Exhuminator wrote:
I guess it depends on what you're wanting to get out of the game. If the ride is all that matters, fair enough. But I personally would feel like a wuss beating games on Easy all the time, and I'd consider my victories to be a bit shallow. I always play games on Normal the first time I play them. I consider Normal to be the difficulty the developers intended by default, with Hard adding extra challenge if so desired.
We cross-posted, it seems.
That's actually why I usually start on Normal - because it usually seems like the way the developers intended the game to be played.
My uncle and I recently finished a playthrough of all 5 Gears of War games, in order, on max difficulty. It was fun overall, but there were times when the games didn't hold up well - it was like max difficulty was just serving to enhance the series' flaws. Enemies in those games tend to be bullet sponges - cranking up the difficulty just makes that a lot worse!
On one of our off nights, I decided to play some Horde mode on Normal difficulty and it was tons of fun. The game just felt better at that difficulty level.
I suspect what happens in a lot of games is that Normal gets all the development time and Hard is done with a lot less thought put into it. So you get a lot of games where things don't scale well into higher difficulties or the mechanics just get all crazy and don't really make sense.
Exhuminator wrote:I can't agree with this. Some series are famous because they are so challenging, that's their whole identity. If the Souls games started adding Easy modes, that'd be the end of the series sooner rather than later.
A perfect example is Etrian Odyssey. The original games on DS were considered hardcore (and they are hardcore) and attracted a strong cult following for it. Then the 3DS EO games started adding Picnic and Standard modes (both far easier then Expert mode, which is the true difficulty of the original games). So then you had people going around saying they beat Etrian Odyssey this or that on 3DS, saying it like they were hardcore gamers. But in reality, they beat the games on Picnic or Standard mode, so no, they didn't REALLY beat an Etrian Odyssey, they finished the game on training wheels. So original hardcore EO fans got sick of these shenanigans pretty quick and started abandoning the series. And thus each successive 3DS EO got less sales then before. Finally EOU2's sales were so bad that Atlus isn't even bothering releasing EO5 in the west. It is my firm belief if Atlus had never included babby modes in the 3DS EO's, the series would still be going strong today, even domestically. You don't take a mountain and turn it into a molehill so just anybody can go and climb it. That ruins the whole point of the mountain in the first place.
A lot of Souls fans make that argument, and it makes sense in a way. But I must it admit that I don't find it convincing. I don't see what is wrong with giving players options.
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