Not when "everything" includes the player, and every enemies have shotguns to use against you.

At least those games let you change the difficulty mid-game. (Well, not Arena and Daggerfall, which don't have difficulty settings, except one in Daggerfall that affects enemy speed rather than damage and gives you faster leveling to compensate. Also, I don't know if Fallout 1/2/Tactics have difficulty settings.)

Also, I don't really consider the games to be RPGs (except Fallout 1/2/Tactics), as the combat there is affected by the player's skill and reflexes in doing things like dodging attacks; that's very different from a game like Dragon Quest or Final Fantasy, where avoiding attacks requires either not letting the enemies use them or finding a way to become immune. (Well, or a high evasion set-up and a bit of luck.)

In a game I consider to be an RPG, the implications of increasing enemy health and damage are quite different. In an action game, a good enough player can (in theory) just dodge all of an enemy's attacks, but that's not an option in an RPG. In an action game, a good player could, in theory, handle enemies with arbitrarily high health that kill in one hit (whether that would be fun is another matter), whereas that's not true in an RPG. If an enemy can kill you in one hit and you are not ablie to kill or disable the enemy in one action, you have no chance.

In Arkham City there were these training challenges like flying through a bunch of hoops. I did a few and then gave up... it was more frustrating (for me) than fun.

Which is not the case in Duke. Or are you talking in general?

But if we take Duke.

1) Getting 2 shot by a Pig Cop with 100 health is impossible even if you are in his face and he hits you fully.
2) You rarely get hit by the full blast (5 pellets).
3) Your health can go over 100 and you can also have armor.

1 and 2 do have difficulty settings, but they don't affect HP and damage. Not sure about Tactics.

Out of curiosity, what *do* they affect if not HP or damage, and can the setting be changed mid-game?

I'm talking in general.

One possible way a difficulty setting could work (in an action game) is to increase enemy damage while not changing their HP.

It depends on a lot of factors I think. The game has a respectable difficulty by default (medium) and to me at least it's very, very far from boring. It's just that after having beat the game 3 times I'd prefer some extra challenge. I hoped hard would give me that, but instead it just made the game frustrating.

I think part of the problem is that 'high risk but high reward' is the point behind the shotgun in Q4 (unlike in Duke Nukem 3D, or at least not nearly to the same extent). You have to get up close and personal and put yourself in more danger, but you get rewarded if you pull it off with a visceral close range kill. Depends on the enemy of course. Some are way too terrifying and force you to keep your distance, but these 'normal' Strogg ones are regular human sized opponents. It's simply annoying and immersion breaking to have to unload 4 shotgun blasts at close range into the face of human-esque opponent (without a helmet mind you).

True. It doesn't help much that the Shotgun in Duke is basically a sniper rifle.

When weapons start to feel unimpactful is a sign that the enemy HP went up by too much and I'd agree that 4 point blank shells required to kill a basic enemy is too much. The key is to have variety in the hit points of the enemy roster, not have everyone incredibly tanky just for difficulty's sake.

The problem with having difficulty mainly affect accuracy is that low accuracy tends to make things too frustrating and RNG-dependent. (Basically, the same problem that low-level combat in AD&D based games has.)

I think Wizardry 8's difficulty also tends to affect accuracy rather than damage.

In fact, I think it's better for damage to be tweaked rather than accuracy, as it leads to less RNG (and hence less frustration over being unlucky) and it also scales better. (I note that, for example, in D&D 3e with the Epic Level Handbook, at level 4000 a 1% diffierence in level can mean the difference between 5% and 95% accuracy; that's far too sensitive, and makes balancing the game at such extreme levels essentially impossible; contrast that to Disgaea, where such a small level difference has only a minor effect.) This is one thing that I feel JRPGs handle better than WRPGs; in Dragon Quest, for example, accuracy and evasion aren't level or stat dependent, but damage is, so you don't get tons of misses at low levels or have the problem of always hitting or missing at high levels with no improvement left. (Early Final Fantasy still has accuracy being the main thing that improves with level, but at least there you get extra attacks, much like in Wizardry.)


But then you get situations like Final Fantasy X's Penance, where once you have the right strategy, you basically can't lose but the battle still takes over half an hour (and the boss's high HP makes it necessary to have those powered-up celestial weapons that require difficult out-of-genre tasks to obtain).

There needs to be a balance somewhere.

(Final Fantasy IX's Ozma is more fun to watch, even if the battle is heavily RNG (for example, one of the boss's many attacks, which you might see repeatedly or not at all, hits your whole party for something like 200-9999, possibly wiping out your entire party except for the character who's almost dead). Maybe it is more fun than low level AD&D, in part, because the RNG doesn't make your attacks fail, but rather affects the enemy's actions.)

I am now on Icewind Dale 2 chapter 5, trying to kill that grey dragon after the Yuan-Ti temple. Yeah it feels damn hard, but apparently it can be done, I just need to figure out how.

The best point about it is that the battle is optional. You don't necessarily have to fight it in order to proceed in the game. So if I get fed up trying to figure it out, I guess I will just move on.

Overall, I am ok with very difficult parts in games, as long as I find it believable that the game designer or game tester could beat the game, if I asked them to prove it. There are some games where I suspect this was not the case.

Half Life 1 - i know exactly the area you are talking about. It was some type of core that you had to jump up but it had many levels and they were turning at differents speeds, so your timing and landing had to be perfect. I ended up rage quitting this area too, but then i decided to cheat and use the flying cheat that allowed you to float and go where ever you wanted then deactivate the cheat and safely land. It was the only way i could progress. I hate platforming in FPS. It was bad design and un-necessarily complicated.

CHEAT ENGINE has become my gaming bible these days. It helps me mod a game to the way i enjoy playing it. I don't care what the developers intended. I bought the game, so im going to play it the way i want to play it.

Thats awesome,!!
I have no problem with super difficult OPTIONAL stuff , what sucks is when some random mechanic is thrown at you that is really not part of the game mechanic and it is a barrier to continue

Finger of Death and keep trying until it gets a critical fail on its fort save.

The final boss in Hydrophobia. I enjoyed the whole game and it's water physics but found it to be fairly easy... until the final boss fight, which was insanely impossible, boring and repetitive unlike any other part of the entire game. After a multitude of attempts to finish it I gave up for a week then tried again a week later for another hour. Then I watched several walkthrough videos of the final fight and how to finish it and tried again for several hours until finally completely giving up and uninstalling the game. I play games to enjoy them and be entertained, and playing some impossibly difficult final boss just to finish a game and feeling angry the whole time is not part of what I consider fun or enjoyable, so I never did finish it and wont ever finish it.

The final level of Warcraft III: Not unlike the above game, the final level of Warcraft III is completely scripted and on a timer with which you have to survive several timed waves of enemies, by building up your army as fast as possible and dishing out as much damage while restraining your own losses and building up strong defenses at your main base which is where the final fight will occur. Only it doesn't really matter what you end up doing, you're so massively swamped by enemies that just about any strategy you employ you will end up getting mauled with massive devastation and have to repeat the 30 minute long or so level over and over again to the same result - an overly difficult unbalanced and not fun final battle to what was otherwise a fun game. I never did ever finish the level because like Hydrophobia, the final battle just was not fun for me at all, just a boring repetitive grindfest. I did watch someone else defeat it in a YouTube video, more or less using a strategy similar to mine, but just getting randomly lucky more or less and surviving it.

I hate it when games make impossibly difficult mandatory challenges that just are not fun at all like this, and contrast greatly with the entire rest of their game. It's out of place and just not fun, at least not for me. I like a challenge, even a difficult one, but not pointless grinding on a timer just for the sake of grinding.

Are you talking about original Xbox 360 version or the updated Prophecy version ? I played the Prophecy version on PC and I remember the boss fight was hard and required some luck as well, but I beat it in 15 minutes. Then I tried to do it again and I really struggled. There is a lot of going on with bombs, lasers, foot soldiers and you have to be lucky the boxes align well so you can throw them. Also it is a shame the game ends like 10 minutes after you get the water control powers, you didn't even have the chance to learn to use them, not to mention they could design some interesting water puzzles and stuff with it. A lot of untapped potential in that game and the engine itself, too bad developer shut down.

Yeah I read about that (and some other instant death spell) and I am trying that too, so far it hasn't worked.

However, yesterday I was VERY close to succeeding. I was actually able to kill the dragon, but I decided to reload the game because just seconds before dying, the dragon was able to kill my fighter. Anyway, this proved to me that it can be done, in a way I did it already.

Some notes:

- Even though my wizard has used three "lower resistances" spells on the dragon, none of my druid's spells seem to cause any damage to the dragon. At the same time though, at least the wizard is able to do some damage with magic missiles and such.

- None of my ranged weapons seem to do any damage, e.g. my thief has some +4 heavy crossbow and masterwork bolts, ineffective. I don't know how those ranged weapons are calculated anyway, are the plusses of the weapon itself and the ammo summed together or what?

- My Paladin has that skill to do extra damage to evil creatures, including dragons, and yep he can deal quite nice damage with the +4 Ice Lance or whatever it is. My fighter does respectable damage with his +4 axe and +4 long sword as well (ambidexterity + two hand combat).

- My main strategy, which seems to work, includes lots of micromanagement and pausing the game every few seconds. After puffing up my paladin and fighter with spells and summoning lots of creatures, I call the dragon and start fighting it with my two tanks

Since there are lots of summoned creatures around, the dragon concentrates mostly on them while my tanks hit him. As soon as I see he is targeting either of my tanks, I order that tank to run away from the blows, while the other tank keeps dealing damage. Keep doing that, always making the targeted tank to run away while the other attacks, and if some summoned creature is targeted instead, then both attack.

At the same time the wizard causes a bit of extra damage with magic missiles etc. and also remove fear if fear has struck some party members, and the cleric keeps casting the mass healing spells.

I was actually surprised how fast I was able to get the dragon to "almost dead" state. I guess my Paladin is quite a dragon slayer now.