Comment by proc0
19 hours ago
This works for sandbox or simulation type games, but otherwise I think difficulty sliders are like going to a restaurant and getting all the cooked ingredients in separate plates for you to combine. While that can be fine and cater to the maximum number of people, it's a safe approach that wastes good opportunity cost of a great plate of food catered by someone with the skills to do it.
If a game can afford a designers to really think what the experience should be, I think the gold standard should be no difficulty slider. Playing the game should be a self-consistent experience that gets more difficult as you get better at the game, and gating the final content with skills is very rewarding and makes the experience feel more "real" than if you just get a super configurable game where everything can be turned on/off.
I’m not suggesting you hit a new player with a wall of configuration options. Guide them into the gameplay experience as you intended it, but also allow them to make changes to settings as relevant to the game.
I liked when games used to include cheat codes or debug commands. Let me trivialize the game if I want to. I paid for it and it’s my time I’m spending. Not once did I ever play The Sims as intended. And enjoyed it enough to buy another version or two. I used cheats all the time in WarCraft 2 and StarCraft single player.
And when games don’t include that, almost always someone will create a hack or mod that does do that, because there is a demand for it.
That's fair, but I think each difficulty level needs to be designed as its own challenge, as oppose to the developer exposing the internals of the game so you can turn all the nobs and make anything trivial.
In short, there needs to be intention and design, and not just exposing the developer tools, generally speaking.