FTL. At least until you've beaten the game several times
this post was submitted on 12 Sep 2024
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This is such a good answer. I remember playing it on easy back in the day and the final boss still kicked my ass.
And once the game has become a breeze, with 100% of your runs being a success, install the Captain's Edition mod and suddenly, it's a pleasantly challenging title again. The add-on that turns it into an endless game in particular is so good, I spent dozens of hours playing it.
Shoutout to Twinge’s Balance Mod. It’s actively maintained, and it makes the game more interesting by encouraging use of unpopular weapons and systems
Captain’s is great too, but it can be overwhelming.
Thanks for the recommendation!
The difficult steps in FTL are no joke. I was having no difficulty clearing on easy and was just trying to unlock all the ships. Once I did I switched to normal and had to restart 3 times before getting out of the first sector.
Dwarf Fortress! Turn off attacks and sieges and just let your dwarves die by your own incompetence instead
Usually the issue isn't my incompetence, people just get too drunk in the tavern and decide to kill each other. FUN.
I'm taking this as an opportunity to illuminate issues with particular games, since... well, play on easy if you wanna, naturally. So, for my recommendation: If you don't use the mod that makes all weapons very dangerous, Mass Effect Andromeda. Without a mod to speed it up a lot, every fight becomes ages of tedium. There's one weapon that can be made any good and even that doesn't make fights bearable. You're basically sitting for like ten minutes at a time hosing down foes with off-brand Super Soakers until they get frustrated and leave. It's quite bad. Just play it on easy. Not just easy, the easiest easy. Whatever the lowest difficulty is, pick that one. There's just no point in anything higher unless you've got infinite patience. And ammo. Bleeegh.
So, generally I play things on easier difficulties when I feel like anything higher will get tedious rather than interesting. The Mass Effect trilogy, I play on the maximum difficulty because that adds a bunch of mechanics that give me more to work around. Fighting armoured enemies should be done differently from fights against shielded enemies, that sort of thing. Enemies become more dangerous when they're not shut down so there's that encouragement to get them figured out before they bring out the scary attacks. Some games just increase health amounts, which... okay, just shoot them more? 😴 Boring.
tl;dr: Games like Mass Effect Andromeda where difficulty settings only increase tedium. Am never gonna want to crank up the tedium setting.
off-brand Super Soakers until they get frustrated
I'm now imagining the leaders of the Andromeda Initiative shopping for guns at the Citadel branch of Temu, which is Commander Shepherd's least favorite store.
NieR Automata, for basically the same reasons. Hard mode is filled with instakills everywhere and is really just a damage multiplier, so you have to be the right kind of person for that. If you're not, Normal is probably already fairly easy because of all the auto-heals, but the pacing can be a bit slow for something where most enemies aren't dangerous. Might as well play Easy and play for the story.
I love the combat in the game. I think I played it on normal. I wouldn't recommend anything easier. I feel like everything would die too easily.
Uncharted on console/with a controller. Unless you really love sitting behind knee-high-cover™ I highly recommend playing them on easy and like an older Tomb Raider game. Much more fun that way.
Let's be real: I doubt many people are playing the Uncharted games for the gameplay. These titles are doing the bare minimum to meet AAA action-adventure standards with some technical flourishes here and there, but that's about it. You get by the numbers cover shooting, by the numbers occasional easy stealth, by the numbers climbing, by the numbers (and by that I mean really small numbers) puzzle solving, etc. The appeal lies in the spectacle, the artistry, the technical excellence by the standards of the platforms they are on, experiencing what are essentially slightly interactive Hollywood adventure movies that manage to keep the player hooked with expert pacing and characters that are straddling the line between psychopathy and charm just right.
One might also argue that it's more fun watching footage of these games than actually playing them. The best example of this is the car chase sequence in Uncharted 4, which looked amazing when I first watched it years before being able to play it, but once I got to actually experience it first hand, this was the moment when I dropped the difficulty down, because it was remarkably (and surprisingly) frustrating and irritating to play. Don't get me wrong, it's an astonishing technical achievement, but not one second of playing it was fun, at least in my opinion.
Project Zomboid. That’s the most recent game I can think of where I reduced the difficulty (and that’s coming from someone that has nearly 400 hours into Elden Ring). It’s not that the game is tougher than ER or anything like that. It has a ton of cool mechanics and detail that are really enjoyable if you’re into zombie survival games, but the zombies can really swarm you in that game and you won’t live long.
It also has sandbox mode where there’s no zombies and you can focus on farming, building, etc.
I think easy game modes take away what a great game makes a great game. I'm not sure if I can explain this with words, but if you are going to play on easy, then it means you don't want to play. At that point, its probably not a game for you. I'm talking across all kind of genres and type of games. However, if a game is unfair or badly designed, that is the moment when I would recommend using easy mode. And it depends on how the difficulty scaling is implemented. Some easy modes are really dumb and take away the core principles of the game, while others are very intelligently realized.
Your example is a great example of what I meant by that. You are not interested into the combat, therefore made it easy so it does not get in your way. You didn't turn it down because its unfair. What happens is, you are actively playing a game, which you don't want to. I don't know what exactly scales in that game, so maybe its not a bad easy mode at all, but can't judge the game.
I'm currently playing Metal Gear Solid 5 for the first time (just played a few hours on launch and now I'm back to it) on normal difficulty. The game can be brutal at times and there were multiple moments when I almost quit the game. Yet I did not turn easy mode, and now I'm happy that I overcome the challenge naturally. And that's what I mean. I you turn the game to easy mode, then you get into these habits of not solving the challenges.
This might be a weird one as the game is often blamed for not having difficulty settings, but Elden Ring. While it doesn't have a straight up setting that says easy, there's a lot of ways to make the game easier.
I really hate how Fromsoft put the "Prepare to Die" tagline onto Dark Souls when it came to PC and seems to develop into more bullshitty scenarios that kill you in unpredictable ways. Elden Ring has for example a lot of enemies that hold their attack for unintuitively long just to catch you off guard and punish you when you roll on the intuitive timing.
The community is to blame as well for the bad reputation of the games with people making fun of others using big shields and summons to beat the game. And herein lie the difficulty options of Elden Ring:
- Using greatshields makes a lot of the game a lot easier
- Using spirit ashes makes places that allow them a lot easier (as opposed to player and npc summons they don't affect the enemies health pool)
- Using magic allows you to attack with little risk to yourself
You can also summon other players but i don't know if that makes the game easier: As noted above it raised the enemies HP so everyone has to do their part to succeed but if you are a caster you can mostly sit back and blast enemies from afar while your summons tank. Using player summons also opens your world up for invasions and while the invader usually is in a 1v3 situation they also usually know what they are doing and how to deal with such situations.
If you're still stuck at a boss, just go somewhere else and explore. The game is designed to teach you that lesson with the first actual boss but a lot of people take it as the game just being hard.
All of this is to say: it is okay to use the games integrated mechanics that make it easy. It doesn't make you less of a gamer. Elden Ring has such a beautifully crafted world and if you're looking very interesting lore and it's a shame that seemingly all people talk about is the difficulty. It is actually the easiest Fromsoft title if you want it to be as it gives you a lot more and more powerful tools than the other games.
(Also if you see a chonky looking gal in black full body armour called Sieglinde, summon me. I have great heals, a big chonky sword and love helping people 😘)
XCom
Literally any fire emblem game, I might just have dum tho
I think there's something to be said about completing some games on yard difficulties, and Fire Emblem falls in that category. The category is puzzle games that require insane tactical strategy.
A lot of unit based RPG's function this way, and they do a really good job a lot of the time. But that is just one way to play the game, and quite frankly grinding through levels to "properly" beat a certain difficulty is certainly a better option for the majority of players.
There is something unique about finally completing a damning level, but it's only something that is there if the player has the drive to get that fulfillment.
I wouldn't say you have big dum, more likely you just value your time and the engagement of the game is more rewarding on lower difficulty, due to the element that is driving you to play the game. That is to say, it's aspects of the gameplay and the story that keeps you coming back, not necessarily the insane strategic plays needed to beat a hard level.
Both are completely valid forms of gameplay, the hardest difficulty is often min-maxxed and tends to account for a small section of players, and is probably included partly for replayability.
Mainly I jsit enjoy the games. Not great at them tho
Those games have a tough start, but if you can get over the initial hump then you can do pretty well in later level. That is until the final boss where shit hits the fan again.
Blue lions final boss is a hell of a time.
Also with awakening. Shit hits the fan c19. Send help
Maybe it’s a skill issue, but this game was Star Wars Jedi Knight 2 for me. I think I played it on the second easiest difficulty. On higher difficulties, the enemies move much faster and do more damage, and you start to realize how inaccurate the guns are. On top of that, the weapons are projectile weapons, so you’re aiming inaccurate and slow projectiles at stormtroopers shuffling left and right rapidly. I think it’s much more fun to just play on the first or second difficulty.
Uncharted, especially the final installment. On normal and higher difficulty dealing with the enemies becomes a bit of a chore: they force you to hide a lot, as well as waste entire clips of ammo on a single guy. On easy the game becomes forgiving enough food you too start pulling off cool stunts: swinging on ropes, shooting during a climb/jump, etc.
It's just more fun on easy.
I think I beat all of the non optional content in Celeste in non-assisit mode, but a lot of the difficult optional content becomes much more tolerable with assist mode. Even just setting it to 90% speed is amazing. My reflexes aren't great, and more importantly I don't have as much time as I used to. I don't want to spend hours trying to beat an optional challenge. They're still challenging at 90% speed in assist mode, but they don't take me hours to do.
Dungeon of the Endless you should try Easy mode because it's actually the normal mode lol. The easy mode is called Too Easy. Those are the only two difficulties (apart from a different world gen setting thingy).
I think people get too caught up on what difficulty you should play. If you get frustrated, turn the difficulty down. Then, if you get bored, turn it back up.
A game that gets a huge thumbs down from me is Resident Evil Village. I died a lot early on because I didn't understand the game and hadn't played a console fps in forever (and there was a graphical glitch making everything grayscale). The game asked me if I wanted to go to easy mode. I finally did. Once I got the hang of it I was ready to increase it back. NOPE! You can only go down to easy mode and then never change it ever. The reason this pisses me off is because are we so concerned with bragging about accomplishments in single player games that we remove useful features? Why? Who cares! I get the same anger towards and rogue like game that doesn't have a save and quit feature because they're worried about people save scumming. Oh boo hoo, maybe someone save scummed to beat the games, who cares? Sometimes shit comes up and I need to stop playing. I'd rather not have to throw away a whole run than worry about people saying they beat the game but save scummed their way to it.