Mod
(media.scored.co)
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Yup. Marginal improvement Or difficulty increase? Nope, its always straight to turbo cheating or nerf everything to make the game less fun instead of marginally more difficult than hardest setting.
Yeah if you're a connoisseur of balance tweaks you definitely have to learn to customize things yourself.
Those insane game breaking mods can sometimes still be handy as a nice quick template so you don't have to dig through and learn the proper variable names for a quick tweak though.
Because setting a variable to 999,999,999 is easier than figuring out a multiplier system or testing to see what values would increase difficulty without becoming impossible.
Is that really the case? I've seen a few mods that actually try to do balance or challenge fairly well, though Sturgeon's law applies to mods as much as it does internet fiction.
I'd say I really enjoyed a good few mods for Legend of Grimrock 2, especially their rather plug-and-play nature. There were some stinkers, but the ones which were even marginally good made me feel like I was doing the whole game all over again.
They exist, but aren't as popular as the ones that turn you into a god.
It's the reason that From Soft's games don't sell as well as CoD, most normies don't play games for the difficulty.
My brother in law uses every cheat, exploit, and built in easy mode option he can. Does the game include an item obviously intended for small children that trivializes the entire game? If so, you can bet he's using it.
Then, after beating the game, he complains that it was too easy and not fun.
I just don't get it.
If I use a mod to tweak difficulty, it's usually to change a bullshit challenge to a reasonable challenge. There's so much BS in games that make it harder, but in a dumbass way. Like, you do hardly any damage but the boss can one-shot you. So I would mod it where now you aren't one-shotting the boss, but you're also not using a super soaker against a demigod. That's not a fun challenge, that's just lazy game design. Literal brute force over making the NPC behavior more clever and complex.
It's understandable. That statement (which I can believe) reminds me cheating devices like the action replay or gameshark were popular for similar reasons (I remember using Action replay to get illegal pokemon in black and white), though they've been falling by the wayside as consoles have gotten more resilient to such devices. It's a marginal part of the charm of bygone generations, particularly the DS era.
Remember game genie in the early 90s?
The pokemon thing was more because fuck you I'm not buying your game twice and I'm the only person I know that plays Pokémon.
Reminds me of when I played an shmup a while back and I have to use cheat engine to make the game harder than "impossible" difficulty as I wanted slightly more challenge than max without the game turning fucky. So I made the game 1 life, no checkpoints but infinite continues. You either perfect no miss the entire stage or start the whole stage over.
Depends on the game, depends on the players. Many games on Steam have a very wide range of mods ranging from entirely non invasive music in the background to character voice packs to entire gameplay total conversions.
For "normal" Stellaris there are things like Leviathans Events Xtended, More Events Mod, Zenith of the Fallen Empire, New Ship Components, Ancient Cache of Technologies, and many more that offer different kinds of challenges be they edits to existing ones, novel additions, or simply more ways to build ships and have things to fight. Then there are total conversion mods like Star Trek New Civilisations that lets you play Stellaris but as Star Trek. There are several Trek mods like this. There are also Star Wars total conversion mods, as well as ones for Mass Effect and a few other franchises.
X-Com 2 is similar to this. The Hive adds in new chrysalid mobs to deal with while Long War 2 flat out changes how the game works with its total conversion and novel class designs.
I think the majority of mods I see for games make them harder, often in stupid or bullshit ways. But the most popular ones are usually blatant cheats or coomer mods (and I have nothing against coomer mods).
Every Elder scrolls game has mods to remove level scaling but they all make the game worse. I agree with complaints about level scaling in general but no ES games were designed for pre-scripted levels. So the modders just haphazardly spread level 50 enemies all over the starting areas, turning it into a quicksave simulator.
Generally I go for mods that remove inventory headaches or onerous encumbrance systems. I have probably spent literal years of life playing inventory tetris and I am just done with it now.
At least with PC games some of them have files you can edit to do this yourself. A lot of Steam mods have files you can edit in notepad++ to make very minor tweaks to things like this without drastically trivialising something.
This is why trainers are still cool in 2024 because you can modify difficulty options to your liking. Something that should been in the game in the first place. Nothing beats finding and manually editing an obscure configuration file on your own but ain't nobody got time for that.
They shouldn't even fucking have to.We shouldn't have to waste time trying to reverse engineer a shitty game to have fun and dodge bullshit.
How good is cheat engine on modern games anyway that would sort out "mod" nonsense.
To my liking that is too close to the demand of journalist mode in games like Souls or Elden Ring
Upgrading a 6 shooter to 7 hurts my immersion. :*(
What's that you say?
"I know what you're thinking. Did he fire six shots, or only five?"
BANG BANG
"Gotcha bitch, get Septa'd!"
Le Gasp!
This is why I like games that use XML files for it's variables.
Don't mind while I make a copy of this file, and tinker with it until I find out which variable does what, so I can, using this example make a magazine capacity increase that is a bit more sane.
Bonus points for those that annotate what does what, rather than just show us the math and let us figure it out. But I know unrealistic release times and crunch-like time frames at work can stop someone from adding helpful annotation when things need to be done yesterday.
Do programmers not notate the shit out of everything anymore so you don't have to guess and check?
I used to be big on HTML/CSS/JS and I would put notes like crazy in every file for my own sanity in case a year later I had to go back in and tweak something.
Sometimes it's really good and sometimes it's minimal. I understand that it's a convenience and not a requirement, so I'm not too worried about it. I do appreciate it when it's there, though.
Most of them are nice enough to give notes and headings for things like (as an example) ranged damage or melee damage and which armor can prevent which damage and things like that.
But sometimes you get bare minimum things like
internally used gun name:
And a string of damage numbers here that don't mean a whole lot.
And sometimes just a list of all of them using in engine names not used in the game at all and you have to guess a bit to track what you're doing for which weapon.
Like I said, some are better than others, and I'll take what I can get when it's there.
It sure is helpful when it's good enough that someone like me who barely mods can open it and track what does what within a few seconds of reading.
Guy on right has 5/4 ammo. Gotta love it. One in chamber? Unusually realistic.
Thomas the Train one has me busting up over here.