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RPG difficulty

On what difficulty do you play RPGs?


  • Total voters
    125

yooow0t

Educated
Joined
Jan 21, 2019
Messages
34
I always research the difficulty levels ahead of time to figure out which one I'd like the best but, I usually go as hard as I think I can manage. I appreciate having to be strategic and I also like to do a little bit of research on how to build the most effective characters before hand, so I usually have to turn the difficulty up beyond normal in order to achieve that experience.

That being said, most games handle multiple difficulties very poorly. I am of the opinion that difficulty settings should never effect the time to kill of any opponent but this is how most difficulty settings work. A great example of this is Skyrim. Higher difficulties just amount to playing a game of slash and backpedal, or zap and recharge. You can spend ten times as long killing an enemy on the highest difficulty but there is still no added strategy to the combat.

I'd like to see more games where the following factors are adjusted by difficulty
  • Lethality of combat
  • The speed of healing items
  • The cleverness of the AI
  • Your ability to save at will
  • The existence of time restraints on quests
  • The permanency of death
  • The necessity of interacting with the economy
  • Dialogue and story outcomes
 

Citizen

Guest
I start any game on hardest difficulty available from the start, and would only drop it down if the difficulty is too annoying/breaking the feel of the game.

Don't remember any game that would make me drop the difficulty recently tho, since most games that actually offer you a 'gitgud or die' difficulty setting only unlock it after a full playthrough on an easier one (metal gear rising, dmc, bayonetta)

I'm a gamer ffs
 

NJClaw

OoOoOoOoOoh
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Pathfinder: Wrath I'm very into cock and ball torture
Pathfinder: Kingmaker is the only RPG in recent memory whose hardest difficulty mode is bullshit for the sake of bullshit. Other than that, I always go for hardest available because 99.9% of modern RPGs are unplayable below that. Older RPGs have weird relationships with difficulty settings, so I tend to inform myself first before committing to one.
Reminder that Unfair isn't even Kingmaker hardest difficulty, it's just the hardest default one. You can manually adjust the sliders to get an even more unfair experience.
 

Hobo Elf

Arcane
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Feb 17, 2009
Messages
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Platypus Planet
Normal. Hard is usually just shitty stat bloat that only serves to wear you down. Case in point PoE2, which is still fresh on my mind. Sure PotD makes a difference at the very beginning, sort of early-mid game it starts to feel like you're playing on Normal difficulty and then mid-to-end it doesn't matter if you play on PotD or Story since the game is so easy by now you're going to win every encounter anyway - by this point the only thing PotD manages to accomplish is exhaust the player with massive defensive stat bloat.
 

Ocelot

Learned
Joined
Feb 21, 2018
Messages
363
Usually the hard(er) difficulty setting. I generally avoid easy because I like a degree of challenge, and I avoid the hardest difficulty because it's often either badly designed (e.g: Skyrim), or too difficult for my tastes. Playing games on hard is generally rewarding because you must think through the game's mechanics in order to advance. Playing on lower difficulties can make you gloss over certain aspects of the game.

In general, I believe that the level of difficulty isn't as important in an RPG as the role-playing elements themselves. So an overly easy RPG isn't a problem for me.
 
Joined
Oct 19, 2010
Messages
3,524
Most RPGs are significantly too easy (especially late game) so normal mode is generally a regretful choice. Hard mode is a safe bet, but not the hardest setting as that usually has a lot of masochistic and extreme bloat factors that only the most obsessive players can endure
 

Momock

Augur
Joined
Sep 26, 2014
Messages
644
I voted "hard" but it depends of the game. If the hardest difficulty is indicated as "the intended experience" (Deus Ex, Dungeon Rats...) I go for that, but if there is a big warning telling it's intended for NG+ or totaly unfair then I take the second hardest.

I avoid bullshit too. I was so happy to unlock an extra difficulty in Evil Within 2 after finishing it, but in this mode you can save only 11 times for the entirety of your run. WTF? Why? This kind of divisive thing should be a separated from the difficulty modes, in checkboxes.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I usually go for normal because "hard" these days just means "lmao just bloat those numbers and make everything a damage sponge" because apparently having to spend minutes whacking down one enemy is what counts as a "challenge" to modern game designers. Fuck that shit.

From my experience, harder difficulties don't actually up the challenge (usually you still get flooded with healing items to the point of the game becoming trivial), they only make combat tedious because of bloat.
 

Apostle Hand

Liturgist
Batshit Crazy
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it's arbitrary thing when question of difficulty arises
some people find game way too hard even on easy
and some find game too easy on hard
 

Burning Bridges

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Normally there is a difficulty that feels "right" to me.

Measuring this along a 1-4 scale is pointless imo. Often it is necessary to enable individual options or sliders, use mods, mods for mods, or even enforce certain rules on your own.

I can not measure a good difficulty but I can tell you when I'm happy with the difficulty for myself. I would say it's a tradeoff between keeping it challenging and the necessity to replay the same things over and over.

In any even difficulty is right when I lost a fight and it still feels good afterwards.
 

Momock

Augur
Joined
Sep 26, 2014
Messages
644
I usually go for normal because "hard" these days just means "lmao just bloat those numbers and make everything a damage sponge" because apparently having to spend minutes whacking down one enemy is what counts as a "challenge" to modern game designers. Fuck that shit.

From my experience, harder difficulties don't actually up the challenge (usually you still get flooded with healing items to the point of the game becoming trivial), they only make combat tedious because of bloat.
What kind of shitty games are you playing?
 

almondblight

Arcane
Joined
Aug 10, 2004
Messages
2,549
it's arbitrary thing when question of difficulty arises
some people find game way too hard even on easy
and some find game too easy on hard

True. I suppose the answer is that if you actually care about combat, getting killed and having to change tactics shouldn't be an uncommon occurrence. If you're mindlessly going through the game without any challenge or need to think, then it's no different from playing on story mode.
 

Ol' Willy

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May 3, 2020
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Reichskommissariat Russland ᛋᛋ
I usually go for normal because "hard" these days just means "lmao just bloat those numbers and make everything a damage sponge" because apparently having to spend minutes whacking down one enemy is what counts as a "challenge" to modern game designers. Fuck that shit.
Everyone in this thread says this, but I will quote you: what do you mean "modern"? What difficulty does in PST? In Dark Sun series? 1999 and 1993 for that.
 

JarlFrank

I like Thief THIS much
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Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
I usually go for normal because "hard" these days just means "lmao just bloat those numbers and make everything a damage sponge" because apparently having to spend minutes whacking down one enemy is what counts as a "challenge" to modern game designers. Fuck that shit.
Everyone in this thread says this, but I will quote you: what do you mean "modern"? What difficulty does in PST? In Dark Sun series? 1999 and 1993 for that.

I don't remember Dark Sun even having difficulty, and that's how I prefer it. Just balance the game around a decent challenge and be done with it.
 

Darth Canoli

Arcane
Joined
Jun 8, 2018
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Perched on a tree
I don't remember Dark Sun even having difficulty, and that's how I prefer it. Just balance the game around a decent challenge and be done with it.

When it was a hobby for monocled gentlemen, it worked well that way, now it became an entertainment for the masses, difficluty options are mandatory.

The best way from my point of view; if we're talking about good tactical RPG; is to balance it around an insane difficulty and work from there for the easier ones by cutting down the foes numbers and abilities.
 

waken

Educated
Joined
May 18, 2020
Messages
63
Voted hard, but the long answer is that it depends on how good the combat system and AI is. I don't mind losing & replaying the same fight 20 times if it's dynamic enough that each time plays differently enough that I don't get bored. ArmA is a great example of this. But if it's exactly the same each time and just a matter of getting good rolls (or twitch reflexes), then fuck it, that's just wasting my time and I'll go full casul storyfag.
 

gurugeorge

Arcane
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Aug 3, 2019
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Strap Yourselves In
I tend to start a game on Normal with a "scratchpad" character that I'm not all that invested in, learn the game's ropes with it, then when I feel I've got a sense of the game, I start a "serious" character that I invest in, and do it on Hard.

It's a cost/benefit thing though. Harder means more challenging, which is more rewarding. But at the same time, the harder the game, the more you have to min-max, which means you can't build a more rounded, roleplaying type of character. That's why the super-hard difficulties are usually a bit of a waste of time, because you're funneled so narrowly with the build (often shifting in to totally Frankensteinian creations that make no rp sense at all) that you lose out on too much of the roleplaying aspect.

PF:K showed the way around that by making "ancillary" picks more meaningful in storybook sections, but devs in general need to work on it more I think. Of course partly the funneling is an artifact of CRPGs having to graphically represent and not relying so much on imagination (where anything can happen). But the storybook thing does get around that rather neatly, and I do think there's more room in CRPGs for using that and similar tricks to let people explore fuller, more rounded characters.
 

sser

Arcane
Developer
Joined
Mar 10, 2011
Messages
1,866,661
If I like the RPG a lot I'll often go through it on the hardest difficulty, but that's also contingent on how it handles difficulty. As mentioned above, some games have no tactical depth whatsoever, so "added difficulty" becomes "bloated HP." Games with genuine tactical depth become difficult in the manner that your decision making needs to be better refined, not your ability to gamify shit like leashing enemies or fighting 30min battles wherein you pause every 5s to chug potions and eat food.
 

wishbonetail

Learned
Joined
Oct 18, 2021
Messages
671
Wheres "first time hardest available solo blind walkthrough with every exploit and cheese possible" option i always play on?
 

Bad Sector

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Mar 25, 2012
Messages
2,223
Insert Title Here RPG Wokedex Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming! Steve gets a Kidney but I don't even get a tag.
Normal (or whatever is the default) unless the developer explicitly mentions somewhere that the game was designed with some other difficulty setting in mind (though the only game i can think of doing that is Quake 2 the manual of which mentions that the game is meant to be played in the Hard setting) or difficulty affects something beyond stat tweaks (number of enemies is fine as long as the enemies act as more than just HP/resource drains, but i also like it when some games do things like open/close alternative routes in the map or have additional objectives based on difficulty setting).

When it was a hobby for monocled gentlemen, it worked well that way, now it became an entertainment for the masses, difficluty options are mandatory.

I think FromSoftware's games do not have difficulty settings (i've only tried Dark Souls 1 many years ago for a bit but i do not remember if it had any such settings) and yet they do seem to be popular enough.
 

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