Preferred difficulty for non-strategy games

[doc_bean]

Normal, pretty much always. It's how the game was meant to be played.

[CountArach]

Normal on my first play through so I can get a feel for the game and I can go through teh storyline. After that though I ramp it up a bit.

[Omanes Alexandrapolites]

Start on Easy although, once I've got the essential grasp, I either up the difficulty to Normal or start a new game on Normal if the former is not possible. I may later move on to hard, but these FPS and similar games seem to follow a fixed almost unchangeable storyline which makes multiple plays quite uninteresting - a bit like watching the same film several times over.

[Quirinus]

I don't normally progress beyond 'Normal' difficulty-- aside from the fact that I'm a mediocre gamer, I don't like it when the enemy gets health/attack/wjatever bonuses (or when I get penalties). If I really like a game that I play again and again, I might progress to a higher difficulty if the only bonuses the AI gets are accuracy, reaction speed or intelligence, in other words, simulating more skilled opponents instead of merely opponents who are harder to kill.

The highest difficulty I've gotten to was Expert on Condition Zero, back when I was playing daily with other human players, but once I stopped, everything sort of just slipped away. Now I can play maybe on Normal or Hard only.

[Evil_Maniac From Mars]

Normal, pretty much always. It's how the game was meant to be played.

I agree with you and Omanes.

[Xehh II]

I start on normal, then, depending if it's hard or easy, I change to difficulty accordingly.

[Mikeus Caesar]

I've only ever completed one game on super-mega-uber-make-you-want-to-cry-difficulty, and that was Halo on Legendary with a friend. We were up for two days doing that. Considering how it was the first real shooter we'd ever played (Unreal Tournament doesn't count at all), we were quite proud.

But god, did that send us crazy or what. I hate the Library, with a passion.

[Quirinus]

But god, did that send us crazy or what. I hate the Library, with a passion.

Ugh, yes. That was my least favourite level too, I wanted to shoot that bloody annoying robot thingy out of the sky.

But whoa, Legendary was hard. I remember getting screwed up two shots from the Covenant Elite's plasma rifle in the very first level, and then giving up for a lower difficulty setting.

[pdoan8]

Always Normal (sometimes it is the easiest setting) or whatever the default is. Then I adjust it from there.

[CrossLOPER]

Where's the "Murderous" option? THIS QUESTION DEMANDS AN ANSWER!!!

Depends how I feel. If I think I know the format, then either Very Hard or Hard. If there is an "Impossible" option, like in F.E.A.R., I'll take it out of curiosity. Of course, this usually means that there are random enemies with power armor around every corner that force you to empty every gun you have in your arsenal and scramble to collect any weapon that happens to be lying around and eventually simply deciding that the only course of action left is to perform a time-lapsed flying sidekick to the hull of the giant robot-thing that has twenty rocket launchers.