Gaming

I hate bullet sponges in FPS especially. Really makes your guns feel stupid when you shoot someone a dozen times in the head and it doesn't do much.

The problem with difficulties is that it's much more difficult to design an AI system which you can tweak and make it smarter or dumber as opposed to just increasing damage and health values, so devs will just implement the best AI they can and leave difficulties as afterthought.

After playing a lot of games that don't even have difficulty settings, I've started to believe in the idea that difficulty selection is just outdated game design and that having a single difficulty but optional areas/content that is more difficult is the way to do it. OSRS is one of my favorite examples - everyone plays the same game and going through levelling or whatever isn't mechanically demanding. However, there are bosses and challenges (like Theatre of Blood which is an end-game raid or Inferno which is an end-game challenge) that are incredibly challenging and require weeks if not months of attempts to master and finally beat, but also are perfectly skippable and most casual players don't even bother with them.

I hate bullet sponges, but I do think this joke gets too reductive for my taste. There are many games where enemies die so fast on easy mode that you don't get to experience whatever mechanics they have. By increasing health it can have the impact of revealing those mechanics that already existed.

It has to be a reasonable increase that doesn't turn into a slog though.

Middle Earth: Shadow of War got it right with one of its later updates. They added a final difficulty that increases enemy aggression, attack power, and perception. It also increased player attack power. As long as you're not fighting a massively overleveled enemy, fights are hard, quick, and fairly bullshit free.

You have to beat the game first to unlock it but I love the realism mode in jedi survivor. Lightsabers actually kill like in the movies, but get shot maybe 2x and you're dead.

When the game is:

Normal mode - made for the absolute lowest common denominator, every challenge is overcome in seconds before you understand what the intended solution was

And

Hard mode - the intented challenge to normal happens 1 pico second in, you now have to solve 20 combinations of different challenges. Not because it's difficult, because the developers want you to die over and over and over until you understand all combinations enough.

After I had gotten the hang of Hellblade's combat on the adaptive difficulty I turned it to easy by the end because killing enemies had become just a slog. Funnily enough it coincided with her getting the new ultimate sword and made the game feel much more epic.

BTW, Baldur's Gate 3 does difficulty very well. Enemies get better abilities and use the good ones more frequently.

monster_hp=selected_game_difficulty * base_hp

Surprisingly, in COD (at least bo2 & 3) enemies get more and more "abilities" the higher you set the difficulty (this means, grenades, better accuracy, use of special equipment, higher burst rates)

My friend hosted a valheim server on idk hard or very hard. The parry mechanic didn't work since it would let a percentage of damage through. So even with the current highest obtainable shield enemies we were not able to use parries (or blocking lol) at all and had to dodge everything. At boss 4 or so I BEGGED him to lower the difficulty, since the lingering damage would almost one-shot us and we just kept respawning over and over for an hour.

Metro did this right, both you and your enemies can be killed in one to two shots, making combat tense and rewarding.

It's pretty hard to make levels of difficulty that actually change things enough outside of either giving the enemies more damage and HP or simply adding more enemies, or in scored games having higher score thresholds for higher ranks (these can be anything from an actual score to the speed you finished and everything in between that's basically just a number that you can compare to another number).

It certainly can be done, though. I can't help but think about the bots in counter-strike. They range from braindead drooling moving targets to Terminator machines that can 1 tap you with a pistol from across the map. They actually have a difficulty scale that's more than simply being tougher to kill and hurting you more. It affects how they move around, the speed they begin shooting, their accuracy, etc. I don't know why these kind of bots do not extend to pretty much any game with enemies. Just give them 3 sets of behavior that makes them easier or harder to deal with.

In a game where you can dodge attacks 2x damage makes a lot more sense than 2x health. They could also just increase game speed by 10-20% to make everything more chaotic. More enemies + more drops also works pretty well IMO but a sponge just makes everything take sooooo long. RPGs already often have long battles that can take 10 minutes and making the 20 where you use up all consumables, ammo etc is just bad.

If a game deals with difficulty with this method, I'll probably end up using cheats in the easiest gaming mode. Hopefully the story won't suck.

It's either this, or they just scale up the damage by some arbitrary factor, that is a quantum leap from what the bad guys were doing originally.

oh? he did 10 damage in vanilla?

lazy, underfunded programer: dmg= base.dmg^2 <<endl;

Alternative punchline: "we think we're dark souls and you'll die to random shit thrown at you off screen".

I think the comic is contextually true. What really irks me are games designed to be quick, fast paced and aggressive, stop you dead in your tracks. An example is the Battle Toads reboot (which is great, play it) has these enemies that have shields or you can't hurt them until after they've done their thing, slows down an otherwise fast and fun beat em up. Another is DOOM Eternal, a game where you're running at Crack addict speed, and then they put in this dude with a shield that reflects your whole way of doing damage. Really jarring to have that speed bump in your experience. It's for sure a great game, but I think a poor design decision to make the enemy work this way.

That's what I like about raid bosses in Star Wars: The Old Republic where the difficulty changes most of the boss mechanics