Assassin's Creed has no difficulty settings. Other such games that I have played: Door Kickers and Planescape Torment.

I don't like when game has multiple difficulties.

But I like when there are easily accessible cheat codes :))

Ziggurat. The Easy difficulty is fairly trivial, but the Normal difficulty is a major challenge. Never even tried Hard.

I appreciate it when games have that kind of range, from casual to hardcore. Realms of Chaos is interesting in that the difficulty changes certain game mechanics. On the lowest difficulties, player characters start off with maximum health and weapon power, enemies take few hits, enemy attacks only do half a point of damage, and there is no knock-back when the player character is hit. On more difficult settings, players will have to find power ups to increase their weapon damage, enemies do a full point of damage and knock the character back, enemies take more damage, you may find additional poison potions that can harm you, and some levels even have forced scrolling so you have to keep moving. And IIRC in Commander Keen Episodes 4 and 5, there are some enemy types that only appear on more difficult settings.

I usually play on Hard.

Another example of this is Quake. On Hard the maps actually sometimes change and have more usually small areas that are not seen in the other difficulties. On Nightmare enemies attack much faster and are more aggressive, however this lends them to be more exploitable.

Most games can't balance their hard difficulty well, but I played FEAR on Extreme and was really impressed with how balanced it still felt. Enemies could take you down in 2-4 shots, but you could down them just as quickly. Made for a much more intense experience in those gun fights :D

FEAR 2 on the other hand, felt lopsided on Hard, and Normal was WAY too easy. Pretty disappointing as it took away from my enjoyment of the game. Do I want practically zero challenge or unfair one shot deaths across the map?

I agree :)

Usually I play games on easy for the same reasons as Prah, but sometimes I go for higher difficulties, especially in role-playing games, or if I have already finished the game before (which doesn't happen very frequently, because I don't like playing the same games many times). A game which had well-balanced difficulty levels is Oni (I really would like this one on gog), it was really possible to finish it on Hard without cheating. Otherwise there are too many games where Easy = too easy, Normal = difficult and Hard = impossible =P

I think difficulty settings are important. I tend to like challenge, and the rewarding feeling for dealing with challenging situations, so I tend to start on harder difficulties. I also think I suck less than the average player, at least in first person shooters -- so a difficulty optimized for the average would likely be too easy. Then again there are cases when I want to just "see the game" (e.g. the story, or just the atmosphere & experience the game manages to deliver) when I don't actually like the [usually boring, tedious, repetitive] gameplay mechanics that provide the main challenge. So if I can turn it down, I might enjoy the thing until the end.

It does take time and effort to properly implement difficulty levels though. As a matter of fact, I expect a "hard" game to be more *intense*, not just "hard". The lazy way of making a game hard, e.g. by reducing your hitpoints, adding to the enemies', and making them deal enough damage to often instakill you can actually make a game less intense, and more cowardly and slow paced. It takes tons of playtesting to properly balance difficulties, and it becomes harder and harder to judge the difficulty of your own game as you're so familiar with it (and get better at it all the time).

In other cases, people just screw up otherwise. Take Painkiller. I wanted challenge as usual so I started on a harder difficulty. Turns out this disables an interesting game mechanic entirely. On the easier difficulties you can collect souls OSLT from defeated enemies, and if you collect enough, you turn into a weird.. I don't know, monster, shadow, what? It's cool, and adds some depth to the game. And when you start on hard, that mechanic doesn't exist, at all. Shame.

People who think there should be only one difficulty setting are probably severely underestimating players' skill range and desired play style. Like I said, I think I'm pretty good in first person shooters. A big fan of Doom in particular, I'm always looking forward to new community wads, which tend to be *much* harder than the original game (or indeed most shooters on the market), if only due to the fact that these people have been playing Doom for up to 20+ years now. I always start on UV and try to do each level from a pistol start, and I think I fare better than the average. Yet there are levels that I may barely nail on my sixth attempt, in a wad that I find overall hard. Then I go watch first run demos from people who nail these levels on the first try (same settings as me).. and their comment about the wad is that it's a bit too easy and thus boring. Friggin Doom gods. With these setups, most players would just quit the game after dying two dozen times on the first three levels. Such a game wouldn't fare well on the market... thankfully, difficulty levels exist.

Difficulty settings are good, lazy game developers are lazy. Unfortunately.

How about racing games? For me, racing is most intense when you're treading the fine line between "faster than everyone else" and "fast enough to end up in a career-ending crash". How fast this is depends on your skill. Unfortunately, the average gamer either isn't very good at driving, or just doesn't take the game too seriously. So you find that in most racing games, you can crash and bump into things without much penalty. Heck, in some cases, it is actually faster to crash sideways into a wall (letting the wall align your car with the road up ahead) than braking into the corner and driving as you would if you weren't trying to kill yourself. Unfortunately, such arcade-y driving doesn't feel intense for me. If I can bump into shit and get sloppy without consequence, I will start to get sloppy and unfocused and the game will start to bore me... and, unfortunately, only some of these games allow you to select a "realistic" difficulty.

Instead, most of them have rubber banding. Sometimes very severe -- I'm looking at you, NFS Underground (2). Recently I had some trouble with a circuit so I kept trying, constantly getting better and better personal records. But the AI cheaters followed suit and consistently outrode me by a few seconds every time I set a new record. Now, if I crash, I usually restart the race right away. I was starting to get a little frustrated/bored, and made a few blunder corners, plus a head on crash into oncoming traffic... I didn't know whether to quit or restart so I just kept riding. As expected, that race was my slowest one so far. I also won that race, because the rubber banding made the AI suck so much more. Go figure.

NFSU actually has difficulty levels, but it probably just modulates the AI's speed on what appears to be (mostly) a pre-recorded route. So, at least on hard, you'll find them cornering specific corners tighter and faster than the game ever allows you to do with a car built for maximum handling & acceleration... Yeah, I suppose it makes the game harder. Not really more intense though, more just grindy or frustrating, on certain races. The difficulty is all over the place though, so other races can be beat without even trying.

yes

I find that the curve they use to make the game harder is more important than the actual level of difficulty. Too many games I've played have one or two areas that are stupidly hard and break the momentum I've built up while playing.

Hard is fine, but when it's hard because they messed up the camera like they did with PoP:SoT, that's not something I'm going to put up with, especially if it's coupled with check point saving.

no mention yet of Blood's borked difficulty?

As has been said, it's hard to balance a game when different people have different conception of difficulty. That's why I think it's good when a game gives you a brief description of each difficulty level and who it's meant for. I also like the way Bastion did it, with a bunch of different idols that you could turn on or off to tweak the difficulty to your liking.

As long as it's reasonably consistent within a particular difficulty setting, not a problem.

One thing I do like is the ability to alter various settings within a range to sort of create your own difficulty level. For instance, adjustable AI aggression and/or overall strategy, accuracy, detection range, that sort of thing. And even more so in, for instance, 4x games where you can make individual setting for each AI opponent.

I really dont get the idea that much. I play most games on EASY and leave it at that. If the game is giving me extreme difficulty on that level then i trash the game-Pure and simple

However if the game is supposed to be hard for a reason then i will play on easy and grin and bear it. I guess you could look at it like if the game is fun but frustrating then no matter how good it is-I will trash it like titan quest and probably grim dawn.

I have to really really like the game if its difficult and fun to get through it. Im extremely picky.

I found Wasteland 2 to be a clusterfuck on normal difficulty, completely unenjoyable and a mess, so I switched to the designed difficulty "ranger" mode and everything immediately started to click and be fun and rewarding.