What is your preferred brand of "super hard"?

TL;DR - Just answer the question. I've just had a half-week off from work and wanted to share some thoughts about some games and their difficulty. Short version: Horizon Zero Dawn is awesome on Super Hard, Sekiro is a son of a bitch, Resident Evil 2 means incredibly well and I appreciate what Fallen Order was trying to do.

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I was a Game Genie gamer as a kid. If I died too much for my liking in games, it wasn't long before I blew some dust out of the Game Genie's contacts and turned on every infinite anything cheat I could find in there. I've never liked being frustrated while playing a game, and have always preferred challenges that push me right up to the edge without actually falling over the cliff and into the dreaded Game Over screen. As such, the sorts of games that led this hobby towards current-gen blockbusters like Tomb Raider and Uncharted were usually what I gravitated towards. Games that offered a challenge, but often held out a guiding hand or offered alternative, less skill-based solutions to problems.

And then, for much of the PS3 era, I pretty much only played PS+ games alongside NBA 2K, and so I felt like I'd lost whatever "gamer feel" I ever had. That is, until I took up the challenge of Bloodborne on a whim. I bounced off of it initially, left it alone for the better part of two years, but something about the game always scratched at my subconscious so I gave it another go in March of 2017, timed alongside its PS+ release and an influx of new players. It took me 6 hours (no exaggeration, I just listened to podcasts and tried to figure out what the hell I was doing wrong for six hours) of running loops in Central Yharnam before I stumbled across the Cleric Beast and realized only then could I level up my character, but something about that struggle absolutely charmed me. I then beat Gascoigne, easily, on my second try, struggled against the Blood-starved Beast but ultimately prevailed, then the same with Amelia. Bosses I utterly hated, like Darkbeast Paarl, I could just summon in a friend to one-shot them. Sure, I learned through a Fextralife page that the Tonitris was the thing to use against Rom, but I had stumbled across that weapon early all on my own, and so it felt like a fair compromise between the internet and myself.

From that experience, I took a renewed interest in playing games on "Hard", and I've spent a lot of the past two years thinking about what it means for a game to be hard. Is it damage taken/damage dealt? Is it enemy intelligence, the variety of their attacks, the placement of their units across the gamespace? Is it control liability or camera inconsistency? And which of these factors do I find fun about a game being hard and which do I find cumbersome and overburdening?

I feel like my experience with two games this year - and two games last year - have really allowed me to hone in what it is I like and dislike about games being hard. I'll start with the two games this year because one of them is such a hot button for the topic - Sekiro. Like I said before, and have probably said many times on these forums, I loved the parry-based fights of Bloodborne. If there was a parry counter that quickened a fight, I was there to master it, with the Hunter fights often being my personal favorites. So when news and footage of what Sekiro was attempting to be started coming out, I felt right in assuming it could be my favorite FromSoft game almost by default. It'd be doubling down on the things I loved about Bloodborne's gameplay, in a unique for this generation setting, and I'd be experiencing it for the first time right alongside everyone else.

Unfortunately, whether my television is too old, my PS4 too creaky, or my fingers decidedly lacking in nimbleness, Lady Butterfly/Seven Spears/Snake Eyes/Genichiro is a slash-line (shout-out baseball fans) I have seared into my brain. All three fights I solved mechanically and could not execute physically, smashing my head against them over and over, as recently as this past week after watching Ben solve Owl, only to find defeat through a random change in animation strings, or a camera deciding to break lock-on right as I was about to break posture, or pure recklessness on my part. I thought, Ben did just fine on a multi-passed signal to a TV several feet away obscured by bright studio lights, and I can't fucking do this?!

Like Bloodborne, this game has lingered with me, haunting and taunting me. Particularly intimidating are the PSN Trophy numbers: about 20% of people who played Sekiro have beaten it, compared to the same roughly 20% of Bloodborne players. That was when I remembered I'd never played the Frozen Wilds campaign of Horizon: Zero Dawn, and noticed that not only had only 30% of players finished that campaign, 1% of players had completed a Ultra Hard NG+ run.

I'd never completed Frozen Wilds because I'd done just that, started a New Game+ on Ultra Hard prior to the DLC's release, but set the game down long before, and when I first encountered that Scorcher that opens the game I felt entirely outmatched. I'd just finished Bloodborne and did not want to acclimate myself to another combat system that was expecting me to still be fluent in it. But after Sekiro, I just had to know, how hard was that fight, really? Turns out, sort of hard, though not nearly as hard as most of what was to come in that DLC, nor now that I've decided to replay the whole game for the Ultra Hard trophy is it even as hard as the first fights involving Corruption in the main story. These are missions labeled for level 15 players and I am level 57 needing multiple tries to complete them...and I am loving it!

What Horizon seems to give me that Sekiro doesn't isn't exactly the same as Bloodborne, but it's close. Horizon puts you in a sandbox, tells you everything about it before you enter, and then wonders what you'll come up with. Are you feeling like a trap god with your Tripcaster, Proximity mines and Ropecaster? Arrows blazing with hardpoints, shock and freeze arrows? Or do you just want to spam Blast Bombs and pray? On Ultra Hard, you often have to be some version of all of these, and the fun of the fight comes from a combination of both solving the puzzle inherent to the mix of enemies and terrain as well as improvising when best laid plans don't work so well. Bloodborne mostly would mitigate this through increasing your stats until you could brute force mistakes, but Horizon one-ups that conceit at the Super Hard difficulty by maintaining a huge emphasis on mobility and improvisation. Even with the endgame Shield Weave armor that deflects most initial damage and constantly recharges, the game finds fun ways to challenge you while offering multiple exit strategies, ways to regroup and adjustments to your attack patterns.

Beating Frozen Wilds' final boss on Ultra Hard was arguably more satisfying for me than defeating Rom or Micolash. I'd suggest everybody give it a go if you haven't. To me, it is a simply sublime mixture of creativity and hardship that is nearly perfectly balanced. There are issues, of course. The camera received a lot of "go home, your drink" missives from me at times, enemies can one-shot you FromSoft style in a way the game doesn't actually feel designed to deliver (especially with that Shield Weave armor) and, most egregiously, at random the enemies become so relentless that you'll get knocked down once in a fight and be endlessly pummeled until you're dead, as if you were cornered by a pro Mortal Kombat player. None of that stuff ever felt right, but neither did it discourage me from continuing on.

Briefly, there were other games I put time into on Hard (not Super Hard, or Extreme, or whatever) this year and last that either left me wanting and dropping the challenge down or just had me stoked the whole way through.

I appreciated the hell out of what Resident Evil 2 was trying to do with its Hardcore mode, but if I ever finish that game it'll probably be on Normal. For me, introducing Mr. X to the ink ribbons, massive damage and limited ammo of Hardcore was just far too stressful and overwhelming. No thanks.

Likewise, The Outer Worlds seemed like it had a lot of ideas about its systems and how higher difficulties would inspire players to explore them, but much like The Witcher 3 I felt its hard mode was disgustingly unbalanced in the early game, and by the time I got comfortable and curious about switching back I was just too checked out on the various status' and whatnot under the hood, contented by the power fantasy.

Star Wars Jedi allowed me to complete a game that felt like Sekiro without the uber punishing micro-second parry windows or taking damage from broken posture, and so I wound up preferring its difficulty even if the combat itself felt less polished. It turns out, I just can't handle being punished for retreating to regroup and comport myself; the final boss of this game in particular ranks among the more exhilarating fights I've had in this sort of game, and was shockingly polished and Bloodborne-like compared to the rest of the game.

Looking back on this year of deliberately challenging myself to play games on their hard (or, again in Horizon's case, hardest) mode, I think I have a much clearer picture of what makes a fun hard mode for me. I like a challenge that is malleable to my skillsets or interests in a game; when I fail at something, I simply need to find a new approach to the same scenario. Sometimes, it's even less than that - I just need to do what I was already doing and be more patient about it. I also need a way to back out and reconfigure myself. If the stress and the punishment is unrelenting or inescapable, I feel trapped, overly stressed and even a little claustrophobic. It was times like these in Bloodborne I loved phoning a friend, heading back to the Doll for some Vitality or Strength upgrades, and coming back with more vigor. Alternatively, games like Sekiro or Resident Evil 2 just made me feel trapped in a cage of somewhat alien design, and I could either Houdini my way out of the prison or drown.

Ultimately, I still prefer to play most games on their Normal modes. I want to progress, to see new things, and to feel fairly powerful or whatever analog could be used to describe how The Witnessdidn't make me feel as I bumbled through that game with a Youtube guide at the ready. But 2019 has taught me that there is yet a place for hard modes in games, and it's really hard to predict whether a hard game, or a game made hard, will be for you until you take the plunge and give it a shot. And for that, Horizon, I salute you. Yours just might be my favorite extra/super/ultra/very hard mode I've played since the 007 mode of Goldeneye or Perfect Agent of Perfect Dark.

For me it was also a FromSoftware game (Dark Souls) that got me interested in playing games on the harder difficulties. I usually didn't bother beforehand.

The Witcher 3 is actually my go-to game when describing my ideal hard mode. It isn't perfect (human opponents take a truly insane number of hits to kill relative to other opponents) but I loved how it forced you to consider each fight and the tools you have at your disposal. You have to engage with the mechanics, like dodging, potions, blade oils, etc. in order to survive a lot of the fights. I never really felt like I became overpowered either.

In general I'd say that's what my ideal hard mode is: one that necessitates learning and mastering the mechanics and avoids the problem of just fiddling with health bars until the game is zero fun to play. Lots of people enjoy that kind of challenge but it's definitely not for me.

I've played around 400 hours of FTL over the years on the hardest difficulty as part of my quest to beat the game with every ship. It feels beatable but still challenging, and the RNG element makes every run exciting.

And on the opposite side of the coin, Sid Meier's Civilization games have my least favorite version of Hardest difficulty. They bump up the difficulty by just front-loading the challenge -- if you can survive the massive starting advantage other civs get, the game isn't really that hard after that. Fortunately there are some great mods out there that fix it by spreading the AI's advantages over the course of the game instead of dumping them all at the beginning.

I grew up in hard games, but stuck to normal difficulties throughout the first decade or so of 3D games. 360 achievments got me down the path of super hard games. These days, however, I'm more willing to play on normal or hard rather than the toughest. All depends on the genre.

So to answer your question, I still love super hard action games. But the moment the controls aren't pitch perfect, I'm willing to drop it down. And if it's strategy or a card game or an RPG, I derive very little joy in difficulties when I don't have precise control. I think that's the key for me, really tight gameplay. I like games where I have to think or plan ahead, but there's nothing more frustrating than having a plan fall apart slowly. If I get shot or fall off a cliff, then I have no problem banging my head against a scenario for hours on end.

This perfectly describes what I want out of a video game most of the time, and why I gravitate to harder modes/games. I want a game that requires me to actively engage with it's systems. From games are some of the best at this, particularly Sekiro. I like feeling myself get better at something and learn it.

For Sekiro in particular, I'll be honest, early on that game kicked my ass. That's what I like about the progression of Dark Souls to Bloodborne to Sekiro. They're all similar, but ask very different things from you in combat. Even though I've beaten every previous game, I really struggled with Lady Butterfly because I didn't yet understand what the game expected of me. Once I did, the entire game clicked and I had a blast. Learning the systems in Sekiro and seeing the results of me getting better is exactly what I want out of a game like that.

I think Dark Souls irreversibly changed the way I play and enjoy games now, for the better or for the worse, I can't say. I always pick the hardest difficulty when playing a game now, as I find that a lot of the time it forces you to engage with mechanics that you wouldn't on lower difficulties, simply because you wouldn't need to. Rage 2 is a great recent example for me, a lot of the criticism was that the powers and abilities were meaningless, because you could just shoot everyone in the head with the assault rifle and move on. But when you played on Nightmare, you were encouraged to search around for the powers and actually use them, because otherwise you'd get your ass beat.

On PC, the combat actually feels incredible as a result, because there is an actual gameplay loop with cycling through the different powers and managing their cooldowns, something you'd never have to engage with on normal, because everything just drops dead. It ends up feeling more like an Id game, and got me really excited for DOOM: Eternal.

Ultimately it just comes down to what you are looking for out of games. For a lot of people, the last thing they want to do with their free time is be frustrated playing a game because it's too hard for them. Games are mean't to be enjoyable, and if it isn't enjoyable, there is no point to them. Simple. This is where Dark Souls changed what I'm looking for out of games.

If I'm playing a game on the hardest difficulty and really tearing into it regardless, that feels good to me. I feel like I've really "conquered" it. And on the other hand, if I'm getting my ass handed to me, I enjoy that as well, because it means there's still many things left to figure out or master. It keeps me engaged. The only other times I feel engaged with a game that's easy is when mechanical difficulty isn't the focus, such as narrative focused games like Disco Elysium.

Ultimately I think Dark Souls is far and away the most influential game to come out since Mario 64 or Ocarina of Time. It changed what I want out of the games I play, and the way I look at them. If the hardest difficulty in a game simply changes the percentages on damage intake/output, that's just lazy.

I feel like I'd have to talk at length to really find the best version of my opinion on the topic. But ultimately it comes down to this:

Does the game's balance support heightened difficulty? In my opinion, the answer for almost every game is no. I don't even think From Software's games walk the knife-edge successfully at all times. And often, games that ape the Souls formula undercook the balance necessary to make their difficulties feel justified.

I like it when difficulty feels solvable. There's a difference between difficulty encouraging optimal play and difficulty flat-out narrowing (or eliminating) your options. It's a hard distinction to make, but an obvious one to notice.

I almost always play on hardest as it normally forces you to engage more with the systems. Genres I am bad at I will normally only bump it some of the way up. I almost never have the complaint I often hear from people about games where you have skills that you never need to use. I dislike difficulty settings that just bump enemy hp and decrease your damage but modern shooters are often so easy that I don't really mind it in that genre. The untouchable best version of Super Hard is the Thief games which added in extra objectives and conditions that needed to be met for each difficulty bump.

I don't usually play on Hard modes because I find they're almost always kind of trash? Usually it is accomplished by way of inflating all of the numbers at play and that's just really boring and frustrating more than offering actually interesting play.

I prefer that if a game wants to put a focus on difficulty then they design the base experience to perhaps be on the tough side and then have the options to scale back if need be.

I don't tend to play hard modes either. I enjoy the Souls series because they design the game with the challenge in mind. Hard modes elsewhere don't, to me, have that consideration.

Two of the genres that I spend the most hours playing are arcade-style shmups (bullet hell, etc) and rhythm games, so I love an extreme challenge in many instances. But for the majority of mainstream console games, I play on the default difficulty (or lower) and very rarely ever increase it above the default. In The Witcher 3, I happily bumped the difficulty down to the lowest because I wasn't interested in the combat challenge at all for whatever reason, but still loved everything else about that game. I enjoy the Dark Souls games, but it isn't really inherently related to their difficulty, I don't think.

If I was pressed to try to come up with an explanation for the distinction, perhaps it's because shmups and rhythm games are largely all about becoming more skilled at them as the primary long-term progression. On the other hand, in narrative-driven games I'm usually just interested in seeing the story and setpieces and don't care as much about being challenged or "getting good" at the game. Difficulty walls just end up frustrating me because it's stopping me from progressing the story, more than anything else.

@doctordonkey: Speaking of DOOM, that's the ticket for me and hard games. DOOM '16 on Nightmare is vicious, but never insurmountable feeling. (that's my problem with the Souls franchise... they're fun, but each one I've played has hit a point where I'm like "I simply can't do this, and I won't have fun trying")

Now, Ultra Nightmare is much too far for my tastes, but Nightmare just feels perfect. Eternal looks like it'll be a fair bit more difficult due to the larger bestiary complicating combat arenas, but hopefully it captures that same balance on Nightmare.

I play most of my games on medium/medium-hard (when possible), but old-school shooters just beg to pose a steep challenge. 1997's Blood is a great example. That game shows zero mercy, occasionally unfairly to be honest, but that's kept me coming back to it from release until today.

The only Souls-type game I've enjoyed so far is The Surge, I really liked the combat mechanics and the gameworld in that game. I've tried Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, Bloodborne, Nioh, Sekiro, Lords of the Fallen and Jedi, but did not enjoy the combat mechanics in those games that much. I also didn't care for their gameworlds, ... apart from Jedi. So for me it largely comes down to the combat mechanics itself and the gameworld, rather than the idea of "playing a difficult game".

I enjoy playing old-school FPS games on harder difficulties, stuff like Blood, Painkiller and Serious Sam. It's the sense of being a badass and the gory mayhem that follows, together with the sweet stress of looking for health packs or similar. I find it very satisfying in a primal way, to play a game like Doom on a higher difficulty. It's a feeling that's unique to these types of FPS for me. I don't like playing modern FPS games on higher difficulties, partly because there's too much crap in the HUD, and too many flashy explosions. That said, I could potentially see myself playing games like Sniper Elite and Ghost Warrior on higher difficulties.

I also enjoy playing racing sims on higher difficulties. However, increasing the difficulty in some racing games only results in stupidly aggressive AI, they become torpedos that constantly bump into you. I can spend hours learning a track and gear changes, and setting up the vehicle just right. By the time I feel done I'm forced to raise the AI difficulty because it's just too easy on Normal or Medium.

Some genres become too restrictive on harder difficulties, like strategy games and RPGs, they become more linear: you have a much smaller set of strategies, tactics and character builds to choose from, you have to do things in the right order, and so on. To me, this is not fun in a strategy game or an RPG, to me these genres are about player freedom and creativity.

So, generally, I play games on Normal.

It depends like you break down but interesting examples. I would put up Doom as an example of a game that shines on hard for me, and I also think Witcher 3 is hugely elevated by playing on Blood and Broken Bones. Yeah it is hard at the start but you just spam Aard and hang in there for some levels. The combat is so much better there and everything comes together very well.

I also loved XCOM 2 on harder difficulty. A well balanced turn based game is one I usually love playing on hard.

From is developer that IMO has lost their way on difficulty. I love Demon's Souls and Dark Souls 1 and find the difficulty there fantastic, but as they've gone in with Dark Souls III and Sekiro in particular it has become too many bosses, too many bosses with tons of possible moves across different phases, hidden extra phases, just a bit too much health. I am not against the challenge but they have lost me going just a bit too far. It's a fine line.

The best kind of difficulty is the kind that will gradually forces you to use all of the tools available to you as you increase in difficulty and that occasionally forces you to approach a problem in a different way than you are used to.

I think Nioh actually does this really well. On the standard difficulty, the game is actually pretty easy. There are a ton of systems, but you don't really need to interact with very many of them and can mostly level your way through any roadblocks. Once you hit the NG+ modes, though, you actually need to start thinking about what stance you are in, what combos you have available for your weapons, which Guardian Spirit you have equipped, etc. You can play the game and have a fun time on normal if that's your thing, but the harder stuff is there if you want it.

Compare that to Sekiro, which is a game I think does difficulty exceptionally poorly (among many other things). The issue I have with it is that the difficulty is immutable. It demands you play it "the game's way," but then never switches up what that way is. Initially that makes the game frustratingly, off-puttingly difficult, but once you've figured it out, you've figured it out and . . . that's sort of it. Every enemy type can be dealt with using the exact same parry/jump/dodge mechanic. Instead of giving you interesting new enemy types, the game increasingly relies on a boss rush. But when the bosses change forms, it's just changing the attack pattern you need to memorize, it isn't really introducing any new mechanics you need to master.

There are 2 main rules for difficulty.

- Ever narrower checkpointing, or save anywhere

- Faster reloading

Soulslikes/roguelikes break the first rule almost by definition, and often the second one as well.

Some games that do difficulty well would be Super Meat Boy and the Trials games. In Meat Boy every screen is a checkpoint, in Trials you never have to redo more than 3-4 jumps at most, and reloading is instantaneous.

For me to enjoy very hard games the mechanics have to be tight and to my liking, and the story and world has to draw me in completely.

Only two games have been perfect for me in this regard, and that's Bloodborne and Sekiro. I definitely had a hard time with some of the bosses, and you bet I got frustrated, but I thoroughly enjoyed getting their platinum. Dark Souls 1 is also among these as it was my first of these types of game experiences, but the formula has since been improved on.

Edit: The Witcher 3 on the highest difficulty is also a different kind of hard I enjoy. Preparation, perfect timing, upgrading and being very careful when approaching fights.

A modded Skyrim with realistic damage, frost damage and other survival settings is also definitely my jam. The hardest part is perhaps spending "too much" time modding and then getting them all to work together...

Good example - Halo: Combat Evolved

The AI did cooler shit on hard. It felt smarter and was tougher. I bet damage sliders were at play as well, though.

Bad example - Dark bots in Perfect Dark Zero

The Dark AI would do things not possible for a human to do. I’d see them shoot people behind them. It was absurd and not fun.