Mod
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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.