The eternal struggle
(media.scored.co)
You're viewing a single comment thread. View all comments, or full comment thread.
Comments (37)
sorted by:
I think it's generally understood that numbers have to play a role in difficulty on some level, but the question is where the line is drawn. For example, difficulty in the good Halo games is largely numbers; there are a few AI tweaks that happen and if you're using skulls you can add non-numbers things like exploding enemies or no checkpoints, but a big part of the scale from Easy-Legendary is about how much damage you do, or enemies do, or your occasional marine allies do. For the most part, people are fine with this because it's very well-executed in general and the number tweaks are done with intention and consideration.
But there are definitely some games that are guilty of saying "okay, my higher difficulty setting is that the basic grunt who you're supposed to be mowing down in hordes now takes five hits to kill and if he hits you you die." (And to be fair, some people enjoy this too).
The only game I can think of where difficulty isn't numbers at all is something like "I Wanna Be The Boshy," where if you ever mess up a jump or get hit you die. But not every game can be or should be a precision platformer, and some genres do need to use numbers on some level.
Halo is a great example for it because Legendary in a lot of games also shows the problem with "Numbers" as the big barometer.
Halo Legendary is often a game where numbers are cranked so high that a lot of the mechanics actually stop mattering. Most of the weapons that aren't named Plasma Pistol become useless. A lot of the vehicles just become death traps. Heck merely peeking out a pixel from cover is death if you haven't memorized Jackal spawns. It becomes basically "meta only."
Its not "absolutely bad, no one can have fun with this" but its a good example of why people also dislike the Numbers system a lot of the time as well.
I think Halo helps itself on this one by having Heroic mode. If you want reasonably challenging without being too meta, that mode works and if you want a "you have to know this game and the strats really well" mode, you can turn it up to legendary.
If I had to name a really bad numbers system, I'd probably pick something like Breath of the Wild because the hard mode makes everything chunkier and deal more damage and even gives health regen to every enemy. If you don't know where to go to start getting good weapons quickly you're going to struggle (especially since the early game weapons also break really fast)... but in the normal mode, a lot of the combat is too easy for anyone that has a decent amount of gaming experience. There's no in between mode. And I think stuff like that is what makes people really angry at numbers systems.
Yeah Heroic is by far the best balance between all the factors. You can pick up Heroic without a deep knowledge of the game and still have an enjoyable but challenging time.
And Breath of the Wild already had a terrible difficulty system even in Normal mode. The durability system is designed to force you to constantly hard gimp yourself so you can save "good weapons" for bigger moments. Not only using subpar equipment, but taking up more and more inventory slots with stuff you are hesitant to use because you know it'll break instantly once you do.
Its just not super noticeable because the game is so easy that you aren't really hard challenged much. If you aren't getting one shot, you are usually not in any danger and will eventually whittle down anything.
I think most numbers systems are bad, because usually they are made on the coding side without consideration for how they actually play. A lot of companies have admitted they don't even play test their highest difficulty levels. Sometimes this creates emergent strategies, often times it leads to the Legendary restrictions I mentioned earlier.
And its not just the number systems becoming too hard, it can happen in the opposite. Games that are too easy numerically never let you engage with to learn the systems or get good at them because you never need to and its wasteful to pretend to try. You see this a lot with bad tutorial modes/zones, or even games where "the post game is the real game." Halo on Easy or even Normal suffers from this a lot.
Heroic Halo really was a perfect balance, its a shame it took them until like Reach to say "this is the intended version" because I think most people default to Normal because it says Normal.
Do you mean in terms of default settings for mission selection? Maybe I’m being misremembering, but I swear that all the way back in the original CE, the description for Heroic said “Halo the way it’s meant to be played.”