Do you think there's any shame in playing on easy mode?

See runescape.

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if the difficulty is entirely statistical and can only be resolved by grinding then no

If the game is shit but for some reason you have to finish it, do whatever you want (cheating would make more sense though).
If you're trying to unlock everything and you have to finish it on easy too, go ahead.
If you plan on playing through it again on a harder difficulty, sure.
Other than those reasons? You're playing the game on a difficulty lower than the developer intended, why would you do that?

A game is only a game if you can win or lose. If you can't lose then whats the point, you may as well read a book you'd be better off.

If you never played a particular game before and you can change the difficulty to normal or hard later I don't see any issue with setting it on easy initially just to get accustomed to things.

I usually don't play games on hard unless they're boringly easy on normal because I have no one to impress but myself and myself doesn't care.

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I agree with this, but I would add that there are certain games where the enjoyment doesn't come through enemies dealing more damage but from other aspects of gameplay.
Red Faction Guerilla is one that comes to mind where its more fun on easy and normal because you get more freedom to destroy buildings, but on the harder difficulties you just die much quicker you have to play it more like a cover based shooter instead of going out and utilizing the destruction physics more. So the challenge turns from being able to defeat enemies into destroying as many buildings as efficiently as possible. You don't need to bump it down easy though as normal is fine.
I always play games first playthrough on normal, because usually that is the difficulty that developers intended you to play it on, then bump it up to hard and then dante must die if I liked game and want to replay it down the line

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Why is easy modo meme so fucking sexy?

Yeah, there's fucking shame
The bare minimum you should do in any game is the default or "normal" setting
If you're old enough to post on Holla Forums you should be old enough to know how to handle yourself around a goddamn video game

The gameplay was shit but it was also fun

If you're playing on easy mode because you can't handle normal mode, then yes.
If you're playing on easy mode because it gives you more leeway to experiment, play aggressively and generally have fun, then no.

Some megadrive/genesis games easy difficulty was japans normal and normal was hard ect. I think Streets of Rage 3 was like this.

No. Not everyone's dedicated to games so it's fine they make a mode for casuals, as long as they keep it separate from the other modes.

GOD TIER:
Enemies have access to more abilities

GREAT TIER:
Harder enemy types are encountered sooner and more often.

GOOD TIER:
Enemies move and act faster.

INDUSTRY SHITSTANDARD:
Multiplied enemy health/damage.

SYSTEM SHOCKER:
Difficulty adds a time limit.

Also god tier is when there's only one difficulty so i don't have to make any decisions and don't have to worry about what's intended or not.

Fucking casual.

Yeah.

Yep.
allthetropes.org/wiki/Non-Indicative_Difficulty

EEEHHHH MAJIII??? EIIJIII MOODOOO??????

After playing Darkest Dungeon, no
That game is fucking busywork: the game and the game is a retarded timesink for no purpose but to prolong game time unless played in the easiest difficulty, which doesn't really make it easier, just makes leveling not retarded and avoids stupid "you better level 3 other champions again to max level for the next level" from the final dungeon

leave

Sometimes older Japanese games have the NA release difficulties be harder, so US Easy Mode = JPN Normal Mode, and US Normal = JPN Balls to the Wall Mode.

Only then is it acceptable.

yes. I play games on whatever difficulty they were meant to be played on the first time around then up the ante on the second playthrough

Having to make decisions is what makes real life so terrible, why would i want to make them in video games?

fuck you Ruiner.
A game hasn't forced me into Easy mode since playing Onimusha in my youth.

Depends. If someone asks you if you played Z game, but you only played it on easy, do you say "Yeah I played that game." ,or do you say "Yeah I played that game….

Because you're a beta male and there'e so rest for the weak.

If Easy mode is a step to getting good, no. This is one of the reasons I like how Forza handles assists and simulation. You can turn them off as you grow in skill. Everyone should aspire to get to at least Hard difficulty, or in Forza's case, Full Damage, Stability and Traction control off, Manual transmission, Expert AI.

Some games are so blatantly shit that I loathe playing it in every aspect, but am nevertheless obliged, for whatever reason, to finish. This is where Easy Mode is king. It's a rare occurence but it does happen.

I believe I played Tales of Zestiria like this, once I had gotten 20-25 hours in and fully realized it was hot dogshit through and through. Changed it to easy and never looked back.

No, but instead there is lack of satisfaction.

Depends on the game.
If it's something like Half-Life 2 where the higher difficulties do literally nothing else except turn enemies into bullet sponges, then no.
If it's something like Doom where it can radically change things like ammo placement and enemy location, then yes.

none but you should amp it up once you get comfortable to at least "normal" or middle difficulty

I actually dislike this.

Every difficult should experience all the abilities of enemies and all should be facing down the same "good" AI.

More health and damage is the best way to do this. Players who want a challenge get their challenge and nobody gets a dumbed down experience that's objectively worse.

so is stalker harder on easy mode, because of how damage scales. sure monsters will one shoot you but you can one shoot them, and considering that ammo is limited this makes it easier to conserve it

As a 100% perfectionist OCD fag, I hate it when games have 3 difficulties.

I always want to beat the game in all difficulties, so I am forced to start with Easy on my first playthrough. Not because I'm bad, but because I'd have to get Easy done some time just to see what's different from the other modes, so it's best to start with Easy and get it over with already.

That is the single most lazy way of making of making difficulty levels.
Mr. Shotgun Man taking 5 shots to kill on Normal and 7 on Hard is a sign the devs don't know jack shit about game design.

Why not start on hard so that your first playthrough is a fun challenge where you're figuring shit out and then play it on easy?

This has been proven wrong so many times its not even funny.
STALKER's difficulty works the same as any other game.

No, but consider switching to distilled water if you start having thoughts of converting to Judaism.

You're not a perfectionist, you're a retard who wants instant gratification.

Really? You want to take the bullet sponge approach?
There are games out there that have really smart ways of making themselves harder without having to resort to "lol more health".

But that's wrong. You can check the config files for this.

How about you check them yourself and get back to me?

More work doesn't automatically mean better.

Sometimes its better to just keep it simple. You can also have alternative areas and plotlines but why does a change in difficulty have to mean a different game?

Why not give all players the best AI possible and all of the enemies abilities to deal with? I think games should be a challenge even for people that want to play on easy.

Less health, tougher enemies, less tools.

The idea is to make the higher difficulties a harder version of the game, not a different game. Harder difficulties should force you to work with limited resources and master mechanics like dodging and parrying.

Dragons Dogma
At the beginning you'll have some trouble and you'll be forced to play defensively, but after three basic goblins you'll have so much gold that you will get the best equipment available. And it just snowballs from there.

You can also have shit like ranger mode in metro.

That's the gayest shit ever. And what games are you playing where your currency is simply "gold" anyway?

My friends.. What a simply.. epic thread I am posting in.. I shall upvote immediately….

Because the second and third runs (easy and medium) would be boring.

If you start on Easy, the next 2 runs will feel more challenging and not boring.

Pretty sure someone who plays Ghost Recon (2001) and Rainbow Six (1998) is the opposite of an instant-gratification CoD kiddie.

But that's exactly what you deserve for being a filthy casual

Alternatively, reward the players who rise to the challenge in some way, by giving you special items, or more varied enemies, or something. Just adding damage multipliers usually results in tedious hard mode and/or piss-easy easy mode.

Doom rarely uses difficulty settings for anything but monsters, and generally you should be playing on UV or NM where the item layout is identical. Very few fan levels do much creative with the difficulty settings.

Why even bother playing easy in that case?

I liked the level 1 mode in Portrait of Ruin. Not so much in Order of Ecclesia where they add respawning enemy rooms everywhere and other tedious unfair crap.

Why was Goebbels making wiggerish hand signals?

Look at a game like Paper Mario.

People made their own hard difficulty by sticking with 5hp. This required mastering blocking and making full use of partners, FP and BP abilities.

The game was the same but more challenging.

Your vision for difficulty is going to bring about Jim Sterling's dream of all games being stripped of their difficulty requirement for completion. Every games playerbase segregated between player and those who want just the story ( wonderfully convenient for reviewers).

Rewarding people with good equipment and drops for taking on challenges? Sure but my ideal for hard mode involves learning to make do with less.

I did and you're still wrong.

It's way better for the easy difficulty to have inflated player health and reduced enemy damage than the hard difficulty to have inflated enemy damage/health and reduced player damage.

Do show me what you found and how that proved me wrong.

As other anons mentioned, damage/health type difficulties are a complete joke and shit design and should never be even considered.
Example: Skyrim. If you raise difficulty high enough, a bandit with a wooden bow and crap arrows oneshots your mage with an armor buff. Normally this should only be happening when you're fighting an elite mob with an ebony bow and arrows. Fucking retarded.

In games like Devil May Cry difficulty levels are well designed. You receive more damage and do less, obviously, but not by an absurd margin and it fits well into the learning curve. Harder enemies pop up earlier, have more abilities and there's more of them around. At some point they gain a devil trigger buff if you don't kill them fast enough. This kind of thing encourages you to git gud, especially considering there are "grades" you're assigned for after completing a mission.

And then there are games I suck at: RTS and turn-based strategy games. I enjoy them a ton, but I've never been very good at playing them, especially real-time since I'm not a gook. In games like HoMM3 2/5 or 3/5 difficulty is the highest I can do without AI obliterating me.

I like playing RTS campaigns at max difficulty, it becomes a test of autism. You have to figure out how to deal with the often overwhelming odds, either by adapting an optimal strategy or cheesing the AI. Beating that level you previously thought impossible, with waves of enemies coming early and in huge amounts, is quite satisfying.

More can be less if the items are scaled appropriately, like in Diablo II where you eventually open up some ridiculous toys but by then the enemies are much more threatening. I'll agree it's mostly a good thing if you're playing with New Game+ type games though.

Nope, it's crap.

It's fine because you won't be playing the easy difficulty anyway, right?

Wew lad

There really isn't shame in it but you're usually missing out because you're getting a stunted AI and bosses without their full powers.

t. every Mountain Dew guzzling AAA fanatic, quite frankly

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Find a way to afford to live while working less hours. Or find a more challenging job so your brain isn't mush at the end of the day. If you lose the ability to continue exercising your brain on your own time, you lose your freedom too.

If hard mode is just enemies with ballooned HP disrespecting my time, I don't have any issue switching to normal. Most of all, I want to experience a game as the developer intended. That usually rules out both easy and hard.

If the game is well designed then yes (i.e. difficulty settings actually meaningful). If you've got an actual physical disability or severely limited time then no. Also if a game has a retarded difficulty spike or is only difficult by means of excessive grinding I wouldn't judge someone for dropping difficulty, life's too short to waste on bullshit.

No user.
Half my brain is constantly busy with making me function normally because of huge anxiety problems, any work makes me equally stressed.
Not everyone gets the luxury of a normal working brain.
Polite sage.

You're missing Thief tier: there are more/harder objectives added (often also more parts of the level added). It also does things like messing with the placement of important items, adding parts to the map and throwing in more guards.

There's way more shame in playing on medium/hard and wanting that difficulty to be lowered just because you're a fucking retard journalist who can't exist on his own, yet wants to feel the sense of accomplishment from overcoming a challenge which at the same was removed so you wouldn't need to put any effort

Good
Terrible

Work exacerbates it. Work less.

depends on the way difficulty's made. if it makes enemies that should be dying faster into bullet sponges then by all means, play on lower difficulty. if it multiplies the number of enemies or changes the gameplay in another significant manner then play on higher difficulty. so nah, there's essentially no shame in it except when a journo does it, still fails and then blames the game.

Since devs NEVER EVER make the AI actually harder on higher difficulties its always just:

To begin with? No. If you stay there, with no desire to improve? Yes.

Depends on what the reasoning behind playing on easy. If you're doing it to somewhat break the game, need to get through it faster or just generally want to dick around, that's fine. If you're playing on easy because you're a pansy-ass scrub with no talent, that's still okay as long as you bump up once you improve. If you play on easy because you're a lazy faggot on top of being a vagina, then you deserve to be laughed out of any video games discussion that isn't about mobile games.

I've tried my whole life.
There is also various degrees of anxiety problems, I'm sure you realize that.

Because, believe it or not, Nazis liked to have fun.

You can't make fun of the easy mode if you're using Overcucks as a reaction pic.

Don't be mean, user.

You're a baby
Ruiner gave me a lot of trouble at certain chokepoints but I still beat it on Normal

You forgot one
ULTRA VIOLENCE:
There are different enemy and item counts depending on the difficulty.

No, if you go on easy mode you should kill yourself.
Normal I can take, but if you're over 13 years old and can't finish games on Normal you should kill yourself for being a pathetic human being.

Why play on easy when there's a normal mode?

If the gameplay is shit and increasing the difficulty only makes it artificially harder e.g. Torchlight 2, there's absolutely no shame in it. Otherwise it's just admitting that you're too bad to beat the game normally, which isn't really shameful (except for when you make your money with playing video games) it's just saying that you suck at vidya.

user, I work for a living and like to play video games. I don't have time for trial and error bullshit, or bulletsponge bullshit, when I only have an hour or two tops to play games a day.

Then play on Normal
Or better yet, stop playing vidya
Else all games will be Call of Duty and Uncharted

I like to play on easy mode to test certain things, to see if they could be usable in harder difficulties.

Example:

Then I took the same strategy, improving some aspects of it and tried it on hard. For me that's what easy mode is for, testing what you can do and then doing it on the real difficulties.

Don't tell me how to spend my money when you live off my taxes, you NEET bastard.

I'll go with this user. Easy mode is for trial or for faffing around.

I want to FUCK Tewi.

what are you trying to say? you can't ride a bike? are you 4?

College has to be good for something I guess

She probably has fleas.

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It's the government taking money from productive people to provide for unproductive people. A wealth redistribution from the able to the incompetent. Same thing.

guess the game

I'd say that Vanilla DH is easy mode and that modded DH is hard.

You're required to use more things like healthpacks and have a strategy that can be maintained long term.

Crash Bandicoot.

What? No.

Buddy, even my kid brother plays on hard.
And he's 11.

NieR. Persona.

I wish that screenshot wouldn't be fake.

why play games then? if you "don't have time for trial and error" you're just wasting time playing games anyway. just watch a movie or an anime instead. gitting gud is the point of video games. if you just blaze through them without a proper challenge you might as well be playing walking simulators.

I died 17 times on the first level of Ruiner on Hard. Had to lower the difficulty to Normal to beat the boss after about 10 unsuccessful attempts.
Yes I am ashamed. And yes, you should feel shameful for defaulting to Easy mode unless you haven't got the time to git gud. Even as a kid I only had 1 hour per day to play on my NES and I still played those hard motherfuckers.

Theres nothing wrong with playing on easy mode. But if asking the question is a sign you doubt yourself and care for what other people think. In the wrong hands those feelings are even worse than the insults you will suffer for being a noob, worse for everyone else that is.

If you were in any kind of unrequited position of power over the medium, youll try to normalize your lack of skills, demean more experienced and talented people, censor fun, etc.

Thats why you should be beaten into submission if you ever display any kind of pride at sucking. Keep it to yourself, and at least try to appear humble. And never blame your fellow gamers for this, they werent the ones that invented this necesity. It was people like you.

stopped reading there, fellow redditor, I agree completely.

Yes, you should feel shame. BUT that's not to say there aren't games where default and hard difficulties are bullshit to the point where easy mode is the only viable option. Conversely, faggots who think you should always play on the hardest difficulty, even in games where hard mode just adds tedium, busy work or just breaks the game, should be gassed.

Thanks for ruining that meme. Now I have no shame in playing on easy.

Dark Souls

100% yes it is shameful and disgusting to play most games on easy. Play the game as intended at least or you're doing yourself, the game, the developers, and the experience you were meant to have a disservice.

Simply put if you don't look down on people who play games on the easy/easiest setting despite how easy modern games are, you are part of the cancer killing video games.

No, that was opposite. Japanese Streets of Rage 3 was easier, while the English version was harder purely as a means to discourage losing profits from people renting the game. It was also censored to shit. There are faggots on Holla Forums who advocate for the cucked version of the game purely because of muh difficulty.

I think the only game I ever played in easy mode was EDF and thats for completionist sake. There is absolutely no reason to play on anything lower than normal in vidya. If you play on easy mode you are absolute trash

Second Maximus of Peinis doesn't have it. 2 "harder" modes are unlocked one by one, yes grind, but you can complete it in just under 2-3 hours. Also: live Mona, live! Live longer mode is kind of bullshit 10-20 minutes parade when only 2 seconds are added afte each successful kill, yes, but it trains you to become a better marksman.
Also: don't kill the lone 'poets of fall' listener
Finns are fucking depressing alcoholics.

Yes, unless you are a kid

It's only acceptable if you are a kid or are trying to understand the mechanics of a complicated game.

Reported for avatarfagging.

I see you in every thread posting with Hitler images.

And yet you missed the one directly under one of your posts.

The only time I play a game in easy mode is when I'm fucking around and don't even care about the game.

Play the game however you want, but just don't tell anyone that you actually beat the game without doing it on normal at least.

That only proves his point further. At least with the American "college loans" system, some of these faggots have to pay back some of the taxpayer money they took.
In your case, you just used taxpayer money and never had to pay it back.

You can play it on hard if you want to challange yourself.
You can also play on easy if you just want to enjoy the game mechanic.

My point being: you have the fucking choice to pick your fucking difficulty. Why the fuck are you making a shitty thread about it. Thats the point of putting the choice in the game so you can either play easy or harder difficulty jesus fuck you shitter its almost as if you asume that there are two types of people who either play only easy or only hard like there is only two factions of players on the entire planet earth and you have to make a fucking pointless shitthread just to pour shit into the fire to create a war between two factions which are nonexistent because YOU HAVE THE FREEDOM TO CHOOSE WHATEVER DIFFICULTY YOU WANT AND NOBODY IN THIS ENTIRE SOLAR SYSTEM GIVES A SINGLE FUCKING FARTED SHIT ABOUT IT. STOP MAKING POINTLESS THREADS WITH SO LITTLE EFFORT.

Fuck you.

easy mode is only allowed in shitty games you just wanna finished for the sake of finishing it

You didn't answer the question, I specifically asked whether there was any shame in playing on easy which you have yet to answer.

bullshit, on hardcore mode the ending game boss fights are near impossible

Your question is irrelevant. He answered it. Eat shit.

You are not allowed to make fun of easy mode if all you do is read wikis.

fuck off, chad

Fucking diamonds.

I'm tired of this casual bullshit.

Yeah, video games can be fun, but that's not the sole purpose of their existence. Not all video games are about """fun""" and thank fuck not all video games are about """comfy"""

Video games are a hobby and as with any other hobby the point of having it is to keep yourself mentally, emotionally, and even occasionally physically engaged and to challenge yourself. While fundamentally a game that's distracting by way of pretty colors and flashing lights is similar in base concept, the idea of growth and prolonged focus is lost.

People who play chess or card games as their hobby won't tell you it's "fun" and "comfy," they'll tell you they engage in the hobby because it's challenging and rewarding. People who climb mount Everest don't do it because it's "fun," they do it because it tests the limits of their human abilities. People who compete in any sport for a living don't do it because it's "fun" or "comfy," they do it to physically challenge themselves against other human beings and strive to become better.

If you play video games for "fun" or to be "comfy," you can't be compared to a hobbyist because you're nothing more than a filthy addict mainlining Xanax to keep you sedated and out of the real world and out of the way of real human beings who are actually getting better at life.

you're alright

My addiction needs a nice balance of comfy for when I'm tired or bored and challenging if I masochistically seek it out for a rush.

I need both.

What? Being good at the game isn't even a matter of skill anymore. You have to know the AI and abuse the shit out of it and even then, you have to maintain that abuse, never slipping because the bosses are also damage sponges. It's not even a proper challenge.

I love that comic.

Having decisions is literally one of the core factors that differentiates games and VNs from movies and books.

I play 2hu games on easy because I suck at bullet hell, but it's too much fun for me not to play.

Then you're missing the point of "easy" you fucking illiterate.

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no, you do you.

There should still be a bare minimum skill level to beat games.

I don't follow your and Jim Sterling's dream of having a baby mode.

There are shit tonnes of hobbies that are fun and comfy. I don't really see how you can't see that

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Just wait 'til you get to the church office levels in Extraction Point.

It's resonance of fate.

Only if the game is hard on easy mode and if the only change in difficulty is an increase in damage taken and enemy health. A beat em up should require a player to do more than just be good at landing basic punch-punch-punch combos and not getting hit, the enemies and bosses should move and fight in ways where the player's forced to do more than just walk out of the way or land the most basic move. A game on easy mode should have bosses who fight in patterns, which normal mode should have them fight more sporadically, while on hard they're entirely geared towards trying to kill you.

Usually easy mode is scrub shit and is only not shameful if the game is rng or random event heavy like wazhack or ftl or of the gameplay is kinda shit and clunky but you're in it for everything else. I.e Danganronpa fps.

Shit recommendation. The only way to make Fear actually fun, is to never use bullet time. I guess you were masturbating over the incredible AI, completely missing the point that you were paralyzing it with a hack - so you couldn't actually see shit.

I think playing video games in general is pretty shameful

Yes

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At least people who play on it are honest about being bad instead of whining on social media about how "unfair" a game is.

Not really.
Unless you're a streamer or are actually way into video games, because at that point it's a pretty big part of your life and if you can't even git gud at it enough to at least start on the hardest available difficulty then you're a failure on every level.

Only if you're not physically disabled in some way. Like, if you don't have depth perception or the full use of your hands, I wouldn't shame you for playing on easy.

anyone else in my boat?
her version of drop pop candy is very nice, tho

ecchi.iwara.tv/videos/pd6ygt857hojgb08?language=en

Depends on the game. If the difference between easy and hard is just that enemies take 5 times as many hits, then no. I didn't play Zelda Breath of the Wild in master mode because of that shit. Right at the beginning of the game, just one of the intro enemies takes almost all the durability of your axe to kill. If you use bow and arrow, it takes like 15 headshots. That shit's not "hard", it's tedious and irritating. Just means I'm going to spend almost the entire game just harvesting gear. Fuck that.

if you are still a child it's not as embarrassing. otherwise very much yes.

I guess another exception is games with cheating a.i. or broken missions, legitimate reasons for turning down the difficulty.

Here's the skinny on run-of-the-mill difficulty settings:
Easy Mode
Normal Mode
Hard Mode

And now for special settings:
Very Easy Mode
Very Hard Mode
Insane Mode

Name?

I miss his silly shit

Yes but because I'm psychotic.

It's just meant to be a catch-all term for currency. Gold, zenny, credits, yen, pokedolars, whatever works.

LV1 runs can be great, usually because of mechanic abuse. It's not the same as "It's a regular run but leveling up means killing 50 bears instead of 25", though.

Posting because everyone else is.

Y E S

tbh, you should feel shame for playing on normal too. modern games are easy as shit on normal.

Is there any nice hard "Ohoho" smug but pleasured dickings? Because I fucking need that in my life.

*sigh*

Raven is so perfect.

You're both fucking babies, go Hard mode like the game tells you to.

Easymode is shameful for games before 2007
Normal is shameful for games after 2007

It's fine

I don't like baby modes either, but nigger fucking get over yourself. If I wasn't playing games to have fun, and that's even on hard difficulties, I would've stopped playing them long ago.

First, you've never met a masochist before. Second, for all you know that adrenalin rush you get from pushing your physical limits can be "fun" for someone.

Real human beans who get better at life and do important shit aren't sitting on their ass playing games so they can achieve the self satisfaction of huffing their own farts by playing on Extreme difficulty settings.

The fact that you equate playing with electronic toys to athletes playing sports is proof of your colossal faggotry. Go back to your esports circlejerk where you can sperg out over assfaggots in perpetuity.

Make the runt play games in which hard actually meant hard. Modern games on hard are as easy as 90s games on easy mode.

In torchlight 2 you have to fight for a couple of minutes to kill something because everything is crazy fat. They should have spend more time balancing that shit.
The best difficulty of tl2 is exit game difficulty.

Please.

If you're just naturally terrible at games or outright disabled, go for it, but I play on Normal and that's already the "no serious challenges encountered" mode.

lol

One of the only games you can brag for finishing it on easy mode

I don't remember the exact games, but I have a few where I've just died in a sudden succession about 3-4 times like falling of the same ledge due to a dumb mistake and not focusing, and the game then offers me easy mode option. I think that's the issue - games that come out (AAA/AA) are built with millions as experiences and as we go on, less and less people who buy the game ever complete it, I think some research showed that only about 30-40% of those who purchase something actually complete it. The devs are the ones putting in time and effort so even the most fucking casual cunts would be able to "experience" it to the end, maybe fueled by execs craving a sequel/series from a title to get that longitude, but that is the biggest issue.

A game "experience" used to involve failing, failing and failing many times. It wasn't necessary if you were great at at game from the start, but it was ingrained in games and it's what made so many games unforgettable and likely unsurpassable by modern games.

Every game has a difficulty that is, objectively as declared by the developer, "the way the game is meant to be played" like Heroic in Halo. When it doesn't outright say that on the difficulty selection screen, assume it's Normal. I always play it on that difficulty first, because the AI and weapon drops and shit like that are engineered for that difficulty. If I like the game enough, I'll go back for Hard but if Hard is just bullshit raising enemy damage and turning them into damage sponges, then fuck it.

Easy is almost 100% of the time a piss-poor bastardization of the game that should not be experienced by anyone but literal toddlers. They dumb down the AI and lower their health, decrease incoming damage, and give you piles of money and ammo you'll never use unless you're a (((games journalist))) who needs to rely on health items like a crutch for every battle. Easy is basically god mode and saps the fun out of the game, but it still can't help the imbeciles who demanded it in the first place because if they had any ability at all, they'd be playing on Normal or above. Training wheels don't stop someone from hitting a curb and flipping over the handlebars because they can't steer.

Stop.

For challenge, there's always multiplayer. It's just too bad that even multiplayer games are dumbed down, or, in the case of certain niche online games, server admins are retards and flip every arcade mode switch on.

Nah. But there is a shame in playing easy mode and still failing.

I played Nier: Automata on easy because I didn't enjoy the combat.

I prefer the tried and true Demostenes method: not only you should train on Hard, you should also impose restrictions on how you face the challenges, so you can perfectly master them. Always start on the highest difficulty available, and build skill from there.

This has no bearing on anything and you are fucking stupid if you think it does. Paper Mario has one (1) difficulty setting, and if you want to personally challenge yourself (that's what it is, a PERSONAL CHALLENGE, not a difficulty mode) then that's your prerogative.

You forgot NIGHTMARE:
Ultra Violence plus the only way to kill a monster is to tear it to shreds, otherwise it's only a knockout and later it will come back to kill you. Items still don't respawn.

>>>/reddit/

No. But I do think that people who play on hard and brag about how thy get a sense of achievement, while wasting their life in front of a computer screen, are pathetic

Yes, but it's forgivable if you also play through the harder modes afterwards.

that's how I cleared EoSD on hard

It's shameful because it's usually a waste
By decreasing the challenge too far you end up breezing through everything
When there's some challenge in the game, there's a sense of achievement to be had, a sense of satisfaction.

It depends, if you're new to the game why not? But in cases like Thief: The Dark Project, you will miss out on additional fun stuff to do.

...

More abilities etc is great, but in most games more health/damage dramatically changes how the game has to be played. Often it's the case where you can damage-race enemies on easier modes and win without ever really having to learn any real skill or strategy. I suppose you could just go for no-damage, limited equipment runs in some games to have the equivalent experience of damage/HP-amped hard modes, but the fact is it makes a fairly substantial difference and not all games can be played that way anyawy

When I was NEET, I thought there was a lot of shame in playing easy.

But, I've been employed for awhile and I gotta say. Difficulty levels really should be renamed from EASY MEDIUM HARD to UNEMPLOYED PART-TIME FULL-TIME

In games where the gameplay is just filler (like all WRPGs), no.

In any other game, yes.

Why do you even play the games if you don't wanna bother playing it?
EASY, MEDIUM, and HARD should be renamed to I DON'T REALLY WANNA PLAY THIS JUST END IT ASAP, I WANT TO PLAY THE GAME LETS GO, and I'VE ALREADY PLAYED THIS, I WANT MORE!

I always start games on the hardest difficulty and hate being forced into lower difficulties because i think they are like playing a interactive movie.
However everyone has the right to play however they want and i wouldn't shit on someone if they like to play on easy mode.
That said i think the idea is that YOU should adapt to the game not the other way around