Trashos
Arcane
- Joined
- Dec 28, 2015
- Messages
- 3,413
Because players want to play a badass (heroic fantasy) but playing a badass on Easy feels wrong. So it has to be on Hard but without any real effort.
Since AoD's #1 complaint was difficulty, we added 3 difficulty modes in DR to see if it solves the problem. To be honest, I was pretty sure it would but I had many conversations with very upset people who showed me the error of my ways.
One person was convinced that we made Hard and Normal too hard on purpose, to humiliate players and force them to play on Easy (as if we have nothing better to do). I tried to explain that Hard is for people who like challenging fights but that upset him even more, as if he wasn't good enough. So he couldn't play on Hard but refused to play on Easy or Normal. Oddly enough, quite a few players felt they were humiliated.
Another person felt that he deserved to win because he was a veteran player who beat Dragon Age on Hard (usually people namedrop Baldur's Gate to impress me with their credentials) and he shouldn't have to give enemies penalties (that's how the lower difficulty modes work) in order to beat the game. So again the reason is that the victory didn't feel so good if you know that you had to cripple the enemies. It has to feel real so next time we'll go with these difficulties: Hero, Great Hero, the Greatest Hero. No penalties to enemies, that's just wrong, but your super saiyan powers will grow exponentially with each difficulty level. The harder the game, the easier it should be.
It might worth it checking out Civ4's difficulty levels (I am talking about Civ4, because it's the last Civ I 've played). It offered dozens of difficulty levels for idiots, so by the time one reached "Normal", he already felt like he was doing better than all the people who play on all those levels below. (To this day, I don't know if anyone actually plays on Civ's lower difficulties. Maybe they are just there for psychological support.)
I also seem to remember that the highest difficulty had the comment "Bwahahahaha!". Indeed it is extremely tough, and very few people play on it. Civ does a good job of making players feel OK despite difficulty on higher levels.