Hated Tropes
[Hated Trope] Games gatekeeping low difficulty players
Platypus Reclayed (This feature was deleted after the community feedback here lol)
Cuphead
The Binding Of Isaac: Fiend Folio (the only instance of this trope well executed)
Undertale (reverse trope)
Disclaimer: the first example shown is actually outdated as when I bought this game the developers listened to the feedback and made the final level accessible to all difficulties.
I'm not talking about locking cutscenes, achievements and other non-gameplay content. I'm talking about games not allowing the player to progress unless they choose a specific difficulty.
I'm not against games mocking the player for choosing low difficulty. That can be pretty funny sometimes, assuming the game is still playable.
I feel like the worst part about this trope is how deceptive it actually is. When I pick the difficulty for a game, I want to play a game at that difficulty. And the game wastes the players time by forcing them to play higher difficulty after finishing.
Platypus Reclayed - due to community feedback, this feature was removed, and the final level is now accessible to everyone. Considering that the game substantially increased in difficullty this was especially painful. I'm glad devs realised that though.
Cuphead - not only simple mode prevents your progressing and is not accessible on final bosses, it also straight up doesn't allow you to experience some phases. Which means it cannot even be used to practice the bossfights, unlike some other incarnations of this trope.
The Binding Of Isaac: Fiend Folio - calling "Super Easy mode" a "difficulty" is a little bit of a stretch as it plays more like a minigame than a variation of the base game. And it's so short you can't even complain about your time being wasted.
Undertale - reverse trope: the "hard difficulty" ends prematurely. This one works because it's: a) the mode is very quick, b) is NOT treatet like a hard mode for the base game c) the reversal of this trope is actually pretty unique IMHO.
Came to post this. Iirc the last level of Twisted Metal 3 is eithet inaccessible or after you beat it, you just dont get to see the ending on easy mode. Can't remember which
Yeah he doesn’t give them what they want at all, he just ends up being a dick to them all. Same with the endings of 4. So both games end up as excessive destruction with the real prize being a giant middle finger and a “thanks for wasting your time dumbass”
Yeah, don’t get me wrong Calypso is always a dick, but more often than not he tends to less directly screw them over, and more just let them do it themselves. In 3 man was just done with everyone and deliberately tortured them just to get it over with.
The only one that was happen was disco kid or whatever his name was.
Everyone else got fucked.
Mr Grimms is the best one, but also I’d hate to get it since he’s the hard mode character (he rides a motorcycle in a car combat competition where the cars launch missiles, flaming ice cream scoops, and tornados. He’s a glass cannon with a crack in it) and it would really piss me off at the time if I got that ending
Grimm’s ending is basically he wants Calypso’s soul(same as his wish in TM1 oddly enough), so Calypso gives him the sole of his shoe via kicking him in the head.
There's also one with Grasshopper or his daughter who is actually a robot with a bomb, and Calypso hugs her despite knowing he would die.
One of the funnier endings was the duo who wanted to fly and Calypso was gonna give them first-class tickets. He didn't really screw them over since they were idiots who thought they could literally fly. Both I think we're in Twisted Metal 2.
The X-men game for the Sega Genesis ends halfway through the campaign if you are playing on the amateur difficulty. It also is one of the hardest games made for the console
Holy shit, I had this game. I don’t think I ever got the end of it without using a Game Genie to skip to the last levels. There was a ton of variety in how you played, as each of the four primary X-Men had their own abilities and move sets. But there some infuriating decisions that made some of the characters way more difficult.
For instance, you could crouch to duck below some enemy projectiles; except for Gambit, he’d still get hit. He’d be like half standing up and the projectiles would just hit him in the face instead of going over his head. Wolverine, the guy known for his healing factor, would steadily lose health while he had his claws out. Iirc he also had a worse jump than everyone else making some of the platforming a lot more difficult. Night Crawler’s teleport let you skip big sections of the game by going through walls to the next part. Still, it was a lot of fun when I was a kid, although I bet it’d be frustrating nowadays.
Wolverine, the guy known for his healing factor, would steadily lose health while he had his claws out.
Each of the four character had a health and a mutant power bar. Wolverine's mutant power would steadily decrease if his claws were out. The mutant power regenerated if you weren't using your powers.
Wolverine does have a healing factor in the game, but it's very slow. I used to clear the enemies in the area, then leave for a few minutes while Wolverine's health regenerated.
Night Crawler’s teleport let you skip big sections of the game by going through walls to the next part.
I love how busted Nightcrawler's power was. It dealt good damage to any enemy you went through while teleporting, too.
That reminder I think made me remember what it was, I believe that he lost health if you tried to use claws while out of mutant power. Nightcrawler was by far my favorite, even though my brother and sister said Cyclops was better I just loved zipping around the screen as a purplish blob while teleporting.
This happens a lot in older games before the 6the generation. Take Twisted Metal 2 and the stop sign with the message “No losers allowed beyond this point”.
TM2 can get away with it because it happens just after Minion's boss fight at the halfway point of the game.
Twisted Metal is not the kind of game that takes dozens of hours to finish it, it's meant to be replayable with different vehicles so a "try a harder difficulty" here is far from being as bad as the rest of examples.
Doesn't really fit the prompt, but it's too weird not to mention. In Pokemon Black 2 and White 2, beating the game unlocks... Easy Mode. Yeah, you need to beat the game to unlock the lower difficulty. I guess the idea is to send the game to younger players after you beat it, but... just have it unlocked from the start.
It's even weirder because the difficulty settings are version exclusive. You only unlock easy mode by beating White 2 and you only unlock hard by beating Black 2. If you want to play Hard mode on White 2 you need to have a completed copy of Black 2 to give you the difficulty option in White 2.
Also whomever thought it was a good idea to monetize features in modern games, that were originally free and part of the game in previous installments.
And this shit ain't even a hard mode. Sure, they tweaked some of the Gym Battles and the Champion fight. Game Freak increased the opponents' levels, but they forgot to actually increase their stats, so you're actually stronger than you are in the base game. Since you get more exp when you are underleveled
Fun fact about that oversight, there actually ARE trainers who have their stats properly match their level between difficulties, but it's just the trainers fought in Funfest Missions for some reason
What worse is that during gen 5,if u fight an opponent weaker and equal to ur level,ur exp is halved so u don't easily level past them.Hard Mode made it easy since every one does have a higher level,just not the stats.
Easy Mode lowers Trainers' Pokemon's levels, but doesn't actually lower their stats to match, meaning that all it does is slightly decrease their damage dealt (since damage calculation takes into account the user's level) as well as make it slightly easier to land OHKO moves, while lowering the amount of money gained after winning due to the level decrease.
So it doesn't even do that good of a job of providing an easier play experience.
And on the same note Hard Mode makes trainers more rewarding, and Pokémon speedrunners have a category specifically for it because of how it affects their battle strategies.
And thing is only WHITE 2 SPECIFICALLY has easy mode. Black 2 gives you Hard mode and you have to fully beat one to have the ability to send a difficulty option to the other.
And ON TOP OF ALL THAT BULLSHIT!
Easy mode is technically more difficult…because they didn’t program the fucking difficulty right…the enemy Pokémon are said to be lower leveled but they actually aren’t…the only difference the level makes is you get less XP for defeating them…so for Easy mode you’ll be lower leveled, while on Hard mode you’ll be higher leveled and the opponent’s Pokémon don’t change their stats for each difficulty so Easy mode just makes you fight with less power.
One of the funniest examples of this is in superman 64, an infamously frustrating and dogshit game, but to even access the finale, you need to play the game on it’s highest difficulty. Like imagine trudging through the agonizing journey to even make it to the game’s finale, only for the game to flick you in the ass and tell you to try again on a higher difficulty so you can see it’s dogshit conclusion.
It’s funny because the game is so broken that you can glitch your way to the ending on easy mode anyway
It’s actually speedrunning strat to play the game on easy mode (since that mode removes the god forsaken rings) and then glitch to the ending on the final level
But thats for 100% completion, and you can beat all of the bosses and get most unlocks on easy mode; so it doesnt lock you out of a big chunk of the game like the other examples.
b-but how can you live without SMELTER?! And without the fuckton of multiplayer babies?!
but yeah it also locks you out of godhead which is pretty good
Pretty much anything vaguely roguelike that ChillyRoom touches. Abyssal Soul is the most rouguelike, though it's gacha, it's kind gacha. That one is more the not quite slay the spire style.
Been a while since I touched any others, I just downloaded all of their games that I missed for this week LOL.
ChillyRoom had the most soul crushing fall from grace, i remember when Soul Knight was an offline game without seasonal bs and i feel like screaming because of what we lost.
I don't care about anything they ad, create a custom infinite attack 0 mana rapid fire for real money if they want. All I need is offline mode, and I won't install it back untill it's returned to us
I believe that's because they are designed around harder difficulties.
That the binding of Issac, for example. That gamę is literally designed against playing it in hard mode, since most unlocks are locked behind that and normal mode is more of a practice thing, especially if you are playing the game blind and don't know how to unlock stuff.
I rented it, played on easy cause I only had a day. Game play is exactly the same except it just stops at different places. On easy, you don't even get to enter the castle! What a waste of a rental, and a Saturday morning.
This game inexplicably locks you out of not only the ending, but also half the levels unless you play on the hardest difficulty, in which you die in one hit
Apparently this was another case of localizers in the 90s making the American versions of games unfairly difficult, because you can access all the levels on Normal difficulty in the Japanese version. there’s a fan made patch for the North American version that fixes this though.
Yeah, this is the likely answer. iirc the developers of the Lion King game for the SNES and Genesis intentionally made it WAY too hard for an average kid to beat specifically because they didn’t want kids renting it from blockbuster and finishing it in a single weekend.
That makes a lot of sense. I'm old enough to remember trying to power through games in a weekend when my parents got them from Blockbuster. I'm sure there were a ton of other kids doing the same thing.
Fairly certain several developers have gone on record stating this, at least one at Virgin who worked on the Lion King tie in game. Also Konami was infamous for doing it across 8 and 16 bit eras. Working Designs was also infamous and 7th Saga from Enix and Produce is another infamous example.
Exclusive to hard difficulty is the final battle against The End, a larger-scale version of the hacking missions. However, on easy and normal, it’s truncated down to just the final quick-time event
Honestly, not even hard just tedious. You blow it's health down before it even finishes it's speech but it won't let you take away the last bit until it finishes said speech.
Somehow The Final Horizon expansion does the reverse (kinda)
They did adress the parry being overpowered because you could keep your guard for more than 10 seconds before punishing your enemy, the problem is that the new parry window was so short (especially with the Wyvern titan being hard to counter) that it drastically ruined people's fun.
Well, that's what happens when you have to make a whole DLC with 3 more characters with their own moveset in a year.
Isn’t the parry window on hard like 12 frames or something? And doesn’t the secret even more difficult mode have only fucking 4 frames too?
Like the is brutal for a game not designed around timing parries originally (like look at when you gotta parry some of the Titans attacks…that shit was not made under the assumption players only have a TWELVE OR FOUR FRAME WINDOW to parry) and it’s especially telling that The Supreme End fight which was made for the Final Horizon and forces the Perfect Parry stuff on you, suddenly has accurate parry timings for the attacks…hmm wonder why that fight’s suddenly way less annoying to try and parry during?
I seriously have no clue why they did that like would it have been that hard to just make it shoot fewer projectiles? I beat the game on Normal (like most first time players probably did) and was confused on why it seemed so anticlimactic. Didn’t help that I didn’t understand how Supreme worked in the slightest and was pretty much just mashing buttons.
At least we have Final Horizon now. Iirc playing on easy mode (among other things, probably) makes the parry window much more forgiving, which was basically the only way I had any hope of beating those bosses. Seriously, why did they introduce perfect parrying with no buildup whatsoever? The tower trials beforehand were the perfect place to do that.
To be fair, having frisk be the original name in undertale would have kind of broken it, so it was probably best they did cut it short. Otherwise, he would have to rewrite the entire plot for hard mode.
But that kind of screws the entire message. The entire point was that Frisk was not blank slate and their own person separate from the player, rather than the design the player chose. Toby even does this again with Deltarune where he scraps your created character.
Yeah, but to name the character Frisk you have to already have beaten the regular game and found out that name, so you'll already have seen the message.
This isn't relevant to anyone but myself, but my childhood copy of Tony Hawk's Underground was so scratched that if you chose the Easy difficulty, the game would freeze after a few missions.
I'd complete the "Impress Chad Muska" mission and the game would immediately freeze. 10 year old me thought it was the game telling me to change the difficulty
If you chose Normal, the freeze would not happen and you could play the entire rest of the game.
The first time I played Tony Hawk Pro Skater I didn’t have a memory card and somehow everything was already unlocked. I thought that was just how the game was until the next day when I turned it on and could only access the first level. Never been able to replicate the glitch.
Similar trope, when a game requires 100% for the true ending
To be clear a game giving a better ending for 100% is fine and giving a poor ending for doing the bare minimum is fine (ironically doing the bare minimum can be harder sometimes)
My problem is when its "oops you didn't collect every collectable and didn't replay every level with every character, you don't get a satisfying ending"
Ha, X-2 is exactly what I thought of. I had a Tips and Tricks Magazine that had a complete 100% guide, but I was still daunted with anxiety over actually doing the task.
I tried to do it. I don't know what I missed but I missed some tiny thing and I wasn't gonna scour the entire game for it.
The 100% reward is frankly not worth it at all, even if it was a 90% it heavily pales in comparison to the hidden good ending, which has no % tied to it and thus you'll definitely see before you even try to go for 100% the extra cutscene.
FFX2 was just ridiculous because even if you actually revisited every location and talked to every NPC to see a few lines of throwaway dialogue that count for .5% of completion for some reason, you could still miss out because you didn't do it in a particular order.
X2 also has some kind of trigger in a cutscene that you have to respond to and press a button or else you don't get the best ending, the one where yuna looks really Japanese suddenly and tidus looks like he just got back from Chernobyl.
This, on too of having to 100% the game for the final ending is only further compounded by the fact you need complete a whole entire game to even get to this end. It demands so much of you just to gatekeep it all
There was a collectable earlyish on you had to get on first visit to the area iirc as it would not be accessible again. If you missed it then that play through wasnt getting 100%. Total BS.
Pragmata is a good example of it. You still get the same end, but if you do the 100% plus the unknown signal mode, you'll get a little bonus dialogue in the end, one single character speaks but says something that changes a lot.
Expanding on this: Tom Clancy’s Wildlands has a ridiculously bullshit ending mechanic requiring you to beat the final boss twice.
The first time, the game assumes you did not complete everything and El Sueno gets off. The second time becomes available after completing every optional target.
Except if you do all the optional targets first, the game STILL forces you into the “bad ending.”
okay i think you’re talking about the Riddles and the Trophies, yeah there’s a ton of them. not to mention having to do every side mission on top of that (and some of those checkpoints are fucking annoying)
Exactly this. I enjoy this trope if the game actually has replayability and your actions feel like they have weight on the world. You feel like a time traveler trying to shape your ideal future. This trope only sucks when it's "collect every marble or sit through the bad ending" which is like 90% of games that use this trope.
Super Mario Odyssey to an extent. It's not TERRIBLE but the moon requirement for both Darker Side and the 100% postcard is really high and some of the moons later on are just straight BS to find. You also can buy moons directly from the shop but then you have to coin grind and if you don't use Luigi's Balloon thing or that one spot above Bowser's Kingdom good like getting 999 moons
And also, some moons are actually locked behind Toadette which functions like an achievement system. Some of the achievements are just tedious (mainly the 'do thing x times' ones) but just TALKING to her takes forever because she gives each moon individually
Mischief Maker has this but instead of true ending, it's the complete ending. The ending is on a timer, the more of the one item(forgot what it's called) you collect the longer you can view the ending.
Peaceful mode's limitations did lead to one of the funniest ooc Minecraft clips I've seen where a peaceful seed speedrunner meticulously put a bunch of books into a large chest and then popped off like crazy like "YESS!! WE FUCKING DID IT CHAT!!!"
Context was something about repopulating chunks and somehow making Minecraft erroneously load in an End portal block through some convulated method. Quite beautiful the way the indomitable human spirit found a path to beating an impossible(y easy) difficulty
Oh I saw that one too. He's standing in the middle of a lake on a cobblestone platform and just loads the double chest full of written books and then something happens that nobody except him understood
An example is the game Final Fantasy Stranger of Paradise, You can't play the DLC you paid for unless you've beaten the game on the hardest difficulty beforehand. This got a lot of negative feedback because they stuck that stipulation in after people already bought the season pass. You had to beat the game on hard to unlock Chaos difficulty, then beat it on Chaos to unlock the DLCs. I think they eventually caved to people complaining and asking for refunds by adding essentially a god mode you could enable to the harder modes and new missions to get through them easier for lower skilled players.
On the topic of Final Fantasy as well, FFXIV has a new form for bosses if you play at savage, and multiple new forms if you play at Ultimate difficulty. There also is a resolution to a popular character's arc locked behind very difficult 8 man raids. Since then they changed it to declare any higher difficulty exclusive content noncanon and they cannot ever be referenced in canon or story. They were retconned to be hypothetical "what if the boss was super ultra strong and had more forms?" modes now.
The way FFXIV implements higher difficulty is you tell the canon story to a wandering minstrel who embellishes the fight. I actually love how they do it
I'll add something to the FFXIV bit.
Savage is not meant to completely inaccessible to the people who are less skilled, as due to how the game works there's an option to tackle it in the next expansion or at the end of that expansion as well. It makes a massive difference and allows people to get the rewards that they want. It is just a matter of patience.
Fuck binding coil though, absolute disaster of how they handled their first raids.
If you beat the security owl on normal difficulty, the game taunts you by saying you beat an imaginary enemy in an imaginary game on the easiest possible difficulty, with the real final boss, Scott Cawthon himself, being exclusive to hard mode
Overall this is nasty because a lot of players take their skills for granted.
My dad only got into games again after he widowed and we grew up. We weren't even there to help him get back into games most of the time, I try my best but it's like TeamViewer in the evenings.
Last shooter he played was Quake II
Imagine modern games making fun of him not having time to pick up skills. Sorry, he was busy having a life
When he started playing WoW it took him ages to pick up most skills we take as basic like running and turning with the mouse at the same time. He couldn't run sideways because all of it was lost on him.
Difficulties exist for a reason. Not everyone has the full set of fingers, or free time and reaction of a 20-year old
So I don't like when games do that. Why not also have like coloblind mode and subtitles but they are garbage and make fun of people for being hard of hearing and coloblind. Nerds.
While it doesn’t require you to play at an higher difficulty to proceed with the story, I find pretty funny that the Okamura boss fight in Persona 5 is at its easiest while playing on the hardest difficulty
On my second playthrough I overleveled so hard for this fight that I had endgame stats when going into it. Getting stuck on this the first time around left a scar
For Cuphead you fight all the phases of a boss in normal difficulty. All expert does is they throw more stuff at you, faster and the flying bosses have a set pattern.
Simple - Easy mode, what is shown on the left of the Cuphead image. The one OP seems to be talking about. Enemies are much easier with less health and some phases on some bosses are skipped entirely.
Regular - Default mode, full gameplay
Expert - More health on enemies, different sets of moves. Only available after beating The Devil.
The game would be miserable if expert difficult was the intended first experience (not exactly sure if that’s what OP is implying). The regular mode feels hard the first time going through it and expert is a pretty significant step up from that.
The issue is Simple mode doesn’t count as beating the boss (at least in terms of getting soul contracts) and it removing phases just makes it feel pointless since like…it doesn’t count for progressing the game, and it can’t even really be used for practicing the bosses so…why is it here?
Yeah that’s what I’m confused about it’s not hiding anything from you it’s adding more to make it more difficult. It you don’t want it to be more difficult why would you be missing out on anything?
Hercules ps1 game, on easy mode game ends after you find zeus on top of Olympus, but on normal or hard mode there are two more levels, underworld and Hades boss fight.
Tetris Attack/Panel De Pon (also Pokemon Puzzle League) does it but not in a way I mind.
The game ends on one of the final four bosses depending on the difficulty, but this is fine because the next difficulty ramps up right where you left off. It feels more like "level 9" instead of "level 1 again"
Locking actual unique, interesting content in a game behind a difficulty is one of the most horribly frustrating things to me.
One of the worst examples was BG3 Honour mode when it released. It literally fixed several broken game mechanics, and added new cool mechanics to bosses as well, but I never played that mode just because I didn't want a single-save permadeath run, not because it would be too hard, but because I didn't find it fun. Thankfully in a patch they made it so that you can toggle Honour ruleset in custom mode without the single-save restriction.
I'll defend BG3 and say those added mechanics are specifically what makes the game harder and not the other way around. You don't actually miss anything meaningful apart from a new pair of dice
To be fair, even at release you were never forced to delete a failed honor mode save. You could simply continue playing the honor mode version of the game "dishonorably" after dying and not get the prize at the end
If you want to play on easy mode then that's on you for choosing Touhou from any other possible game, but in some games you need to CC (Credit Clear, finish it without continues) a game to unlock an extra stage with an extra boss, in some of the games you need to be playing at least on normal, which means that you can't acess the extra stage of a few entries if you play only on easy mode
Edit: and as others mentioned, you straight up can't finish Touhou 6 on easy mode, a detail I swore I mentioned (the whole reason I even choose a Touhou 6 gif) but somehow forgot to add
The thing is that the Extra stage has a fixed difficulty, usually somewhere between Hard and Expert (but a little more beatable than the main game on Hard because it's short so you can practice way faster).
So it's not really just gatekeeping, if you can't beat the game on Normal, realistically the extra stage will be unplayable. And due to the way the game is designed it doesn't really make sense to have an easy mode for the extra stage~or it'd at least take extra dev time.
Pretty sure you can't finish touhou 6 on easy mode with sakuya telling you to go home and marisa just going "ok!" (there are bullet patterns clearly meant for stage 6 on easy mode which implies that they were cut due to time constraints)
one thing shared in all the games though is that you cannot get the good ending if you use continues.
To be fair, if you can't 1CC the game on Normal, you probably don't stand much of a chance on Extra anyway (speaking as someone who has 1CCd a grand total of 3 mainline games on Normal and beaten zero Extra stages)
I agree. If you're not going to have the full game there, WTF DID YOU BOTHER WITH THE DIFFICULTY SETTING?! Just get rid of it, and stop wasting both yours and my time!
Lots of game intend for you to replay them. The idea is that you managed to get this far on easy mode, therefore you're now ready for normal. Similarly lots of games lock the hardest difficulty behind beating the second hardest difficulty. Obvious example being DMC
Kind of this, but a lot of fighting game devs realize that a lot of new players probably come for the waifu characters, so they make some of the waifu characters hard to use or non-beginner friendly, like Jack-o here. that’s at least what some of the fgc thinks
Strive is like the least gatekeeping game I can think of for this trope.
A better example would be Xrd or BlazBlue. Both games had an alt control scheme called Stylish Mode which gave players completely new to fighting games the ability to do combos and special moves without ever having to learn how they're actually supposed to be done.
This mode makes you do low damage, prevents access to your character's full moveset, and makes your gameplay very inflexible/predictable.
This is why they never saw any competitive relevance whatsoever.
Why would they make the new-player-attracting character difficult on purpose? People think the game designers grand plan is to make people pay for the game, then give up because the character they bought the game to play is too hard?
Nah the real newbie magnet characters are the guys on the cover of the game. Jack-O wasn't even base roster in Strive so I don't think total noobs are even care about her. Unika would be a better example since she is kinda like a Sol/Ky derivative
Since someone is going to inevitably say FromSoft games, the whole “git gud” meme was not originally meant to be making fun of people for not being good, it’s that the only way to progress is to learn and get better at the game
Edit: I missed the part about the difficulty selection, I thought this was just complaints about difficulty in general
The closest thing you have to a difficulty option is the build you use, and even then it isn’t a guarantee. Ranged/magic builds can help against melee boss fights and picking off enemies in packs one by one, but the instant you run into a fight that resists the damage you deal, it becomes hard again.
I think they're just bringing it up because Fromsoft and Soulslike games are mentioned a lot in discussions around game difficulty. It's where the "git gud" thing comes from, and we'll probably see some comments of that in the thread.
Some of them do, like the Armored Core game series does, though in the older titles it appeared in, it only made your lock on range smaller, while in stuff like Armored Core 4 and For Answerer, it essentially revamped levels to be more difficult
Yeah, but instead of just trolling people, the point was to tell people that (for the most part) it is supposed to be hard and progressing requires learning and getting better. A lot of people eventually just interpreted that as being made fun of and there are also shitty fans who just make fun of anyone who struggles with the games, which is everyone at some point or another. No one is instantly good at it, they all had to get better.
The issue is that you'd play the game, get sideblinded by intentional game design, and when talking about it people would just drop "git gud" like it's a solemn statement that solves everything, and not "well that's how the game is, be ready for more"
Fromsoft games don’t make sense for this, though, as they don’t have set difficulty options at the start of the game. There’s only one difficulty, and you can either play it or not.
Fromsoft games are actually pretty fair in terms of difficulty balancing for whatever type of gameplay you prefer. Jank aside you have a lot of build options
I just don't like difficulty selection in the first place.
It seems like what I like best is an engaging but easy main story, and then difficult side content.
Like the berserker outfit in Breath of the Wild. There are three obvious labyrinths in the world, so you can't miss them. The labyrinth isn't trivial to get through, and gives the berserker outfit. Which at its base, is fairly useless.
To upgrade it you need to kill Lynels. The hardest enemies in the game. Things you have no business fighting, but you can if you want to.
Only after doing these challenging things do you have this powerful set of equipment. It's harder than beating the game, but it's fun content that tests your skills.
On the other end of the spectrum is some achievements and upgrades in FFVII Remake. To get the achievements, you need to replay the game on hard mode. That seems to include rewatching all the cutscenes and going through all the filler stuff, like slowly walking through a town to deliver flowers. If it was just the fights that'd be one thing, but you do need to redo *everything*.
And then there's the final powerups for your weapons, which you cannot get without upgrades from hard mode.
If this was just hidden behind a hard boss or encounter I'd be perfectly happy. But I don't want to redo everything to get it.
Even if we take a super replayable game like Dark Souls. Dark Souls has built-in difficulty selection via challenge runs. This unfortunately means that you can unintentionally play the game on hard mode by just having a bad build, but it feels more organic and satisfying than just pressing a button at the start.
I'm also not opposed to difficulty selections in *missions*. You gave Cuphead as an example, but I think that's a really well done example. You can chose your difficulty. You don't have to do it in a harder difficulty, and can sidestep the fight completely by just doing it on easy. And there's no real benefit in doing it in hard mode. But there's always more that you can do, until you've done the fight perfectly. And it shows on the flag how much you've done. I think that's nice.
The Contra games were a series of side-scrolling arcade shoot-em-ups, famous for their high level of difficulty. Contra 3: The Alien Wars and Contra 4 both feature this trope, where the final two levels of the game- and thus, the games' endings- are inaccessible on Easy difficulty.
yes absolutely hate it when games offer difficulties and punish you for making a choice. i'm fine with maybe enhancing rewards for harder difficulties, but cutting content is such a huge bummer.
Eh I think your cuphead example is a bad example. Changing attack patterns or boss phases is a good version of difficulty changes unlike most games where difficulty is just a health and maybe enemy density slider.
It’s really funny because the game makes as many opportunities to say “This game is so hellishly difficult in Hard Mode bro” and it’s over only getting two pieces of candy instead of three.
The Hercules movie game for consoles cuts out the last two levels if you play on Easy, for no apparent reason at all. You don't even get an indicator that there are more levels, and it's confusing since if you watched the movie you would be wondering how this is the end (Spoiler for a 30 year old movie; it ends before Hercules goes to the underworld and saves Meg).
I'm too old to feel the need to prove I can beat the hardest difficulty.
I want to relax and not be stressed by my game, I'll play the easiest difficulty a lot of times these days unless its the kind of game like BG3 where you play over and over again and it would get boring if you didnt increase it over time.
Star fox 64’s easy route… because of the game’s branching levels you’re held out of the choices you didn’t pick by default until your next run, but the easy route makes star fox come off as awfully incompetent.
First, you lose a high value target in corneria, then you disobey pepper to check out the asteroid field. You lose to star wolf on fichina as they stalled you long enough to let the base blow up. He tries to keep you out of active combat zones by sending you to sector x to deal with the rogue weapon, but you can’t even do that right without one of your own being downed to a veritable death world. By the time you get your wingman back, you’re too far away to do anything other than go for a defense satellite that, in the grand scheme of things, only tells andross you’re coming. And by yhe time andross falls, you have no idea it was only a fake gou destroyed, leaving rhe real andross free to rebuild his army….
I say this as someone who has cleared a lot of difficult gaming challenges (Pantheon 5 hollow knight, most souls games to ng +7, getting over it 50 times for gold cauldron etc.)
No one gives a fuck what difficulty of game you beat. It does not matter, you are not cool or interesting for beating a game on a har difficulty nor a hard game. At most it is a small talking point.
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u/Commandur_PearTree Aug 13 '26
The old twisted metal games did this a lot