Unfortunately, most games nowadays are in fact not creative or efficient with their difficulty settings.
"Nowadays"? The vast majority of games at any stage in the industry's history haven't increased difficulty in particularly inventive ways. The conflation of tedium with difficulty has been around for as long as gaming has. Games that do difficulty right are - and have always been - rare gems.
I remember a lot more in the earlier days, like Doom which adds enemies but has no lazy effect on damage, or Streets of Rage 3 where it not only adds enemies and enemy types, but several stages and a true ending on the harder difficulties. I'm not sure I've played anything even remotely recent like that. A game at its hardest difficulty should challenge you to every single aspect of the gameplay and require a firm understanding or ability to adapt and learn very quickly... Essentially the "true" experience. Not simply make it more difficult to get to the next cutscene or something.
Maybe I'm just unhappy with the integrity of the gaming industry, and difficulty is just one reason.
Yeah. But even still, it was rare that a game made things hard in a good way. You can sure name a lot of games. But when you compare that to the number of games that made a lazy hard mode, the number starts to look pretty minuscule... ---
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