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[Uthimienure]

Our government mental-health programs put young mothers in 12-hour underpaid shifts dealing with sometimes violent mentally-ill persons.  If the girls are attacked they are trained not to retaliate or they are liable to prosecution. The violent persons never face any consequences beyond a night in the local jail, which they quickly forget due to their spoiled, entitled lives.  I've seen several attacks myself and interposed myself between them and the girls.

[Rolan7]

I am going to make it through December without blacking out~

I might tell a moderator to "fuck off" for labeling me a conservative for defending men's rights, but by golly, I'm going to remember it all.  I've lived in the shadow of this "holiday season" for too many years.

I'm astonished I didn't get banned, haha.  It wouldn't be the worst thing... they've got the most disgusting habit of posting 2-3 @everyone for every live show they do.  But the shows are pretty good at the overall discourse is pretty interesting.  It'd be kinda perfect if they didn't keep spamming notifications 2-3 times a week.

Seriously though, men are people too.  Jeez.
Edit: Lefty infighting reassures me that I'm on the correct "side".  I get worried when everyone agrees too much.

[JoshuaFH]

Man I think I'm getting really cynical about videogames. I'm trying to start up Persona 4 Golden, which I've been meaning to play, and I can't enjoy it at all cause the game gives me customizable difficulty options that are available at all times. I don't appreciate the option, it reinforces the feeling that the game is just psychological masturbation meant to pass time, and makes it that much harder to immerse myself when the game candidly opens its guts up at the touch of a button to allow me to 'change things to my liking'. I just want the game to be confident enough in its own design that I don't get the option to stick my own grubby mitt into its insides to tweak things around.

[MrRoboto75]

Man I think I'm getting really cynical about videogames. I'm trying to start up Persona 4 Golden, which I've been meaning to play, and I can't enjoy it at all cause the game gives me customizable difficulty options that are available at all times. I don't appreciate the option, it reinforces the feeling that the game is just psychological masturbation meant to pass time, and makes it that much harder to immerse myself when the game candidly opens its guts up at the touch of a button to allow me to 'change things to my liking'. I just want the game to be confident enough in its own design that I don't get the option to stick my own grubby mitt into its insides to tweak things around.

Its better than MGSV going "hey I see you died a whole two times, do you want the chicken hat? y/n"

[Frumple]

I'm definitely very opposite of that -- adjustable difficulty, especially on the fly, is a genuinely excellent bit of design and one more games should be adapting more fully, imo. I'd frikkin' love if every game difficulty is a relevant setting for just slapped sliders down somewhere for the mechanical aspect of things and let folks go as wild or restrained as they please. Even multiplayer ones (though those on a map or round basis or whatever, probably). Have a default, balance that default around your envisioned design, and then let the players do whatever the hell they want to on their own time.

Confident, as it's being referred to here, design when it comes to mechanics is one of those things that can and does hard lock swaths of the population out of a game's content. Be it mechanical insufficiency (there's basically one proper bullet hell game I can beat without cheating, and that's Starward Rogue playing Redshift, which radically changes how the game plays in the exact way that compensates for my trouble with bullet hell design), time constraints, or whatever, when you design without some form of give you're, well... designing without give.

Some folks are basically going to be punished for daring to try your game, and that honestly kinda' sucks. Especially for folks that don't have the means or awareness of how to beat the shit out of a game that's being an asshole with a memory editor bat. More will be let down because there's just not a perfect design, some folks just really don't or do like something (grind, drop chances being low or high, damage/tankiness values, whatever) and it's going to be incompatible.

Rather than telling one set of folks to get stuffed, you can just... let them adjust it. If you're good enough at what you do, most people won't care to adjust the values, and for those that do it'll be a kindness (and if you're not good at getting the mechanic values right, well, giving folks the means to fix your screwups is also a kindness :V). That, to me, is confident design, a belief their stuff will hold up and be enjoyable regardless of what shenanigans the players get up to, as well as respect for their audience's time and preferences. It's good stuff, even if it maybe pulls back the proverbial veil a bit.

[JoshuaFH]

We do differ in opinion, as my outlook has always been that if a game allows me to overcome a challenge by simply letting me change the rules of the game, the game doesn't have confidence in its own design and, subsequently, I lose interest because I'm not even sure what game I'm even playing if the game designers themselves apparently don't even know. It boils down to what the intended experience is supposed to be, and through that what my expectations are. If there isn't an intended experience, then I have no clue where to set my expectations. I would consider it being disrespectful of my time and preferences to have to blindly guess on the game designer's behalf where my own difficulty should be for my own enjoyment.

I'm not wholly against adjustable difficulty, or variable difficulty; one of my favorite games, God Hand, has both. The difference being that there is never a question what the intended experience is, and there's never a question of where your expectations should be as you play.

Moreover, I'm of the opinion that players aren't locked out of content by difficulty. The difficulty IS the content. Perhaps moreso than dialogue or cutscenes, the experience of overcoming a challenge within the game's rules is what makes the game worth playing in the first place. Obviously for a game like Persona 4, which is more visual novel than RPG, that line of logic probably doesn't describe its core audience, and so the existence of the variable difficulty menu comes into play. I would atleast wish it were hidden behind a couple of menus, and not up in your face at the press of a button.

[Rose]

Everybody plays games for different reasons.

[Mathel]

I think it depends on what kind of game it is.

In RPG games, or any game with an important story, adjustable difficulty is good. Many will play the game for the story, rather than for the combat mechanics, and denying them the story because they just are not good enough at the combat would not be nice.

On the other hand, in twitchy games, like bullet hells, platformers, simple racing games, there might be difficulty settings, but adjusting the difficulty on the fly makes no sense.

[Kagus]

I'd like to bring up Middle Earth: Shadow of War. You're allowed to switch between any of the five (originally three) difficulty settings pretty much at whim, you just need a quick refresh to enact it.

Now, while the first three difficulty settings are more or less linear progressions of each other, the last two are considerably different and generally require a very different approach in order to survive or get anywhere. They require a much better grasp of the game's underlying mechanics, and a number of tactics and strategies that the game isn't very good about teaching you (because they're mostly superfluous or even somewhat counterproductive in the normal difficulty range), not to mention quite good reflexes. Where you once would be able to survive anywhere from 3-5 hits in the lower difficulties, you can only survive 1 at best in the highest, and they come out faster and with greater frequency.

I spent a slightly unreasonable amount of time on the game, having recently clocked in at over 200 hours. I took a significant break in the middle of that though, and when I came back to my 100+ hour save file I highly appreciated the ability to just turn the brutality down a smidge so I could regain my footing before cranking it back up to where it's supposed to be. It's easy to fall out of "the groove" when life gets in the way, and it's nice to be able to have a little warmup again to get back into it without having to start an entirely new playthrough without all my gear and unlocks.


Of course, this doesn't really avoid the comment about the developers' design and pacing. And, to be quite frank, the game honestly has an absolutely godawful grasp of both most of the time. But I still think it's a lot of fun, despite the at times shocking failures of the dev team behind it.

Although, to be honest, I think it's also a little bit unfair to expect developers to try and make a game that is tailored to everyone's experience of it. Sure, there are lots of games out there with no difficulty settings at all, and they still manage to be compelling games, but even those definitely don't appeal to everyone's different ways of approaching a game. Giving the end user the ability to fine-tune that experience just seems like a way to make everyone involved happy.

In the end, we're the ones defining a lot of the difficulty anyways. No one is forcing me to run through a game with a hideously sub-standard weapon, I just do it because I think it's funny and an intriguing challenge to make it viable. Similarly, no one is forcing me to stack special modifiers so that I do 400% damage for 0% of the cost, I just do it because I like how it trivializes the game in a way that makes me feel smart.

[EuchreJack]

I'm basically of the opinion that Adjustable Difficulty Levels in game are sorta like an open debug button.  Sure, its there.  Doesn't mean I have to use it.
But I usually ignore/forget the feature whenever it exists, so maybe I'm just exceedingly talented at ignoring such things.

[Lord Shonus]

Difficulty levels in games are fine. Being able to adjust them on the fly is also fine. Just give me a "I do not want to lower the difficulty, never ask me again" button.


Absolutely hated that in Resident Evil 2 Remake. Especially since the place I was dying was all about getting timing right and the difficulty level was nearly irrelevant.

[Kagus]

Difficulty levels in games are fine. Being able to adjust them on the fly is also fine. Just give me a "I do not want to lower the difficulty, never ask me again" button.

Oh god yeah, that needs to be dumped in a hole and buried. Screw that patronizing kind of interruption, just let me enjoy my masochism in peace.

[LordBaal]

Options, options. The best games currently give options to the player to customize their games. And these kind of pretty basic but vital options are what developers need to pay attention to.

[Iduno]

The discussion reminds me of the difficulty levels in Outer Worlds. It's similar to the 3-d Fallout games, because it's made by the same company as New Vegas. 3 difficulty levels are easy-hard, then the highest difficulty is the only one that requires you to eat and drink, but also your companions die permanently. If they'd made the last 2 things options available at any difficulty, it would have been worth trying different things. I kind of wanted to play again to try out different companions, but the game felt too easy on the second-highest difficulty. So instead, I uninstalled and played something else.

[pisskop]

So, random, but does anyone know how to get an audiobook copy of Sid Meier's Alpha Centauri's book series?