Note: This thread has been recycled from another forum. Thread reuse is good for the environment, as it allows people to refresh and recycle their thoughts.

Ya know what? I turned off the combat in System Shock Enhanced, and I'm okay with that!
The game already has several ways to kill and stump the player (and I turned the puzzles up to advanced), the levels are mazes, and there are several resources to manage. And being a tourist in a disaster zone is an interesting thing, especially when you do have some agency.

In short, what's your opinion on Story Mode/Difficulty? Do you ever engage in content tourism?

Great topic, Darvond.

Games should be accessible to all people, but I can also understand the reasoning some devs have to maintain a minimum level of difficulty if it's part of the experience (eg:many roguelikes). Luckily, watching playthroughs is a great way for those players to still experience the game without wasting their money.

Easy mode becomes more appealing every day as you get older and you have less personal time to devote to gaming.

Especially Roguelikes; some of them going so far as to even penalize a player for choosing to enroll in an easier mode. Which is odd, when all Nethack does is disable the saving of scores. Tales of Maj Eyal on the other hand goes out of the way to antagonize the player, disabling the many tiered unlocks for playing with unlimited lives. And it has, shall we say a silly number of unlocks.

Many of those unlocks, I add with a glaring addition, rely on chance or specific circumstance.

And patience to go through all the annoying bits is lowered by a ton. Yep, i hear you. Used to balk at the idea of playing under hard or normal, and now i just don't care anymore., i'd like to beat the game in a relatively simple period of time so i can see the story.

Though depending on the game, increasing experience and gold by 10x makes the game, not easy, but streamlines a lot of games that would otherwise be grindy.

I try not to. If I have trouble playing I at least try a game on the lowest "playable" difficulty before resorting to the story mode.

Not to say story mode isn't worthy, it's just games which employ this option already have a gameplay difficulty woven in, so I tend to personally believe that if I'm not challenged at least a little then I'm not getting the complete experience. And I rarely like to replay linear games, so I approach each game as it comes.

But if someone else uses that mode? That's fine to me. I don't have problems with it existing.

I tend to play games on the lowest difficulty settings. Unless it cuts out some content (like for example, Amnesia Rebirth) then I play on the easiest difficulty that doesn't cut any content. I haven't played many, if any, roguelikes, so I'd like to know, are there any story-based games where difficulty plays a major part of the experience, and the game will be ruined without it?

One suggestion is Darkest Dungeon. All your deaths are related to the story. You could try a playthrough without losing anyone, but it's very hard to do so. The theme and later story dialogue would feel out of place because it already presumes many of your characters died already.

www.gog.com/en/game/darkest_dungeon

DLCs

- Musketeer - free
- Shieldbreaker - optional, but I like the character so easy to recommend
- Crimson Court - optional, changes base game to make it much harder, wouldn't recommend for 1st playthrough
- Colour of Madness - optional, it's a dungeon with constant enemy waves and triggers a strong monster that roams around in other dungeons

'Story Mode' comes in handy when you have to kill the biggest machine in HFW about 30 times and others even more often to upgrade your gear.
Apart from that I usually play "normal", I don't need a challenge. Exceptions are games like Dark Forces (which I always play on 'hard'). I managed to finish HZD on the hardest level and am currently trying in Spider-man to do the same.

But I find 'storymode' rather dull and boring. A friend of mine always plays this mode and his fights always take way longer than they take me. Reason? Because he'll survive anyway, he never bothers to get the right gear for the job, does not leanrn shit about elemental damage or where to get higher dps gear. So he just keeps shooting and shooting and shooting and shooting ...
(well, almost. If he happens to find something new along the way, he always choses the weapon with the highest dps, ignores all the other stats)

If it's handled like Even the Ocean, where (to my understanding) Story Mode basically removes the actual gameplay, I would not play on Story Mode because I play games for the gameplay, not story. (Well, maybe if I happen to be in the mood I might do a separate "playthrough" on that mode, but not on my main file.) In fact, I'd be more likely to play something like that game's Gauntlet Mode, which instead removes the cutscenes and story, keeping the gameplay intact.

(I wish more games, particularly RPGs (and especially JRPGs), would have something like Even the Ocean's Gauntlet Mode.)

I tend to default to "normal" or whatever the "middle ground" difficulty happens to be called. It's rare for me to go either lower or higher. I can't think of any instance of playing story mode, though I definitely don't see anything wrong with that. In fact, if I ever I give Divinity Original Sin 2 another try, after my initial abortive attempt, it will probably be in "explorer mode" if not outright "story mode".

Bottom line, everyone should play on whatever difficulty is most fun for them for any given game. And more games should give the option of changing difficulty throughout the game. I mean, unless I already played this particular game on every given difficulty, how the hell am I supposed to know how difficult it actually is? I played games that were more difficult on "easy" than some other games on "hard". Let me make an informed choice after I played for a while without restarting the whole thing.

Depends on the game. For some games playing them too easy you can either lose out on the challenge / content / atmosphere, eg, I wouldn't play horror games like Maid of Sker or SOMA where all enemies are removed / made completely passive as it would remove nearly all tension from the game and it's precisely tension that defines the horror genre for me vs just being a walking sim. For other games though that are stuffed with obvious cheap padding / bullet sponges, easy / story mode can be much needed de-grind that can actually make the underlying story feel more immersive / fluid (eg, stuffing Oblivion's difficulty slider to the max where it takes 48x sword swings to kill a L1 sewer rat is not 'hardcore challenge', it just feels silly).

Many games difficulty sliders are just dumb passive multipliers (50% / 100% / 150% on damage, HP's, etc) rather than gradually enhanced enemy AI, ie, Easy vs Medium vs Hard often doesn't "feel" harder to play, it feels the same but just takes longer. Some devs get Medium difficulty "feeling" right, whilst others are still bullet sponges even on easy. If "Story Mode" / Easy means the difference between being able to save anywhere vs consolized single-slot checkpoint-only with checkpoints placed 20mins apart, etc, (that again are far more about cheap gametime padding than being "challenging"), I will happily skip over such crap that intentionally disrespects the players often limited gameplay time these days.

And story mode gets programmed into games by gremlins?

I would say that in most games, story mode is more of a accessibility option than a "proper" game mode.
Maybe the "most games" I refer to, are just the games I came across.

So, are all difficulties "not proper", or just the story mode?

Anyway, and I know Isaid this before, the whole "as developer intended" logic is fundamentally flawed. Difficulty is entirely subjective. I may have the experience on medium difficulty someone else will have on "extra hard", and someone else on easy.