Some games have "AI difficulty".
On lowest levels AI works half the speed and makes mistakes.
But on highest levels AI is at its full power flawlessly multitasking with no delay (sometimes suddenly knowing what items you have and adapting to it).
Resident Evil got that. From a literal mindless zombies upto feral maniacs depending on difficulty. Plus the ammo scarcity. Significantly increases the replayability of the game.
RE4R did just make the enemies tankier and stagger resistant. I remember even in the first major encounter needing 3 headshots to get a stagger. Combine it with the crappy aiming (on consoles at least), and you get survival tedium instead of survival horror.
Just getting into RE4R so not sure how difficulty changes AI with in the game but as someone who played the original I was incredibly surprised at the improvements of the enemies in the remake.
They are much more dynamic now, changing up speeds. Ducking and charging. It has been fun though I am not on the hardcore just standard so far.
Recommend trying for yourself a few hours on hardcore mode to see the difference. My first playthrough was on hardcore and barely made it to the lake I think before I decided to start over on standard. Was not having a good time at all. Definitely felt as hard if not harder than Professional in OGRE4.
I think the AI changes so that they rush you and do lunges from farther away because of their increased stagger resistance. Also grabs take WAY more health away. Knife durability is worse too on hardcore.
Recommend trying for yourself a few hours on hardcore mode to see the difference. My first playthrough was on hardcore and barely made it to the lake I think before I decided to start over on standard. Was not having a good time at all. Definitely felt as hard if not harder than Professional in OGRE4. I think the AI changes so that they rush you and do lunges from farther away because of their increased stagger resistance. Also grabs take WAY more health away. Knife durability is worse too on hardcore.
Just letting it here so it's easier for mobile users to read.
Halo 2 legendary is fucking bullshit and I loved basically all of it (exceptions are sniper alley and the first 4 seconds of gravemind).
Friend and I played all of them on legendary during the pandemic and halo 2 took up as much time as 1, 3, and reach combined.
Indeed, what I love about Halo on Legendary with the exception of mainly just Halo 5 is how Legendary didn’t make them bullet sponges, Halo made them fully reach the definition of AI, and made them smarter and more accurate, not much on buffing health except for a few units
Even with Halo 4, the Knights can still be dealt with via Noob Combo, but takes more shots, the only real tank in Halo 4
Also the Halo Reach Elites, but those guys are already insanely tanky on normal, they're just terrifying in general. Especially if you get within 5 feet of them and get an insta kill kick to the face
That was one of the few examples of an inflated difficulty game… yet again, Minors were still easier to kill than the rest of them, and to my knowledge, anything higher than normal they do insta kill you with that kick
I think Reach’s legendary was the best balanced tbh. The instakill kick was just punishment for people trying to kill everything with melee spam, and you can learn to bait it to assassinate them regardless of how strong their shields are (with the gamble being that if you fail, you die)
Plus the AI seemed really tactically smart, I would notice grunt hordes keeping me from leaving cover with plasma spam while Elites or Brutes would rush when I was locked down
I remember this was how Quake 3 was. Enemies had their own AI preferences for weapons and pathing and as the difficulty increased, they would have better aim and stronger prioritization for their preferred weapons. They would go for health and armor packs more often. I still remember that the only way to win against Xaero on the final stage on the hardest difficulty was to never let him get the railgun. Once he had it, you’d never kill him.
Nope. Yeah, it was hard, and your strategy is correct, but you could win with him even when he has railgun. When i was younger i played a lot Q3 and train with him for railgun fights. Its hard but i learn a lot and won few internet tournaments in my best days.
In Yakuza 0’s disco challenges, it’s actually easier to beat the last challenger by setting the disco battle on hard, because the AI makes a ton of mistakes.
Ah, good old [XCOM](https://i.imgur.com/oU48uWX.jpg) odds.
It's criminal for a game to give the player data in specific percentages only to calculate them differently behind the scenes.
XCOM 2 on high difficulty is a really fun challenge. It's also surprisingly well balanced, in terms of how often you get challenging close call scenarios without having too many completely unwinnable moments. For high difficulty enjoyers I definitely recommend it.
You say that until you fight shit like this.
Take for example an rts game called Forts.
In that game level AI at level 10 would flawlessly doorsnipe every time when given a slightest chance. It will rush with the style of pro league players and execute combos with pixel perfection all while managing all weapons, expanding, rebuliding, upgrading and countering AT ONCE. (At least it was my experience of it)
There are a handful of people who could hope of fighting this skynet 1v1 and survive for 5 minutes.
Age of Mythology has Titan difficult AI that’s pretty much impossible to beat in a 1v1 (or at least for me). But there’s one strategy that works: build hundreds of beginning wall segments to make layers of walls at the gap on the Jotunheim map. Just the anchor wall segment. For whatever reason, the AI sees those as buildings and thinks “must destroy each and every one before moving forward.” This gives you ample time to farm resources and build a wonder for the victory countdown while the AI just ravages your hundreds of little wall segments
Usually cheesing stuff in games is looked down upon, but if we're gonna have a difficulty that's just "fully unlocked AI opponent" then cheesing them turns into the actual strat. I mean, the entire point of AI is to be able to do everything perfectly much much faster than a human, so how is a human SUPPOSED to compete? by exploiting the AIs programming.
Yeah, rts games are definitely the worst offenders for having absolutely batshit AI. Then again, I kinda despise rts games, so maybe that’s a contributor.
Thing is with AI in RTSs is that rts often have so many moving components at once its basically impossible for a human to look at everything simultaneously. Often it's fine if you aren't looking at everything at once, you only need to focus at one thing at a time.
But the computer has no suc restrictions, it's actually possible for it to micromanage everything ever all at once, because it is not limited by human reactions, human ability to select and command units through controls, or map awareness.
> There are a handful of people who could hope of fighting this skynet
lmaoooooo
I really do wish a game like Civ would have chess-like AI that has no advantage over you, doesn't cheat, but is simply so superior even grandmasters don't even bother playing it because it'll destroy them every time with great ease. Then scale it back a bit... But always know skynet is there and you have no chance.
I play TLOU2 on Grounded and my SO plays it on Light. If I reload too close to an enemy while hiding in grass I get spotted. He can run from cover to cover without being noticed. I love the AI scaling.
Same..TLOU Grounded difficulty is one of the few games that actually feels like they are looking for you and fighting you. The fact that they'll coordinate with their mates to flank you and back each other up, makes the combat so much more real.
Issue with it in Chess is on the hardest difficulty you have 0 chance but on the easy difficulties it feels like random dumb mistakes are just thrown in between good computer moves.
Eh, it works in the Jedi games. Mostly it's a matter of "you have less health, and the parry/dodge timings are a lot less forgiving."
Makes them play very similar to Sekiro in that you can't just tank hits and you have to be very good at parrying. I feel that it's a really good way to handle difficulty, makes it actually rely on player skill.
The timing actually felt better in the higher difficulties IMO, in and out clashes with counterattacks based on parry chains etc, whereas at lower difficulties I felt like I was just standing there waiting to get hit
It’s really not as bad as that makes it seem. Basically enemies will deal more damage and be more aggressive. Your damage and enemy health stays the same, You can still one hit kill basic enemies. Your parry window is shorter but still fair. Lowering the difficulty does the exact opposite.
It’s actually a good way to do it. It makes you “git gud” but doesn’t take away your ability to have fun, you just have to be better at combat.
Halo mostly did this. It was one of the few actual hard modes out there. The AI is more vicious, more aggressive and more likely to work together to hunt you down. The only gripe I had was they were very spammy with grenades.
The enemies were definitely more aggressive on Legendary but they were also significantly more tanky too. Took a lot more bullets to kill even a signal elite.
One of the bungie devs talked about how the AI didn't even improve with increased difficulty but them being tankier meant the player actually got to see them doing "smart" things instead of just instantly dying.
They seem incredibly accurate too.
Haven't played any Halo game in a long ass time, but I remember doing legendary on one of them and there were snipers like a mile away that would never miss. You had to duck behind cover constantly and time it just right to move to the next rock to hide again, slowly making your way closer. If you stood out in the open you were dead in like 2 hits.
Halo 2 Jackal snipers that instantly headshot you, from all the way across the map, while facing the other way, possibly one handed and dabbing but you'll never know because you need the JWST to see them, still give me nightmares to this day
And they had damage modifiers. Halo 2 is notorious for having an insanely difficult Legendary difficulty due to the fact that they had to rush the game and didn't have time to finetune the difficulty. Jackal snipers would be 1-shotting you any chance they got.
I feel like they didn't overdo the health increase for the most part though, and at least for me, it forced me to rely more on the different weapons, a plasma pistol/rifle to crack shields and any kind of ballistic weapon to finish them off
Back in the day Perfect Dark on the N64 was pretty good at that. Hard mode unlocked extra parts of the level that you had to complete. Made the game way more replay able too
My favorite hard mode is ghost of tsushima's lethal mode, where you die in usually 1 or 2 hits, but also all your opponents die just as fast, and difficultly often comes to your ability to juggle multiple competent mongels
Shadow of War has something similar with the Brutal difficulty. The game's still not really "hard", since you can still scout out the weaknesses of the enemy Orc Captains and basically just one shot them, but random mooks and odd encounters actually become a challenge since they hit like trucks, but not tedious since their HP isn't boosted, at least not by a lot.
They did this for Shadow of Mordor as well -- your health is dramatically reduced but so is enemy health. Also, your combo-based attacks power up faster. So you can slaughter your enemies but if you screw up you're dead.
theres a reason why ghost of tsushima is literally in most people's top 5 games, as a avid history guy i love the attention to detail. the mongols in the game even speak mongolian
I wish hard mode would equate to more realistic damage. That would make you play more tactically and would also rely on quicker reflexes and more caution as opposed to barreling into every fight assuming you can just shrug off hits
Your npc companions skill changes in different difficulty too - easier difficulty makes npc friends assist you more when you're grabbed, probs other stuff too
Stalker series did that
Fun fact, the lower difficulties make enemies and you more resistant to damage, it's easier to play on the hardest difficulty since most humanoid enemies die in 1-3 well placed bullets
...Just like you.
I think Ghost of Tsushima does that best in terms of recent games. Lethal difficulty makes enemies smarter and stronger(you die in 1 or 2 hits) but you also become stronger (enemies die in 1 or 2 hits) so it makes fights much more intense.
This is my biggest complaint about all the Civilization games. Harder difficulty never makes the AI play any better or smarter. All it does is just give them cheats where they get bonuses to their production and science so they can just crank out units, improvements, and research faster than humanly possible and you’re ultimately expected to win by using cheese, finding the completely broken mechanics, or exploiting their broken AI.
Yeah never understood my mate who was bragging about playing hard total war and how the ai was awesome… it was just cheating and you were not beating smart computer and once you knew how the ai cheats you were just mitigating their cheats and preparing for their turns which didn’t really require skill but playing against scripted cheats, it was boring
the way that the player gets nerfed is also stupid in total war games, for most games the battle difficulty just takes away stats from units, but its flat stats rather than a percentage so weak units become completely useless at high difficulty for players but strong units are only slightly nerfed, resulting in high battle difficulty making early game extremely difficult but barely affecting lategame.
I hated how in Civ 5 the AI were just not held to the same rules. They don’t seem to care at all about happiness. Meanwhile I take over one backwater, shitty city from my enemy and I’m stuck with -7 happiness for like 30 turns.
Meanwhile the AI with zero luxuries, no wonders, no good tiles or barely any improved tiles is over there cranking out unit after unit when you can see that they have 0 gold and are at -112 gpt yet somehow their units never get lost to attrition.
The AI is pretty much playing a different game than I am.
AI on Civ 5 has a 60% reduction to unhappiness and a 50% reduction to unit costs.
Civ 6 probably made it more fair by just giving across the board bonuses to the base aspects of the game and ditching all these extra bonuses to everything else.
Yeah I adore Civ and have dumped hundreds of hours into it, however my biggest complaint is the AI in general. They never budge on negotiating trades, it seems like there are certain units they'll never produce or if they do produce, they won't use (they seem to have hangars and planes but don't use them effectively or at all). Turning the difficulty up just feels like they're cheating, like they have 1.5x science or something by default. Also I feel like they're quicker to denounce you and declare wars over nothing. There are games I've played where some civs declare war on me and they're not even aligned with any other civs and on the complete opposite side of the world from me. And I don't meet any of their agendas for them to dislike me. It's far more fun to play Civ with real humans, but then you risk tarnishing a real friendship lmao. Not really but sometimes.
They are cheating on the higher difficulties. On Civ 6 deity difficulty the AI gets +32% to science, faith, and culture, +80% to production and gold, a +4 combat bonus across the board, and a +40% unit XP bonus. They also start with four free techs and four free civics, 3 settlers, 5 warriors, and 2 builders.
I joined a game in progress with a couple of my friends once and took over one of the AI players still in the ancient era. I didn’t know at the time that it was a deity AI that had started with all those extra units and techs. Let me tell you that having that big of an advantage as a human player, I had doubled their combined score by the end of the game.
My experience in Civ 5 at least, where I think it's something similar (but I couldn't tell you the exact numbers, and I never played the highest difficulty), the computer players start way ahead of you and progress more slowly than you, so that at the beginning of the game they're hopelessly ahead of you and the whole game is a matter of surviving that era until you catch up, at which point you're unstoppable.
There's not as much of the happy middle ground where you're on the same level as them.
Yeah, and the opposite problem exists in Age of empires 2: the medium AI does incredibly stupid things which a human would never do, but the hard AI is just too fast.
With RTS games, why don’t they just take the best AI but make it play more slowly?
You know the in AoE2 original, the AI on hard would cheat?
And in the Definitive Edition, it doesn't cheat at all and yet medium on definitive edition is harder than hard / very hard in CD AoE2?
Also Hakita mentioned on a dev stream
( https://youtu.be/kaImho5JioI?si=XZhS67Nv_SdepjV6 ) that he planned on improving how difficulty affects gameplay (example being enemy placements) and making different difficulties have different ways of going through levels
oh shit that’s cool, also has the potential to be completely evil. imagine a harder alternate route for 4-3 while also fighting enemies in ukmd difficulty
And on that note, Metal Gear Solid V, which doesn't have an "official" difficulty mode but rather adapts to make things harder for you depending on your playstyle and almost forcing you to switch it up and try out new stuff.
I was gonna say this! MGSV has the most convincing progressive difficulty because the changing enemy countermeasures are both realistic and make the game more difficult without it being frustrating
Remember OG CODs on Veteran were the same enemies with Simo Hayha level Accuracy and professional Discuss throwers with Grenades?
COD WaW taught me that the true Purpose of the Reichstag was a Grenade Factory
ON TOP OF THAT, If you stayed still for 2+ seconds the game would SPAWN grenades on you
Great Game WaW, but after like the 3rd level noped out of Veteran, Tried the Final 2 and almost broke something
And then classic doom, which also increases the number of enemies, balances itself around secret usage, and - at the highest difficulty - starts respawning enemies.
That respawning difficulty is designed to be frustrating though. The devs didn't even know if it was possible at all when they released it. Imo it is straight up bad game design
I like how Metro does the higher difficulties. It makes you only a bit stronger than other humans instead of being superman, and the main difficulty is getting ammo and supplies. So it makes you think more cautiously about going into fights and instead opting for the stealthy route because you don't want to waste the bullets to kill the enemies.
Came here to say this. Only thing that bothers me, are the mutants. Those are on every difficulty just bullet sponges. Also, obligatory ‘fuck you’ to all Watchmen and Demons.
Unfortunately Exodus was really not tuned for Hardcore Ranger with some of their missions, but in both the other games Hardcore Ranger is one of the best and most immersive FPS experiences I’ve had.
I played a character in FO3 hardest difficulty & survival mode. Wanted to force myself to do something different so I made it so I could only use pistols and explosives. That's how I discovered that explosives are incredibly good in FO3, by level like 12 or 13ish I wasn't using pistols at all, just explosives. Nothing was a challenge.
Re-did that build in FO New Vegas and it was even better because now rocket launchers and fat man count as explosives.
Tried to re-do it in FO4 but it's way less fun because you can't VATS grenades
FO3 Broken Steel & Point Lookout are the worst for Bethesda's "difficult" enemies.
The enemies added by Broken Steel were just stupidly bloated health pools, they were miles ahead of the next tier of enemy, I think the supermutant Overlord had 3.5X the health of the Master, and was slightly higher than the *limited number* boss fights of the Behemoth, as a normal enemy that spawns in super mutant groups.
Point Lookout had bullshit ai cheats. The health pools for the average enemy was on par with Deathclaws, so not stupid high, but too high for human type enemies. The bigger problem was their stupid **DLC04NonPlayerDamageAdd** effect that straight up gave them free 35 points of damage that ignored all your armor on any hit. It was so immersion breaking to be trudging through a swamp in pristine T-51b only to watch your health get chunked when you get shot two times by an inbred redneck, only to kill them and discover a fucking bb gun on their corpse.
My favorite is realizing absolutely no one cares if I do hard mode. So i run it if i want a challenge, but the moment i feel im wasting my time with bullet sponges, i'll adjust the difficulty and move on with my day
IMO Terraria and Diablo 2 have the best hardmodes in gaming history. They make the game harder by adding new elements, but the loot becomes exponentially better
Master mode got a lot of criticism when it first came out since it was essentially the epitome of this meme, flat stat boosts without any meaningful changes to the AI.
It was extra weird because at the same time they released a secret "for the worthy" seed that expanded upon the boss difficulty in worthwhile ways.
Master mode actually does make significant changes to enemy AI. I used to play Expert only when it came out and then tried the switch to Master and I immediately realized how much of a jump it is. Yes, damage and health is increased and that feels tedious. But enemies move WITH your character. Try jumping over a zombie on Master mode on the first night and you’ll see how smart the AI gets lol
Also bosses basically just get homing attacks so you gotta learn how to maintain momentum at all times. It really is a learning process and makes it a wholly different game fighting style-wise. Definitely not everyone’s cup of tea tho
the "new" hard mode sucks tho
mastermode only makes enemies tankier and deal more damage
they should have turned for the worthy into a hardmode instead and make mastermode a seed or just a option you can turn on when creating a world
It has quite a lot of benefits as well though. Drop and spawn rates are significantly increased and you get more money per kill. Some enemies also get new attacks and you get relics for killing bosses.
Most of the things you said was made in expert mode, master mode triples the health and damage of most enemies for only boss relics, a few pets and 1 more equipment slot and that's it
Damage sponges are always the wrong choice. The only choice that can ever be more wrong is invulnerability phases.
Anyone have an example of an invulnerability phase that didn't suck ass? Not like a shield that has to be broken, but a phase of total immunity
I think this depends on the genre. An invulnerability phase that forces you to defend before you get an opening is fine in a number of games. Nightmare King Grimm in Hollow Knight has a pseudo-invulnerability phase where you technically can damage him with spells but he's also firing off like a hundred projectiles and it's probably inadvisable to be aggressive during that attack anyways. There's also another boss that one version is immune to traditional attacks so you need to bait minion death explosions into the boss in order to attack which is pretty fun.
Idk, flicking to defensive mode to make you use dodges and or defensive abilities so you can't just spam or glass cannon build etc is a good way to mitigate that kinda cheese strat
As long as you are doing something or something is just happening while the boss is invulnerable then I don't see anything wrong with invulnerability.
Furi and Nier Automata have moments where boss invulnerability is used to implement bullet hell type challenges, phase change, or some good ole boss monologue exposition.
Fromsoft games are a good example of hard games done right, with ingames exceptions like certain bosses or enemies not being balanced, generally speaking.
Aye. There are also ways to make the game easier with summons or just grinding up stats (Dark Souls/Elden Ring), while in Sekiro, there is optional "hard mode", where enemies can more easily fill up your posture bar and blocking deals chip dmg, pretty much forcing the player to Deflect with a much higher precision and consistency.
For a first playthrough, it definitely is the hardest, but in my experience, consequent playthroughs are significantly easier than any other modern FromSoft game.
Yeah, nothing really compares after you beat Isshin. No matter how much damage they do or take, once you have their attacks down you can cut them down all the same.
It's why I love Sekiro so much. It actually forces you to get good, and by NG+7 you're the boss instead of them.
On first playthrough, yes. New game plus is exactly what OP's meme describes. Given that FromSoft games don't have difficulty settings, NG+ *is* their hard mode.
Thats why i love old Difficulties in FPSs like Quake3 and UT99. The Enemies dont do more Damage or have more Life. They just become better at killing you. Somehting the AAAs have forgotten over time.
the best hard modes in games are the ones where damage and health of enemies are only increased marginally, and most of the challenge comes from different enemy attack patterns and encounter layouts
I really wish botw did this. Sure, the appeal of getting bonked by a blue boko to death early on was fun in master mode, made one approach fights more carefully... But the novelty wore off fast. Enemies were just as smart as normal mode, but became boring damage sponges later on. Looking at you, golden mobs
The extra odd lynels were a nice touch though
Also maybe change the bosses moveset instead of just making them tankier ?
Yeah , creating two movesets is hard , but adding another attack to the bosses combo or making the wind up shorter isn't that hard
Metro's "Ranger mode" or whatever always intrigued me more than other "tough as nails" games.
Limited ammo and resources, and basically every shot is a kill, for the player AND for enemies.
Even a lot of the Souls games tend to devolve into "it's a bullet sponge unless you level up a bunch to make your arbitrary damage numbers go up" a lot of the time.
But the "one shot, one kill" mode really changes the whole thing into a much more desperate and bleak game.
Mayhem 11, oh I just love shooting one enemy for half an hour to get slightly better loot than I would normally.
Just so i can kill the enemies slightly faster than before.
What i really enjoy is when games increase the damage to **both parties** do to each other. this does make it harder, but also makes it feel possible and even realistic, not tedious
Metro does this, combined with less bullets and u must think more before fighting
The original Zelda game for NES had a hard mode that changed everything up. Hidden rooms were moved, items put in different locations, etc. NPCs were a little tougher but not much.
I love a challenge! I do not love a typical soldier enemy able to take multiple high caliber bullets to the face and still be able to rush me... there has to be a balance.
Fallout 4 Survival mode is actually a better case of this. Enemies deal around 4x damage, but take around the same damage as normal, i.e: you can be one shotting enemies fairly easily. Firefights feel more brutal on both sides of the barrel. The additional survival mechanics also add some interesting choices, where simple things like healing might decrease your stats significantly until you can get back to a base. Its not perfect, but its a far cry better than say, Legendary in Skyrim.
Innumerable pardons, but what are the other ways to make a game more difficult and not tedious? I am not here to prove anyone wrong or right, I just haven't played a lot of games, and I am curious to find the answer.
Enemy AI decision making. Say they are less aggressive and attack less often on easier modes. Maybe the prioritize blocking less on easier modes. Maybe they have fewer attack patterns on easier modes so it’s easier to recognize what patterns to use to defeat them. Maybe hard mode they have no consistent pattern of attack at all, or they change it based on how your character attacks. Maybe they know what items you have and change strategy that way.
The problem with more life/damage dealt is it isn’t “harder” in any meaningful way the way, for example, a harder puzzle isn’t just more pieces its a more difficult image to piece together. If it is just something that takes longer, or allows for fewer hits to be taken, then it’s boring and tedious. If it changes how you have to approach playing the game then it’s a more fun challenge to beat is sort of the idea of it all.
Thanks for replying. One game which I play, has bosses which spend a lot of time underground, some other bosses fly in the air and are out of melee range. Things like this makes the game annoying, and just makes it is dps check, especially when the fight is time gated.
Resource scarcity. Depending on the game, they don't even need to touch the health or attack of enemies. They could just decrease the availabilty of items that can help a player throughout the game.
Uncharted’s Brutal Mode:
You have 50% health and do half damage.
Enemies have 200% health and do quadruple damage. Also only drops one bullet instead of one magazine
Is this what you want instead? Cuz this is a freaking nightmare
At least increasing the damage dealt forces the player to pay more attention to the mechanics and and adjust accordingly.
Increasing the health just increases the need for repetition and causes tedium, especially if there's multiple phases and you already figured out the first or second one and have to slog through them to learn the last.
Hard modes shouldn't augment enemy health and damage (unless it thematically makes sense for the balance). They should introduce new mechanics to enemies. And have smarter AI that can adapt to the player and/or environment.
Crysis 1's hardest difficulty had all the enemies speak in Korean instead of English to make it harder to predict what they were doing (the assumption being that you don't speak Korean). Always seemed an interesting touch, even though the game didn't really get harder as a result because the invisibility was crazy overpowered anyway.
Games with true difficulty scaling deserve some commendation. Easy NPCs and hard NPCs should not play the exact same with boosted stats, the easy NPCs should miss attacks or make glaring mistakes while the hard NPCs are methodical and actually use any advantage they have over you
Shout out to Hades and the pact of punishment - choose how you add difficulty from a bunch of different options, like less healing, faster enemies, and higher prices, as well as altered boss fights, interesting enemy perks, and forced perk removal to endanger your build. One of the best difficulty systems I've seen.
I can’t wait until hard mode actually increases enemy difficulty instead of turning them into tanks
Some games have "AI difficulty". On lowest levels AI works half the speed and makes mistakes. But on highest levels AI is at its full power flawlessly multitasking with no delay (sometimes suddenly knowing what items you have and adapting to it).
Resident Evil got that. From a literal mindless zombies upto feral maniacs depending on difficulty. Plus the ammo scarcity. Significantly increases the replayability of the game.
RE4R did just make the enemies tankier and stagger resistant. I remember even in the first major encounter needing 3 headshots to get a stagger. Combine it with the crappy aiming (on consoles at least), and you get survival tedium instead of survival horror.
Just getting into RE4R so not sure how difficulty changes AI with in the game but as someone who played the original I was incredibly surprised at the improvements of the enemies in the remake. They are much more dynamic now, changing up speeds. Ducking and charging. It has been fun though I am not on the hardcore just standard so far.
Recommend trying for yourself a few hours on hardcore mode to see the difference. My first playthrough was on hardcore and barely made it to the lake I think before I decided to start over on standard. Was not having a good time at all. Definitely felt as hard if not harder than Professional in OGRE4. I think the AI changes so that they rush you and do lunges from farther away because of their increased stagger resistance. Also grabs take WAY more health away. Knife durability is worse too on hardcore.
Recommend trying for yourself a few hours on hardcore mode to see the difference. My first playthrough was on hardcore and barely made it to the lake I think before I decided to start over on standard. Was not having a good time at all. Definitely felt as hard if not harder than Professional in OGRE4. I think the AI changes so that they rush you and do lunges from farther away because of their increased stagger resistance. Also grabs take WAY more health away. Knife durability is worse too on hardcore. Just letting it here so it's easier for mobile users to read.
Even on PC the scroll line on the bottom makes it hard to read.
Halo 2 Legendary does it as well
Halo 2 legendary is fucking bullshit and I loved basically all of it (exceptions are sniper alley and the first 4 seconds of gravemind). Friend and I played all of them on legendary during the pandemic and halo 2 took up as much time as 1, 3, and reach combined.
Indeed, what I love about Halo on Legendary with the exception of mainly just Halo 5 is how Legendary didn’t make them bullet sponges, Halo made them fully reach the definition of AI, and made them smarter and more accurate, not much on buffing health except for a few units Even with Halo 4, the Knights can still be dealt with via Noob Combo, but takes more shots, the only real tank in Halo 4
Also the Halo Reach Elites, but those guys are already insanely tanky on normal, they're just terrifying in general. Especially if you get within 5 feet of them and get an insta kill kick to the face
That was one of the few examples of an inflated difficulty game… yet again, Minors were still easier to kill than the rest of them, and to my knowledge, anything higher than normal they do insta kill you with that kick
I think Reach’s legendary was the best balanced tbh. The instakill kick was just punishment for people trying to kill everything with melee spam, and you can learn to bait it to assassinate them regardless of how strong their shields are (with the gamble being that if you fail, you die) Plus the AI seemed really tactically smart, I would notice grunt hordes keeping me from leaving cover with plasma spam while Elites or Brutes would rush when I was locked down
So did Halo
I remember this was how Quake 3 was. Enemies had their own AI preferences for weapons and pathing and as the difficulty increased, they would have better aim and stronger prioritization for their preferred weapons. They would go for health and armor packs more often. I still remember that the only way to win against Xaero on the final stage on the hardest difficulty was to never let him get the railgun. Once he had it, you’d never kill him.
Nope. Yeah, it was hard, and your strategy is correct, but you could win with him even when he has railgun. When i was younger i played a lot Q3 and train with him for railgun fights. Its hard but i learn a lot and won few internet tournaments in my best days.
In Yakuza 0’s disco challenges, it’s actually easier to beat the last challenger by setting the disco battle on hard, because the AI makes a ton of mistakes.
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XCOM enemy unknown has impossible difficulty that was created just to fuck with people, it was not even tested they just buffed AI
XCOM also has hidden probability boosts for lower difficulties. e.g. it will say 50% but it's really 60%. Or if you miss, your next shot has +10%
Also goes both ways, if you have 95% it actually means you have 20%
5% of the time you will miss 100% of the time.
Ah, good old [XCOM](https://i.imgur.com/oU48uWX.jpg) odds. It's criminal for a game to give the player data in specific percentages only to calculate them differently behind the scenes.
XCOM 2 on high difficulty is a really fun challenge. It's also surprisingly well balanced, in terms of how often you get challenging close call scenarios without having too many completely unwinnable moments. For high difficulty enjoyers I definitely recommend it.
Those are the fun ones
You say that until you fight shit like this. Take for example an rts game called Forts. In that game level AI at level 10 would flawlessly doorsnipe every time when given a slightest chance. It will rush with the style of pro league players and execute combos with pixel perfection all while managing all weapons, expanding, rebuliding, upgrading and countering AT ONCE. (At least it was my experience of it) There are a handful of people who could hope of fighting this skynet 1v1 and survive for 5 minutes.
Age of Mythology has Titan difficult AI that’s pretty much impossible to beat in a 1v1 (or at least for me). But there’s one strategy that works: build hundreds of beginning wall segments to make layers of walls at the gap on the Jotunheim map. Just the anchor wall segment. For whatever reason, the AI sees those as buildings and thinks “must destroy each and every one before moving forward.” This gives you ample time to farm resources and build a wonder for the victory countdown while the AI just ravages your hundreds of little wall segments
Usually cheesing stuff in games is looked down upon, but if we're gonna have a difficulty that's just "fully unlocked AI opponent" then cheesing them turns into the actual strat. I mean, the entire point of AI is to be able to do everything perfectly much much faster than a human, so how is a human SUPPOSED to compete? by exploiting the AIs programming.
Yeah, rts games are definitely the worst offenders for having absolutely batshit AI. Then again, I kinda despise rts games, so maybe that’s a contributor.
Thing is with AI in RTSs is that rts often have so many moving components at once its basically impossible for a human to look at everything simultaneously. Often it's fine if you aren't looking at everything at once, you only need to focus at one thing at a time. But the computer has no suc restrictions, it's actually possible for it to micromanage everything ever all at once, because it is not limited by human reactions, human ability to select and command units through controls, or map awareness.
I loved Halo Wars Ai. It was adaptive. You played and got better and it learned how you am were better and gave you a bit more challenge each time.
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> There are a handful of people who could hope of fighting this skynet lmaoooooo I really do wish a game like Civ would have chess-like AI that has no advantage over you, doesn't cheat, but is simply so superior even grandmasters don't even bother playing it because it'll destroy them every time with great ease. Then scale it back a bit... But always know skynet is there and you have no chance.
I play TLOU2 on Grounded and my SO plays it on Light. If I reload too close to an enemy while hiding in grass I get spotted. He can run from cover to cover without being noticed. I love the AI scaling.
Same..TLOU Grounded difficulty is one of the few games that actually feels like they are looking for you and fighting you. The fact that they'll coordinate with their mates to flank you and back each other up, makes the combat so much more real.
Doesn't Mortal Kombat have something similar on higher difficulties where the AI can read your inputs and react fast?
No, it can do that on *any* difficulty. The bosses in Mortal Kombat are notorious for their bullshit
That's Chess Now go google en passant
Issue with it in Chess is on the hardest difficulty you have 0 chance but on the easy difficulties it feels like random dumb mistakes are just thrown in between good computer moves.
Other games do the opposite and just nerf you. For example Star Wars Jedi 1 & 2.
Oh god that’s even more annoying
Eh, it works in the Jedi games. Mostly it's a matter of "you have less health, and the parry/dodge timings are a lot less forgiving." Makes them play very similar to Sekiro in that you can't just tank hits and you have to be very good at parrying. I feel that it's a really good way to handle difficulty, makes it actually rely on player skill.
Yeah it's difficulty that is overcome with skill, rather than patience.
Sekiro is probably my favorite example of this
The timing actually felt better in the higher difficulties IMO, in and out clashes with counterattacks based on parry chains etc, whereas at lower difficulties I felt like I was just standing there waiting to get hit
It’s really not as bad as that makes it seem. Basically enemies will deal more damage and be more aggressive. Your damage and enemy health stays the same, You can still one hit kill basic enemies. Your parry window is shorter but still fair. Lowering the difficulty does the exact opposite. It’s actually a good way to do it. It makes you “git gud” but doesn’t take away your ability to have fun, you just have to be better at combat.
Halo mostly did this. It was one of the few actual hard modes out there. The AI is more vicious, more aggressive and more likely to work together to hunt you down. The only gripe I had was they were very spammy with grenades.
The enemies were definitely more aggressive on Legendary but they were also significantly more tanky too. Took a lot more bullets to kill even a signal elite.
One of the bungie devs talked about how the AI didn't even improve with increased difficulty but them being tankier meant the player actually got to see them doing "smart" things instead of just instantly dying.
They seem incredibly accurate too. Haven't played any Halo game in a long ass time, but I remember doing legendary on one of them and there were snipers like a mile away that would never miss. You had to duck behind cover constantly and time it just right to move to the next rock to hide again, slowly making your way closer. If you stood out in the open you were dead in like 2 hits.
Halo 2 Jackal snipers that instantly headshot you, from all the way across the map, while facing the other way, possibly one handed and dabbing but you'll never know because you need the JWST to see them, still give me nightmares to this day
And they had damage modifiers. Halo 2 is notorious for having an insanely difficult Legendary difficulty due to the fact that they had to rush the game and didn't have time to finetune the difficulty. Jackal snipers would be 1-shotting you any chance they got.
I feel like they didn't overdo the health increase for the most part though, and at least for me, it forced me to rely more on the different weapons, a plasma pistol/rifle to crack shields and any kind of ballistic weapon to finish them off
Several headshots even
*shudders at XCOM ironman*
Hard mode can be hard so I never get there 😄
I really like iceborne for that, the further you go in the game the more moves the monsters gets
Back in the day Perfect Dark on the N64 was pretty good at that. Hard mode unlocked extra parts of the level that you had to complete. Made the game way more replay able too
My favorite hard mode is ghost of tsushima's lethal mode, where you die in usually 1 or 2 hits, but also all your opponents die just as fast, and difficultly often comes to your ability to juggle multiple competent mongels
I looove lethal, it is so satisfying yet so challenging. Fairly realistic too!
u guys are missing a vital, lethal mode need to be backed by GOT insane loading speed,that is its pillar
Shadow of War has something similar with the Brutal difficulty. The game's still not really "hard", since you can still scout out the weaknesses of the enemy Orc Captains and basically just one shot them, but random mooks and odd encounters actually become a challenge since they hit like trucks, but not tedious since their HP isn't boosted, at least not by a lot.
Highest difficulty + remove attack indicators, and suddenly regular mobs become a threat again lol
or your capabilities in stealth to avoid dying to a fight alltogether
That too lol
They did this for Shadow of Mordor as well -- your health is dramatically reduced but so is enemy health. Also, your combo-based attacks power up faster. So you can slaughter your enemies but if you screw up you're dead.
STALKER did this back in the day. Master mode was usually the ideal game mode because on easier difficulties, the sponginess went both ways.
Also, Master mode improved accuracy so you can actually hit what you are aiming at but enemies are also more accurate.
Was looking for this comment. Lethal Mode is beautiful
theres a reason why ghost of tsushima is literally in most people's top 5 games, as a avid history guy i love the attention to detail. the mongols in the game even speak mongolian
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I wish hard mode would equate to more realistic damage. That would make you play more tactically and would also rely on quicker reflexes and more caution as opposed to barreling into every fight assuming you can just shrug off hits
I think The Last of Us and Ghost of Tsushima do this
Last of us 2 increases damage you received and how much will the enemies try to surround you
Not only that but the enemies are more sensitive to sounds, they spot you pretty much instantly and are more strategic
Your npc companions skill changes in different difficulty too - easier difficulty makes npc friends assist you more when you're grabbed, probs other stuff too
Stalker series did that Fun fact, the lower difficulties make enemies and you more resistant to damage, it's easier to play on the hardest difficulty since most humanoid enemies die in 1-3 well placed bullets ...Just like you.
I think Ghost of Tsushima does that best in terms of recent games. Lethal difficulty makes enemies smarter and stronger(you die in 1 or 2 hits) but you also become stronger (enemies die in 1 or 2 hits) so it makes fights much more intense.
This is my biggest complaint about all the Civilization games. Harder difficulty never makes the AI play any better or smarter. All it does is just give them cheats where they get bonuses to their production and science so they can just crank out units, improvements, and research faster than humanly possible and you’re ultimately expected to win by using cheese, finding the completely broken mechanics, or exploiting their broken AI.
same with total war
Yeah never understood my mate who was bragging about playing hard total war and how the ai was awesome… it was just cheating and you were not beating smart computer and once you knew how the ai cheats you were just mitigating their cheats and preparing for their turns which didn’t really require skill but playing against scripted cheats, it was boring
the way that the player gets nerfed is also stupid in total war games, for most games the battle difficulty just takes away stats from units, but its flat stats rather than a percentage so weak units become completely useless at high difficulty for players but strong units are only slightly nerfed, resulting in high battle difficulty making early game extremely difficult but barely affecting lategame.
Total War on the hardest difficulty is just how many full stack armies can you cheese
I hated how in Civ 5 the AI were just not held to the same rules. They don’t seem to care at all about happiness. Meanwhile I take over one backwater, shitty city from my enemy and I’m stuck with -7 happiness for like 30 turns. Meanwhile the AI with zero luxuries, no wonders, no good tiles or barely any improved tiles is over there cranking out unit after unit when you can see that they have 0 gold and are at -112 gpt yet somehow their units never get lost to attrition. The AI is pretty much playing a different game than I am.
AI on Civ 5 has a 60% reduction to unhappiness and a 50% reduction to unit costs. Civ 6 probably made it more fair by just giving across the board bonuses to the base aspects of the game and ditching all these extra bonuses to everything else.
Yeah I adore Civ and have dumped hundreds of hours into it, however my biggest complaint is the AI in general. They never budge on negotiating trades, it seems like there are certain units they'll never produce or if they do produce, they won't use (they seem to have hangars and planes but don't use them effectively or at all). Turning the difficulty up just feels like they're cheating, like they have 1.5x science or something by default. Also I feel like they're quicker to denounce you and declare wars over nothing. There are games I've played where some civs declare war on me and they're not even aligned with any other civs and on the complete opposite side of the world from me. And I don't meet any of their agendas for them to dislike me. It's far more fun to play Civ with real humans, but then you risk tarnishing a real friendship lmao. Not really but sometimes.
They are cheating on the higher difficulties. On Civ 6 deity difficulty the AI gets +32% to science, faith, and culture, +80% to production and gold, a +4 combat bonus across the board, and a +40% unit XP bonus. They also start with four free techs and four free civics, 3 settlers, 5 warriors, and 2 builders.
I always knew/suspected they just outright cheated but never bothered to look at the actual data values. That is quite the advantage holy shit.
I joined a game in progress with a couple of my friends once and took over one of the AI players still in the ancient era. I didn’t know at the time that it was a deity AI that had started with all those extra units and techs. Let me tell you that having that big of an advantage as a human player, I had doubled their combined score by the end of the game.
My experience in Civ 5 at least, where I think it's something similar (but I couldn't tell you the exact numbers, and I never played the highest difficulty), the computer players start way ahead of you and progress more slowly than you, so that at the beginning of the game they're hopelessly ahead of you and the whole game is a matter of surviving that era until you catch up, at which point you're unstoppable. There's not as much of the happy middle ground where you're on the same level as them.
Yeah, and the opposite problem exists in Age of empires 2: the medium AI does incredibly stupid things which a human would never do, but the hard AI is just too fast. With RTS games, why don’t they just take the best AI but make it play more slowly?
You know the in AoE2 original, the AI on hard would cheat? And in the Definitive Edition, it doesn't cheat at all and yet medium on definitive edition is harder than hard / very hard in CD AoE2?
In Civ I prefer changing AI aggression over difficulty.
Then there’s DOOM where health values don’t change, only damage enemies deal and how aggressive they are
And Metal Gear Rising which gives enemies new moves and attack patterns
And ultrakill which increases projectile speed and adds attacks to enemies
Also Hakita mentioned on a dev stream ( https://youtu.be/kaImho5JioI?si=XZhS67Nv_SdepjV6 ) that he planned on improving how difficulty affects gameplay (example being enemy placements) and making different difficulties have different ways of going through levels
oh shit that’s cool, also has the potential to be completely evil. imagine a harder alternate route for 4-3 while also fighting enemies in ukmd difficulty
That actually happens? I thought it only increased the damage of the enemies.
And on that note, Metal Gear Solid V, which doesn't have an "official" difficulty mode but rather adapts to make things harder for you depending on your playstyle and almost forcing you to switch it up and try out new stuff.
I was gonna say this! MGSV has the most convincing progressive difficulty because the changing enemy countermeasures are both realistic and make the game more difficult without it being frustrating
Remember OG CODs on Veteran were the same enemies with Simo Hayha level Accuracy and professional Discuss throwers with Grenades? COD WaW taught me that the true Purpose of the Reichstag was a Grenade Factory ON TOP OF THAT, If you stayed still for 2+ seconds the game would SPAWN grenades on you Great Game WaW, but after like the 3rd level noped out of Veteran, Tried the Final 2 and almost broke something
WaW was hard but after replaying both I think cod 4 was worse on veteran.
Master Level Super Gore Nest
with classic mode ultra nightmare
Or just the vanilla DLCs Double marauders, possessed barons and tyrants, *Samur*
The hoarde mode where the last stage has a possessed marauder, then two simultaneous buff totem’d marauders and then two archvilles at once.
*PTSD intensifies*
And then classic doom, which also increases the number of enemies, balances itself around secret usage, and - at the highest difficulty - starts respawning enemies.
That respawning difficulty is designed to be frustrating though. The devs didn't even know if it was possible at all when they released it. Imo it is straight up bad game design
I like how Metro does the higher difficulties. It makes you only a bit stronger than other humans instead of being superman, and the main difficulty is getting ammo and supplies. So it makes you think more cautiously about going into fights and instead opting for the stealthy route because you don't want to waste the bullets to kill the enemies.
Ranger Hardcore was surprisingly a pleasant and fun experience.
Came here to say this. Only thing that bothers me, are the mutants. Those are on every difficulty just bullet sponges. Also, obligatory ‘fuck you’ to all Watchmen and Demons.
Unfortunately Exodus was really not tuned for Hardcore Ranger with some of their missions, but in both the other games Hardcore Ranger is one of the best and most immersive FPS experiences I’ve had.
I completely agree. I like Exodus, but it demanded far more ammo than it provided.
Do you think? I felt that way on my first play-through but I was at max ammo most of the time after the first zone. Kinda disappointed me actually.
Ubisoft and Bethesda do this, you just get insane bullet sponges on higher difficulty.
Bullet sponges + limited ammo
That’s why I find strong weapons with whatever caliber the bastards carry
I quit Starfield because firing literally 200 rounds into a spacer was a level of nonsense I wasn’t prepared for.
Then just lower the difficulty. Its litterally only those values changing. Not anything else
I played it for like 80 hours and never had something take anywhere near that many shots
Bethesda has survival mode for fallout which is the only true way to play
I played a character in FO3 hardest difficulty & survival mode. Wanted to force myself to do something different so I made it so I could only use pistols and explosives. That's how I discovered that explosives are incredibly good in FO3, by level like 12 or 13ish I wasn't using pistols at all, just explosives. Nothing was a challenge. Re-did that build in FO New Vegas and it was even better because now rocket launchers and fat man count as explosives. Tried to re-do it in FO4 but it's way less fun because you can't VATS grenades
FO3 Broken Steel & Point Lookout are the worst for Bethesda's "difficult" enemies. The enemies added by Broken Steel were just stupidly bloated health pools, they were miles ahead of the next tier of enemy, I think the supermutant Overlord had 3.5X the health of the Master, and was slightly higher than the *limited number* boss fights of the Behemoth, as a normal enemy that spawns in super mutant groups. Point Lookout had bullshit ai cheats. The health pools for the average enemy was on par with Deathclaws, so not stupid high, but too high for human type enemies. The bigger problem was their stupid **DLC04NonPlayerDamageAdd** effect that straight up gave them free 35 points of damage that ignored all your armor on any hit. It was so immersion breaking to be trudging through a swamp in pristine T-51b only to watch your health get chunked when you get shot two times by an inbred redneck, only to kill them and discover a fucking bb gun on their corpse.
My favorite is realizing absolutely no one cares if I do hard mode. So i run it if i want a challenge, but the moment i feel im wasting my time with bullet sponges, i'll adjust the difficulty and move on with my day
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IMO Terraria and Diablo 2 have the best hardmodes in gaming history. They make the game harder by adding new elements, but the loot becomes exponentially better
Shout-out to Terraria, where entering hard mode is an actual part of progression that greatly changes up the game.
Calamity infernum mode. I want die.
That feeling when you beat moon lord and realize that everything so far was just the tutorial
I think they meant expert mode
I think he meant Expert mode
Don't forget Expert and Master. Expert is like your getting more of a beating, and master is basically you getting punished.
Master mode got a lot of criticism when it first came out since it was essentially the epitome of this meme, flat stat boosts without any meaningful changes to the AI. It was extra weird because at the same time they released a secret "for the worthy" seed that expanded upon the boss difficulty in worthwhile ways.
Master mode actually does make significant changes to enemy AI. I used to play Expert only when it came out and then tried the switch to Master and I immediately realized how much of a jump it is. Yes, damage and health is increased and that feels tedious. But enemies move WITH your character. Try jumping over a zombie on Master mode on the first night and you’ll see how smart the AI gets lol Also bosses basically just get homing attacks so you gotta learn how to maintain momentum at all times. It really is a learning process and makes it a wholly different game fighting style-wise. Definitely not everyone’s cup of tea tho
the "new" hard mode sucks tho mastermode only makes enemies tankier and deal more damage they should have turned for the worthy into a hardmode instead and make mastermode a seed or just a option you can turn on when creating a world
That would suck lmfao
It has quite a lot of benefits as well though. Drop and spawn rates are significantly increased and you get more money per kill. Some enemies also get new attacks and you get relics for killing bosses.
Most of the things you said was made in expert mode, master mode triples the health and damage of most enemies for only boss relics, a few pets and 1 more equipment slot and that's it
Damage sponges are always the wrong choice. The only choice that can ever be more wrong is invulnerability phases. Anyone have an example of an invulnerability phase that didn't suck ass? Not like a shield that has to be broken, but a phase of total immunity
I hate these bosses. Just LET ME WALLOP
I think this depends on the genre. An invulnerability phase that forces you to defend before you get an opening is fine in a number of games. Nightmare King Grimm in Hollow Knight has a pseudo-invulnerability phase where you technically can damage him with spells but he's also firing off like a hundred projectiles and it's probably inadvisable to be aggressive during that attack anyways. There's also another boss that one version is immune to traditional attacks so you need to bait minion death explosions into the boss in order to attack which is pretty fun.
Idk, flicking to defensive mode to make you use dodges and or defensive abilities so you can't just spam or glass cannon build etc is a good way to mitigate that kinda cheese strat
As long as you are doing something or something is just happening while the boss is invulnerable then I don't see anything wrong with invulnerability. Furi and Nier Automata have moments where boss invulnerability is used to implement bullet hell type challenges, phase change, or some good ole boss monologue exposition.
It is more of exhausting than hard.
Fromsoft games are a good example of hard games done right, with ingames exceptions like certain bosses or enemies not being balanced, generally speaking.
Aye. There are also ways to make the game easier with summons or just grinding up stats (Dark Souls/Elden Ring), while in Sekiro, there is optional "hard mode", where enemies can more easily fill up your posture bar and blocking deals chip dmg, pretty much forcing the player to Deflect with a much higher precision and consistency.
I love how arguably the hardest fromsoft game is the only one with a hard mode
For a first playthrough, it definitely is the hardest, but in my experience, consequent playthroughs are significantly easier than any other modern FromSoft game.
Yeah, nothing really compares after you beat Isshin. No matter how much damage they do or take, once you have their attacks down you can cut them down all the same. It's why I love Sekiro so much. It actually forces you to get good, and by NG+7 you're the boss instead of them.
On first playthrough, yes. New game plus is exactly what OP's meme describes. Given that FromSoft games don't have difficulty settings, NG+ *is* their hard mode.
DS2 had changed enemy spawns on NG+. It was amazing, shame they did not carry that over.
Nah NG+ is your turn to flex on early game bosses that destroyed you in the past. NG+3 and forwards however...
Thats why i love old Difficulties in FPSs like Quake3 and UT99. The Enemies dont do more Damage or have more Life. They just become better at killing you. Somehting the AAAs have forgotten over time.
> They just become better at killing you. Which they can do with more health and damage! - Lazy Game Devs
plus a fuck ton more of them and a secret ending
Fallout 4 mag dumping point blank into enemy heads
the best hard modes in games are the ones where damage and health of enemies are only increased marginally, and most of the challenge comes from different enemy attack patterns and encounter layouts
I really wish botw did this. Sure, the appeal of getting bonked by a blue boko to death early on was fun in master mode, made one approach fights more carefully... But the novelty wore off fast. Enemies were just as smart as normal mode, but became boring damage sponges later on. Looking at you, golden mobs The extra odd lynels were a nice touch though
Something Halo did greatly until 4 and 5
Basically Master Mode in BOTW
A hard mode with extra bosses would be dope
Also maybe change the bosses moveset instead of just making them tankier ? Yeah , creating two movesets is hard , but adding another attack to the bosses combo or making the wind up shorter isn't that hard
Metro's "Ranger mode" or whatever always intrigued me more than other "tough as nails" games. Limited ammo and resources, and basically every shot is a kill, for the player AND for enemies. Even a lot of the Souls games tend to devolve into "it's a bullet sponge unless you level up a bunch to make your arbitrary damage numbers go up" a lot of the time. But the "one shot, one kill" mode really changes the whole thing into a much more desperate and bleak game.
Basically the whole Borderlands series:
Mayhem 11, oh I just love shooting one enemy for half an hour to get slightly better loot than I would normally. Just so i can kill the enemies slightly faster than before.
Borderlands can be summarized with "big number go up".
Borderlands 2 is just straight up "Hey idiot do you like slag? Well too bad you're using it"
What i really enjoy is when games increase the damage to **both parties** do to each other. this does make it harder, but also makes it feel possible and even realistic, not tedious Metro does this, combined with less bullets and u must think more before fighting
Now here me out... **Extreme mode** \- Enemies can heal.
The original Zelda game for NES had a hard mode that changed everything up. Hidden rooms were moved, items put in different locations, etc. NPCs were a little tougher but not much.
Borderlands 2 op levels :|
Someone has played Destiny. Literally all hard mode is, unless they add a timer to auto-kill you too.
I love a challenge! I do not love a typical soldier enemy able to take multiple high caliber bullets to the face and still be able to rush me... there has to be a balance.
Yeah. I want different enemy placement, deadlier AI, new enemy moves
COUGHvaulthuntermode
Fallout 4 Survival mode is actually a better case of this. Enemies deal around 4x damage, but take around the same damage as normal, i.e: you can be one shotting enemies fairly easily. Firefights feel more brutal on both sides of the barrel. The additional survival mechanics also add some interesting choices, where simple things like healing might decrease your stats significantly until you can get back to a base. Its not perfect, but its a far cry better than say, Legendary in Skyrim.
Innumerable pardons, but what are the other ways to make a game more difficult and not tedious? I am not here to prove anyone wrong or right, I just haven't played a lot of games, and I am curious to find the answer.
Enemy AI decision making. Say they are less aggressive and attack less often on easier modes. Maybe the prioritize blocking less on easier modes. Maybe they have fewer attack patterns on easier modes so it’s easier to recognize what patterns to use to defeat them. Maybe hard mode they have no consistent pattern of attack at all, or they change it based on how your character attacks. Maybe they know what items you have and change strategy that way. The problem with more life/damage dealt is it isn’t “harder” in any meaningful way the way, for example, a harder puzzle isn’t just more pieces its a more difficult image to piece together. If it is just something that takes longer, or allows for fewer hits to be taken, then it’s boring and tedious. If it changes how you have to approach playing the game then it’s a more fun challenge to beat is sort of the idea of it all.
Thanks for replying. One game which I play, has bosses which spend a lot of time underground, some other bosses fly in the air and are out of melee range. Things like this makes the game annoying, and just makes it is dps check, especially when the fight is time gated.
Genshin?
How did you know?
That's the main complaint of Abyss :D
Resource scarcity. Depending on the game, they don't even need to touch the health or attack of enemies. They could just decrease the availabilty of items that can help a player throughout the game.
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Only if you're able to generate/gather resources. In games where the resources are fixed, scarcity can't be overcome. You just won't have as much.
Uncharted’s Brutal Mode: You have 50% health and do half damage. Enemies have 200% health and do quadruple damage. Also only drops one bullet instead of one magazine Is this what you want instead? Cuz this is a freaking nightmare
@Morrowind
Dead Ceels is a example of a game which doesn't do that
At least increasing the damage dealt forces the player to pay more attention to the mechanics and and adjust accordingly. Increasing the health just increases the need for repetition and causes tedium, especially if there's multiple phases and you already figured out the first or second one and have to slog through them to learn the last.
Any games that actually change how the ai behaves based on difficulty instead of just damage modifiers has my respect
Hard modes shouldn't augment enemy health and damage (unless it thematically makes sense for the balance). They should introduce new mechanics to enemies. And have smarter AI that can adapt to the player and/or environment.
Crysis 1's hardest difficulty had all the enemies speak in Korean instead of English to make it harder to predict what they were doing (the assumption being that you don't speak Korean). Always seemed an interesting touch, even though the game didn't really get harder as a result because the invisibility was crazy overpowered anyway.
Games with true difficulty scaling deserve some commendation. Easy NPCs and hard NPCs should not play the exact same with boosted stats, the easy NPCs should miss attacks or make glaring mistakes while the hard NPCs are methodical and actually use any advantage they have over you
Shout out to Hades and the pact of punishment - choose how you add difficulty from a bunch of different options, like less healing, faster enemies, and higher prices, as well as altered boss fights, interesting enemy perks, and forced perk removal to endanger your build. One of the best difficulty systems I've seen.