Grampy_Bone
Arcane
Trial and error does not mean hard.
This is a bad argument.
Difficulty is difficulty. Quibbling over why a game is hard is just academic.
Normally I would agree, but in the case of Age of Decadence the question is: how often do you die and how often is it because of encounters you are not supposed to win? Contrast with other games where you can die 100 times, but you are expected to beat them. In Age of Decadence, if you die 100 times, you are probably not expected to beat that particular encounter/scenario. Wizardry IV is hard. It is hard because you are expected to get to the end of that nightmare. In Age of Decadence, the multiple paths make people believe any path is valid for any given build, but this isn't true, and I admit this is very difficult for a lot of people, including myself, to come to grips with.
Like with the JRPG discussion thread, it's worth mentioning that the difficulty of these games is judged by the people who have played these games. The people who rated Deadfire's difficulty are probably people who are used to this kind of game. The game also has different difficulty levels, so we don't know based on what difficulty level they are rating the game.
My issue is when people try to classify forms of difficulty as being "fake" or "not counting" for whatever reason (and this always seems to be to take the piss out of Souls games), like the above example that a game isn't hard if you can use trial and error to pass it. This somehow ignores the idea that most games are hard until you figure out how to play them correctly, whether that includes hand-eye coordination, complex strategies, or rote memorization. When people talk about difficulty, they are usually referring to how punishing this learning process is.
AoD and Wizardry 4 are hard in different ways, but that doesn't make one actually "fake," they just require learning different sets of skills in different ways. If learning how to play AoD right requires reading a guide or forum, I would call that bad design, not "fake difficulty."