Difficulty and Challenge

This was discussed the other day in Daily chat, but how i like my weapons and my music, i like to make threads to facilitate discussions to various other topics.

So, Difficulty and Challenge. These are two words that are often spoken about regarding our video game experiences. We have had countless discussions on various media outlets regarding the difficulty and challenge of video games and how should they be designed and executed.

What do you consider as "Difficulty" and "Challenge"? What video games can you cite that perfectly executes the kind of difficulty and challenge you seek in video games? What are some of your favorite as well as disliked concepts regarding difficulty and challenge? Etc so on and so forth.

This discussion refers mainly to single player or player vs environment (PVE) in video games. Competitive or Player vs Player is a far different story that will be discussed soon in a different thread.

PS:
EVERY THREAD poster MUST answer my survey then proceed to post their sentiments.

So when you fire up a game and you see those difficulty levels (As seen in the picture used for the thread), what difficulty level would you pick and why?

Oh and it is very important for you all to take the survey as seriously and as honestly as you can. I'm doing an actual survey.

Power Fantasy aka I wanna feel empowered just like GamerTron (whobtw is a skroobb)


Can I play Daddy?


Harsh/Hurt me Plenty


Brutal or ULTRAVIOLENCE BABY! ALL DAY EVERYDAY IN THE F***KIN PANTS!


The next few difficulty levels are the "Secret" difficulty levels after playing enough of the game in either Hurt Me Plenty (normal) or Ultraviolence (Hard) and are for those who truly want an even more challenging experience. All of the more extreme difficulty levels retain the enemy volume from "Ultraviolence"

I'm a man and a half:


12.0 on the 10 point scale of badness:


I AM THE PAINKILLING DEATH INCARNATE


The Last Heroic Challenging Man on this Lunatic Hell on Earth OF LEGENDS aka You win B**ches and Fanboys

Harsh and Brutal are the way to go, since everything above just bloats HP and damage output. Good AI would be more aggressive, but having more HP just makes it tedious rather than tough and challenging. That's why difficulty in games like Fallout and TES is a joke and playing it on anything higher than Normal just makes the game tedious. Good high difficulty should make both you and the enemy easier to kill than just making you easy to kill and the enemy a massive HP blob.

Any difficulty above Harsh is considered "difficult" or "challenging" according to a lot of gamers I see in other places of the internet, including PC. If they see you playing any easier modes, they'll ridicule you for not being a true gamer like them, because they grew up with brutally difficult games. These games including quarter-eating arcade games like Double Dragon and Ghosts 'n' Goblins, NES titles like Kid Icarus and Ninja Gaiden, and the 16-bit era games like the DKC trilogy and Kid Chameleon.

I go with Brutal/Normal Mode, since I always like to play games in its most standard difficulty.

If there's one thing i love about the difficulty/skill level in certain games, they make sure that they don't go just the whole "increasing enemy stats" trope.

I can easily cite the likes of Classic Doom as one of the best examples of well put difficulty levels, hence that's why i've used the Doom mod, Brutal Doom: Project Brutality's difficulty select screen as the thread's picture. Anyway, in Classic Doom, lower difficulty levels decrease not only the enemies but also replace certain enemy types with weaker enemy types, which is quite prevalent with Doom 2. On the other hand, putting the game on Ultraviolence (the difficulty I always play Doom at, even Doom 2016) not only gives a craploads more enemies to fight, but higher tier enemies also appear in earlier stages, such as the ever famous Revenant in the first few tiles in Map 06: The Crusher (Normally, The Revenant isn't there at all since this is a higher tier enemy).

Metal Gear Rising on the other hand also does something like this in its difficulty levels. In anything after normal (Hard, V, Hard, Reveangeance) Not only are you given more aggressive enemies, you also fight higher tier enemies earlier as well. Like fighting a Gecko during at R-00 Guard Duty.

I would have liked the way Halo does their difficulty settings if it didn't involve directly buffing the enemy's defenses. I find that really cheap and poor in the game design department. Like come on, do game developers know how to make actual challenge without over inflating their egos?

Oh survey. Anyway, I'm quite used to difficulty that's slightly harder than hard, so I went with Man and a Half. At least in that setting, I'm okay with the increased enemy damage, as long as the defenses aren't.

So i played a bit of Quake 4 and i just found that playing the game on any difficulty other than Corporal (Normal) was pointless because of oh you know, that lovely game design flaw of "HIGHER ENEMY HEALTH = HARDER DIFFICULTY!? ARIIIGHT!?" seriously, whoever came up with that choice of difficulty/challenge design should seriously reconsider things, especially when their game (mentioning Quake 4 here) doesn't even have the whole fundamentals of headshots to quicken enemy deaths to compensate for the beefed up enemy health. I tried several times. Quake 4 has no headshots, yet Doom 3 had them.

Then again, Quake 4 wasn't even made by Idsoftware. Raven Software did, and with Publishing by Activision (sigh...) I mean Raven Software is okay and all, but yep Activision... this was during Quake 4's time.

So I'm replaying Duke Nukem 3D and i do have to say, this game especially in its fairest hard difficulty setting "Come get some" is quite challenging considering how crazy the enemy placements are in the later levels. Aside from more enemies to kill, tougher enemies also present earlier than usual. Love it. This is how the barebones of difficulty scaling should be. It definitely took well from Classic Doom. My only gripes really with Duke 3D is that a lot of the more basic weapons other than the good ole Shotgun lack any sort of power or punch behind them thus requiring more use of ammo, and its scarcity is really an issue.