I think "Easy" and "Assist" Mode are perceived quite differently.
While Easy is about the difficulty of the game Assist ist more about inclusion.
I know both of those have similar effects on gameplay but they still feel very different when you activate them.
Plus a proper Assist Mode allows you to tweak much more than just setting the game to easy. So I think the Assist Mode approach is actually the better way to convey an intended experience while still letting as much people as possible enjoy it.
I for one am glad Easy/Story mode is still available. I was worried that the rise of Dark Souls and it's various clones would make every game into the first levels of Nioh which killed me so many times that by the time I got to Japan I was seriously wondering why I was plugging away at something that I wasn't enjoying. I liked how Diablo III did it you could have fun at lower skill levels but the juiciest loot and biggest rewards were to be found in the numerous Torment levels.
Am I the only one who plays all the modes in a game? I go from easy to hard.
I try to start at highest difficulty as I can, because then that becomes the norm, but that's after 40+ years of gaming.
I beat all the modes in Bayonetta
I did that on FTL, but FTL is hard and random enough that even easy mode isn't a sure thing (especially with some ships) and hard mode has to be unlocked. Plus a rogue-like is a lot different than most games.
Depends how easy you can switch. Or if theres some advantage.
You are not alone, trust me! If a game is good and I have the time, I'll absolutely go back for a new game+/ harder difficulty!
This is a nicely nuanced discussion. I find that a lot of the negativity around the idea of easy modes tends to end up boiling down to gatekeeping; people who want to keep gaming small of just for people they approve of. But the more, the merrier. Inclusion is a net positive, especially for a medium like this.
I want more customizable difficulty modes. For example maybe I want to lower my health but not have the enemies be bullet sponges, or I want to really beef up my defence but lower my damage. I find 99% of shooter games just slide a scale of enemy health and your own health and I just find that an annoying way to handle difficulty. Especially when most shooter games just have you hide while your health comes back and then pop out and shoot again.
I appreciate it when video games refer to easy mode as story mode or don't even set modes but rather let you activate accessibility or assist options. Many big games are now understanding, like mentioned, that people barely have more an hour to devote everynight to gaming, let alone 40+ hours total to get good at a game and finish it. Some people really just want to experience the story without being treated like a baby for it. The number of times my spouse and I have turned on an easy mode and had the game literally mock up for it (think Wolfenstein overtly, but even paper mario origami king mocks players that struggle with puzzles or uses assists) is exhausting. We are both employed and busy and when we sit down to game together, we just want to enjoy the story and not worry about mechanics. Gaming is a relaxing and bonding time for us, not a screaming session. And a lot of times we'll go back and play it on a harder difficulty when we are feeling up for the challenge. Celeste is a fantastic example of people playing through once with the assists and then easily finding themselves sucked into the thought "I bet I can do this without assists. I bet I can do this faster and better!"
I just wanna randomly say this, I enjoy that you all put your sponsorship stuff at the end of the video. It starts up in a way that gets your attention and makes you focus throughout the episode, and then handles all that at the end. It's a good way to handle all that stuff. The beginning can work too. Honestly, putting sponsorships and stuff in the middle of a video should be considered a video creation sin.
Please always include a colourblind mode! If you're after an easy way to do that, just use the ColorAdd system.
I mean why have an easy mode, when you can have just... custom mode. I am often tweaking my games with mods, and often i make them harder, not easier. And every time i think: why isn't there a menu with toggles to customize my game?
For example, what if i WANT enemies to be bullet sponges, but me too? Because i am playing in VR and i want to have to swing a lot as a workout, but i don't want to die in one hit? It should be just two scrollbars in the settings...
i can agree with a lot of this but i also think that not all games need or should have easy modes, for example, hollow knight is a game with no difficulty settings and its a pretty challenging game, but it does give you all the tools you need to figure out the game and its nuanced mechanics, and maybe being hard is something that some games just need to be, and part of participating in those games is growing your own skill to match and surpass the challenge of the game
Having specific difficulty adjustments and accessibility options can make for a vastly better experience to having the choice of easy/medium/hard. Not only do people find that different specific factors contribute to difficulty in different ways, but they can also enjoy difficulty in different areas as well. For example, a player who is technically skilled in shooters might enjoy having faster enemies but find more durable enemies to be tedious. Increasing both speed and durability with one setting would make the game harder for them, but not necessarily a better experience.
I couldn't agree more. I've had limited time since my college days (engineering degree), so games that don't expect me to invest dozens or hundreds of hours to "git gud" when I just want to enjoy a great story or setting, is super important to me.
Not only that, but I have Major Depressive Disorder, so a crushing difficulty just damages my already broken mental state. If I want to experience an endless series of crushing failures due to my own shortcomings, I'll just try dating again. Or other real-life activities. And no, finally overcoming that challenge isn't worth it for me... if I can manage it, then at best it's merely a relief that returns me to a pre-frustration level. That sense of accomplishment lasts but a few fleeting seconds, and doesn't wash away the damage that hours of failure left behind.
Also, since they had to bring up TLoU2. I agree that their gameplay customization is top-notch. I just wish there was a setting to change the story away from "makes me want to take a hot bath with razor blades and my favorite toaster."
Couldn't agree more
Striking the balance of easy and engaging is very tricky.
The worst is when they just reduce your damage and increase the enimies hp and damage. Though it works, I find it very immersion breaking and it teaches you to just use exploits and other game breaking min/max. It's always better to just increase enemy AI for more challenging gameplay.
Difficulty modes that simply change the amount of damage you deal and take are terrible, unfortunately, it's what's easy that ultimately gets put in, and stuff that requires more thought often tends to get left to the wayside.
I always appreciate when you guys do videos about game mechanics or subjects like this. Assist mode made control a lot more enjoyable for me except for one thing. That wall of difficulty you mentioned at the beginning applies to me with puzzles. I would really like to see a video going deeper into the subject of why some people dislike puzzles in games and what devs can do to solve the problem.
The first System Shock game handled puzzles by giving you a difficulty slider for them.
Shoutout to Touhou games, who have a "Lunatic" mode aka "Hard Harder Mode"
I'm surprised the people who run this channel have enough time to actually produce videos, seems like their free time would be filled up with all the fart huffing and self-congratulatory back pats for having the right opinions.
There's a factor here that I think is being overlooked. Difficulty setting have the potential to make challenge feel arbitrary. Dark Souls does a lot to make itself feel brutal and uncompromising, when it' was actually designed to be beaten, and the bosses are (in a sense) letting you win, but a difficulty option would risk breaking that illusion.
Robust mod support will always be the best way to let gamers customize there experience, but Free accessibility DLC helps preserve "the integrity of the game" as well.
Easy, normal, and hard are too vague to someone who has never played your game before. There should be an effort to make choosing difficulty as painless as possible, so the player wont have analysis paralysis. We could use universe specific adjectives. For example, lets use a barbaric theme for the game. Wanderer is easy exploration, champion challenges you at every turn, and barbarian is a mix of both.
Did my dissertation on dynamic difficulty adjustment in games, wish this video came out back then XD would have had another video to reference for the paper :P
Customized difficulty settings are awesome and I wish more games would have them.
I don't play much anymore, mainly just because the rise of HD has exponentially increased complications caused by my colorblindness. More in-depth colors for everyone else means less ability to distinguish slightly different shades of context clues and a muddy looking environment...
Engaging the audience with many different options is great, but I do like a game in the older style that may be very rough to play initially but gets easier - but also more interesting - as you learn the quirks and skills that is needed to play them. It feels different to complete a game you need to master, compared to beating a game that's set to be easily completed because it caters to my specific likes. Dark Souls is a game I'd add to that category, but older games like Mario 64 required that "shift" in mindset to fully beat.
Speaking as someone who didn't need Control's assist mode but gave it a try once I'd completed the game just to see what it's like, it's pretty comprehensive. You can customize most aspects of the game, from how much damage you take to how quickly your energy and ammo regenerate to the strength of aim assist, and it's all independent of each other. If you like throwing forklifts at enemies, for instance, just bump your energy regeneration to the max and don't touch anything else. I've been considering doing a sort of John Wick run where aim assist is set to max (you automatically snap to enemies once you hold the aim button and stay locked on) and one-hit-kills are turned on, but I don't upgrade my character at all or use any powers.
I've also thought a similar system could provide a sort of "reverse assist" system where players who want a challenge could alter things in the opposite direction to make things harder. Or just mix and match assists and reverse assists for their own game modes; imagine a mode where everyone takes so much damage they die in one hit, like DMC's Heaven or Hell.
To add to this, Hades is also a good example of an easy mode done right. Being a rogue-lite, It's god mode simply increments with each death. Add on a means to make the game harder as you go as well with the pacts of punishment, the game will always level out to your skills. And god mode can be turned off at any time.
I like strategic, turn-based games since I don't have to deal with having to have fast reflexes or be alert all the time. If i have to do too much at once I get foggy and frustrated, which is why I only can play one league game at a time lol
I always play a game on Easy the first time through, so I can best enjoy the story.
Very well done video! I wish more devs would put the time and resources into getting this right.
Recently i started playing through Shadow of the Tomb Raider, and they have separate difficulty sliders for combat, platforming and puzzles, which is great. But when i was setting the difficulties and it showed me in detail what each slider affected about the relevant part of the game i couldn't help but feel what a wasted opportunity it was to not further break them up. Particularly about puzzles, it would affect Lara giving hints when going into the special detection vision mode, how many interactables are highlighted in that vision mode, and the time windows for timing based puzzles. I would have loved to be able to switch off hints entirely, while having it highlight some relevant objects, and have the longest possible time windows on timing based puzzles. Because i love solving puzzles myself, but im not particularly a friend of not getting there because i keep missing a tiny detail, and I especially dislike aving already found the solution but i have to keep retrying because I cant act fast enough. And it felt like such a waste to gtave to find a compromise, when the developers obviously already knew what individual parts of the difficulty they could make customizable.
This is why I really dont appreciate games that actively shame you for choosing an easier difficulty *coughwolfensteincough*
Thank you for the episode.
Another option which "Ratchet & Clank Future: A Crack in Time" used: If you are stuck somewhere in the game, offer the player to skip the current part of the game (i.e. move you to the next platform if you fail to jump there more than three times, skip a boss battle or turn the battle into a cut-scene, same with puzzles). It's also quite easy and cheap to do: Just record the moves of a test player and replay them on demand.
You forgot another reason that people want easy mode: more realism. Dying 100 times in hard mode takes away from immersion in the game by requiring more and more suspension of disbelief. How would an actual hero do this game in one take? What am I actually role-playing when I die this often? How does that fit in with the plot of the game?
Petition to buy his studio a new carpet
My favorite is definitely how the dark souls includes the option to play as a pyromancer for those who aren’t great at parrying
Pyromancer, sorcerer, cleric, or hunter. Ranged fighting is Dark Souls easy mode. Also you can summon players and NPCs.
I sometimes play Guitar Hero and Rock Band on easy just so I can enjoy the music
I feel like some games benefit from not having an easy mode but that said it sould probably not be the standard for most games and accessibility is important
Anyone else remember the dynamic difficulty from Morrowwind? Leveling up non combat skills like alchemy or speech increased the level of enemy encounters... absolutely ridiculous
Was that in Morrowind too? Level scaling was definitely in Oblivion, EC has a video on this topic
Honestly, in my opinon...
While it is good that a lot of games have difficulty options..
Is it 100% valid for a game to not have them either.
A game designed to be beat at once specific difficulty, not harder, not easier, is a completely valid approach.
What i want to see going foreward is the ability to custom tune difficulty to how the player likes it. think like the Pro Codes and Fast Pass from KH3, or the settings in The Last of Us 2, but even MORE robust. let us change the values of enemy and party health, damage, as well as a bunch of other things. i find that there's a lot of games where there's this one tiny thing that's either overtuned or undertuned that messes with the experience for me. having more direct control over difficulty would make the experience more focused on the person, whether it would be easier or harder. also, you know that people are gonna mess around with the settings to make some really weird challenge runs, which is also fun to see. I know i'm asking for a lot, but being able to change various vales around does more than you think.
One thing that goes a long way and I'm astonished not every game has it yet:
The ability to toggle the difficulty and assist settings while in the game. In many games, you need to go the the main menu, change, then load a save game; or the difficulty setting is permanent and a specific save game.
Because there are often unintended difficulty spikes or throughs in mid game. For example, in Witcher 3 and Ghost of Tsushima the early game is incredibly difficult while your too OP for everything by late game, especially if you play side content a lot. I had to crank up W3 to Deathmarch to have a fun experience in the late campaign because I completed every. single. side quest. (to be fair, that's something the game teaches you to do with the first boss enemy).
Also, higher difficulties in action and strategy games tickle out new strategies and playstyles out of me and are quite fun. Higher difficulties in Jump'n'runs just frustrate me. On my current play through of It Takes Two with a friend, I die to simple jump passages 10 times. I'm not a jump and runner. I have reaction times and depth perception that are sometimes hazardous in everyday life (in other words, I'm really clumsy).
The illustrations for these videos are so great.
One strategy for creating a difficulty setting that I've seen thrown around is to balance the experience around being enjoyable on easy mode, and only start working on the harder difficulty modes once that basis is a solid and enjoyable experience.
Most games do that. The opposite extreme is a similar issue for designing difficulty modes.
I'm particularly fond of the way Hades handles the difficulty problem. With "Godhood" you start with a 20% damage reduction and get 2% more every time you die up to 80%. This lets the game scale baseline difficulty automatically to the point where you can win consistently. Then once you finish a run for the first time you unlock a list of challenge modifiers to modulate the difficulty for future runs in your preferred directions. They put a lot of effort into letting players choose their own difficulty and challenge scaling and it is beautiful.
Althought I love some challenge, lately I have been apprecianting more and more being able to reduce the game difficult or simply go for the easy mode, since my time to play ins't as long nor my reflex to hard challenges (and button mashing) match when I was kid.
And I can alweys tweak back to hard if I feel like challenging myself.
I think one of the best solutions is the way Masahiro Sakurai does it. In both Kid Icarus Uprising and Super Smash Bros Ultimate (In Classic mode), there's a difficulty slider, ranging from effortless to extremely challenging, and dying lowers the difficulty while doing well raises it. So the games balance themselves as you play, with a vast range of possible difficulties. (From 0.1 to 9.0, there's *10* difficulty settings in both examples)
i really resonate with the message in this video. I remember when I was super excited for Sekiro, but just being unable to get past the first real boss. Had to eventually stop trying because I got just too frustrated with it. Too bad, because the visuals and setting of the game were very interesting to me
Same! I was so glad when my spouse downloaded a mod for the pc edition that adjusted the difficulty! If you have it on PC, I absolutely recommend looking into the mods and picking which one would be best suited for your gameplay. There are mods that buff you or mods that slow down enemies, and there are a few to choose from!
And, because it needs to be said for some people: Easy Mode doesn't ruin YOUR experience of the hard modes!
Agreed
_But how can I feel superior if not by telling other people to "git gud"?_
14 hours ago it only came out a few minutes ago wtf
@@rolfs2165 why would that make people feel superior?
Absolutely true! For example I played XCOM2 on easy the first time because I just wanted the story and wasn't interested in the rest, now I'm sucked into impossible ironman modded runs for everything the game has to offer apart from the story.
Starcraft 2's campaign actually does a great job of modulating difficulty- up or down, by your preference. It doesn't tweak the unit or building balance, it just adjusts how aggressive the AI is, what units it favors- or can even use, in at least one case- and how many units it has on the map for free right at the start. I wish more RTS games changed difficulty that way. (Looking at you, Dawn of War.)
Given the sheer skill with which FROM Software make such masterfully designed games, how successful their games have been with all the money that implies, and the plethora of ways games showcased here have included easy modes and accessibility settings, they really don't have any excuse to not work towards easy modes and accessibility settings in their games.
They don't want those things in their games. It conflicts with the experience their game design is selling. A challenge is laid down and you're expected to meet that challenge, no shortcuts. They even weave it into the game world and their story telling. I wouldn't expect an easy mode any time soon.
Why should they? Their games aren't hard. They are just are not casual. With many mechanics, complex gameplay. I just don't see how they could make it easier without making it casual. What do you want to add? Quicksaves? Enemies do almost zero damage setting?
When talking about trying to keep the 'intended difficulty' of a game with difficulty settings, I'm very much reminded about Pathologic 2 and Celeste - both games are supposed to be really challenging, and they do tell you that up front in the difficulty menu - but at the same time recognize that everyone's tolerances and abilities are different, so they give you those accessibility options anyways.
That way, you are aware of the intended vision, and can tweak the gameplay experience to make it work that way for you, if you'd like to. I think games should have some sort of intended difficulty rating, as well as a very brief description of the intended difficulty of a game.
I also learned that most of my game troubles is actually just from processing speed - because if things are too high-paced I get overwhelmed; so having a way to slow down the game just a few notches really helps. Of course, Celeste has that feature built-in, but I also used a cheat console for Sekiro so I could actually play it.
Yeah, exactly.
We shouldn’t be ashamed for easy difficulty and its existence.
But it also shouldn’t be TOO easy.
Depends 100% on the game the devs want to make.
0:44 He said it! He said the thing!
What I always think is a good way to make modes is to start with Normal then add harder AI and more enemies to make it hard, then go one step further adding difficult weapons to make legendary. To make it easy, decrease enemy AI and make enemies lower rank or inumerous. Combat Evolved was my perfect difficulty design
I can't wait for the Soul-Borne crowd to lambast this episode for just existing.
Actually Extra Credits already made an episode explaining why Dark Souls had an "easy" mode.
ironically hardcore Souls Fans were worried that the Demon's remake would have "balanced difficulty to make it harder"
I feel like a lot of people play those games more to say that they have rather than wanting to enjoy the game.
Forgive me if you've already done a video on this, but I think there's a lot to dig into on this subject with fighting games specifically; I know it's a much more specific issue, but at the same time, the narrowed scope would let you talk about some of the "how"s and "why"s of what makes accessibility options function.
My go-to example is the "combo assist" mode from the 2013 Killer Instinct reboot; instead of motion inputs and whatnot, combos can be done by holding forward and pressing a single button. The catch is it's always the same move, which makes combo breaking significantly easier for the opponent, and as a result, combo assist is actually tournament legal (last I checked).
I loved the pic of Ellie reading to the Rat King, and I want it on a poster
I prefer games to be hard at the beginning and easier down the line, reflecting the growth of my character and make me feel badass. So a difficulty between normal and hard works great for me!
Oh, yeah. Balancing wanting to make the challenge greater as you get better with with players getting meaningfully stronger is hard. I think the new Spider-Man did it pretty well in that you unlock a bunch of tricks but not that much raw power, and they keep introducing meaningfully different enemies.
I hate it when easy mode changes combat but keeps puzzles exactly the same.