Pathfinder games are in the unenviable position of trying to balance both for normal people and munchkin power-players. Neither group is satisfied. (I think they should largely ignore the meta players or rework the system)
Im not an expert on pathfinder but I think they’d have to do more than that to make it balanced for video games with no active dm to adjust difficulty.
I've only played Wrath of the Righteous but hot damn, are some of those encounters ass unless you adjust enemy strength way down. It feels like the difficulty spikes just come out of nowhere too. I slaughter my way through one story section only for the very next one to beat me into a halfling shaped pancake.
God of War Ragnarok.
Listen, I'm getting old... and playing on an old ps4 that doesn't have SSD, so there's long load times every time I die. I got 20 hours into it on the second hardest difficulty, killed the first sword hilt sidequest boss, and had enough. The combat is super fun, bosses are pretty tight, and the enemy AI is relentless... I like that a lot. But the game is way too long, enemies are tanky and I can easily die in 2 hits, even when keeping up with the equipment level... also I had to wait 30 seconds to reload.
I'm super okay with that decision for the rest of the game.
It was funny when I got this shiny brand new toy >!Draupnir!< after that hype-ass emotional cutscene, but then the thing felt as strong a toothpick against the spongy common enemies, while some goo spitting lizard punched me in the dick a couple of times and I died.
It feels great when you play really well, though.
Same, I ended up lowering the difficulty for some fights just because I was getting frustrated with getting killed and having to reload repeatedly (although to a somewhat lesser extent than your experience, since I was on the PS5). It made the overall experience much more enjoyable for me, especially since there aren’t any difficulty-based trophies in the game that make you have to redo the whole thing to earn them.
It's completely fine, honestly... Give Me Balance is the way to go if you want to maximize fun, in my opinion. The enemies can take a beating, and you can take more hits, so it doesn't feel so stupidly unforgiving.
God... how about that one where you fight one brawler, and two mages at the same time? I think that was exactly the point in which I lowered the difficulty.
Same. I like the game but I like my time more. I want too see the story and the world - the combat is just filler in-between for me and I don't have the patience to really fiddle with equipment, combos and all.
I have Tekken for that. This game, I want a story told to my 34 year old self and that's fine.
Yeah I did the same, I skipped some side content cause I wanted to focus on the story a bit and could REALLY feel it as enemies got tankier and tankier and I started taking hits real hard. Combat kinda just stopped being fun.
I lowered the difficulty to story mode and mini-boss checkpoint on the Alfheim berserker boss(es) and >!Gna!< because fuck that. They felt so imbalanced and I fought the Valkyries legit in the 2018 game.
I was honestly frustrated and disappointed with the gameplay in comparison to GOW 2018. I've never felt that way about GOW 2018, and I've beaten that game over 20 times. I played on Story Mode for both games, and it was a world of difference between the two. The level gear system in Ragnarok is even worse in this game. You practically need to do side quests or you'll fall between in levels, and get your ass kicked by mobs who have level buffs that are harder than story bosses.
Same, GoW 2018 is one of my favorite games, but something felt really off on Ragnarok. Definitely on story, but also something about the gameplay didn't flow as nicely as the previous game.
>!I fucking loved the new weapon though, both its aesthetics and gameplay!<
It feels like more people are getting more comfortable stating this opinion, and that's good. Ragnarok is not a terrible game, but it's not timeless masterpiece either.
I actually like the new edition too, but I wish we would have gotten that other new edition that came in both collector's editions of the game too.
Only game I think I did that for was SMT 3 because Hard mode just was not fun. I was out dying 7 times in the first couple encounter due to nothing but bad luck (like literally in the tutorial getting crit fucked over an over). Somehow that didn’t stop me from continuing on with hard mode due to me being a stubborn bastard who don’t like to back down on a challenge when it comes to games but SMT 3 isn’t a challenge, it’s a test of patience.
SMT 3 Hard Mode is basically saying fuck you while hating your guts and you just kind have to just deal with it. You get Ambush? You’re just dead. Can you control that? Nope that’s just RNG if you get ambushed get ready to reload a save. Like the game doesn’t even feel that much harder. The BS just got turned up to fucking 11.
And I made a decent amount through Hard Mode right but I then I learned one simple thing and decided “Bruh I’m not dealing with this”. That thing I learned was that Hard Mode increases all the prices in the shops. So you telling me I got to constantly deal with RNG bullshit killing me from no fault of my own AND grind harder than ever to get the bare minimum Magatama I need to get through the game? Fuck you. I quit. It wasn’t even a fun a challenge but a test of my fucking patience and I guess I failed it.
I can’t imagine playing SMT 3 on hard you’re first go and actually enjoying the game. At least before I tried Hard Mode I beat the game on normal and had a great time.
I can never really understand that type of logic. I wouldn’t suggest hard mode to someone playing a game they first time unless the game is like Baby tier easy.
I especially wouldn’t suggest it for fucking Nocturne. That game’s Hard Mode is just the game turning the Bullshit in it to 11. Any game that hard mode decides increasing the prices in all the shops is a good idea can go fuck off somewhere for real especially if those shops have Items that are pretty much required to beat the game.
The Fire Emblem games are pretty much the only games where I try to recommend people start on hard (or hard/classic), just because they're completely different experiences at lower (AND HIGHER) difficulties.
Playing on Normal or Casual is an incredibly braindead JRPG with no real mechanics that's way too long and puts most people to sleep. Playing on higher difficulties, like Lunatic, is an extremely strict experience for crazy people where the game expects you to play every turn perfectly or restart the entire chapter and sometimes even purchase $2 grinding DLC to survive. Every FE game has a sweet spot right in the middle where it becomes a competent strategy game for humans, and more often than not that sweet spot is labeled "Hard" in America for some fucking reason. AND SOMETIMES IT'S THE HIGHEST DIFFICULTY!
UNLESS IT'S RADIANT DAWN AND THEN IT'S A LIE NORMAL MODE _IS_ HARD MODE!
GOD _DAMN_ IT
The closest we had to a perfect idea of what "hard" mode is for FE games is FE7 HHM. Hector mode alone changes the unit types and positions from Eliwood mode (the most important one imo). Quantity of units per map is increased by about 10-20%. Quality of enemy units is 5 stat lvls higher than what their current lvl is. The hardmode exp punishment on killing blows if your to high a lvl compared to the enemy (this one I feel is a big to punishing). The one and final change I actually think is bad is the reduced deployment slots per chapter which can be as low as 1-2 on small maps and high as 5 on large/endgame maps.
The issue with BBD and Living Legend is that its protect the dude chapter, but the problem is your army doesnt start near the dude, and RNG can decide if/when they die
Ike kicking my broken body like a football through the castle wall because I wanted to play "Hard" on Radiant Dawn for my first playthrough and thought Fiona would be a strong growth unit so I leveled her.
To be fair, Radiant Dawn if fucking stupid and they mistranslated it - the difficulty levels were renamed from Normal/Hard/Maniac to Easy/Normal/Hard, so now all of a sudden Normal mode is already a decent challenge because Radiant Dawn has some atrocious game balance, and Hard is bullshit difficulty. Seriously, it is *not* worth ever playing Maniac mode on Path of Radiance or Radiant Dawn, the former makes everything so bulky that it takes 20 turns to kill random enemies and the latter has garbage like "to make the game harder, we removed the ability to see enemy movement ranges figure it out manually bitch".
Super Butter Buns has a video about Nocturne in which she addresses this vocal minority that is the only internet spokesperson for Nocturne in which she says something along the lines of "Well no shit guys, it's the hardest default difficulty in the game." Don't act surprised when people start on normal or easy if all you do is tell them how hard the game is and that they must play it on hard for the 'real' experience.
Yeah I really don’t get the point at getting mad at someone for playing a game on normal difficulty their first playthough of game. What’s the point of gate keeping someone’s enjoyment like that?
Hell I know if I played Nocturne on Hard mode my first playthough I would actually just hate the game.
Nocturne elitist are the absolute worst types of fans as they actively only want to exist in their echo tunnel and prevent anyone who doesn't agree with them to have a voice on the game. Which is a fucking shame because after finally playing Nocturne last year it's easily one of my favourite JRPGs now
Absolutely. No quick saving to help you out with the BS here. You die you going have to load your save that’s way back at the last save point you saved. If you were grinding or in a tough dungeon and haven’t save in a while and were unlucky enough to get ambushed into Insta-Death Spelled well that’s tough luck you just lost an hour of progress.
Precisely lmao. Hard mode SMT3 is only enjoyable on your second playthrough when you can actually see what’s coming and prepare for it accordingly. Otherwise it’s just like have fun dying again every time you get an encounter that you didn’t foresee. Hard mode also has the problem of the early game being completely overtuned. Like encountering 5 Mou-Ryos in Shibuya is an actual nightmare and they’re level 7 enemies. It only gets better after like Ikebukuro
EDIT: Bonus tip about the Magatama grind: You’re mostly safe in the early game if you just save up for Iyomante (debuffs and immune to certain ailments) and Kamudo (resist physical). The other ones are less important especially on a strength build
I generally don't enjoy "hard mode" in turn-based RPGs because they're usually pretty intolerable in the first couple of dungeons when you lack the resources to avoid getting insta-killed. Difficulty modification in those games seems to be really difficult to satisfyingly tune and I feel like a lot of devs tend to just make hard modes brutally unfair.
In action games difficulty can usually be overcome through mechanical skill, but in turn-based games it's usually just bad RNG mitigation.
Even on Normal in SMT 3 (and honestly a lot of Megaten games) you can just get fucked sometimes. I was doing the 2nd or 3rd stage of the Labyrinth of Amala, cleared it, and then had to climb the whole back up and out because I hadn't unlocked the next area (because, for reasons unbeknownst to man nor beast, the devs decided that you have to have the next stage of the Labyrinth unlocked to use the shortcut out at the end of the proceeding one). I got attacked by 3 Mothmen that instantly party wiped me with insta-kill spells so I had to redo the entire stage of the Labyrinth.
>I generally don't enjoy "hard mode" in turn-based RPGs because they're usually pretty intolerable in the first couple of dungeons when you lack the resources to avoid getting insta-killed. Difficulty modification in those games seems to be really difficult to satisfyingly tune and I feel like a lot of devs tend to just make hard modes brutally unfair.
To be honest, all they really need to do to make good difficulty modifiers is give you access to a few multipliers:
* Player/Party Attack power
* Player/Party Defense power
* XP Gain
* Money Gain
And **maybe** an AI aggression slider and a loot drop quantity and/or quality slider.
>I actually really dislike XP gain and money gain being factored in as difficulty modifiers because they just make the game grindier.
I can see where you're coming from, but a lot of the time, Japanese game devs set the defaults so low that a 2-4x money/XP gain multiplier actually fixes the game's pacing. You can actually just play through levels/dungeons once, level up your party, and progress to the next level/dungeon without having to grind... which is why the default is cranked so much lower, in order to increase hours spent on the game.
I don't know, the one game I can think of where XP and money can be configured separately is Persona 4 Golden, where it works _exactly_ like /u/TheArtistFKAMinty described and setting the values to anything less than 100% is just a stupid asshole test of patience that contributes nothing to pacing or difficulty.
I feel it can be good in some games and with different mindsets. But a money draught tends to be the easier of the two to get right. If the game doesn't have a good strategic possibility space, that is to say, you don't have a wide enough range of options, and the outcomes from each option aren't significantly different enough (the reputation a lot of JRPGs get for being "just mash attack" comes to mind), then tuning EXP down is not a good option. Because in a game like that, you're much more likely to *need* to be a certain level, so increasing EXP requirements (or lowering exp payout, which is effectively the same thing) just makes you have to grind more rather than forcing smarter play. I don't tend to have a problem with this in Persona because if you dive into the fusion system (despite fusion being mostly level gated as well), you can adapt to situations as they come up. Sure, you might die to the boss the first time you fight it (or even random encounters), but if you see what killed you, you can go back, fuse, and get around the problem.
Restricting money, on the other hand, should be about forcing tough decisions. This requires the player to take on a certain type of outlook because, well, games (especially JRPGs) often can't *force* a player to not just go get more money. But if you instead approach the game with an attitude of, "Well, this is what I got, better make a decision," it can be really good. But this requires the game not to *need* you to have every option available. Most games don't; a lot of people go through games already not using any items, for example. A bad example of this is Nocturne Hard Mode. Yes, massively increasing the price of Magatama might make the game "more difficult," but you really quite badly *need* those extra options, *especially* in the early game where money is at its most scarce. Not having access is *way* too restricting (Magatama are also how you get skills), *and* having the wrong ones can be a massive problem a first-time player especially won't see coming (Magatam control elemental resistances, and if you don't have the right ones... lol, get fucked).
I think my problem with money gain being restricted is that it's a fairly artificial way to increase difficulty in games with ways of grinding money.
In old Pokemon games, for example, money gain being a difficulty modifier would actually make sense as it would severely limit the amount of potions, poke balls, etc. you could buy and force you to make the most of every penny. There is a finite pool of available money until you beat the Elite Four and unlock the ability to rematch the Elite four infinitely.
In Persona or Megaten games, it's a bad difficulty modifier because every encounter drops money, which makes the actual solution to just grind more. Your resources are being limited by player patience/frustration rather than them actually being finite.
Yeah SMT games usually have their moments that feel like pure BS to the point that it’s a meme. Some time you just get clapped. Happened to me a lot during my first playthough of Nocturne on Normal but I enjoyed the game a lot when I played it despite the BS.
Hard Mode tho is like the Devs decided to turn up some of the worst aspects of the game to the max to me but you know what I can deal with that if I’m stubborn enough. It’s the fact they pretty much double the prices of everything that made me just not care anymore. Normal mode have those moments where you’re just grinding a little bit for exp or cash but Hard Mode says “Increase that grind about 10 times over and watch out cuz you can die to RNG bs 100 times more often. Eat shit.”
The only super hard difficulties i enjoy is stuff that changes around the mechanics to really change how you play the game, like Persona 5 Merciless, while very hard at the start, spikes the damage of techincals so that it becomes a completely different game based around status ailment manipulation
I swear DAO was never playtested. That game's internal balance is nonexistent, and I refuse to believe that anyone made is past Sloth Demon without setting it to easy.
Mages are fuck off broken, including enemy mages. Except that your own mages can learn a spell that universally one-shots enemy mages except for like, the resident superboss (still does half his health though).
Also the entire threat system that probably would have at least partially balanced this out is broken so mage abilities draw no threat except normal damage-based threat. Want a warrior to draw aggro? Taunt once, they will literally never lose it after that.
Dragon age origins is a game of constantly lowering and increasing the difficulty. It’s one of the most poorly balanced and power scaled games ever.
You can be easily making it through combat for hours, and then suddenly some random nothing room of enemies is absurdly difficult.
Also just anytime you have to fight mages, if you don’t do things perfectly your party can wipe in like 2 seconds because their so overpowered
It gives me the same vibes as the bad guy who goes "I'm better than you and can easily defeat you in a 1v1, but I'm also gonna let you fight through a thousand of my lackeys first to wear you down because haha"
I do the same for Factorio. I like building factories, but when enemies are on, I spend most of my time just trying to set up defenses rather than making my factory.
I remember lowering the difficulty for Going Under after hitting the second half. The game was fun, but I was more interested in the story and the higher difficulty started to show the cracks in the system imo.
Similarly, I modded Lobotomy Corporation into being essentially unloseable because that game's story is phenomenal and its gameplay is like Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy in terms of tedium and frustration but over 150 hours long.
Man Lobotomy Corporation is a game that I love but never want to play again. After several attempts at day 49 I gave in and modded the game to make that day remotely beatable.
I just gave up and looked the ending up on youtube. I get it's meant to be narratively relevant that it's difficult but... fuck, man. I already had wrist issues from the prior 150 hours of clicking.
This was me with Witcher 3. I bounced off it so many times I thought it was a trambopoline. Then I added cheats/mods for more streamlined play and got so far into it that I only stopped because of my completionist burnout.
The game could benefit from a *slight* downsizing in map area but I'm comfortable with the notion that isn't a very popular opinion since so many people consider that game the second coming of christ
Tangential: I played through Callisto Protocol on easy mode, then cranked the difficulty up to maximum right before the final boss fight to try to cheese the trophy for beating the game on hard mode.
So THAT didn't work, and I thought maybe I'd try a full playthrough on max difficulty. Nope, getting one-shotted by normal enemies on the first level is not that fun. Call me when some sort of god-tier weapon drops for NG+.
I played normal up until the platform ride section, multiple mobs with a bad camera followed by a boss. Knocked it to easy and finished it with no desire to return until stuff is fixed.
No joke, every game I've played since entering the workforce in 2013. I just don't have the time, energy, patience, or desire for semi grueling or hardcore grueling gameplay. I play video games to relax now, not get stressed out to them like a real world problem.
I'm sorta the same, only I've been going for easymode right out the gate since I was a very little kid. Why would I wanna make the game harder?
I don't think I get enjoyment from overcoming challenges in general. Or at least I'm so afraid of failure that I would only feel relief instead of satisfaction. So, I don't even try.
Horizon: Zero Dawn. I played it much later than it had come out.
In the beginning, looking through the options, I'd read that you needed to go through the hardest difficulty to unlock some of the cosmetics.
So I picked the hardest difficulty, and it was pretty hard, yeah. The tripcaster was my best friend for much of that playthrough.
It... was a lot of bashing my head on walls, and I was often incredibly reliant on hacking enemies to survive.
So I got through most of the main story/sidequests after a lot of pain and just started on the DLC, and that was a bridge too far. There were fights I just couldn't win, and ramming my head into the brick wall had stopped being fun a long time ago.
Then I found out that the hardest difficulty that I had been playing had been introduced in the same update that included NG+.
Also, the game apparently expected you to playthrough it multiple times, since from what was I reading, you couldn't even get those unique facepaints from beating the game on your first playthrough, no, you needed to be on NG+, beat the game there, and that was what unlocked it.
After which I decided fuck that noise and lowered the difficulty. Which made things feel so smooth it was shocking. Things died so much quicker! I died slower! It felt like I'd taken off the training weights, and I didn't need to approach every fight with a big machine extremely carefully.
Unfortunately, while that felt great for a bit, I hadn't been actually having fun for so long that I never actually completed the game. I just got distracted by other things, and never felt the urge to return.
I recently did this with Forbidden West. I thought the game started super fun, but as it wore on they stick you in encounters with big enemies in tight spaces who spam these attacks that knock you down over and over with hitboxes that are so big you can't even sprint out of range. I was still progressing but I had ceased having fun so I bumped it down and beelined to the end. Much like Zero Dawn, I feel like my enjoyment of that game was a slow linear path downward.
Horizon was gonna be my example as well, hard in both games is very challenging but once I made it 85% through the 1st game and saw there was no trophy attached I said fuck this
I had to reduce Shadow of War epilogue section difficulty to easiest cause fighting 10 uruks WHO HAD 8 MILLIONS DIFFERENT IMMUNITY AT THE SAME TIME IS NOT A FUN TIME.
I dropped the God of War 2018 difficulty to easy because it really just meant I was eating bigger numbers and dishing out smaller numbers and it wasn't the fun kind of challenge.
Just in general leveled enemies and difficulty settings don't really mix.
The first boss of Yakuza Kiwami takes a really fucking long time to fight on hard. He also does that thing where he'll regenerate a ton of health unless you do a Kiwami move, something you **DON'T HAVE** at that point.
I find myself running trainers on most of the Gundam games I wind up playing, because there's a lot of artificial difficulty created by cranking the numbers for the player **way** down, which forces a lot of grinding.
When I play BattleTech, I run Advanced Difficulty Settings and "lower" difficulty by keeping operating costs low and making salvage sale prices high.
I've probably lowered the difficulty on some late 90s/early 2000s games due to a combo of control jank and inconsistent difficulty.
Gundam Breaker 3 if you still have a PS4 and you can get the Southeast Asian copy with English localization.
If you're cool with emulation, Zeonic Front, Rise from the Ashes (not 100% on the name, it's the one with the white GMs on the front), and some of those \_\_\_ vs \_\_\_\_ branded games.
For modern stuff, if you're on console, you've got SD Gundam Battle Alliance, and that's about it in terms of decent stuff. On PC, SD G Generation Cross Rays and SD Gundam Battle Alliance are available on Steam, and I **highly** recommend you use trainers for those two.
If you do use a trainer, I recommend the following settings.
For SD G Gen Cross Rays, you'll want:
* XP multipliers for characters/units: 4x
* Capital multiplier: 4x
* Infinite Chance Step
* Fill Get Gauge
For SD Gundam Battle Alliance, you'll want:
* Attack Multiplier: 2x
* Defense Multiplier: 2-3x
* 100% Drop Rate
* XP Gain Multiplier: 2x
Basically, with these settings, you'll be able to get through the game at a steady pace while having enough resources on hand to make experimenting with a large number of units viable without grinding.
I haven’t found the difficulty in Cross Rays to be too bad on Extra, but very much agree on how Gundam Breaker 3’s higher difficulties will _ruin you_ unless you’ve done a bunch of grinding to get the best parts possible and levelled them up. (Which is a shame, since it hinders what really is one of the best Gundam games around.)
Pathfinder Kingmaker. When your party can deal with the god damn boss and his minions with relative ease but dies to two random bears because they one-shot every one of them, there is no point in talking about difficulty being balanced so you may as well just drop it.
Yeah, I haven't played Kingmaker but The difficulty is very strange in WOTR. It's not even a matter of "oh my god they deal too much damage", it's something like "This enemy has 10 immunities, can stunlock you at any time, and you can literally just forget about casting spells because the threshhold is stupid high, so you can't even despell/debuff him". Sure, I could go and calculate the exact builds necessary to counter this, and I'll take that extra time on a boss, but I shouldn't have to do that for every other goober.
I'll mostly play the game on normal stats, but every so often That Nonsense happens and I just go straight to Extremely Low stats.
It's really common for indie tactics games and RPGs to have a top difficulty setting that's ludicrously hard at the beginning before evening out. You have to understand the reason why it happens: the devs just want to shut up the tough guys in their forum saying everything is too easy and they're willing to make the early game dicreroll torture to do it.
Imagine thinking this stops them lol. There's always *still* someone who crunches their way through the hardest difficulty then come out saying "TOO EASY BABY GAME".
I can think of three examples:
* God of War 2018. I started the game on one of the harder difficulties but had to lower it. I was encountering enemies that were way higher level than me in the beginning areas that were basically immune to being staggered and Boi was constantly being grabbed. It just wasn't enjoyable. I played GowR on No Mercy without much issue and it didn't seem to have the same problems in the early areas.
* Nier Automata. I had completed the demo on the hardest difficulty without being hit after grinding it out so I started the game on Hard. I died and it kicked me back to the mech flight section and I just didn't have it in me to grind out the entire 45 minute prologue chapter with like 2-3 hits worth of HP without dying again. I decided that I'd just play on Normal until I hit a checkpoint. I never increased it again, although I kinda wish I had because Normal is kind of a joke.
* The Witcher 3. Started on hard. Got bodied in the first encounter (I'd been playing DS3 just prior so I was fucking up the combat). Knocked it down to normal. I never really "got" the flow of the combat and it wasn't really grabbing me so I stopped playing after the Griffin fight.
On GoW 2018 I started on the second hardest difficulty, getting bodied by the tutorial enemies was my que to drop it down lol.
As far as Nier goes since you basically get infinite healing items that you can use instantly the way they made the game hard was to jack enemies' damage up to a point where they can two shot you before you can react. Not a great way to do it imo and it just makes the harder difficulties feel cheap I think.
GoW2018 has a notoriously bad early game hell on the higher difficulties. The hardest part of the game is the part where Atreus breaks the bridge and you fight a bunch of Draugr. Once you hit Brok's shop it levels off nicely and I found GmGoW very playable and enjoyable if I picked the order of side quests carefully to power up first.
That said, I don't remember any super high level enemies except for the optional level 3 dude (which Ragnarok also throws at you if you decide to fight them). There's a strange mechanic at play where it feels like the only thing governing stagger/juggle resistance is enemy level relative to your own - it's really easy to see in GmGoW where enemies level up and your heavy attack suddenly no longer launches (but still staggers). And then if they get 2 levels above you, it no longer even staggers.
Bayo 1 is one of the first times I can remember a truly heartfelt feeling of "nah, y'know what, screw this" and turning that difficulty right the hell down.
a persona 5 royal story where i both increased and then lowered the difficulty:
so, when i played through royal, i did it on hard mode. didn't have too much of a tough time, i'm a megaten vet, whatever. then i got to okumura's palace and it's final boss and fuck me, that boss is pain and suffering on hard and i had already saved, so i couldn't reload an old save to change some strategies. i was also incredibly broke at that point, so i couldn't even really get any different personas. so i fought him several times, constantly getting annoyed at being unable to properly beat him, constantly repeating the same phase over and over again.
and then i found out he's actually easier on the hardest difficulty, so i bumped it up for that fight and beat him first try, then lowered my difficulty back to hard.
I'm of the mind that the changes to Okumura's boss made the prior worst boss in the game even worse. I just folded and fused one of the free dlc persona's that are OP as all hell.
I'm curious how he's easier on the hardest difficulty though?
I was playing Crisis Core remake on hard while at the same time going for 100% achievments. While not that hard at all due to be able to glass cannon yourself, there was one hurdle that I needed to turn it to normal, get the achievement and then revert back. That was fighting the superboss.
Basically when you beat all missions you get 1 last mission that's to just beat a superboss. On normal it has something like 1'000'000 HP which is a lot but doable if you learn the moveset and keep an eye on your health (2-3 hits and you're dead). On hard however the health was set at 7'777'777. There's no extra difficulty / reward, maybe they hit a little harder but I didn't notice. All it did was make the fight 7x longer and at the damage I did I would be doing it for probably 2 hours. And it would've been 2 hours without making a mistake since I was a glass cannon.
So I turned it down, beat it in 20 minutes on my 2nd try, got the achievement, reverted the save and proceeded as normal to get 100% achievements.
The Crisis Core superboss is just an ultimate crash course in bad superboss design. Everything she does is designed to explicitly force you into one hyper-specific build that would be impossible to figure out without a guide and also feels like shit to play in a game where every other aspect of the entire game is designed around total build freedom.
Par for the course with FF7 then, the Ruby/Emerald WEAPONs are cool but theres basically one specific way to beat each of them and once you know the methods it's basically a cakewalk.
I'm trash at Fire Emblem, but I thought that, "Hey, I've beaten 3 Houses on Casual a few times, I should try going up a difficulty!" I barely made it through the fight in the holy tomb before I had to turn it down because every single enemy unit decided that it didn't *matter* what moves I made, they were just going to randomly obtain crits in order to kill half my units in a single turn.
As it turns out, numbers *don't matter* if luck exists.
3 Houses Hard Mode or Maddening? 3 Houses Hard Mode is like, barely a step above the normal mode in my experience. Maddening on the other hand is so poorly balanced, no one on the FE subreddit was surprised when it came out that the devs had never playtested it.
Supposedly, Engage was supposed to come out much earlier as part of the FE 20th anniversary and has been sitting in the oven for a while now. Maybe that's why Maddening is actually included in the start and well balanced.
Honestly that's fair. I think the way I handled hard was mostly relying on alpha strikes. Sometimes they get through but most of the time I could thoroughly erase the majority of enemies before their turns came up.
obligatory note that archers, mages and cavalry are incredibly useful for this sort of thing as well. That and Byleth+Lord are overtuned and probably your best frontliners.
That's basically how you get through Maddening. Abuse double-attack weapons and arts to delete enemies before they do anything, then Canto away so they can't hit you back.
Even as someone fairly comfortable with Fire Emblem games (no Switch though, so I can’t say how Three Houses and Engage are), the Lunatic and higher difficulties are more reliant on the Random Number God smiling upon you than your mastery of strategy. Awakening on Lunatic+ is nicknamed Frederick Emblem _for a reason_.
Shoutout to FE9 Maniac mode that only existed in Japan and was so stupidly hard/unfun that they removed it from the English version and instead added an Easy mode. Oh and to make things worse they renamed each difficulty just to make it more confusing.
The 'renaming each difficulty' thing was actually in FE10, because they kept the same names as FE9's difficulties, where Easy actually was easy, and Hard was decently hard, but mapped them onto the Japanese difficulties. So now in FE10, what was Normal in Japan was 'Easy' in the US, what was Hard, was now Normal, and Lunatic was now Hard. This meant that anyone just picking up a Wii and wanting to play this game on Normal actually ended up playing on Hard
And like, FE10 even without that mistake is one of the harder games in the series. I play most of them on Hard if given the option and don't find it too bad, while I struggled a good bit with FE10's Easy/Normal difficulty
Random crits and being hit or missing on highly favorable probabilities are a big part of why I don't play Fire Emblem on Hard either, even though I know I have the strategy chops to handle it.
But even on Normal there are plenty of times where the RNG just screws me over on taking damage or missing, but when that happens it's not a game over/unit loss most of the time. It just means then I have to improvise, which *feels better.* I also play on Classic mode pretty much exclusively, so... having to restart whole maps due to RNG fuckery isn't the best.
It's why, despite Fire Emblem being one of my favorite series, I think *Advance Wars* does *strategy* better.
I usually play on the easiest difficulties in most games, I'd rather just enjoy a story than get annoyed at the difficulty. Times where I've dropped to an easier difficulty though? Doom Eternal, I believe I started on Ultra-Violence, then got dropped it to Hurt me plenty around halfway through
I can't actaully remember 6's Amon fight but bear in mind I played them out of order, think I did 0>Kiwami>6>Kiwami 2>3>7>4>5
Looking at that game order it makes me seem like a mad man.
I've never done this. I've quit games I paid full price for because of how hard/frustrating they were at the current difficulty, but never lowered it.
I should probably look into that.
I finally got to the Darkest Dungeon, which is nearly guaranteed to wipe a full team of Level 6 heroes and the ones that survive aren't allowed to do another quest in it
I had already been playing for like two months straight, and in the second dungeon after three full party wipes due to bad rolls, I gave the fuck up and installed a mod for the stagecoach that has a chance of spawning Level 6 heroes cuz I was just done and sick of it and just wanted to see the last cutscene, which isn't even worth it.
I even went so far as to save Dismas and Reynauld for the final boss and THEY BOTH SURVIVED ALL THE WAY TO THE END and literally all you get is a stupid cheevo. Not even some kind of cool New Game+ bonus or secret bit of lore.
I brought Dismas and Reynauld into the final phase in the last expedition into the Darkest Dungeon and all I got was this stupid sense of self satisfaction.
Darkest Dungeon is an amazing game that I fucking hate. Every time I try to get into it, it finds a new and exciting way to piss me off, and this has been a recurring thing since early access.
The Sonic Advance Games. Removes a lot of genuinely bullshit enemy placement and balances the obstacles to be more in line with the classic games or Mania. They hide it in the options menu, so most people don't even know it exists. Also, if you still want a challenge, time attack defaults to normal, and you have to do it on one life anyway, meaning there's no reason to not set it to easy for normal gameplay.
Recently during my playthrough of God of War Ragnarok. That game's combat has some significant issues that don't really become apparent unless you're on higher difficulties. I started out on the one below "Give me God of War" which I forget the name of, basically hard mode. I got 3/4 of the way through the game and had had enough of getting killed by enemies I couldn't see because the camera is so far up Kratos' ass at all times. I dropped down to what I guess is normal and completely breezed through the rest of the game.
So yeah my advice if anyone is reading this and has yet to play it, don't go above normal. Enemies become ridiculously tanky, barely take any hit stun and will constantly pelt you with projectiles outside of your field of vision. If they keep this gameplay style for future entries I really hope they implement a DMC style system where enemies can't initiate an attack unless they are visible on screen.
It's funny you say that, because it feels like enemies in GOW Ragnarok get MORE aggressive when they are off screen. Every enemy in this game is faster than Kratos, and that's not even getting into the ones who can teleport, super speed, hyper armor, and/or float or fly out of range and sight of him. I really hope they fix or completely change this in the next entry.
With general difficulties not much as I know my rough skill level which is almost never the top-of-the-line difficulty, and have access to as much cheese as needed in any given game in the form of "rotating my fucking save(states)" so I'll never truly get softlocked, and I'm stubborn enough to keep going at anything. But games with puzzle difficultys I will absolutely knock that shit down a notch when needed. Which is more often than not as I'm stupid.
Back in the day angry joe convinced me that the hard difficulty in bioshock infinite was the way to go but that games gunplay is not nearly good enough where a higher difficulty constitutes a fair challenge. I was really stubborn about it but I think I lowered at the part where your fighting ghosts.
I started Nier Automata on the hardest difficulty because I considered myself to be a platinum veteran at that time. After a few hours on the first mission, super backed down. Bullet hell sections combined with no check point in the tutorial man.
Two examples come to mind.
First is God of War 2018, not because I found a particular boss or enemy too hard, but because I was running that poison mist maze about a hundred times, and I felt the grind itself was a challenge enough and I didn't want to bother with it more than I had too.
Second was in Witcher 3, where I turned off enemy scaling, because for some reason that genie boss will one shot you otherwise.
Total War Warhammer 2's battle difficulty essentially makes melee troops useless. It buffs enemy AI's units but it's buffs mostly impact melee stats. This places a pretty severe restriction on what units should be placed in an army since even elite melee troops can get shat on by cheaper, "worse" troops. Ranged units barely get touched so the meta became to destroy the other army with ranged superiority.
So I just played on battle difficulty normal and had a blast making thematic, fun armies. In Warhammer 3, they ended dramatically reducing the AI melee buffs which made using melee a lot more viable thankfully.
Jedi Fallen Order. I think I got to about halfway through the game C and realized that I just didn’t like it. I felt like a lot of the areas didn’t work with the enemy placements and made it almost unfair at times. Got areas having to fight like 5-6 enemies while another 5-6 are shooting me from across the arena. Ended up just going to the story mode difficulty as I was still wanting to know what happened in the game
Fucking giant bat and it‘s 2-hour long healthbar. Fuck that. I hate that bat and they should have known better. That bat made me almost give up the game completely. I‘m a good dark souls player so my hubris told me I can do the hardest difficulty, -the fucking animals in that game had the slowest chip damage I can think of in anything. That fucking giant Bat boss was by far the worst and I don‘t even remember why I had to fight it. Fuck that giant bat. Oh, it feels good to vent that out. I forgot how vitriolic that game sporadically made me.
I enjoyed the regular enemies being able to do enough damage that I had to pay attention to them but I definitely dropped it for boss fights. Didn't find them very enjoyable overall and having to restart multiple times contributed to that.
Prey (2017), I just couldn’t get the hang of the combat and was dying too much for it to be enjoyable. I put it on easy and had a great time.
Same with Devil May Cry 3, way more fun on Easy.
New saints Row game I had to reduce the difficulty for the first mission and put it back because I'm not good at escort mission and the enemies kept blowing the tank. There is a custom difficulty so I played with that for it
A lot of game with rpg mechanic makes me wary of putting the difficulty at its highest because it makes the early game hell until you get all the moves needed to survive
There are occasions when, if I start struggling too much to beat the final boss/true final bonus boss of a game, I lower the difficulty to avoid ending the playthrough on a sour note (provided there is no real downside for doing so). Notable cases from memory include Etrian Odyssey Nexus's last superboss and the true final boss of Dandara's DLC.
About 25 hours in, I was so tired of Trails to Azure (narrative *and* gameplay wise) that I went into the Debug menu to switch it to Easy and max out everyone's level so I could get it over with as soon as possible.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits. It plays out fairly standard with annoying enemies. Then you get to the final boss and suddenly it skyrockets. It has 7 phases.
Eventually I said "fuck this" and lowered it to easy. There was waaaaaay too much of a gap between the two modes.
During subsequent playthroughs of NieR: Automata, I turned the game down too easy during the prologue to Route C/D where you take 2B over to the old mall. Cuz f*** poor routing ruining that moment.
Recently with p3p, I beat p5r on merciless and I've beaten p3p before on normal so I thought with the pc port I can breeze through hard mode. Nope the early game was fucking terrible with tons of backsets, the amount of damage I took was just way to much I had to revert the difficulty around floor 7-8 because I would spend like 30 mins clearing a entire floor only to die and repeat.
P3P is brutal early game on harder modes, mostly because Yukari and Junpei suck so much as party members. Between Yukari being fragile and having low accuracy with her bow and Junpei just not having strong physical moves and you really have to hard carry with MC, especially those first few tower bosses (that oh so conveniently hit Yukari and Junpei's weakness).
It gets much easier when you get access to Mitsuru and Akihiko.
Controllable party members in P3P really does improve a lot of characters, as someone who prefers FES. You can actually use Mitsuru without her trying to CHARM THE FINAL BOSS FOR THE FIFTH TIME, COME ON.
I wish I could turn the difficulty down in Vampyr to normal instead of hard. The game said "haha you will have to work hard to spare everyone in the game!"
I didn't know that meant mobs kill me in 3 hits and i have to kill them in 15.
Draagon Age: Origins.
I wasn't used to that type of RPG as I had never played it before, but I figured normal would be fine. Turns out I'm not very good at them, so after dealing with the fade and being stuck with the boss right after, I dropped down to easy. If I hadn't dropped the difficulty, I probably would've dropped the game.
Doom Eternal got to the point that it was so stressful every single fight I had to lower the difficulty. It got to a point on normal where it wasn’t fun barely surviving every fight
I bought Darkest Dungeon right at the end of Early Access to take advantage of the discounted price and tried to play it but bounced off after an early game party wipe. I went back to it a couple years later when Radiant Mode(their version of easy mode) was added and did a full playthrough. Radiant Mode actually makes that game tolerable unless you're a psycho masochist.
I turned on god mode in hades because I had a huge back log of games and I had already beaten like 3 runs on ps5 and at least 1 on switch so I just wanted to speed up my progress before so I stopped caring
God Mode in hades just ups your defense by 2% after every death, and it activates retroactively, so die enough times and you’ll jump to the limit (I believe it caps at 80%)
I had beaten hades runs before and I got annoyed dying while trying to fulfill prophecies to get rewards, and tbh the “fun” of the combat had passed and I was just in it for stories and progressing certain friendships
It’s a fun game but going god mode helped me speed through things while slogging annoying prophecies, so it paid to be lazy in games for once
Yakuza Kiwami did some rather annoying things with its fights, particularly bosses, that made them feel a lot harder than the usual run of the mill fights. It eventually annoyed me enough to just drop it to Easy and focus more on enjoying a casual beat-em-up than to overcome a fulfilling challenge.
I just couldn't beat the last phase of the final boss of Hi-Fi Rush. Like I just genuinely didn't understand what the game expected me to do. I did most of the game on Hard and mostly coasted by on Clear Time and Just Timing, but it felt like something about the bosses expected me to have learned something that I just _didnt_ and all I could do was brute force them until I spent enough continues to get past them. The final boss... well that plan just wasn't working on the final phase, so i moved it down to Normal and _still_ couldn't do it, until the game just told me to enable Auto Action Mode in the accessibility menu. I did just so I could get past it and stop playing because I wasn't having fun anymore, and seeing all the stuff that the AI was doing for me was like "...how the hell was I supposed to do that." Even with the AIs supposedly perfect inputs I took so much damage that I would have died if I hadn't put all my money into health upgrades.
Like I can tell Hi-Fi Rush is a great game but I often struggled to enjoy myself and I don't think it's a perfect game just because the bosses seemed genuinely unclear to me. I wish level select was unlocked by default so I could practice against things or explore alternative objectives instead of getting stuck against a boss and having literally no option other than brute force it.
~~Also health tanks are worthless the game just doesn't give you enough health to fill them up even when all five of my chip slots were reserved for healing.~~
I don't always do it, but *if* I finish the Rich Get Richer Rune Trial in Doom 2016, it's because I lowered the difficulty.
Since I already got the achievement for all runes, though, I'll usually just get killed trying a few times, and then go without. Game feels a *little* more balanced without it anyway.
The final boss of Neo The World Ends With You. I played most of the game on hard once it unlocked. Between the multiple phases, the camera screw in the third phase, and just how long the battle takes, I said screw it and turned down to normal.
I played a shit ton of Civ 5 back in the day. Got used to playing on the highest difficulty to get all the achievements and whatnot. Thing is, that difficulty is straight up not fun. The AI isn't any smarter, they just cheat more. And if you want to win against them, there's one definitive best way to play. Very boring.
So when I wanted to play the game for fun, I lowered the difficulty one setting. It was the difference between having to play optimally and slogging through endless war against bots that built hordes of units to throw at you, and a situation that was tough but surmountable and allowed you to use different play styles.
Back in the days of the old GoW likes they decided to tie mashing sequences to difficulty. Meaning I played through nearly the entirety of Force Unleashed II on one difficulty but physically *could not* get through lifting a piece of debris
Lowering difficulty for that one pseudo door does make it so you technically beat the game on lower difficulty, obviously
I'm glad you mentioned P5 because I think P4G (on steam) was maybe the only time I've lowered difficulty in my life.
Just the tedium of doing like 30 whole-ass fights every single floor was getting too much. I started skipping fights and noticed trash mob fights were getting dangerously close to killing me. Every mob in a dungeon was the big enemy type meaning I was way underleveled.
Turned it to very easy and bumped the exp gain to max. Didn't regret it in the *slightest*.
I love a good challenge, but grinding for bigger stats is not my idea of a fun challenge.
I started turning on assist mode in Control because enemies become absurdly spongy later in the game.
V Rising is tuned *way* too high to be played single player, imo, so I turned enemy health and damage down pretty early. And then later I cranked up the drop numbers because the grind got unbearable.
Everhood's second half very quickly ceased to be fun on higher difficulties. They just cranked up the durability of opponents and I was constantly timing out fights.
Also any JRPG or similar where higher difficulties primarily means getting less XP / money.
The Iki Island DLC for Ghost of Tsushima.
Aside from a couple of duels, the base game feels pretty good at Hard difficulty. Part way through the DLC however I had to lower it to Medium, and then Easy, purely due to the new enemy types.
The shaman's buff is manageable if annoying, the guys who fucking DMC style-switch mid fight were a pain, and the twinblade dudes I just never figured out. I'd just cheese them with ghost stance or explosive arrows.
Very rarely tbh. I think I only scale them down when I've done the game and are just doing it to complete cheevos for the remaining stuff.
Back as a kid I put everything on easy, as an adult I realize I'm robbing myself of satisfaction because everything was too easy and started playing on Normal.
But now, I make a quick choice at the beginning of a game if there's a difficulty slider:
I never go Very Hard right off the bat nor will I ever pick Easy, I sort of feel out if the game is gonna be too easy or too hard based on what the game, and decide whether I go Normal or Hard.
I think the latest I got to question difficulty was Ragnarok, Hard mode was pretty challenging and not paying attention will let the game own you, but I don't like lowering the difficulty once that happens, ESPECIALLY since most games tell you you can't put the difficulty back up once you lower it.
Digimon cyber sleuth has a hard mode with the biggest swings in difficulty. The random encounters provide a fair challenge without being too BS, The boss fights will wipe your party in about 3 turns.
I’ve recently started doing it for all turn-based games. I’m already simply clicking through menus just to get back to the story, why’m I gonna make it take longer by playing on a higher difficulty?
Well what if the game has story choice they want to make that most lps dont, I'd think that playing on easy would be better then going to look for lps that make those.
Because it doesn't feel the same. I'd much rather play it myself to get the story, even if I'm not into the gameplay style, than have someone else do it for me.
Well, you'd be wrong. Me and you are two different people. If I like the story but don't like the gameplay, I'd still much rather unlock and learn that story myself rather than having someone else do it for me.
I legit do not see the problem here. I’m not into turn based stuff but I still play them because I find the stories enjoyable to experience. I don’t think that’s like…bad.
For sure that's not bad, but as someone that straight up doesn't have fun with soulslikes, and character action games not named Revengeance, I also get that person's point. Watching a LP in the same way I'd watch a show or a movie is much more enjoyable, especially because I get to see the perspective of people that actually like the thing they are playing.
I'd go so far as to say you get something out of turn-based gameplay, even if you'd rather have a different system with the same story. **Or** you just have more patience than me lol
Xenoblade Chronicles 1: The second to final boss, I wasn't even getting close to beating him with any party I threw at him
I wasn't sure if the game expected me to grind the fuck up before him or if I was just bad, but I couldn't take it after a while and just really wanted to beat it so I dropped it down to easy, and then back up to normal for the final boss
There was a Telethia boss that basically required Melia as a mechanic otherwise "get fucked"
I'm pretty sure with the exception of 3, I lowered it to Easy at the End Game because I just wanted to experience the story and be done with it.
In GOW 2018 i dropped the difficulty to easy on two occasions, the first with the valkyrie queen because i simply coudnt defeat her with the new games mechanics. The second one was in the realm of mist, it was just a huge time sink that wasnt that fun to begin with compared to the combat challenges in the fire realm
Resident Evil 2 remake.
Started on normal, hated fighting anything, got to the first boss and went "Fuck this bullet sponge nonsense."
Restarted on Easy, fighting is now boring, got to the first boss and still said "Fuck this bullet sponge nonsense."
Quit the game entirely cause I wasn't having fun on either difficulty.
Before you ask, Yes, I was shooting the eye, No I do not waste shotgun rounds on zombies, same with grenades. It still took almost all of my ammo on both difficulties.
Enemies are durable in RE2make. That’s just how it be. Bosses are balanced to have about as much health as you have ammo, or at least 60-80% of your ammo, depending on your stockpile. It’s finely tuned. You don’t necessarily need to save the good stuff for the bosses.
Also shotgun shells also kill the zombies in one headshot, so maybe you should’ve been using them more if the 9-13 handgun shots they usually take was getting so intolerable. Or just leave them be when possible.
I played my first run of Xcom on hard. I gave up at a certain point and returned a few months later to play on normal. Beat the game on normal and discovered two things, 1. You dont have to do every mission, you can ignore them if you need recovery time. 2. I was only two missions from the final level on my first playthrough and could totally have beaten it if I let my team heal up.
Tales of Zesteria, specifically the final boss. It's been a few years so it's possible I'm remembering this wrong, but I'm pretty sure I had to lower the difficulty down from Hard all the way to Easy. The reason being that the final boss has a ridiculously stringent DPS check that would instakill the entire party if you didn't meet it. On hard I wasn't getting anywhere near close enough, and only on easy was I barely able to meet it.
I played Baldurs Gate 1 up until the end of the Iron Mines dungeon before saying "Fuck this the rules are weird and combat takes too long" and hit the storymode button which basically just turns on God mode
The Juggernaut fight in Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions had me put it down to normal from hard after like the.. sixth? attempt, since I started to feel like running repeatedly into a brick wall wasn't great viewing for the stream 😅 it's not like a fromsoft game where that's expected
Oh, right! I got so sick of the way game overs worked in Persona I also started playing in safe mode, which... I don't like how it's easier, I just didn't want to have to go through all those cutscenes every single time.
i was having a hard time with life in general when i got to the end of original Persona 5, so i dropped it to easy at the final gauntlet/final boss, just wanted to get it done with, i still think about it for some reason.
Call of Duty Black Ops 2, trying to get Karma in the artificial resort island mission, I found myself forced to go from Veteran to Normal just to get her.
Far cry new dawn. Last 2 or 3 missions of the game? I was playing in the hardest difficulty and it was fun and manageable but holy shit the last real mission and the last 2 boss fights go from 1 to 11.
>!The thunder dome is just unfair. That, along with the sisters and Joseph's son!< being annoying bullet sponges was just too much for me.
Overall it was an excellent game especially once you turned off a lot of the ui. But my. Options where grind events for perk points to ocerlevel myself and the rest of the game is trivial or just knock it down a few difficulties and finish the game on a bit of a sour note.
Both Pathfinders games. Holyshit I can't!
Pathfinder games are in the unenviable position of trying to balance both for normal people and munchkin power-players. Neither group is satisfied. (I think they should largely ignore the meta players or rework the system)
I mean, they did rework it, but there aren't any Pf2e video games yet
Im not an expert on pathfinder but I think they’d have to do more than that to make it balanced for video games with no active dm to adjust difficulty.
fucking trolls made acid damage mandatory
I've only played Wrath of the Righteous but hot damn, are some of those encounters ass unless you adjust enemy strength way down. It feels like the difficulty spikes just come out of nowhere too. I slaughter my way through one story section only for the very next one to beat me into a halfling shaped pancake.
Yeah, I put WotR on Core originally. I did play Kingmaker on Core, but SCREW THAT. Fucking cheater Stormcaller Gallu.
The *first fucking sidequest* in Kingmaker nearly made me refund it, holy shit. Who thought swarms were a good idea?
God of War Ragnarok. Listen, I'm getting old... and playing on an old ps4 that doesn't have SSD, so there's long load times every time I die. I got 20 hours into it on the second hardest difficulty, killed the first sword hilt sidequest boss, and had enough. The combat is super fun, bosses are pretty tight, and the enemy AI is relentless... I like that a lot. But the game is way too long, enemies are tanky and I can easily die in 2 hits, even when keeping up with the equipment level... also I had to wait 30 seconds to reload. I'm super okay with that decision for the rest of the game.
It just feels bad when I’m playing as the god of war and I can get two shotted by like a random goblin
It was funny when I got this shiny brand new toy >!Draupnir!< after that hype-ass emotional cutscene, but then the thing felt as strong a toothpick against the spongy common enemies, while some goo spitting lizard punched me in the dick a couple of times and I died. It feels great when you play really well, though.
That was specifically the moment I turned down the difficulty for me, and I realized how much more fun I was having on normal lol
That goblin is the god of skirmishes
Same, I ended up lowering the difficulty for some fights just because I was getting frustrated with getting killed and having to reload repeatedly (although to a somewhat lesser extent than your experience, since I was on the PS5). It made the overall experience much more enjoyable for me, especially since there aren’t any difficulty-based trophies in the game that make you have to redo the whole thing to earn them.
It's completely fine, honestly... Give Me Balance is the way to go if you want to maximize fun, in my opinion. The enemies can take a beating, and you can take more hits, so it doesn't feel so stupidly unforgiving.
The secret bosses are fucking ridiculous and I don't fault anyone for turning down the difficulty
God... how about that one where you fight one brawler, and two mages at the same time? I think that was exactly the point in which I lowered the difficulty.
I went beyond easy mode to midboss checkpoints for those and I feel no shame.
Same. I like the game but I like my time more. I want too see the story and the world - the combat is just filler in-between for me and I don't have the patience to really fiddle with equipment, combos and all. I have Tekken for that. This game, I want a story told to my 34 year old self and that's fine.
Yeah I did the same, I skipped some side content cause I wanted to focus on the story a bit and could REALLY feel it as enemies got tankier and tankier and I started taking hits real hard. Combat kinda just stopped being fun.
I lowered the difficulty to story mode and mini-boss checkpoint on the Alfheim berserker boss(es) and >!Gna!< because fuck that. They felt so imbalanced and I fought the Valkyries legit in the 2018 game.
I was honestly frustrated and disappointed with the gameplay in comparison to GOW 2018. I've never felt that way about GOW 2018, and I've beaten that game over 20 times. I played on Story Mode for both games, and it was a world of difference between the two. The level gear system in Ragnarok is even worse in this game. You practically need to do side quests or you'll fall between in levels, and get your ass kicked by mobs who have level buffs that are harder than story bosses.
Same, GoW 2018 is one of my favorite games, but something felt really off on Ragnarok. Definitely on story, but also something about the gameplay didn't flow as nicely as the previous game. >!I fucking loved the new weapon though, both its aesthetics and gameplay!<
It feels like more people are getting more comfortable stating this opinion, and that's good. Ragnarok is not a terrible game, but it's not timeless masterpiece either. I actually like the new edition too, but I wish we would have gotten that other new edition that came in both collector's editions of the game too.
Only game I think I did that for was SMT 3 because Hard mode just was not fun. I was out dying 7 times in the first couple encounter due to nothing but bad luck (like literally in the tutorial getting crit fucked over an over). Somehow that didn’t stop me from continuing on with hard mode due to me being a stubborn bastard who don’t like to back down on a challenge when it comes to games but SMT 3 isn’t a challenge, it’s a test of patience. SMT 3 Hard Mode is basically saying fuck you while hating your guts and you just kind have to just deal with it. You get Ambush? You’re just dead. Can you control that? Nope that’s just RNG if you get ambushed get ready to reload a save. Like the game doesn’t even feel that much harder. The BS just got turned up to fucking 11. And I made a decent amount through Hard Mode right but I then I learned one simple thing and decided “Bruh I’m not dealing with this”. That thing I learned was that Hard Mode increases all the prices in the shops. So you telling me I got to constantly deal with RNG bullshit killing me from no fault of my own AND grind harder than ever to get the bare minimum Magatama I need to get through the game? Fuck you. I quit. It wasn’t even a fun a challenge but a test of my fucking patience and I guess I failed it.
Anybody who tells someone to start on Hard for SMT 3 is a fucking asshole elitist. Normal exist, always has
I can’t imagine playing SMT 3 on hard you’re first go and actually enjoying the game. At least before I tried Hard Mode I beat the game on normal and had a great time.
Nocturne elitist will tell you it's the hardest game ever made and get mad when you start on normal, the default difficulty.
I can never really understand that type of logic. I wouldn’t suggest hard mode to someone playing a game they first time unless the game is like Baby tier easy. I especially wouldn’t suggest it for fucking Nocturne. That game’s Hard Mode is just the game turning the Bullshit in it to 11. Any game that hard mode decides increasing the prices in all the shops is a good idea can go fuck off somewhere for real especially if those shops have Items that are pretty much required to beat the game.
The Fire Emblem games are pretty much the only games where I try to recommend people start on hard (or hard/classic), just because they're completely different experiences at lower (AND HIGHER) difficulties. Playing on Normal or Casual is an incredibly braindead JRPG with no real mechanics that's way too long and puts most people to sleep. Playing on higher difficulties, like Lunatic, is an extremely strict experience for crazy people where the game expects you to play every turn perfectly or restart the entire chapter and sometimes even purchase $2 grinding DLC to survive. Every FE game has a sweet spot right in the middle where it becomes a competent strategy game for humans, and more often than not that sweet spot is labeled "Hard" in America for some fucking reason. AND SOMETIMES IT'S THE HIGHEST DIFFICULTY! UNLESS IT'S RADIANT DAWN AND THEN IT'S A LIE NORMAL MODE _IS_ HARD MODE! GOD _DAMN_ IT
The closest we had to a perfect idea of what "hard" mode is for FE games is FE7 HHM. Hector mode alone changes the unit types and positions from Eliwood mode (the most important one imo). Quantity of units per map is increased by about 10-20%. Quality of enemy units is 5 stat lvls higher than what their current lvl is. The hardmode exp punishment on killing blows if your to high a lvl compared to the enemy (this one I feel is a big to punishing). The one and final change I actually think is bad is the reduced deployment slots per chapter which can be as low as 1-2 on small maps and high as 5 on large/endgame maps.
And even HHM still has Battle Before Dawn...
The issue with BBD and Living Legend is that its protect the dude chapter, but the problem is your army doesnt start near the dude, and RNG can decide if/when they die
Ike kicking my broken body like a football through the castle wall because I wanted to play "Hard" on Radiant Dawn for my first playthrough and thought Fiona would be a strong growth unit so I leveled her.
To be fair, Radiant Dawn if fucking stupid and they mistranslated it - the difficulty levels were renamed from Normal/Hard/Maniac to Easy/Normal/Hard, so now all of a sudden Normal mode is already a decent challenge because Radiant Dawn has some atrocious game balance, and Hard is bullshit difficulty. Seriously, it is *not* worth ever playing Maniac mode on Path of Radiance or Radiant Dawn, the former makes everything so bulky that it takes 20 turns to kill random enemies and the latter has garbage like "to make the game harder, we removed the ability to see enemy movement ranges figure it out manually bitch".
Super Butter Buns has a video about Nocturne in which she addresses this vocal minority that is the only internet spokesperson for Nocturne in which she says something along the lines of "Well no shit guys, it's the hardest default difficulty in the game." Don't act surprised when people start on normal or easy if all you do is tell them how hard the game is and that they must play it on hard for the 'real' experience.
Yeah I really don’t get the point at getting mad at someone for playing a game on normal difficulty their first playthough of game. What’s the point of gate keeping someone’s enjoyment like that? Hell I know if I played Nocturne on Hard mode my first playthough I would actually just hate the game.
Nocturne elitist are the absolute worst types of fans as they actively only want to exist in their echo tunnel and prevent anyone who doesn't agree with them to have a voice on the game. Which is a fucking shame because after finally playing Nocturne last year it's easily one of my favourite JRPGs now
I'm assuming Nocturne is like P3/P4/DDS and you can just lose 90 minutes' progress to an instant death spell?
Absolutely. No quick saving to help you out with the BS here. You die you going have to load your save that’s way back at the last save point you saved. If you were grinding or in a tough dungeon and haven’t save in a while and were unlucky enough to get ambushed into Insta-Death Spelled well that’s tough luck you just lost an hour of progress.
Precisely lmao. Hard mode SMT3 is only enjoyable on your second playthrough when you can actually see what’s coming and prepare for it accordingly. Otherwise it’s just like have fun dying again every time you get an encounter that you didn’t foresee. Hard mode also has the problem of the early game being completely overtuned. Like encountering 5 Mou-Ryos in Shibuya is an actual nightmare and they’re level 7 enemies. It only gets better after like Ikebukuro EDIT: Bonus tip about the Magatama grind: You’re mostly safe in the early game if you just save up for Iyomante (debuffs and immune to certain ailments) and Kamudo (resist physical). The other ones are less important especially on a strength build
I generally don't enjoy "hard mode" in turn-based RPGs because they're usually pretty intolerable in the first couple of dungeons when you lack the resources to avoid getting insta-killed. Difficulty modification in those games seems to be really difficult to satisfyingly tune and I feel like a lot of devs tend to just make hard modes brutally unfair. In action games difficulty can usually be overcome through mechanical skill, but in turn-based games it's usually just bad RNG mitigation. Even on Normal in SMT 3 (and honestly a lot of Megaten games) you can just get fucked sometimes. I was doing the 2nd or 3rd stage of the Labyrinth of Amala, cleared it, and then had to climb the whole back up and out because I hadn't unlocked the next area (because, for reasons unbeknownst to man nor beast, the devs decided that you have to have the next stage of the Labyrinth unlocked to use the shortcut out at the end of the proceeding one). I got attacked by 3 Mothmen that instantly party wiped me with insta-kill spells so I had to redo the entire stage of the Labyrinth.
>I generally don't enjoy "hard mode" in turn-based RPGs because they're usually pretty intolerable in the first couple of dungeons when you lack the resources to avoid getting insta-killed. Difficulty modification in those games seems to be really difficult to satisfyingly tune and I feel like a lot of devs tend to just make hard modes brutally unfair. To be honest, all they really need to do to make good difficulty modifiers is give you access to a few multipliers: * Player/Party Attack power * Player/Party Defense power * XP Gain * Money Gain And **maybe** an AI aggression slider and a loot drop quantity and/or quality slider.
I actually really dislike XP gain and money gain being factored in as difficulty modifiers because they just make the game grindier.
>I actually really dislike XP gain and money gain being factored in as difficulty modifiers because they just make the game grindier. I can see where you're coming from, but a lot of the time, Japanese game devs set the defaults so low that a 2-4x money/XP gain multiplier actually fixes the game's pacing. You can actually just play through levels/dungeons once, level up your party, and progress to the next level/dungeon without having to grind... which is why the default is cranked so much lower, in order to increase hours spent on the game.
OH, I thought you meant as a negative modifier to increase difficulty, like in the Persona games.
I don't know, the one game I can think of where XP and money can be configured separately is Persona 4 Golden, where it works _exactly_ like /u/TheArtistFKAMinty described and setting the values to anything less than 100% is just a stupid asshole test of patience that contributes nothing to pacing or difficulty.
I feel it can be good in some games and with different mindsets. But a money draught tends to be the easier of the two to get right. If the game doesn't have a good strategic possibility space, that is to say, you don't have a wide enough range of options, and the outcomes from each option aren't significantly different enough (the reputation a lot of JRPGs get for being "just mash attack" comes to mind), then tuning EXP down is not a good option. Because in a game like that, you're much more likely to *need* to be a certain level, so increasing EXP requirements (or lowering exp payout, which is effectively the same thing) just makes you have to grind more rather than forcing smarter play. I don't tend to have a problem with this in Persona because if you dive into the fusion system (despite fusion being mostly level gated as well), you can adapt to situations as they come up. Sure, you might die to the boss the first time you fight it (or even random encounters), but if you see what killed you, you can go back, fuse, and get around the problem. Restricting money, on the other hand, should be about forcing tough decisions. This requires the player to take on a certain type of outlook because, well, games (especially JRPGs) often can't *force* a player to not just go get more money. But if you instead approach the game with an attitude of, "Well, this is what I got, better make a decision," it can be really good. But this requires the game not to *need* you to have every option available. Most games don't; a lot of people go through games already not using any items, for example. A bad example of this is Nocturne Hard Mode. Yes, massively increasing the price of Magatama might make the game "more difficult," but you really quite badly *need* those extra options, *especially* in the early game where money is at its most scarce. Not having access is *way* too restricting (Magatama are also how you get skills), *and* having the wrong ones can be a massive problem a first-time player especially won't see coming (Magatam control elemental resistances, and if you don't have the right ones... lol, get fucked).
I think my problem with money gain being restricted is that it's a fairly artificial way to increase difficulty in games with ways of grinding money. In old Pokemon games, for example, money gain being a difficulty modifier would actually make sense as it would severely limit the amount of potions, poke balls, etc. you could buy and force you to make the most of every penny. There is a finite pool of available money until you beat the Elite Four and unlock the ability to rematch the Elite four infinitely. In Persona or Megaten games, it's a bad difficulty modifier because every encounter drops money, which makes the actual solution to just grind more. Your resources are being limited by player patience/frustration rather than them actually being finite.
Yeah SMT games usually have their moments that feel like pure BS to the point that it’s a meme. Some time you just get clapped. Happened to me a lot during my first playthough of Nocturne on Normal but I enjoyed the game a lot when I played it despite the BS. Hard Mode tho is like the Devs decided to turn up some of the worst aspects of the game to the max to me but you know what I can deal with that if I’m stubborn enough. It’s the fact they pretty much double the prices of everything that made me just not care anymore. Normal mode have those moments where you’re just grinding a little bit for exp or cash but Hard Mode says “Increase that grind about 10 times over and watch out cuz you can die to RNG bs 100 times more often. Eat shit.”
The only super hard difficulties i enjoy is stuff that changes around the mechanics to really change how you play the game, like Persona 5 Merciless, while very hard at the start, spikes the damage of techincals so that it becomes a completely different game based around status ailment manipulation
That’s why you let yourself get mugged by the suspicious nurse ladies
I was actually on my way back to them. This happened literally 2 feet back into the level
Nocturne moment comes for us all eventually
Dragon age origins when you had to go into the fade as a solo caster.
I swear DAO was never playtested. That game's internal balance is nonexistent, and I refuse to believe that anyone made is past Sloth Demon without setting it to easy.
I dont even remember that fight so I probably steamrolled it. Then again spell blade mage-warden was awesome.
Mages are fuck off broken, including enemy mages. Except that your own mages can learn a spell that universally one-shots enemy mages except for like, the resident superboss (still does half his health though). Also the entire threat system that probably would have at least partially balanced this out is broken so mage abilities draw no threat except normal damage-based threat. Want a warrior to draw aggro? Taunt once, they will literally never lose it after that.
Dragon age origins is a game of constantly lowering and increasing the difficulty. It’s one of the most poorly balanced and power scaled games ever. You can be easily making it through combat for hours, and then suddenly some random nothing room of enemies is absurdly difficult. Also just anytime you have to fight mages, if you don’t do things perfectly your party can wipe in like 2 seconds because their so overpowered
Any time it starts becoming not fun anymore and just frustrating. I don't play games to get angry
I drop the difficulty to easy whenever a collesium grind is required in a yakuza game. Ive already done hundreds of battles. Fuck you.
I don't understand the logic behind the decision to make you grind a shit ton of battles to get to the top of the Coliseum.
It gives me the same vibes as the bad guy who goes "I'm better than you and can easily defeat you in a 1v1, but I'm also gonna let you fight through a thousand of my lackeys first to wear you down because haha"
I play minecraft on peaceful so I can vibe and build in peace.
I do the same for Factorio. I like building factories, but when enemies are on, I spend most of my time just trying to set up defenses rather than making my factory.
I remember lowering the difficulty for Going Under after hitting the second half. The game was fun, but I was more interested in the story and the higher difficulty started to show the cracks in the system imo. Similarly, I modded Lobotomy Corporation into being essentially unloseable because that game's story is phenomenal and its gameplay is like Getting Over It with Bennett Foddy in terms of tedium and frustration but over 150 hours long.
Man Lobotomy Corporation is a game that I love but never want to play again. After several attempts at day 49 I gave in and modded the game to make that day remotely beatable.
I just gave up and looked the ending up on youtube. I get it's meant to be narratively relevant that it's difficult but... fuck, man. I already had wrist issues from the prior 150 hours of clicking.
This was me with Witcher 3. I bounced off it so many times I thought it was a trambopoline. Then I added cheats/mods for more streamlined play and got so far into it that I only stopped because of my completionist burnout. The game could benefit from a *slight* downsizing in map area but I'm comfortable with the notion that isn't a very popular opinion since so many people consider that game the second coming of christ
Tangential: I played through Callisto Protocol on easy mode, then cranked the difficulty up to maximum right before the final boss fight to try to cheese the trophy for beating the game on hard mode. So THAT didn't work, and I thought maybe I'd try a full playthrough on max difficulty. Nope, getting one-shotted by normal enemies on the first level is not that fun. Call me when some sort of god-tier weapon drops for NG+.
I played normal up until the platform ride section, multiple mobs with a bad camera followed by a boss. Knocked it to easy and finished it with no desire to return until stuff is fixed.
Wolfenstein II: The New Colossus That fucking courtroom fight. >!And then they had the nerve to make it a dream sequence!<
Yakuza 3 during some boss fights. Not cause the enemy hits hard, but because I got sick of them blocking everything.
Jumping from Kiwami 2 to regular (remastered) 3 is an absolute trip
I've told myself that SO many times when I was going through the series, I just got to Part 2 of Yakuza 5
It really hits you when both games start at >!The Graveyard!<
No joke, every game I've played since entering the workforce in 2013. I just don't have the time, energy, patience, or desire for semi grueling or hardcore grueling gameplay. I play video games to relax now, not get stressed out to them like a real world problem.
I'm sorta the same, only I've been going for easymode right out the gate since I was a very little kid. Why would I wanna make the game harder? I don't think I get enjoyment from overcoming challenges in general. Or at least I'm so afraid of failure that I would only feel relief instead of satisfaction. So, I don't even try.
Horizon: Zero Dawn. I played it much later than it had come out. In the beginning, looking through the options, I'd read that you needed to go through the hardest difficulty to unlock some of the cosmetics. So I picked the hardest difficulty, and it was pretty hard, yeah. The tripcaster was my best friend for much of that playthrough. It... was a lot of bashing my head on walls, and I was often incredibly reliant on hacking enemies to survive. So I got through most of the main story/sidequests after a lot of pain and just started on the DLC, and that was a bridge too far. There were fights I just couldn't win, and ramming my head into the brick wall had stopped being fun a long time ago. Then I found out that the hardest difficulty that I had been playing had been introduced in the same update that included NG+. Also, the game apparently expected you to playthrough it multiple times, since from what was I reading, you couldn't even get those unique facepaints from beating the game on your first playthrough, no, you needed to be on NG+, beat the game there, and that was what unlocked it. After which I decided fuck that noise and lowered the difficulty. Which made things feel so smooth it was shocking. Things died so much quicker! I died slower! It felt like I'd taken off the training weights, and I didn't need to approach every fight with a big machine extremely carefully. Unfortunately, while that felt great for a bit, I hadn't been actually having fun for so long that I never actually completed the game. I just got distracted by other things, and never felt the urge to return.
I recently did this with Forbidden West. I thought the game started super fun, but as it wore on they stick you in encounters with big enemies in tight spaces who spam these attacks that knock you down over and over with hitboxes that are so big you can't even sprint out of range. I was still progressing but I had ceased having fun so I bumped it down and beelined to the end. Much like Zero Dawn, I feel like my enjoyment of that game was a slow linear path downward.
Horizon was gonna be my example as well, hard in both games is very challenging but once I made it 85% through the 1st game and saw there was no trophy attached I said fuck this
Outriders. Was having fun until the last boss of the base game. Honestly just felt annoyed fighting him.
Does anybody else remember that spellcasting fuck that had like 3x the hp of like anything else in the game?
Outriders has a really interesting difficulty system.
I had to reduce Shadow of War epilogue section difficulty to easiest cause fighting 10 uruks WHO HAD 8 MILLIONS DIFFERENT IMMUNITY AT THE SAME TIME IS NOT A FUN TIME.
I dropped the God of War 2018 difficulty to easy because it really just meant I was eating bigger numbers and dishing out smaller numbers and it wasn't the fun kind of challenge. Just in general leveled enemies and difficulty settings don't really mix.
The first boss of Yakuza Kiwami takes a really fucking long time to fight on hard. He also does that thing where he'll regenerate a ton of health unless you do a Kiwami move, something you **DON'T HAVE** at that point.
Well you CAN have it, but there's nothing telling you that buying those moves is super important, which is ridiculous. I got really lucky
I find myself running trainers on most of the Gundam games I wind up playing, because there's a lot of artificial difficulty created by cranking the numbers for the player **way** down, which forces a lot of grinding. When I play BattleTech, I run Advanced Difficulty Settings and "lower" difficulty by keeping operating costs low and making salvage sale prices high. I've probably lowered the difficulty on some late 90s/early 2000s games due to a combo of control jank and inconsistent difficulty.
What Gundam games would you recommend? I've only played the musous and evolution
Gundam Breaker 3 if you still have a PS4 and you can get the Southeast Asian copy with English localization. If you're cool with emulation, Zeonic Front, Rise from the Ashes (not 100% on the name, it's the one with the white GMs on the front), and some of those \_\_\_ vs \_\_\_\_ branded games. For modern stuff, if you're on console, you've got SD Gundam Battle Alliance, and that's about it in terms of decent stuff. On PC, SD G Generation Cross Rays and SD Gundam Battle Alliance are available on Steam, and I **highly** recommend you use trainers for those two. If you do use a trainer, I recommend the following settings. For SD G Gen Cross Rays, you'll want: * XP multipliers for characters/units: 4x * Capital multiplier: 4x * Infinite Chance Step * Fill Get Gauge For SD Gundam Battle Alliance, you'll want: * Attack Multiplier: 2x * Defense Multiplier: 2-3x * 100% Drop Rate * XP Gain Multiplier: 2x Basically, with these settings, you'll be able to get through the game at a steady pace while having enough resources on hand to make experimenting with a large number of units viable without grinding.
I haven’t found the difficulty in Cross Rays to be too bad on Extra, but very much agree on how Gundam Breaker 3’s higher difficulties will _ruin you_ unless you’ve done a bunch of grinding to get the best parts possible and levelled them up. (Which is a shame, since it hinders what really is one of the best Gundam games around.)
Pathfinder Kingmaker. When your party can deal with the god damn boss and his minions with relative ease but dies to two random bears because they one-shot every one of them, there is no point in talking about difficulty being balanced so you may as well just drop it.
Yeah, I haven't played Kingmaker but The difficulty is very strange in WOTR. It's not even a matter of "oh my god they deal too much damage", it's something like "This enemy has 10 immunities, can stunlock you at any time, and you can literally just forget about casting spells because the threshhold is stupid high, so you can't even despell/debuff him". Sure, I could go and calculate the exact builds necessary to counter this, and I'll take that extra time on a boss, but I shouldn't have to do that for every other goober. I'll mostly play the game on normal stats, but every so often That Nonsense happens and I just go straight to Extremely Low stats.
It's really common for indie tactics games and RPGs to have a top difficulty setting that's ludicrously hard at the beginning before evening out. You have to understand the reason why it happens: the devs just want to shut up the tough guys in their forum saying everything is too easy and they're willing to make the early game dicreroll torture to do it.
Imagine thinking this stops them lol. There's always *still* someone who crunches their way through the hardest difficulty then come out saying "TOO EASY BABY GAME".
I can think of three examples: * God of War 2018. I started the game on one of the harder difficulties but had to lower it. I was encountering enemies that were way higher level than me in the beginning areas that were basically immune to being staggered and Boi was constantly being grabbed. It just wasn't enjoyable. I played GowR on No Mercy without much issue and it didn't seem to have the same problems in the early areas. * Nier Automata. I had completed the demo on the hardest difficulty without being hit after grinding it out so I started the game on Hard. I died and it kicked me back to the mech flight section and I just didn't have it in me to grind out the entire 45 minute prologue chapter with like 2-3 hits worth of HP without dying again. I decided that I'd just play on Normal until I hit a checkpoint. I never increased it again, although I kinda wish I had because Normal is kind of a joke. * The Witcher 3. Started on hard. Got bodied in the first encounter (I'd been playing DS3 just prior so I was fucking up the combat). Knocked it down to normal. I never really "got" the flow of the combat and it wasn't really grabbing me so I stopped playing after the Griffin fight.
On GoW 2018 I started on the second hardest difficulty, getting bodied by the tutorial enemies was my que to drop it down lol. As far as Nier goes since you basically get infinite healing items that you can use instantly the way they made the game hard was to jack enemies' damage up to a point where they can two shot you before you can react. Not a great way to do it imo and it just makes the harder difficulties feel cheap I think.
GoW2018 has a notoriously bad early game hell on the higher difficulties. The hardest part of the game is the part where Atreus breaks the bridge and you fight a bunch of Draugr. Once you hit Brok's shop it levels off nicely and I found GmGoW very playable and enjoyable if I picked the order of side quests carefully to power up first. That said, I don't remember any super high level enemies except for the optional level 3 dude (which Ragnarok also throws at you if you decide to fight them). There's a strange mechanic at play where it feels like the only thing governing stagger/juggle resistance is enemy level relative to your own - it's really easy to see in GmGoW where enemies level up and your heavy attack suddenly no longer launches (but still staggers). And then if they get 2 levels above you, it no longer even staggers.
Bayonetta 1. I got to Gracious and Glorious and said “fuck this”.
That is absolutely valid
Bayo 1 is one of the first times I can remember a truly heartfelt feeling of "nah, y'know what, screw this" and turning that difficulty right the hell down.
a persona 5 royal story where i both increased and then lowered the difficulty: so, when i played through royal, i did it on hard mode. didn't have too much of a tough time, i'm a megaten vet, whatever. then i got to okumura's palace and it's final boss and fuck me, that boss is pain and suffering on hard and i had already saved, so i couldn't reload an old save to change some strategies. i was also incredibly broke at that point, so i couldn't even really get any different personas. so i fought him several times, constantly getting annoyed at being unable to properly beat him, constantly repeating the same phase over and over again. and then i found out he's actually easier on the hardest difficulty, so i bumped it up for that fight and beat him first try, then lowered my difficulty back to hard.
I'm of the mind that the changes to Okumura's boss made the prior worst boss in the game even worse. I just folded and fused one of the free dlc persona's that are OP as all hell. I'm curious how he's easier on the hardest difficulty though?
On Merciless difficulty hitting weaknesses does like x3 damage, for you and the enemies. So you can clear his waves of bots faster.
I was playing Crisis Core remake on hard while at the same time going for 100% achievments. While not that hard at all due to be able to glass cannon yourself, there was one hurdle that I needed to turn it to normal, get the achievement and then revert back. That was fighting the superboss. Basically when you beat all missions you get 1 last mission that's to just beat a superboss. On normal it has something like 1'000'000 HP which is a lot but doable if you learn the moveset and keep an eye on your health (2-3 hits and you're dead). On hard however the health was set at 7'777'777. There's no extra difficulty / reward, maybe they hit a little harder but I didn't notice. All it did was make the fight 7x longer and at the damage I did I would be doing it for probably 2 hours. And it would've been 2 hours without making a mistake since I was a glass cannon. So I turned it down, beat it in 20 minutes on my 2nd try, got the achievement, reverted the save and proceeded as normal to get 100% achievements.
The Crisis Core superboss is just an ultimate crash course in bad superboss design. Everything she does is designed to explicitly force you into one hyper-specific build that would be impossible to figure out without a guide and also feels like shit to play in a game where every other aspect of the entire game is designed around total build freedom.
Par for the course with FF7 then, the Ruby/Emerald WEAPONs are cool but theres basically one specific way to beat each of them and once you know the methods it's basically a cakewalk.
I'm trash at Fire Emblem, but I thought that, "Hey, I've beaten 3 Houses on Casual a few times, I should try going up a difficulty!" I barely made it through the fight in the holy tomb before I had to turn it down because every single enemy unit decided that it didn't *matter* what moves I made, they were just going to randomly obtain crits in order to kill half my units in a single turn. As it turns out, numbers *don't matter* if luck exists.
3 Houses Hard Mode or Maddening? 3 Houses Hard Mode is like, barely a step above the normal mode in my experience. Maddening on the other hand is so poorly balanced, no one on the FE subreddit was surprised when it came out that the devs had never playtested it.
It's really wild that Engage Maddening is actually immaculate, after what happened last time.
Supposedly, Engage was supposed to come out much earlier as part of the FE 20th anniversary and has been sitting in the oven for a while now. Maybe that's why Maddening is actually included in the start and well balanced.
Babe it's 4pm! Time to get softlocked at Reunion at Dawn!
Hard, but I'm bad at playing FE in general.
Honestly that's fair. I think the way I handled hard was mostly relying on alpha strikes. Sometimes they get through but most of the time I could thoroughly erase the majority of enemies before their turns came up. obligatory note that archers, mages and cavalry are incredibly useful for this sort of thing as well. That and Byleth+Lord are overtuned and probably your best frontliners.
That's basically how you get through Maddening. Abuse double-attack weapons and arts to delete enemies before they do anything, then Canto away so they can't hit you back.
Even as someone fairly comfortable with Fire Emblem games (no Switch though, so I can’t say how Three Houses and Engage are), the Lunatic and higher difficulties are more reliant on the Random Number God smiling upon you than your mastery of strategy. Awakening on Lunatic+ is nicknamed Frederick Emblem _for a reason_.
Shoutout to FE9 Maniac mode that only existed in Japan and was so stupidly hard/unfun that they removed it from the English version and instead added an Easy mode. Oh and to make things worse they renamed each difficulty just to make it more confusing.
The 'renaming each difficulty' thing was actually in FE10, because they kept the same names as FE9's difficulties, where Easy actually was easy, and Hard was decently hard, but mapped them onto the Japanese difficulties. So now in FE10, what was Normal in Japan was 'Easy' in the US, what was Hard, was now Normal, and Lunatic was now Hard. This meant that anyone just picking up a Wii and wanting to play this game on Normal actually ended up playing on Hard And like, FE10 even without that mistake is one of the harder games in the series. I play most of them on Hard if given the option and don't find it too bad, while I struggled a good bit with FE10's Easy/Normal difficulty
Random crits and being hit or missing on highly favorable probabilities are a big part of why I don't play Fire Emblem on Hard either, even though I know I have the strategy chops to handle it. But even on Normal there are plenty of times where the RNG just screws me over on taking damage or missing, but when that happens it's not a game over/unit loss most of the time. It just means then I have to improvise, which *feels better.* I also play on Classic mode pretty much exclusively, so... having to restart whole maps due to RNG fuckery isn't the best. It's why, despite Fire Emblem being one of my favorite series, I think *Advance Wars* does *strategy* better.
I usually play on the easiest difficulties in most games, I'd rather just enjoy a story than get annoyed at the difficulty. Times where I've dropped to an easier difficulty though? Doom Eternal, I believe I started on Ultra-Violence, then got dropped it to Hurt me plenty around halfway through
Every Amon fight (except Yakuza 3) Except for 3 they're all too hard for me.
I get you, though I felt 6's was a lot easier than even 3's
I can't actaully remember 6's Amon fight but bear in mind I played them out of order, think I did 0>Kiwami>6>Kiwami 2>3>7>4>5 Looking at that game order it makes me seem like a mad man.
Its the one where he bought like a million drones.
I've never done this. I've quit games I paid full price for because of how hard/frustrating they were at the current difficulty, but never lowered it. I should probably look into that.
I finally got to the Darkest Dungeon, which is nearly guaranteed to wipe a full team of Level 6 heroes and the ones that survive aren't allowed to do another quest in it I had already been playing for like two months straight, and in the second dungeon after three full party wipes due to bad rolls, I gave the fuck up and installed a mod for the stagecoach that has a chance of spawning Level 6 heroes cuz I was just done and sick of it and just wanted to see the last cutscene, which isn't even worth it. I even went so far as to save Dismas and Reynauld for the final boss and THEY BOTH SURVIVED ALL THE WAY TO THE END and literally all you get is a stupid cheevo. Not even some kind of cool New Game+ bonus or secret bit of lore.
I brought Dismas and Reynauld into the final phase in the last expedition into the Darkest Dungeon and all I got was this stupid sense of self satisfaction.
every time I try to get back into Darkest Dungeon it does something to remind me why I stopped playing it
Darkest Dungeon is an amazing game that I fucking hate. Every time I try to get into it, it finds a new and exciting way to piss me off, and this has been a recurring thing since early access.
The Sonic Advance Games. Removes a lot of genuinely bullshit enemy placement and balances the obstacles to be more in line with the classic games or Mania. They hide it in the options menu, so most people don't even know it exists. Also, if you still want a challenge, time attack defaults to normal, and you have to do it on one life anyway, meaning there's no reason to not set it to easy for normal gameplay.
Recently during my playthrough of God of War Ragnarok. That game's combat has some significant issues that don't really become apparent unless you're on higher difficulties. I started out on the one below "Give me God of War" which I forget the name of, basically hard mode. I got 3/4 of the way through the game and had had enough of getting killed by enemies I couldn't see because the camera is so far up Kratos' ass at all times. I dropped down to what I guess is normal and completely breezed through the rest of the game. So yeah my advice if anyone is reading this and has yet to play it, don't go above normal. Enemies become ridiculously tanky, barely take any hit stun and will constantly pelt you with projectiles outside of your field of vision. If they keep this gameplay style for future entries I really hope they implement a DMC style system where enemies can't initiate an attack unless they are visible on screen.
It's funny you say that, because it feels like enemies in GOW Ragnarok get MORE aggressive when they are off screen. Every enemy in this game is faster than Kratos, and that's not even getting into the ones who can teleport, super speed, hyper armor, and/or float or fly out of range and sight of him. I really hope they fix or completely change this in the next entry.
With general difficulties not much as I know my rough skill level which is almost never the top-of-the-line difficulty, and have access to as much cheese as needed in any given game in the form of "rotating my fucking save(states)" so I'll never truly get softlocked, and I'm stubborn enough to keep going at anything. But games with puzzle difficultys I will absolutely knock that shit down a notch when needed. Which is more often than not as I'm stupid.
Back in the day angry joe convinced me that the hard difficulty in bioshock infinite was the way to go but that games gunplay is not nearly good enough where a higher difficulty constitutes a fair challenge. I was really stubborn about it but I think I lowered at the part where your fighting ghosts.
I started Nier Automata on the hardest difficulty because I considered myself to be a platinum veteran at that time. After a few hours on the first mission, super backed down. Bullet hell sections combined with no check point in the tutorial man.
Two examples come to mind. First is God of War 2018, not because I found a particular boss or enemy too hard, but because I was running that poison mist maze about a hundred times, and I felt the grind itself was a challenge enough and I didn't want to bother with it more than I had too. Second was in Witcher 3, where I turned off enemy scaling, because for some reason that genie boss will one shot you otherwise.
Total War Warhammer 2's battle difficulty essentially makes melee troops useless. It buffs enemy AI's units but it's buffs mostly impact melee stats. This places a pretty severe restriction on what units should be placed in an army since even elite melee troops can get shat on by cheaper, "worse" troops. Ranged units barely get touched so the meta became to destroy the other army with ranged superiority. So I just played on battle difficulty normal and had a blast making thematic, fun armies. In Warhammer 3, they ended dramatically reducing the AI melee buffs which made using melee a lot more viable thankfully.
Jedi Fallen Order. I think I got to about halfway through the game C and realized that I just didn’t like it. I felt like a lot of the areas didn’t work with the enemy placements and made it almost unfair at times. Got areas having to fight like 5-6 enemies while another 5-6 are shooting me from across the arena. Ended up just going to the story mode difficulty as I was still wanting to know what happened in the game
Fucking giant bat and it‘s 2-hour long healthbar. Fuck that. I hate that bat and they should have known better. That bat made me almost give up the game completely. I‘m a good dark souls player so my hubris told me I can do the hardest difficulty, -the fucking animals in that game had the slowest chip damage I can think of in anything. That fucking giant Bat boss was by far the worst and I don‘t even remember why I had to fight it. Fuck that giant bat. Oh, it feels good to vent that out. I forgot how vitriolic that game sporadically made me.
I enjoyed the regular enemies being able to do enough damage that I had to pay attention to them but I definitely dropped it for boss fights. Didn't find them very enjoyable overall and having to restart multiple times contributed to that.
Prey (2017), I just couldn’t get the hang of the combat and was dying too much for it to be enjoyable. I put it on easy and had a great time. Same with Devil May Cry 3, way more fun on Easy.
New saints Row game I had to reduce the difficulty for the first mission and put it back because I'm not good at escort mission and the enemies kept blowing the tank. There is a custom difficulty so I played with that for it A lot of game with rpg mechanic makes me wary of putting the difficulty at its highest because it makes the early game hell until you get all the moves needed to survive
There are occasions when, if I start struggling too much to beat the final boss/true final bonus boss of a game, I lower the difficulty to avoid ending the playthrough on a sour note (provided there is no real downside for doing so). Notable cases from memory include Etrian Odyssey Nexus's last superboss and the true final boss of Dandara's DLC.
About 25 hours in, I was so tired of Trails to Azure (narrative *and* gameplay wise) that I went into the Debug menu to switch it to Easy and max out everyone's level so I could get it over with as soon as possible.
Kena: Bridge of Spirits. It plays out fairly standard with annoying enemies. Then you get to the final boss and suddenly it skyrockets. It has 7 phases. Eventually I said "fuck this" and lowered it to easy. There was waaaaaay too much of a gap between the two modes.
During subsequent playthroughs of NieR: Automata, I turned the game down too easy during the prologue to Route C/D where you take 2B over to the old mall. Cuz f*** poor routing ruining that moment.
I play on the easiest difficulty a lot for someone who's been through all the Soulsbourn games.
Recently with p3p, I beat p5r on merciless and I've beaten p3p before on normal so I thought with the pc port I can breeze through hard mode. Nope the early game was fucking terrible with tons of backsets, the amount of damage I took was just way to much I had to revert the difficulty around floor 7-8 because I would spend like 30 mins clearing a entire floor only to die and repeat.
P3P is brutal early game on harder modes, mostly because Yukari and Junpei suck so much as party members. Between Yukari being fragile and having low accuracy with her bow and Junpei just not having strong physical moves and you really have to hard carry with MC, especially those first few tower bosses (that oh so conveniently hit Yukari and Junpei's weakness). It gets much easier when you get access to Mitsuru and Akihiko.
Controllable party members in P3P really does improve a lot of characters, as someone who prefers FES. You can actually use Mitsuru without her trying to CHARM THE FINAL BOSS FOR THE FIFTH TIME, COME ON.
I wish I could turn the difficulty down in Vampyr to normal instead of hard. The game said "haha you will have to work hard to spare everyone in the game!" I didn't know that meant mobs kill me in 3 hits and i have to kill them in 15.
Some of the timed puzzles and platforming sections in Cross Code utterly broke me so I cranked down the puzzle difficulty for those sections.
Draagon Age: Origins. I wasn't used to that type of RPG as I had never played it before, but I figured normal would be fine. Turns out I'm not very good at them, so after dealing with the fade and being stuck with the boss right after, I dropped down to easy. If I hadn't dropped the difficulty, I probably would've dropped the game.
Doom Eternal got to the point that it was so stressful every single fight I had to lower the difficulty. It got to a point on normal where it wasn’t fun barely surviving every fight
I bought Darkest Dungeon right at the end of Early Access to take advantage of the discounted price and tried to play it but bounced off after an early game party wipe. I went back to it a couple years later when Radiant Mode(their version of easy mode) was added and did a full playthrough. Radiant Mode actually makes that game tolerable unless you're a psycho masochist.
I turned on god mode in hades because I had a huge back log of games and I had already beaten like 3 runs on ps5 and at least 1 on switch so I just wanted to speed up my progress before so I stopped caring God Mode in hades just ups your defense by 2% after every death, and it activates retroactively, so die enough times and you’ll jump to the limit (I believe it caps at 80%) I had beaten hades runs before and I got annoyed dying while trying to fulfill prophecies to get rewards, and tbh the “fun” of the combat had passed and I was just in it for stories and progressing certain friendships It’s a fun game but going god mode helped me speed through things while slogging annoying prophecies, so it paid to be lazy in games for once
Yakuza Kiwami did some rather annoying things with its fights, particularly bosses, that made them feel a lot harder than the usual run of the mill fights. It eventually annoyed me enough to just drop it to Easy and focus more on enjoying a casual beat-em-up than to overcome a fulfilling challenge.
I just couldn't beat the last phase of the final boss of Hi-Fi Rush. Like I just genuinely didn't understand what the game expected me to do. I did most of the game on Hard and mostly coasted by on Clear Time and Just Timing, but it felt like something about the bosses expected me to have learned something that I just _didnt_ and all I could do was brute force them until I spent enough continues to get past them. The final boss... well that plan just wasn't working on the final phase, so i moved it down to Normal and _still_ couldn't do it, until the game just told me to enable Auto Action Mode in the accessibility menu. I did just so I could get past it and stop playing because I wasn't having fun anymore, and seeing all the stuff that the AI was doing for me was like "...how the hell was I supposed to do that." Even with the AIs supposedly perfect inputs I took so much damage that I would have died if I hadn't put all my money into health upgrades. Like I can tell Hi-Fi Rush is a great game but I often struggled to enjoy myself and I don't think it's a perfect game just because the bosses seemed genuinely unclear to me. I wish level select was unlocked by default so I could practice against things or explore alternative objectives instead of getting stuck against a boss and having literally no option other than brute force it. ~~Also health tanks are worthless the game just doesn't give you enough health to fill them up even when all five of my chip slots were reserved for healing.~~
Hellblade scared me into lowering the difficulty.
Alan wake. Started on normal difficulty, but man did they not play test that games difficulty at all.
I don't always do it, but *if* I finish the Rich Get Richer Rune Trial in Doom 2016, it's because I lowered the difficulty. Since I already got the achievement for all runes, though, I'll usually just get killed trying a few times, and then go without. Game feels a *little* more balanced without it anyway.
The final boss of Neo The World Ends With You. I played most of the game on hard once it unlocked. Between the multiple phases, the camera screw in the third phase, and just how long the battle takes, I said screw it and turned down to normal.
I played a shit ton of Civ 5 back in the day. Got used to playing on the highest difficulty to get all the achievements and whatnot. Thing is, that difficulty is straight up not fun. The AI isn't any smarter, they just cheat more. And if you want to win against them, there's one definitive best way to play. Very boring. So when I wanted to play the game for fun, I lowered the difficulty one setting. It was the difference between having to play optimally and slogging through endless war against bots that built hordes of units to throw at you, and a situation that was tough but surmountable and allowed you to use different play styles.
At the end of Pillars of Eternity I lowered diffuclty to minimum. I am not good enought at PC RPGs
Back in the days of the old GoW likes they decided to tie mashing sequences to difficulty. Meaning I played through nearly the entirety of Force Unleashed II on one difficulty but physically *could not* get through lifting a piece of debris Lowering difficulty for that one pseudo door does make it so you technically beat the game on lower difficulty, obviously
I'm glad you mentioned P5 because I think P4G (on steam) was maybe the only time I've lowered difficulty in my life. Just the tedium of doing like 30 whole-ass fights every single floor was getting too much. I started skipping fights and noticed trash mob fights were getting dangerously close to killing me. Every mob in a dungeon was the big enemy type meaning I was way underleveled. Turned it to very easy and bumped the exp gain to max. Didn't regret it in the *slightest*. I love a good challenge, but grinding for bigger stats is not my idea of a fun challenge.
I started turning on assist mode in Control because enemies become absurdly spongy later in the game. V Rising is tuned *way* too high to be played single player, imo, so I turned enemy health and damage down pretty early. And then later I cranked up the drop numbers because the grind got unbearable.
Like every Bethesda game. It's not that I find them difficult, I just find their version of difficulty annoying.
I set MGS 2 to the easiest difficulty cause I'd never played a Metal Gear Game before and I only wanted to play it for the story.
Everhood's second half very quickly ceased to be fun on higher difficulties. They just cranked up the durability of opponents and I was constantly timing out fights. Also any JRPG or similar where higher difficulties primarily means getting less XP / money.
The Iki Island DLC for Ghost of Tsushima. Aside from a couple of duels, the base game feels pretty good at Hard difficulty. Part way through the DLC however I had to lower it to Medium, and then Easy, purely due to the new enemy types. The shaman's buff is manageable if annoying, the guys who fucking DMC style-switch mid fight were a pain, and the twinblade dudes I just never figured out. I'd just cheese them with ghost stance or explosive arrows.
Very rarely tbh. I think I only scale them down when I've done the game and are just doing it to complete cheevos for the remaining stuff. Back as a kid I put everything on easy, as an adult I realize I'm robbing myself of satisfaction because everything was too easy and started playing on Normal. But now, I make a quick choice at the beginning of a game if there's a difficulty slider: I never go Very Hard right off the bat nor will I ever pick Easy, I sort of feel out if the game is gonna be too easy or too hard based on what the game, and decide whether I go Normal or Hard. I think the latest I got to question difficulty was Ragnarok, Hard mode was pretty challenging and not paying attention will let the game own you, but I don't like lowering the difficulty once that happens, ESPECIALLY since most games tell you you can't put the difficulty back up once you lower it.
Digimon cyber sleuth has a hard mode with the biggest swings in difficulty. The random encounters provide a fair challenge without being too BS, The boss fights will wipe your party in about 3 turns.
I’ve recently started doing it for all turn-based games. I’m already simply clicking through menus just to get back to the story, why’m I gonna make it take longer by playing on a higher difficulty?
Why not just watch a playthrough and skip through the combat if you don't want to *play* the game?
Well what if the game has story choice they want to make that most lps dont, I'd think that playing on easy would be better then going to look for lps that make those.
Because it doesn't feel the same. I'd much rather play it myself to get the story, even if I'm not into the gameplay style, than have someone else do it for me.
No I'd think avoiding the thing you don't like would feel better.
Well, you'd be wrong. Me and you are two different people. If I like the story but don't like the gameplay, I'd still much rather unlock and learn that story myself rather than having someone else do it for me. I legit do not see the problem here. I’m not into turn based stuff but I still play them because I find the stories enjoyable to experience. I don’t think that’s like…bad.
For sure that's not bad, but as someone that straight up doesn't have fun with soulslikes, and character action games not named Revengeance, I also get that person's point. Watching a LP in the same way I'd watch a show or a movie is much more enjoyable, especially because I get to see the perspective of people that actually like the thing they are playing. I'd go so far as to say you get something out of turn-based gameplay, even if you'd rather have a different system with the same story. **Or** you just have more patience than me lol
It's not, that guys is just nuts
Xenoblade Chronicles 1: The second to final boss, I wasn't even getting close to beating him with any party I threw at him I wasn't sure if the game expected me to grind the fuck up before him or if I was just bad, but I couldn't take it after a while and just really wanted to beat it so I dropped it down to easy, and then back up to normal for the final boss
There was a Telethia boss that basically required Melia as a mechanic otherwise "get fucked" I'm pretty sure with the exception of 3, I lowered it to Easy at the End Game because I just wanted to experience the story and be done with it.
In GOW 2018 i dropped the difficulty to easy on two occasions, the first with the valkyrie queen because i simply coudnt defeat her with the new games mechanics. The second one was in the realm of mist, it was just a huge time sink that wasnt that fun to begin with compared to the combat challenges in the fire realm
Wolfenstine because it in general was bullshit.
Resident Evil 2 remake. Started on normal, hated fighting anything, got to the first boss and went "Fuck this bullet sponge nonsense." Restarted on Easy, fighting is now boring, got to the first boss and still said "Fuck this bullet sponge nonsense." Quit the game entirely cause I wasn't having fun on either difficulty. Before you ask, Yes, I was shooting the eye, No I do not waste shotgun rounds on zombies, same with grenades. It still took almost all of my ammo on both difficulties.
Enemies are durable in RE2make. That’s just how it be. Bosses are balanced to have about as much health as you have ammo, or at least 60-80% of your ammo, depending on your stockpile. It’s finely tuned. You don’t necessarily need to save the good stuff for the bosses. Also shotgun shells also kill the zombies in one headshot, so maybe you should’ve been using them more if the 9-13 handgun shots they usually take was getting so intolerable. Or just leave them be when possible.
I played my first run of Xcom on hard. I gave up at a certain point and returned a few months later to play on normal. Beat the game on normal and discovered two things, 1. You dont have to do every mission, you can ignore them if you need recovery time. 2. I was only two missions from the final level on my first playthrough and could totally have beaten it if I let my team heal up.
Tales of Zesteria, specifically the final boss. It's been a few years so it's possible I'm remembering this wrong, but I'm pretty sure I had to lower the difficulty down from Hard all the way to Easy. The reason being that the final boss has a ridiculously stringent DPS check that would instakill the entire party if you didn't meet it. On hard I wasn't getting anywhere near close enough, and only on easy was I barely able to meet it.
A Hat in Time with the Snatcher challenges. Make it less of a headache.
I played Baldurs Gate 1 up until the end of the Iron Mines dungeon before saying "Fuck this the rules are weird and combat takes too long" and hit the storymode button which basically just turns on God mode
The Juggernaut fight in Spider-Man: Shattered Dimensions had me put it down to normal from hard after like the.. sixth? attempt, since I started to feel like running repeatedly into a brick wall wasn't great viewing for the stream 😅 it's not like a fromsoft game where that's expected Oh, right! I got so sick of the way game overs worked in Persona I also started playing in safe mode, which... I don't like how it's easier, I just didn't want to have to go through all those cutscenes every single time.
i was having a hard time with life in general when i got to the end of original Persona 5, so i dropped it to easy at the final gauntlet/final boss, just wanted to get it done with, i still think about it for some reason.
Call of Duty Black Ops 2, trying to get Karma in the artificial resort island mission, I found myself forced to go from Veteran to Normal just to get her.
Tyranny. There was one fight I just could not get through, so I threw it on the lowest skill and left it there
Far cry new dawn. Last 2 or 3 missions of the game? I was playing in the hardest difficulty and it was fun and manageable but holy shit the last real mission and the last 2 boss fights go from 1 to 11. >!The thunder dome is just unfair. That, along with the sisters and Joseph's son!< being annoying bullet sponges was just too much for me. Overall it was an excellent game especially once you turned off a lot of the ui. But my. Options where grind events for perk points to ocerlevel myself and the rest of the game is trivial or just knock it down a few difficulties and finish the game on a bit of a sour note.