Ooooh isn't that a shamelessly clickbaity title and image I used for this post? When people read a title like that the first reaction I imagine is
"Just let people enjoy games the way they want!"
Or maybe some stupid comment that involves the word "Gatekeeping"
But despite my clickbaity title I'm not actually here to rag on you for playing easy OR big you up for playing hard. People SHOULD just enjoy games in whatever way they want, that's totally fine and not something I have an issue with. My issue really stems from the way that difficulty is implemented.
There are a lot of games that, when started, will prompt you for a selection of how hard you want it to be. Games like Wolfenstien or Doom like to put fun little titles on it but most of the time it just boils down to Easy, Normal and Hard. If you choose Normal you generally get the sort of experience that I feel was intended for that game. Easy tends to make your character beefier, reduce incoming damage and gives you more resources to use while Hard does the opposite of this. In MOST games I've experienced, in terms of actual technical skill at the game, there isn't really all that much difference between the 3 modes. All that you're really choosing is how heavily you want to be penalized for any mistakes you make during play,
Metal Gear Solid is a good example of this. On the harder modes there tends to be more enemies with longer vision ranges, they do more damage, caution mode gets triggered more easily, you can carry less stuff etc. etc. This at first glance is a fine approach to the issue, especially for a first time player. Someone who isn't confident that they can stealth and fight effectively are allowed to take more hits, carry more ammo and healing, makes perfect sense to allow someone new to the series to enjoy it for all its worth. Now if you're the kind of person who buys a game, does 1 play through and then shelves it for all eternity then maybe you will not understand my problem. However if you do multiple replays you'll start to understand why this system is so dull. The leap between easy to normal and normal to hard isn't that great, not really. If you feel that you are bad at stealth games and you put it on easy, I can almost PROMISE you that after an hour of getting used to it, you'd be fine to turn it off, start again, and play on normal, or maybe even hard. MGS only really starts to get really challenging when you go into its top modes but at that point its doing stuff like triggering a game over on being seen at any point which is bordering on levels of daft.
Nier is another good example on why I hate these options so much. When I first played Nier I put it on Hard mode and the bosses took so little damage that the fights became tedious and I started to get bored during each encounter, especially in the early game. However after I beat that and tried it on Normal the game turns all its enemies into paper mache. The enemies and bosses are doing the exact same things they were doing in hard mode, only they died much faster. This ruins that hard mode because all you're doing is making it take longer, you aren't actually challenging yourself in any way.
A game that has difficulty options that comes so very close to getting it right is Furi.
At the start of Furi you can choose between "Promenade" and "Furi" with an extra "Furier" difficulty after you beat the game. I say it comes so very close because in reality, Promenade is a waste of time and Furi is ACTUALLY the sort of tutorial mode to get you acclimated to the "real" game in Furier. Furi is a game essentially about mastery of its controls and knowledge of its bosses. You study the bosses, learn what they do and how to avoid/parry their attacks and then once you have that down you dance circles around them while you cut them to ribbons with your sword. If you played Promenande then I'm not judging you for doing so but I feel sorry that content of the game was just cut for you entirely and you didn't get a chance to learn those things to build that confidence. Entire phases of bosses are cut on its easiest setting which means if you go from Promenade to Furi, you aren't getting extra challenge but you're seeing all new things and in a game like this that feels sort of unfair.
The solution to all this? Player modulated difficulty, designing your game in such a way that allows the player to decide how hard or how easy they want it as they go along. Dark Souls, despite its reputation, is actually very good at this. Having trouble with a boss? Go farm some souls and upgrade your weapon and come back and give him a slap. Boss that's weak to fire giving you trouble? Go get some firebombs and stand halfway across the room and lob them, means that you have to learn about half the attacks. But some people aren't willing or able to put in that kind of time so a better example I have of that is Hotline Miami
Hotline Miami lets you pick a mask at the start of each stage each with a unique ability and you can pick it depending on what's giving you the most trouble. Are dudes swarming into a room and killing you? Wear the mask that lets you kill them with the door to make your life easier. Dogs killing you? Wear the mask that turns off the dogs. Struggling to find weapons? Wear the mask that makes your punches deadly. This is a very elegant solution to the difficulty issue because it allows the player to identify the thing they are having trouble with on a stage by stage basis and give them an advantage in that specific area. What makes it even better is that for weirdos like me that like their games on the daft side, there are even masks that make your surroundings dark so you can see shit or, even better, reverses your controls to make the game just needlessly confusing as fuck, it's great.
Difficulty levels should be abolished and games in general should just be designed in a smarter way. Not only would that be much more interesting, I feel, for anyone of any skill level playing it but it would have the extra knock on effect of getting rid of that elitism that you see in certain people who only like hard games and people who like. Some games I understand need these settings like shmups or rhythm games but for the most part I feel like this crap solution to this problem needs to go.
