In the grand and beloved QuarterToThree tradition of necroing ancient goddamn threads rather than starting new ones, I would like to drag the below difficulty in games tangent over here so that I can complain about it in the whiniest, lamest way possible. I’ll even tag folks like @Rock8man, @tomchick, @Skipper, @inactive_user, @Soren_Hoglund, and @Left_Empty in on the madness!
So, in short, my thoughts to add jackshit of value to the discussion before you all go back to piling onto Tom :)
I really hate games that lock content behind difficulty barriers without any other means of acquiring it. I actually don’t mind high score counters/multipliers like Tom mentioned in ReBuild at all; it’s basically just giving you a formula to calculate how skillfully you overwhelmed impossible challenges to maximize the dopamine release you get from Doin Hard Shit. Good on y’all that dig that!
But gotdamn, man, as someone who does and has always sucked fucks at all games, all the time, forever, I really hate when cool content gets locked behind difficulty walls that the dev doesn’t give me options to waltz through. I love the recent trend of adding Babytown Races modes to RPGs so that I can experience the cool story without having to carefully micromanage the two remaining heals left on my party while there are still 18 Displacer Beets hemming us in from both sides, painting the ground red with our blood and their juice.
Like, I think of all the cool cars in racing games. I literally would bribe more talented gamer-friends over to my house with free food and soda to beat the Burnout games’ most challenging races and wreck-mode puzzles for me on PS2 so that I could finally play all the most tricked out cars. Ditto for unlocking all the cool endgame weapons in FFX so that I could actually challenge the super awesome post-endgame content in that game and see all that stuff. I also usually have to beg people to help me beat fighting games’ upper level challenges to unlock all the characters on my save file, cuz otherwise, when you visit to play Smash Bros at my place, you’re only gonna see like half the cast there, man.
Like, I get it. For a lot of people, the enjoyment of games is the challenge. And I don’t begrudge games having challenges in place that really tax those people!
But for me, the enjoyment is seeing all the other cool stuff in the game–the cinematics, the story, the badass weapons and cars and characters. Like, I paid for the disc. Let me have the goodies! And when there’s no way for me to feasibly get at that stuff because I have the hand-eye coordination of a dead cat, I get real sad.
So there, difficulty in games should either be adjustable with no difference in experience for lower levels, or the rewards for higher levels should be purely structured around the “get moar better” experience (e.g., point leaderboards), not extra content/better endings/etc.