Let's talk about how adaptive difficulty is completely fucking retarded

Let's talk about how adaptive difficulty is completely fucking retarded.

In 99% of its implementations it just exists to make the game easier if you die/mess up in some other arbitrary way. This is incredibly fucking stupid. Failure is a part of gameplay and its important to let people fail and try again until they get better and beat the section. Punishing failure by taking away the actual game and forcing you to play some bastardized easy version is fucking stupid. It also leads to a million questions, because these games never fucking explain what they're actually doing, such as:

What triggers a difficulty decrease? Anything besides death? What if you die, but quit out or load the last saved game instead of continue?
Can the difficulty decreases be removed?
Can the difficulty be increased from base?
Can the adaptive difficulty follow onto different save files?

It's so fucking stupid and it pretty much nullifies any sense of accomplishment you can ever have in ANY video game, even games that don't have any adaptive difficulty because games that do have adaptive difficulty rarely say they do, so you can't just assume that a game doesn't have adaptive difficulty without doing significant research. Even if you never get hit, how do you know that you didn't load to many times, took too long to kill an enemy, took too long to get through a certain section, used too much ammo/resources to do something, just got low on resources in general, and that triggered some adaptive difficulty response?

i can't fucking stand it Holla Forums. help

Shit like adaptive difficulty and level scaling are the opposite of why I enjoy games. I want a clearly defined challenge that can be overcome by mastery.

I already face enough insurmountable challenges IRL.

I think God Hand did adaptive difficulty just fine.

This. OP is a faggot

I can understand where they were going when they invented level scaling, though. The idea is exactly what you appear to want, having a challenge no matter where you go instead of simply grinding your way through the game.

It's implementation is usually horrible though.

Like I said, 99% of the time it's implemented horribly. God Hand is the 1% of the time where it wasn't implemented just to make the game easier if you fuck up.

Well yeah it was implemented to let you finish the game, but it also indirectly made the game harder by giving less rewards so you could get more combos. More or less the game wanted you on level 3 or so given that going into level 4 would kick your shit in faster than most people could adapt and learn.

The idea is to prevent the need of level grinding from interrupting the plot.

Stop dying if you don't want the game to be easier.

The adaptive difficulty in God Hand makes it harder instead of easier. If you play like a chump the game won't become harder but if you perform well the game rises up to the challenge. Not only that but higher levels also give higher rewards with you fighting more enemies per level and getting demons more frequently(which means more drops). Its more of an exception to the adaptive difficulty mechanic than the norm.

Devil May Cry 4 exemplifies OPs problem perfectly because you are literally forced to the easy baby shit mode and unlike the previous games you aren't even asked for it but are still penalized for it.


But most RPGs are already easy enough to not have grinding as a problem.

Well in order to stop dying I need practice and to practice I need to be able to actually play at the appropriate difficulty level.

Just stop sucking fag.

What are you talking about? DMC4 does ask if you want to play on Easy or not after you die a couple times.

No it doesn't. Unless they changed that shit in the recent rerelease it forced handicap mode on you which gimps enemy damage and moveset and penalizes your ranking and red orbs.

Is OP seriously complaining about adaptive difficulty because it means players who are less skilled than him can have the same amount of difficulty and fun with the game?

Did OP seriously use a game with mostly non-intrusive adaptive difficulty as an example of why adaptive difficulty sucks?

Is OP seriously upset that the game decided to baby him because he's more casual than the 10-12-year-olds the game was meant to be played by?

Yes, it does. I played both DMC4 and DMC4SE and neither have forced Easy mode on me because I died a couple times, it always offered to swap difficulty and you could decline.

You are remembering it wrong then m8. Literally google DMC4 enemy handicap.
It even happens on DMD which makes it doubly retarded

maybe, but if i fail in the vidya, id like to try that exact same thing again

Nah m8 we're talking about different things. I thought you meant to say there was a forced activation of the easiest difficulty mode, not enemies being handicapped.

And you can, for about two to three more times. If you're such a casual that you die more than three times on the same section, you really have no business talking about how difficult games should be or not. Do a playthrough on Human first just to get your bearings, then see how well you do on Devil Hunter and above.

Some games don't even wait for you to die to start adapting the difficulty.

Like RE4, take damage and it massively increases the drop rate of health items and lowers enemy damage. And there's no reason to stockpile powerful ammo or grenades because the game flat out stops dropping them past a certain point.

Good job retard

thats a silly system, why give me the option if its going to decide for me?

Did you miss the part where it happens on DMD?

Hell it even happens in Human so the whole "get your bearings" part is complete bullshit.

See "literally forced to the easy baby shit mode" in your post. Anybody could have assumed you were talking about the game switching to Human mode and not enemy handicapping, especially when the game does interject and offer to switch to Human for dying.

It's designed so that casuals like you can have an easier time on the big mean sections and move on to easier, more fun areas. Literally the only person who could possibly take offense to it is someone who is so bad at video games that it takes effect and so insecure that they get offended at the game deciding to help them out.

Enemy handicap is even easier than human. It makes the enemy take even more damage and makes them even more passive than human.

You are arguing semantics because you have no real point.

That is completely antithetical to game design and action game progression. Games get harder the further you get in and the game is supposed to teach you how to use all mechanics not give up halfway through.

I'm not even arguing semantics and I'm not taking away from your point. At this time I'm pointing out we were talking about two different things for which you called me a retard. Personally I've never encountered the enemy handicap because I always reset the entire level on death since you lose your style ranks for dying anyways.

slow down cowboy. you cant just go full bait mode like that in one single post

The game does get harder the further you get in, even with adaptive difficulty on. If you're dying repeatedly, you're making no progress. Though how DMC4 used adaptive difficulty is an admittedly heavy-handed approach, that shouldn't condemn the mechanic entirely.

Just because you're bad at DMC4 isn't a reason to lambaste an actually good game design decision. Maybe next time you go through the level you won't die four times to the same enemy.

Shit, you almost got me.

i honestly dont mind enemies in an rpg that scale all that much. im playing to handle bad guys in different scenarios, not to read some half hearted dialogue and get a few gold pieces from a villager as thanks, thats just me though.
oblivion is an example most people are familiar with, i didnt mind all that much cause i could tell clearly these bandits are a lot tougher now. unlike in adom where suddenly rats are punching through your plate mail.

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What was your favourite game? mine was a crack in time

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Going Commando was the first ps2 game ive ever completed.

itll put food on the table

GC followed by Deadlocked

Have any of you played into the nexus? i would but im not buying a ps4 until they release the trilogy on it, how was it?

Seriously, look up the mechanics and a superplay of Battle Garegga. The amount of depth and the adaptable difficulty of the game is truly amazing.

but what games even do this outside of recent elder scrolls titles? I honestly can't think of games where i encountered your problems

You're my nigger
A Crack in Time has the best story of all the R&C games

my nigga

DMC4 was the worst offender of this. Fucking Capcom.

2, the other games after felt a bit too much gunning without ever balancing the gunplay past gun with rocket(s) > shitty gyro control tornado or anything else that's fun which really hit me after Nexus.

2 hit the sweet spot for me with both platforming and gun play.

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Is your picture relevant at all?

How the fuck is anyone so bad at DMC4 to even have this problem in the first place? I hadn't heard of it at all before this thread, and I'm shit enough to just barely scrape through DMD.