Difficulty in Games 

"Just know that these fuckers are living in a COD montage, and you're in it" is the *greatest* description of sniper Jackals on legendary that I've ever heard.

When a RU-vidr with less than 20k subs makes better videos than some RU-vidrs with millions of subscribers, I gain more hope for humanity. Please continue with this high-quality content!

The “easy to learn, hard to master” type of games are my favorites, because when you want to start investing time into it, the experience can become different and much more interesting. In my opinion, nothing feels better than being a master at a certain game and looking like an absolute badass at it.

Some old games use difficulty to drag out the time. Though, I think a big reason why many old games are so difficult is money. The more you die, the more money in the arcade machine.

Just changing the enemies' hp and damage and calling it changing the difficulty has got to be the worst way of doing it. Well, for certain genres, that is. What I think is that it *could* work in games where you can avoid an obstacle because you want to, but in that case the better solution would be making more bullets instead of dealing more damage to you, like in shoot-'em-ups, but in shooter games you totally have to make certain mechanics for harder difficulties, like in S.T.A.L.K.E.R: Shadow of Chernobyl, and maybe the other two a bullet in your gun might get stuck and you'll need to reload for it to work again. Or I think ambushes can work on higher difficulties. As an example of the first type of games I said about: Terraria. You can avoid all the obstacles coming at you, and it is easier that way. Then there is Expert Mode there, which makes every enemy and boss have 2x more health, defense and damage, and some enemies will get new mechanics, because of which it will be harder to avoid everything. But then, there is Master Mode, which is an example of a bad difficulty implementation. This mode makes enemies have even more hp, damage and defense, this time 3x instead of 2x, but no new mechanics are added. And there are mods that add actual new difficulties, making the game not only harder, but also more interesting and mechanically deep. Take the biggest Terraria mod, Calamity Mod, for example. There are three new difficulties in the mod, all making the game harder: Revengeance, Death and Malice. All of them add new mechanics, such as you will start to burn if you go to the underworld, if you don't have an effect from a certain potion. And my favourite example of a difficulty mod is Fargo's Souls mod, which adds an Eternity Mode. It makes you suffocate in space, burn in the underworld, piranhas will start jumping from the water at you if you're bleeding, Demon Eyes can dash into you, tons of new debuffs, and most importantly, bosses all have new unique attacks. Eye of Cthulhu can summon 8 scythes when dashing, and even more while moving after a dash, at 1/4 of its life it will start teleporting and rapidly dashing in a W shape, with scythes, you'll have to avoid it all. Conclusion: please make difficulties appropriate for your genre of a game

It's always good when this man posts. Also this has nothing to do with the argument made in the video, but I don't think people should bully other people for playing games on easy mode, some people do that.

"Just know that these fuckers are living in a COD montage, and you're in it" best quote

games r supposed to be fun, if you enjoy playing in easy and winning pretty easily while enjoying the story, awesome, if you love getting ur shit rekt in 1 boss from 3hrs (like me:) also awesome! as long as it's fun

I usually pick easy or normal in games, because I don't have a need to prove anything to myself or others, just want to have fun and enjoy the game. And I rarely play any multiplayer because it's usually boring to me. I prefer story, character development, immersion in the world etc. I prefer diffculty by design, like good AI or smart puzzles. Hardest difficulty is for people who love overcoming hard obstacles. I already had to overcome mine in real life, so games for me are fun, not sport, not getting over challenges. Fun is very important factor to me, frustration in games isn't what I want.

I love tough games. Such a high level of difficulty reflects trust in the consumer, wherein the developer feels that they can be more free with their game design. No extraneous tutorials, no weirdly slow or piss-easy encounters. The freedom to do whatever you want with difficulty is incredibly liberating.

Came from kingani, was expecting some kind of normal video where I would just watch for like 3 minutes and leave but no, you really did a great job on the video, you sir supposed to have more subs.

Doom Eternal on Nightmare completely destroyed me when I switched to it after playing on UV for the most time. Following some guide's Doom dance can be helpful on everything underneath Nightmare, but once you decide to try it? You gotta come up with your own kind of Doom dance, and I think that is what made me put hundreds of hours in this game

Gunstar heroes on the sega Genesis had a pretty cool way for difficulty adjustments, instead of just less enemies and less health for enemies, they made mini bosses more smaller the lower the difficulty is and made them move less so you can shoot them properly and the Famous 7 Force Boss gets less and less phases each time you lower the difficulty

The funny fact about souls series is that it does have different difficulties, but you start the game on the easiest difficulty. If you want to play on higher difficulties, you have to find certain items to unlock the harder difficulties. If you are the kind of person who just want to play games for fun and relax, then don't play souls games.

It is the devs choice, but I really like having difficulty settings. What I do with most games is play through on an easy setting, then do another run until I beat the hardest difficulty.

Ideally you'd want a change in difficulty to change the behavior of enemies, instead of just changing damage and health. Making enemies more oblivious or have different variations that only appear on higher difficulties (Kinda like Halo CE did it)

The structure, love, and work behind your videos is amazing. Don’t let anything discourage you from creating such great content.

I never understood why people think the Souls Series has the most difficult games. Souls(-like) games just require a different skill set and a approach than most action/rpg games. They’re more strategic and you have plan ahead, but if you know what you’re doing it can even be quite easy. Basically they’re all about timing and muscle-memory, if you can read the bosses‘ movement pattern and react accordingly, you’re already halfway there.

I love the difficulty in Jedi: Fallen Order. It only changes three things throughout the game. The parry window, enemy aggression and enemy damage. So it always takes the same amount of lightsaber swings to defeat an enemy across every difficulty.

I like RE4's adaptive difficulty. It analyzes how you're playing and adjusts the enemy count and ammo drops accordingly. Then the Professional difficulty turns all the knobs to the hardest possible without any adaptation. It's a cool way to do it

Just stumbled on your channel and really like it. I just wanted to comment on the background music. It's awesome, makes me nostalgic for the days when my youtube experience was top 10 lists from Fawful's Minion and flamesonfire. Thank you for that, though I'm almost certain that wasn't your intention.

Brilliant video

I subbed. Your content's amazing!

GET THIS MAN MORE SUBSCRIBERS!!

Never played halo until my late teens and the way you explained difficulty in 2 is how it felt to play ce on heroic. I may just be trash at halo idk, tell me if your experience is any different

Because dark souls and demon's souls have a scaling difficulty each new game plus cycle. Technically you're playing on easy the first time around

My favorite oldschool difficult game is Summer Carnival'92: RECCA. It might be the first Bullet Hell game, and has a perfect mix of skill and memorization. I don't know if I'll ever beat it, but getting a perfect run of the first level felt amazing. I recommend taking a look a video of it even if you don't like SHMUPS, because it's also one of the best looking and sounding Famicom games.

I remember, when I was younger and first discovering Halo 2, I used to put it on Legendary because I couldn't read english & really thought the symbols meant the quantity of shield you had.

You forgot to mention the impossible nightmare that is Pokémon X & Y difficulty.

You give me hope Stryxo. It's become way too mainstream to complain about challenging difficulty in games (I can understand if the challenging part is implemented poorly) because people want to raise their cholesterol by sitting on a chair for hours engaging in mind numbing gameplay such as which is provided by Warframe as an example. Now don't get me wrong, there are amazing non-challenging games out there such as Stardew Valley, however the focal points of those games are designed well and that's why it works... When you're game is based around gameplay where you already one shot everything just to break a weapon even more and instead one shot the universe there's no doubt that the dents in your brain are being suctioned smooth. It's a hard topic to tackle though, a lot of what difficulty means to someone is 100% individual dependent. Soul's games are easy for me, I know that might raise eyebrows. (Get over it you're just jealous) That makes making games such a pain in the ass because there will always be a section (and not a small section) of people that will find every game too easy or too hard. "No skill that will truly let you get better?" Developing your own skill is what'll help, I believe the difficulty of those older games should become the standard again, that way we can stop raising game journalists that can't pass tutorials. The fact that quick-switching is considered an advanced mechanic that allows you to tackle higher doom difficulties is so fucking sad If you want to truly understand what a high skill ceiling is, please play a good few hours of Nioh 2 and then watch PooferLlama play Nioh 2 while you wallow in depression realizing that you're too smooth brain to ever reach half the heights of that ceiling (Not directing this at you Stryxo) But you know what the greatest thing about Nioh 2's skill ceiling is? You feel like a literal GOD when you can do that shit because holy fuck it is the most satisfying, serotonin pumping flow state you will *EVER* achieve. What would happen if you were to go onto his stream and suggest him to play variety? Nothing, because nothing else will give him that same rush and satisfaction.

The most fun difficult I ever experienced was Spider-Man NGP on ultimate difficulty, it was incredibly rewarding and entertaining to play. God of war on give me a challenge I’d really fun, but GMGOW is just the most ridiculous thing ever, didn’t even get through the first fight in the woods

What a gem of a channel

If you want to have different difficulties, every one should feel like its own game. Difficulty should be dynamic, not just changing some stats around. I think having difficulty settings for every aspect of the game (e.g. enemy health, your health, enemy spawn rate, enemy aggression, enemy awareness, item spawn rate, rare drops, visual clarity, ammo capacity, inventory storage capacity, hud, npc support, QTEs etc.) is also a great idea. If you don’t want to give the player difficulty sliders just make sure to change to change enemies‘ behavior

i love dark souls bloodborn eldenring demon souls and sekiro so much that i sang with when the ds part came

Watching a 2 minute 30 second ad to give you that ad money 😤

Nearly all games follow this some better then others. But the idea of making challenges easier if you take time from the main task. In adventure games you find potions, in RPGs you can level up. Just unlocking an easy mode in a subtle and creative way.

I adore difficult games. I wasn't sure about it before, but I'm playing through Dark Souls 3 right now. Never expected to enjoy it, since I'm not the patient, careful kind of gamer. I'm 18 hours in and I've only beaten 4 bosses, yet I'm loving every second of it and I can't wait to play every game in the Souls series.

Elden Ring was my first souls game. I got Sekiro on sale and im playing it next. Im probably getting dark souls 3 and 2 at Christmas lol

Me an my friend have couch co-oped Halo 1, 2 and 3's campagnes on legendary and the most fun we've had is calling out sniper positions through the instant deaths. Walk forward, fall over, "sniper over here", start over, progress, fall over, repeat.

fount you through ani and have been really enjoying the videos. keep it up man

Love the sonic music

Dude your videos are amazing, keep doing what you do!

I prefer having a baseline difficulty, rather than having to pick some arbitrary setting. Most of the time, playing on a higher difficulty means getting pigeon holed to a very narrow(and unfun) playstyle. That being said, I do enjoy doing self-imposed challenges for replays.

Hyrule castle in the thumbnail makes this a whole lot better

Seeing you go from 1k to 18k subs is an amazing feeling

In the games that I'm familiar with (Open world, fps, linear story) only choice to go is hard, the hardest. Other ones are just WAAAAY too easy

I think games with immense mechanical depth are the best way to develop difficulty in games. Having to learn how to use different quirks of the engine to have the best chance of winning just makes me happy, especially when I finally mastered it and become super consistent. This is the main reason I love SSB Melee. Using wavedashing alone feels super satisfying when baiting an opponent to open them up for a combo and all the unique tech skills available in the game make it a real challenge to even be decent.

That ending though. 😂

One thing to also remember is that difficulty and accessibility in games are two different things. Take Metroid Dread for example. If Mercury Steam added a mode where Samus couldn't die, that would theoretically make the game easier, but not for everyone. Many people including myself would still struggle with the complex controls of the game. Also, just because a game's hard doesn't mean it's not for you if you love other aspects like the world and characters. I hope more devs keep this in mind that people play games for different reasons.

Regardless what anyone say the best way to increase difficulty is to make the enemy's AI smarter or if you do choose to simply increase the enemy stats then keep it hidden because in a lot of JRPGs I hate fighting a rival character with three of my teammates while his hp is like 10x higher than mine and he does more damage, it ruins the inmersion and ruins the whole story setup. Tales of Vesperia is a fine example of this. Monsters and main villains are fine though, they should be stronger stat wise.

this video makes me feel like dunkey

Halo 2 Legendary is hard. But once you finish it you turn it into just fun chaos with friends. And then comes LASO.

I know this is weird and off-topic, but I love coming to your channel and seeing your cute fox pfp.🦊 Also as someone who has never touched a Halo game in my life, even I felt the immense frustration just by watching those clips.😂

another great video with fucking awesome takes, stryxo. great job

I feel like i'm the only one who is like "this is so hard I am never going to beat it" and then when I beat it i'm just like " yeah it wasn't that hard it was kinda easy tbh" Summarises my Cuphead Expert mode playthrough pretty well.

Tried these games, personally didn't like how difficult they were but at the same time there's other games that are interesting too. Will give Soulsborne and Soulslike respect for how great they look

i think the game just shapes and beats does good with difficulty because instead of hard mode being less hp they made ENTIRE SECOND VERSIONS for every level as a "hardcore mode"

Persona 4 golden (its a turn based rpg for those who don't know) has a great system where you change how hard you hit, how hard you get hit, exp you get, and how much money you get. While overall it's still pretty easy I love games that let you control so much as a player

i’ve followed you on twitter for like two years and apparently you make really good videos. so that’s cool

the Surge is a great for easy against dark souls but still difficult and entertaining because as you get more powerful and crush your enemies

The pyro burning me to a crisp in my genius hiding spot because he randomly decided to hold left click and beat someone over the head with his mouse: MAA, MA, MA GET THE CAMRA.

I literally only play normal difficulty setting in games

i loved css b-hopping

YEAAH ANOTHER STRYXO VIDEO

...And then Metroid dread casually gave me one of the most thrilling challenges I've ever faced in any videogame

A great example of a good hard mode is Expert Mode in Terraria. Not only does it buff enemies quite a bit, it improves their AI and adds entirely new attacks to bosses. You also get good rewards for playing in Expert Mode.

I play doom eternal on nightmare and just and run and gun or doom dance still manage to beat it while most my time was exploring the lvls

I think mmo's do it best when they have the hard mode of content add new mechanics or atacks to learn but don't just add health.

Goddamn jackal snipers

I always forget that you are a smol channel the videos are so good

"the unrelenting torturous hellscape of twitter." really sounds like the same of death metal album

I didn't start the video yet but the worst part of high difficulty in some games is just enemies with high health that do more damage. If the game is unplayable than its not engaging. I'm not a developer BUT I think high difficulty should make a player USE all their options given to them if that makes sense.

I'm to young to have experienced halo and never had an Xbox, but I wish I could've

That cod montage comment fucking killed me

Hard just like my pickaxe

There actually is a difficulty setting in Sekrio, only instead of playing it on an easier mode its on a harder mode

Gravemind in Halo 2 took me around an hour and a half to 2 hours on my first heroic playthrough. High Charity was even worse.

FINALLY NEW STRYXO VID

Great as always! Would be even better If you would have showed up to our wedding on the 24th but..😒

Ah yes, the Three Levels of difficulty 1. *Games Journalist* 2. *Casual* 3. *I haven't turned my system off in years*

halo 2 is the only one i’ve played and i just thought they were all like that

Joy Ride Turbo is the best racing to be made ever.

Just make the difficulty balanced and give people the ability to find or gain helpful items and skills that they can use if they so choose. Elden ring is a perfect example of how to maintain the experience of the integral difficulty, while also letting the player themselves choose how to tackle the challenges. It doesn't need a difficulty slider because you have other ways to accommodate people's personal playstyle. In games like these, I think most people would rather have the ability to unlock higher difficulty settings after beating the game. There are however many games where that simply wouldn't be feasible, and difficulty options would be a better choice in those games. That being said, nobody loses anything from there being difficulty settings in games. *Other people being able to enjoy something, doesn't take anything away from you.* Unless you are directly involved with the creation of the game, and therefore feel like it would directly impact your vision negatively, there is no logical reason to be as upset as some of these people are by the mere mentioning of sliders and modes.

Hardest game: Rain World. Mind-wrenching and ball-crushingly brutal. This game literally is a masochism simulator that really makes you *feel* like you enjoy your own pain and suffering. Second best game in history.

Speaking of difficulty, operation rapunzel, if you know you know

Jackle snipers in Outskirts can be skipped btw

I think more games should have dynamic difficulty that responds to how well you play it like RE4

6:57 To be honest these clips of cs looks like players behind them are some sweaty try hards, bashing on their keyboard while heavy breathing.

I feel like there is difference between making something hard and making a challenge satisfying. When I play dark souls I enjoy myself and I know it's not always fair but its mostly fair. But when I play games that take a formula that works and makes it clunky or goes bullet hell for the sake of making it harder the challenge becomes less fun and more annoying. Games like dark souls takes weighted combat and makes it satisfying where as tales of zesteria and arise make it annoying.

You should have Mentioned The Roguelike Genre.

I wanna play Dark Souls now while I'm still a student lol

A someone who has beat every co-op Halo Laso from Halo CE all the way to Halo Infinite (which was much easier solo), some of these games on Legendary alone are difficult enough, let alone LASO, but idk, I found LASO pretty enjoyable... then again I enjoyed dying over and over again in the Fromsoft games, learning patterns and enemy spawns so... eh. As far as difficulty options in Fromsoft games... yeah no that would be a horrendously terrible idea. The games are built on FAIR trial and error methods, (most of the time... Bed of Chaos can suck it), but making those games have an easy mode would make those games worthless.

Ok, it took him 3:15 to mention the term that everyone mentions when talking about difficulty. No problem with that ofc, just wanted to see how long it took lol

Dark Souls moment

👌

I fucking love dark souls and other soulsbornes I don’t mind a bit of difficulty even if I baby rage and am shit at the game.

Just Hit 100k Pog

This man makes peak content 💯

I'm fine with games not having difficulty settings and only having one static difficulty setting. What I don't like is when said games are stupidity hard right from the beginning and don't ease the player into the high difficulty. I've played my fair share crazy hard games and the ones I like the most are the ones give you a few levels to learn how everything works before throwing you into the fire. Super Meat Boy is a good example of this, that game is really hard, but it's first world teaches you everything you need to know in order to succeed.

I first played halo on legendary it was 2 and odst