The TL;DR synopsis of the subject line: if I were to ask you to name a game whose difficulty levels felt superfluous once you discovered what felt like its one true difficulty, or had you expecting an experience you didn't think you got by the end, what would that game or games be? For me, an iconic example of the former would be The Last of Us, while the latter would be Diablo III. Read on to learn why, or skip ahead to offering your own!
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I've been playing more and more games that eschew this aspect of game design over the past few years, particularly incredibly fine tuned products like Returnal and various From Soft titles, which has had me thinking more about this subject as I sink into the latest model of The Last of Us and, again, Diablo III.
Y'see, in a fit of boredom, a few days after upgrading from an iPhone 7 to an iPhone 13 I decided to donwload Diablo Immortal. My only real experience with a loot game of that sort has probably been the Destiny games. If you'd like to count the Final Fantasy XI beta, feel free. Anyway, as the game's main questline (or whatever you'd like to call it) started demanding multiplayer that seemed to take forever to matchmake Diablo III happened to hit $20 on PSN for the umpteenth time and I decided to finally bite. I was never a Baldur's Gate kid, either, so when the game said that Normal, my default move for most games, was "for players just starting the game", it seemed like a no brainer.
Little did I know, as I'd hear Jeff so casually state about five hours later as I played along to the Quick Look of the PS4 collection I've been playing, that Diablo III can be an intensely mindless activity and Medium might as well advertise itself as a clicker more than an action RPG. Which got me thinking about how difficulty options have evolved in the years since the transition from arcades demanded new ways to extend a game's playability, and the standard "normal/hard" dichotomy slowly evolved into the sort of system a game like DIablo can present, with five difficulty options that also scale along five acts of the campaign once you've reached the endgame. And how sometimes all these options can either completely obfuscate some of the more nuanced aspects of a game - for example, did you know enemies deal damage in Diablo III? Because I wasn't sure until facing the DLC's final boss!
Anyway, some much more brief games that came to mind as I was diatribing up there:
• Alternatively, I think Tetris Effect is perfectly honest. "Beginner" is easy in asmuch as it's easier than "Normal", but it appears to me that "Normal" Tetris is for maniacs, and if "Beginner" is described as "for novices or players feeling rusty", count me in. If the Hulk's secret is he's always angry, my Tetris secret is I'm always rusty, baby!
• I very specifically remember Brad playing The Last of Us on Hard while most other critics he spoke to played it on the default and how that led to him having a very different relationship with its exploration and gameplay than some others. Having played this game (and Part II) forward and backward multiple times, I get why they have so many difficulty presets (and now even more granular sliders) I do think Hard is the game they made, and Very Hard is often their ideal stress level for the player.
• I actually don't think this applies to Forbidden West because it can be too damn nuanced for its own good, especially returning to the game after some time away, but Zero Dawn actually makes the most sense from a raw new game on Ultra Hard, which I think you can only access after beating it unfortunately. I'm by no means an advocate for Hard modes despite the tone this post has so far, but that game really, really sings when every single encounter feels like a fight or flight, life or death situation. Every weapon has a purpose, other than maybe the traps, which I know some people use the hell out of but always felt tacked on to me.
• Similarly, I think you can get away with calling Kena Bridge of Spirits bland or simple on its default difficulty, but on the harder modes it asks you to consider your tools in a way that's often pretty clever despite how limited the tools are.
• On a somewhat different note, the Lethal difficulty a later patch added to Ghost of Tsushima paradoxically makes the game far easier in its quieter moments and far harder in its louder ones. It's fun to imagine a game designed from the ground up with a Bushido Blade philosophy and has been for years, but aside from carving up the fodder enemies in Sekiro nothing feels quite as visceral and I wonder how that game would've been received by some of the more burned out on open world players had it only ever been what that Lethal mode molds it into.
• On the flipside, the modern Wolfenstein games tell a boldfaced lie implying that the harder difficulties offer more challenge. Kotaku's Ethan Gach somewhat famously wrote about this back in 2017 and he was totally right - the game is a power fantasy about rebelling against a global Nazi regime! Not only was the damage registration difficult to parse at launch (did they ever address this?) and the stealth a step back from what I already felt was a flawed system in The New Order, even the game's default difficulty seemed unnecessarily punishing. "Can I Play, Daddy?" sounds insulting, but it's the question every player should be asking that game - can I just play you, and revel in your ridiculous plot, marinate in its transcendent forward momentum, without worrying so damn much about how many damn Nazis occupy this space station?
• More controversially, while The Witcher 3 presents a harsh world and does a hell of a job establishing all the lore and mechanics behind the pursuit of monsters...it's not actually fun to think as hard about those beasts as a Witcher would have to because most of that thinking has to be done in menus, and occurs just as often after one or two deaths as the initial encounter. I know plenty of people out there love this franchise's harder difficulties, but I think deep down even they'd admit it's the character building and storytelling that makes this game what it is, and the higher difficulties may promise you'll feel like a true Witcher but in practice really just mean you'll waste a lot of time roundhouse slashing at a pile of rocks while casting Quen over and over.
• My last personal submission requires me to stop using my trophy list as a crutch and remember my youth, when one of my very favorite games was Contra III: The Alien Wars...provided a Game Genie separated the cartridge from the SNES. I get that these games were built to "test your might" as us playground gamers used to say to each other before karate chopping twigs and other items far more delicate than blocks of wood or broken down sedans, but Contra III never felt more complete than when the lives were infinite and the game became more of a zen-like experiment in how few lives you could lose in a single play session rather than whether you could get good enough to beat the game at all. Because getting good enough to beat this game and many of its ilk was, dear reader, silly to a young me with near infinite amounts of time to do so.
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