Lazy Difficulty

I would want to discuss what could be appropriately called "lazy difficulty design", you may call it "artificial difficulty" but I think that's not quite the term, even if it may not be due to laziness the term "artificial" always fires up a debate with no winners.

What are examples of that lazy difficulty? the usual suspects, bullet sponges, fully automatic sniper rifles replacing assault rifles, or omniscient snipers.

Trial and error level design is not quite there since it would influence the game in all settings.

Anyway, what do you think? any games come to mind when you experience this phenomenon? I guess it is mostly shooters.

maybe this thread will just die out instead

Artificial difficulty, to me, is things that make the game harder without testing skill. Leaps of faith, traps that can't be seen by a trained eye or defended against, basically anything that you'll only learn about by it fucking you up once. This is lazy, in that they don't make an effort to teach the rules or make distinct art assets.

One big one is input reading in fightan games, literal "if player does X, counter with Y" done with inhuman reactions. It's just dumb.

Rubberbanding, usually seen in racing games where AI behind you speed up past their maximum to stay a set distance behind you. Can also occur in stats-based games or sports, where a trailing AI in handegg suddenly gets ungodly luck in making passes.

Nu XCOM's pod system is dumb, aliums don't move from cover to cover before you see them, the just spawn in magically and get a free turn to find a position or murder your dudes.

More or less, but as you can see that one goes more on level design, rubberbanding on the other hand is a good example of what I was talking about, the AI doesn't get a better path finding, in kart racers is even worse, they get good items and flawless aim.

I'd define lazy difficulty as something that is connected to difficulty settings in games rather than actual world design and enemy placement.
It's lazy to just give enemies higher damage output and maybe more health on higher difficulties.
There are far better ways to make a game more difficult e.g. advanced move sets, different enemy placement and weapons, etc.

I think this way of lazy difficulty can be best seen in Bioshock: Infinite. Enemies in late game are just bullet sponges with way to much damage output.

Any game made by Spiders Studios or Cyanide Studios is lazy difficult to the max, at least the difficulty options. Because all higher difficulties do is just make everyone incredibly tanky and one-two shot you which makes the games unfun to play. If you've played dark messiah on hard difficulty you pretty much know what I mean, sans the one shot part

Yes, that's what I meant.

It depends on the genre. In God of War 1, they decided to make enemies have more HP and hit harder in hard. This made the game tedious, not harder, because they're still easy to kill but it just takes longer. In GoW3 they get better AI, become highly aggressive, and hit harder. Making many encounters life threatening if you're not on your toes. Ninja Gaiden Black did it very well. By making it so new enemies replace inferior versions, treasure chest contents change, you hold less items, and bosses come with allies as well as getting altered. They then give you access to better tools earlier to deal with the onslaught.

Shoot em up games sometimes have 1 difficulty setting, but alternate routes. Dodonpachi has you play through the game twice and the second route is essentially hard mode (like the first Kirby game). Gundemonium has a on the fly difficulty system like you see in God Hand. Hard mode being just like its Kick Me Sign hard.

Bullet Sponge enemies or straight stat increases can be a good way to make Strategy RPGs harder. It's not the best way but it at least makes you have to think more instead of playing the game like a musou.

Lazy difficulty to me are things that simply make a game more tedious and, in turn, less fun. There are times where a boss can only be killed through lame tactics because playing normally means suicide. Whether it's because enemies have telepathy or clairvoyance and always know where you are. Or hard hitting hit scan weapons that give you no choice but to play the game the safest, and most boring way possible.

Artificial Difficulty/Lazy Difficulty=Pointless/meaningless challenge

I recently played Binary Domain and decided to just cheat to see the good ending so I turned unlimited health, then I noticed something interesting, enemies in that game use automatic weapons most of the time and surprise 90 of all those bullets were always hitting my head.

A lot of people say that "Enemies hit harder and have more health" is a lazy approach to difficulty, and they're right. But there are times when it works. What that particular change actually means is that you can screw up less before you die, so in the correct genre, having less fuckup room can be a genuine increase in difficulty. What you never want are bullet sponge enemies that you can easily find a pattern and wail on.

Personally, I've become a big fan of "on the fly" difficulty adjustment. Whenever the game becomes too easy or too hard, you can tweak it; it's even better when this tweaking has some effect on the gameplay. My favorite difficulty system of all time, despite it mostly falling into the "hit harder, more health" category is probably The World Ends With You, which actually gives you two different ways to modify your difficulty. Firstly, you have the actual difficulty level; Easy, Medium, Hard, and Ultimate. You don't even unlock Ultimate until postgame, and the true final boss on Ultimate will kick your ass BADLY, even after collecting shitloads of OP secret items. But generally, this difficulty makes enemies do more damage, take less damage, and move faster and more aggressively. Also, it gives them different drops, which is cool. The other way you can change it is with your level. You level up in TWEWY like other RPG games, but at any time, you can voluntarily lower your level, and you get an increased item drop rate based on how many levels you're giving up, so skilled players can cut down on grind by jacking up their drop rates.

I wouldn't say extremely accurate and deadly snipers like your pic related are necessarily "lazy" difficulty. Moving in cover even against unseen enemies, avoiding being exposed especially when otherwise vulnerable and quickly checking potential sniping places are real skills.

Like what Holla Forums's captcha has?
>because of this, I now hate getting the babby captchas even though any other person would be happy to get them all the time

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I'm gonna have to defend Arkane and Cyanide here.

Dark Messiah's Hardcore mode, while it just changed your damage and enemy damage, still drastically changed the way the game played, and while it did make combat somewhat tedious, it also made it dangerous and fun. Literally the only thing it should have done was not buffed enemy health (but kept their damage super high), which is what happened with Dishonored (enemies can kill you really easily, but you can also kill them just as fast). You can actually get this same effect in Dark Messiah by editing one of the .inis so enemy damage is buffed but player damage isn't nerfed.

Cyanide, I can't speak for Of Orcs and Men, but Styx was basically designed with Goblin Mode in mind, wherein getting caught means probable death, the core of a good stealth game. Then lower difficulty modes were thrown in for casuals (not that it worked; casuals gave up in droves), same as Thief did.

Dark Messiah's hardcore would've been much better if I could kill an enemy with a single execution after knocking him down. Having to coup de grace a regular enemy thrice is the very definition of tedious.

Try impaling with any sword other than the basic shortsword. Will always instant kill.

Jackals were never omniscient. Pop up somewhere, and they'll keep looking that way waiting for you to pop up again. All you have to do is changing position. The further you get from their AoS, the slower they'll spot you again. Git gud OP, you can say many things of Halo, but not that it was artificially difficult.

The quasi-predetermined rng miss/hit chances of xcom.

A lot of RTS games are riddled with this bullshit. Crank up the difficulty setting, and instead of better AI, you get:

Are there any RTS games where difficulty scales well and the opponent doesn't cheat?

You forgot

Any designer who uses rubberbanding deserves a swift kick in the balls.

Sometimes I wonder if they do some play testing to see how frustrating that is.

You must be referring to the battle rifle from Halo 2, hence the pic. I can assure you: the only component word that's correct about that descriptor is that it's a rifle and it's also a very shitey weapon.

No, I actually just wanted to illustrate with Jackals because they are literal aimbots in higher difficulties, that is, the moment you pop your head they shoot, and of course, is almost always a headshot, the automatic sniper rifles are all non-snipers in Binary Domain.

So literally all of Dark Souls

Only Bed of Chaos if you ask me.

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I think there is a video version of that pic.

Except that in at least two locations (in Mombasa and Delta Halo), you are funneled right into their line of fire with no realistic way to sneak around. On legendary, your only option is to brute force it by dying until you a) get lucky and run to cover without them hitting or b) kill them without them hitting you.

Playing hard mode on any GSG, or Total War game.

What it should do is make the AI more aggressive, what it does it give diplomatic penalties and give the AI lower maintenance overheads

Really quite dull

I want to go after that last point. In the first game there was just enough delay in switching to the pistol that the player was tempted to experiment with different ways of handling Elites. Spec ops elites were genuinely scary, and were cleverly embedded in areas where you simply would not be carrying the noob combo due to too many flood. There was just enough risk and thought involved with Elites to make you respect instead of groan at them. Even if the player knows what is coming they will likely be ill-equipped due to the need to survive the areas leading up to them.

Halo 1 had lots of issues but I can't help but feel that in many areas 2 failed to learn from it. Doesn't help that it's a contender for most cut content of any game, let alone shooter.

The whole point of legendary is that it's ridiculously unfair. It's like complaining that your food is too spicy when you broke the bottle of Tabasco over your plate. If you're on heroic, as you should be, you can quite comfortably take out the jackals with either a BR or one of any dozen sniper/beam rifles from earlier in the level.

So you admit certain difficulty settings twist the rules instead of being a little more dynamic.

A fair point that I hadn't thought about. It still sucks, though, because you can git gud at the rest of it but still get anally annihilated every time those fuckers show up.

Worse than fucking rocket flood.

I definitely agree that most difficulties should scale up enemy health and damage. But a good barometer is if the players are saying, "Damn, it's hard to kill these guys," or if they're saying, "Jesus fuck can the game just give me more ammo so I can kill them?"

If health scales at least enemies should have weak points or weaknesses for critical hits or the like to balance it out.

Pic related.

Every difficulty increase makes the enemies smarter, faster, more accurate, more aggressive, less likely to flee, higher ranked, and a little bit stronger, alongside with slightly reducing your shield capacity and weakening your AI soldiers a bit. Legendary is the only jump in difficulty which actively shits on the player by just changing numbers.

I forgot the picture.

Which makes it even more cringe worthy, except for the partner AI thing, that's still bullshit in every game.

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Doom should've set the standard on difficulty levels; instead of changing damage output or health it changed how many enemies showed up. I mean shit, with modern source ports you can even control items that show up.

If going this route, I'd say jack up the enemies general defense everywhere on their body except the weak point to make sure good players get rewarded really well.


Stalker does it really well and makes the game deadlier for everything the higher the difficult is jacked up.


Shame Rare used this a lot in B-K and DK64.

It doesn't make a big difference. Bungie themselves said that heroic is the way to play the game, so it doesn't take a genius to realise that legendary is just there for its own sake.

Pretty fair, just give them 1 super weak point and 1 or more regular weak points to not make it tedious.

As for Doom, it basically gave you a certain variety of enemies and you had to prioritize according to your skill.