They kinda do, in this respect. When huge warning signs didn’t work, devs started locking the highest difficulties until you beat the game once or implementing a hidden system that lowers difficulty or sneaks you some goodies if you keep dying too much.
When huge warning signs didn’t work, devs started locking the highest difficulties until you beat the game once or implementing a hidden system that lowers difficulty or sneaks you some goodies if you keep dying too much.
Adaptive difficulty has been a thing for decades. The first one I remember is Max Payne, released 25 years ago, though I don’t remember if it was active on all difficulty settings…
Yeah I realised that might have been the case as I was hitting “comment” and was like “oh well” - just my first impression was that you meant to imply that it was recent :)
You never know how old someone is around here. Not long ago I saw someone write something like “maybe they didn’t learn about 9/11 at school” and after a quick calculation I was ready to go climb into a grave and stay there =P
No, but people these days are very stupid. AAA game design these days tries to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The C-suite types don’t want a player bouncing off their game because the player was too dumb to select the right difficulty type for themselves.
Their solution seems to have been to phase out difficulty selection altogether though. It’d have been more fun if they tried something like this though.
I think, with modern AAA games, you also run into the problem that they’re typically a dozen games in a trenchcoat. So, you might be able to make the shooting gameplay more difficult by just adding more enemies, but you can’t easily do that for the platforming parts or the stealth sidequests.
You’d need to build the game three times over, pretty much, to really offer three different difficulty levels.
And so, yeah, they try to avoid that by giving help to players that struggle and optional challenges for players that can handle a higher difficulty.
Replay value doesn’t really have to do with difficulty. That’s what all these mobile game designers found out. They get replayability through a reward system or adding some kind of social aspect to it for peer pressure.
No game developer is going to try to reduce time playing their game though.
Some games literally have a “speed time up” button. I use those all the time.
They kinda do, in this respect. When huge warning signs didn’t work, devs started locking the highest difficulties until you beat the game once or implementing a hidden system that lowers difficulty or sneaks you some goodies if you keep dying too much.
Adaptive difficulty has been a thing for decades. The first one I remember is Max Payne, released 25 years ago, though I don’t remember if it was active on all difficulty settings…
I didn’t say it was a recent development, but if anything it has more common over the years.
Yeah I realised that might have been the case as I was hitting “comment” and was like “oh well” - just my first impression was that you meant to imply that it was recent :)
You never know how old someone is around here. Not long ago I saw someone write something like “maybe they didn’t learn about 9/11 at school” and after a quick calculation I was ready to go climb into a grave and stay there =P
They teach that in sehool?
💀
No, but people these days are very stupid. AAA game design these days tries to appeal to the lowest common denominator. The C-suite types don’t want a player bouncing off their game because the player was too dumb to select the right difficulty type for themselves.
Their solution seems to have been to phase out difficulty selection altogether though. It’d have been more fun if they tried something like this though.
I think, with modern AAA games, you also run into the problem that they’re typically a dozen games in a trenchcoat. So, you might be able to make the shooting gameplay more difficult by just adding more enemies, but you can’t easily do that for the platforming parts or the stealth sidequests.
You’d need to build the game three times over, pretty much, to really offer three different difficulty levels.
And so, yeah, they try to avoid that by giving help to players that struggle and optional challenges for players that can handle a higher difficulty.
Replay value doesn’t really have to do with difficulty. That’s what all these mobile game designers found out. They get replayability through a reward system or adding some kind of social aspect to it for peer pressure.