LogFAQs > #981894016

Notti posted...

I think more games should try to have easy and hard together.

Like, basic victory is easy. But going above and beyond in difficulty opens up new paths, dialogue, or prizes.

That's just hard mode done properly, as well as a good demonstration of why some games don't have an easy mode. To use the obvious example of Dark Souls, you could absolutely double the player's damage and half the damage that enemies do and it would make the game easier. However, the encounters are designed with the original values in mind, as are all the weapons, levels, enemies, even the arrangement of enemies. If you adjust one value without adjusting the others, it's generally less fun. Souls combat without both parties getting hit hard is just a clunky action game.

MGS5 did this nearly perfectly imo. Each mission had main objectives that you could do pretty much however you wanted, although your score was better if you went stealthy and had zero kills. You also had bonus objectives that increased your score and sometimes unlocked bonus equipment and other side missions, which were often more difficult or sometimes timed. Finally, you could bring whatever equipment that you wanted, but it all had a cost with better equipment obviously being more expensive.

The end result was that if you went in guns blazing for the objective, it would be easy and your score would be low. If you went with minimal equipment and went for the side objectives, you'd be well rewarded. Anything in between these extremes was possible too. The player was able to finely tune their difficulty without so much as glimpsing a difficulty selection menu.