“ideal” difficulty is whatever you get the most enjoyment out of. Nothing more or less.
Comment on Gaming Pet Peeves
Lojcs@piefed.social 7 hours ago
I’m souring on difficulty options lately. How am I supposed to know the ideal difficulty of a game without having played it before? You’re the developer, you designed it and if you’re confident in your game balance you should pick the default difficulty. Better yet, get rid of discrete difficulties and add customizable assist mode instead.
Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net 3 hours ago
Lojcs@piefed.social 1 hour ago
How am I supposed to know which one that is
Doc_Crankenstein@slrpnk.net 1 hour ago
By playing the game and adjusting as needed to the experience you are having. That’s what difficulty options are there for.
Lojcs@piefed.social 1 hour ago
While I do change them if I feel things are seriously off, I don’t think changing the settings mid-playthrough is the solution. It is normal for the same game to have different difficulties at different times so if you’re adjusting difficulty mid fly on a first playthrough you probably won’t get the same highs and lows as intended. It is impossible to know from the first stages how the difficulty ramps up, sometimes they are easier, sometimes they are just mechanically simpler and sometimes they are purposefully difficult so you have to learn key mechanics.
Difficulty options are like consumable potions to me if that makes sense
Flamekebab@piefed.social 6 hours ago
Whilst I didn’t enjoy the mechanics of Control, I was very impressed at the settings it offered. I could essentially turn off combat if I wanted. Yes, it won’t be the same game experience, but if I choose to play that way - let me!
In the old days we had cheat codes for this stuff. I cheated my way through a lot of games and then revisited later without cheats. Some of those became my favourite games of all time (Theme Hospital and Tony Hawk’s Pro Skater 3 both spring to mind).