Topic: Do you think that "well designed" games should have difficulty modes/dynamic difficulty or should they not need them because they are "well designed"?

Seeing the discourse about the difficulty of HK: Silksong got me thinking about the way people enjoy games and how game developers create games. Every video game usually has a difficulty curve of some kind as the player goes from start to end. As the player gets better and more skilled at the game, its difficulty should equally rise to make sure they are thoroughly challenged.

A "well designed" game means that from start to the end, the game never asks too much from the player while also giving them a proper challenge. Its a fine line for game developers to tread, and there are many examples of games that have failed- being too hard for the average player or too easy for its intended audience.

Games like HK: Silksong, despite not having played it myself, are what I consider "well designed". Despite this, some people who have played it- and some who haven't but want to- wish that the game had difficulty options. While others who have finished it/ are still playing state that the game's difficulty is fair already and that those who complain simply need to "get good".
Just like HK: Silksong, Cuphead is a game that has the same sides. It is also one that i've played to completion and I can say... that the ability to beat the game on easy would be nice. It's a well designed game (Except for two boss fights), but without the dev's adding a limited use cheat code in the DLC island update I would have never beaten it.

Shovel knight and its many campaigns are inspired by how difficult games on the NES were without designing the levels to be unfair. Dark souls is incredibly hard and rage inducing for most, but some will still call it their favorite video game.

What's your opinion? (note: please don't focus on only just HK: Silksong when discussing)

My personal opinion is that forced changes made to games through updates to make the game easier are absolutely stupid.

Though I do love it when games include multiple optional difficulty options to choose from. The more options the better, I think.

Easier or better is always the question. Devs aren't omniscient and any game you create yourself is often going to feel easier to the devs then to players. Huge devs like Nintendo probably do enough play testing, but small teams aren't always able so some of the playtesting happens effectively after release and sometimes it turns out that games aren't balanced the way the devs wanted for their intended target audience.

Fundamentally it's never 'forced', the devs just make a decision.

Depends on the genre and intent of the game. Some well designed games are supposed to have zero challenge. Some well designed games are supposed to actively torture the player and yet still be fun.

The 'just git gud' argument is essentially the 'I never matured beyond age 12' argument and can be safely ignored. Which is not to say challenging games shouldn't exist, but a discussion with someone only thinking about themselves doesn't add any useful input.

In terms of 'should there be difficulty settlings'? 'well-designed game', 'widely accessible game', and 'well designed widely accessible game' are 3 distinct categories (note that I mean accessible to a wide player audience here, not accessibility settings which is a different thing). If you're aiming for the third category and hardness is naturally a part of your game, difficulty settings can certainly help reach that wider audience though you have to be careful with them to keep everything well balanced. If you just want to make one polished game at a specific difficulty level, go for it. I don't think anyone would claim the base Breath of the Wild without DLC is badly designed because there are no difficulty levels (The DLC added master mode but DLC often adds ways to extend playtime so that is a little different).

Since a lot of the discussion about difficulty settings this week has been about Metroid Prime 4, it should be noted that Metroid Dread added both easier and harder modes post-release. I never tried either of these two modes but their existence took nothing away from the enjoyment I had during my own playthrough.

I would say the only real negative about difficulty settings beyond the devs having to balance the game in multiple ways instead of just once (which is a potentially big negative and definitely shouldn't be required) is how to herd a given player into the 'proper' category for that person rather than one which will be too hard or easy for them and affect their enjoyment. Some games have automated and 'invisible' dynamic scaling difficulty based on how well the player is doing, but that is a whole different can of worms.

I personally don't think it's a huge issue even on game balance especially if it's VERY signposted that this is not the intended experience. Like, do people said Celeste is easy because one of the assist mode has infinite jump and dashes? No right, so I don't see it as a huge issue.

Like for example I'm right now playing Silksong on tons of qol mods and making the game easier.. and I still die lmao. Like, this just helps to stave off tons of frustration that I don't really want to handle, especially when I don't get much happiness from replaying the same bosses and finally winning.

Like I will give an example on silksong. Will having an option of "halving all incoming damage" be a huge balance issue in silksong, likely yeah if you really want to have people have the same feeling. But if the aim is just to let people have more choices and room for mistakes, I think they can literally just leave it? They don't have to change anything else.

Yeah, I strongly believe in the Celeste approach. One where there is a clear specific difficulty but hey IF YOU REALLY WANT TO, here you go.

But other than thinking that's smart and good, I don't personally care either way? Just make the game good at its base level and whatever else happens or doesn't...just is what it is.

Yeah, playtesting is definitely the key here. Even just with software dev generally as I do (i.e. not games) it's not uncommon to finish work on something and get feedback from even just testing that the implementation isn't clear or that they tried doing a thing you didn't anticipate. Then the back and forward happens with testing where it's refined but then they get comfortable with it so now user acceptance testing comes back with a different set of confusions

It's very, very easy when you're deep into working on a specific solution for sometimes months on end to get so comfortable with it your perspective on how the average user will interact with it gets shot. User feedback is the way to close that gap, it's critically important..... and also often the first thing to be skipped when trying to reach a deadline

Do in the end you just blame the end users for being idiots or blame their staff for not training them properly (aka "get good")

I am reminded of how apparently they didn't test the original Rayman enough, so the game ended up with wild, sometimes unfair difficulty spikes. Which if you play it...yeah...they did.

Though considering Rayman Redemption exists, maybe game devs shouldn't care at all of if their game is fair so fans can make a cool new thing on top of fixing it. :V

I play video games for the art. Options are better than no options. Better to include an easy mode even if your game is designed to be challenging. Most recently, Where Winds Meet handles this pretty well.

Normal difficulty, parry timing is tough for an old man like men. Switched the difficulty to story mode. Parries are turned into QTEs. And subsequent parries inside the enemy's combo are auto-parried.

Perfect, beautiful. Every souls-like should take note and adopt this. Even at the expense of making a difficult game too easy. Turn off the achievements/trophies to give the tryhards their due, but otherwise let us normies leisurely take in the experience you devs spent years crafting.

@Magician Parrying timing is a funny one; I often dislike it in games regardless of whether I'm good at it or not because it almost never feels natural to me - half the time it is some arbitrary timing which has nothing to do with when your weapon hits the enemy weapon. In Expedition 33, a lot of players gave up on parry but still beat the game on normal mode anyways without parrying much. The problem with story mode is it would have made everything easier, not just dodge and parry timing.

Prince of Persia: The Lost Crown deals with this in a really neat way. There are 4 general difficulties and also 'custom' which lets you mix and match - you can make parry easy but also make enemies hit harder for example.

It’s not about being well made or not. A well made, well balanced game does not make up for lack of difficulty options. Difficulty options are about making the game accessible, and not just in the sense of skill levels. This is the key thing people forget or don’t understand. Not everyone can “get good” because not everyone is physically able too.

There are people who cannot physically do certain actions, because of their actual, real life physicality. Difficulty options can be a huge help for people who have these issues. They don’t solve everything of course, no one setting can, but they don’t detract either.

I often see people talk about the “artistic intent” of the game when it’s a difficult game. And the thing with that is unless you’re the dev or know them personally, you have no idea what the artistic intent is. Game dev is a lengthy process, and throughout it the devs play the games a lot. The game becomes muscle memory to them, it’s easy to loose track of how difficult the game actually is, which is why external testing companies and things like betas exist, to try and raise those issues. A game might be hard because that was the intent, but it also might not be. Have you ever seen Jonathan Blow play The Witness or Sakurai play Smash Bros? If they released the games expecting that skill level from everyone they would be impenetrable!

But even if the intent is to make it hard, if that is the artistic intent, why block it off to certain people? That’s like if the film Alien paused after the first 30 mins and forced you to show you understood the metaphor before you could continue watching. The rest of the film is only for the most media literate! It would be absurd. And games like Celeste and The Last of Us have proved you can have an amazingly well made game, with a hardcore reputation, but loaded with accessibility and difficulty options. Celeste goes as far as to allow no damage, infinite jumps, no death and slowed time in it’s levels for those who need them to enjoy it. And those that don’t need them still relish the challenge of playing without. This is why they’re options, you can choose to use them or not.

And I’ve seen people complain that some people can use these settings when they don’t need them, ruining the game for themselves. To which I say, so what? That’s their choice. Again if I watch Alien and I’ve put it on my phone and I’m also doing the laundry not giving it my full attention I won’t get the full experience but that’s my choice. Should my viewing setup and planned activities be screened before I watch it? Of course not. Why should games be any different?

Multi-player games do muddy this a bit, there are arguments for settings and options making it easier for some players and this unbalancing the game unfairly. Fortnite had this when they introduced a visual to the reticule to show the direction certain audio is coming from, with the intent to help those hard of hearing. A bunch of people with perfectly fine hearing used it too and found it to be just a generally useful feature and now most players have it turned on. So a feature that people were worried would unbalance the game for some, actually improved it for most.

It’s a fair chunk of work to do it right and well, and often involves a lot of planning ahead which isn’t the most exciting part of the process. But adding difficulty options is important to make games for everyone. After all, games are both a product and an art, and both of those things are things that work best when exposed to the maximum number of people. And you don’t get your art viewed or products bought when you place them atop a 10,000 step staircase with no optional elevator.

I think the initial argument here is missing something. Yeah, the idea of a game being so well designed that it never asks too much or too little of the player is nice, but there's a problem with this, which is the fact that every gamer is different. A game that may feel like it has perfectly balanced difficulty to me may not be well-balanced for you, and vice-versa. Personally, I'm a fan of difficulty options because they offer the most ways to enjoy the game. The newer God of War games are a great example of this. Do you struggle to play through games and just want to experience the story? There's a mode for that. Do you want a challenge but nothing too crazy? There's a mode for that too. Do you want to be a masochist and play on the absurdly hard difficulty? There's an option for that too. And in general, I think it's not if a game has difficulty modes or not that determines if it's well-designed, rather it's if the difficulty mode(s) are well-designed that matters.

Earlier this year, I played Hollow Knight for the first time. Overall, the game was great, but the aspect of the game I loved the most was the Metroidvania exploration and platforming side. While the difficult bosses were generally fine to deal with, sometimes they would just be a painful roadblock that kept me from exploring the game and enjoying the game as I would have wanted to. That said, I also know many people enjoy the tense boss encounters in Hollow Knight. This issue could be rectified with a difficulty system (ideally one that can be fine-tuned by the player throughout the adventure, as while I'd be happy to make Markoth or Watcher Knights easier I wouldn't want to change Nightmare King Grimm at all) which allows players to engage with the game how they want to.

On the other side of the spectrum, Pokemon players (myself included) often complain about how the series often caters towards novice players with excruciatingly long tutorials and decreasing difficulty (cough cough The Geeta fight). While the 3D era has given a handful of challenges---the Ultra games, Legends: Arceus' postgame, and the Indigo Disk DLC---they come few and far between. If Pokemon used difficulty systems (and not the weird one from B2W2), veteran players could opt for a challenge while beginners take an easier experience. Hopefully we see such a system in Gen 10.

Overall, difficulty systems enhance a game's appeal by making it more accessible to players of different abilities and preferences and should be implemented wherever possible.

It depends on the type of game but generally speaking having a difficulty select makes a game more accessible to people who may not be that good at them COUGHCOUGHSPLUTTERINGSILKSONGCOUGHCOUGHSPLUTTERING