Cries in shadow warrior
Comment on Gaming Pet Peeves
DaCrazyJamez@sh.itjust.works 23 hours ago
When the only difference in difficulty is either by adding more waves of enemies, or giving bosses a bajillion hitpoints.
If I already learned all the game mechanics, and the only scaling is having to repeat them a lot more, that’s poor design.
I dont mean this as much for adjustable difficulty, like easy vs hard mode, but rather in game progression…
Lojcs@piefed.social 20 hours ago
vateso5074@lemmy.world 17 hours ago
I’d also make that complaint about adjustable difficulty, but to speak to the game progression, I have to agree.
Games should be teaching players what they’re getting into from the very beginning. The tutorial should be “When you do everything right, this is how easy the game is. When it’s not this easy, it means you’re doing something wrong”. That “wrong” thing could be messing up a mechanic, not upgrading your character enough, or you’re trying to go to a later area too early. It’s a teaching moment.
So many games today, at “Normal” difficulty, will throw players into combat encounters where they just basically kill everything in one hit. So players in the tutorial think “This is a bit too easy, I’m going to up the difficulty to Hard”, but then they don’t realize that everything gets harder when you exit the tutorial, and then over the course of the game the difficulty keeps outpacing your progression.
As far as the difficulty slider goes, I think it’s always better when harder modes just make you easier to kill, rather than enemies being more difficult to kill. There’s often a good balance that can be struck between the two, but too many games just opt for just making enemies tankier and tankier, which ends up turning the “difficulty” slider into a “time/resources waster” slider.