Games which work better on higher difficulties

[frogbeastegg]

My first arena topic in ... a year and a half? Something like that.

Today I overheard a conversation panning a game which I have played, and it started me thinking. I played that particular game twice, once on normal and once on the hardest level. The experience was very different, with me disliking the first playthrough so much that I honestly have no idea why I allowed it back in my xbox. More on this game later.

For years it has been a generally accepted fact in the gaming world that increasing the difficulty level above normal does little to change the experience, aside from making the AI cheat and the enemies into bullet sponges. Most people find this tedious. Occasionally there's a game which takes on a whole new life when you raise the difficulty. Currently I can only think of a few.

Batman: Arkham Asylum. On hard you no longer get a lightning flash above enemies' heads indicating that they are about to attack. This means you need to pay close attention to what is going on - and that increases your situation awareness to the point where your combo counts spiral and you glide through entire large fights without getting hit. Enemies do cause more damage, yet somehow it feels right instead of cheap, raising the stakes and reinforcing the message that the combat system is all about avoiding getting hit.

Bioshock 1. My hard/no vita chambers playthrough was tense, exciting and atmospheric. Best of all, it forced me to improvise, to scramble, to scrounge, to wring every last advantage out of stealth, and - finally - become an unstoppable dealer of death. On lower difficulties you can simply walk through shooting everything, barely exploring the systems the game has to offer.

Galactic Civilisations II. There's a range between normal and the very highest difficulties where the AI gets smarter and does not yet begin to cheat. I suppose you could say the 'hard' range instead of the 'very hard'.

Mass Effect 1. On normal and lower combat is quite dull. You don't need to do much more than point and shoot. On hardcore it's gone a bit too far the other way, and it takes forever to kill anything. Insane, now insane is just right. You have to use your team's abilities, customise your weapons, play smart, and maintain situational awareness. Shame ME2 didn't learn anything from this.

And now the game which prompted this thread. On normal mode the combat system was broken and lousy, the targeting crap, the camera useless, the gameplay dull, and the experience completely at odds with what your character was meant to be. The upgrade system felt pointless. I have no idea why, over a year later, I felt compelled to try the game again on the highest difficulty. Shortly after beginning this second playthrough I was starting to realise that everything had changed and that the new way worked a far sight better. If you attempted to play as you were meant to, you died. In the first room. Repeatedly. The group of basic enemies shot you down before you could blink. Playing in the opposite way to the developer's intention eventually saw survival of that first room, after half an hour of experimenting and refining my approaches. And from there the game flowered. When a single attack will get you killed, stay unseen. When closing to range gets you smushed, attack from a distance. When your primary weapons are ineffective examine every last alternative in your tool box. Utilise patience. Observe your enemies, watch for their patrol patterns and identify the moments when they are separated into more vulnerable groups. Find the limits of their awareness, their range, their attacks. Progress inch by inch, enemy by enemy. Anticipate each upgrade, value them, choose them wisely, because now the tiny little increases are the difference between life and death. Suddenly most of the flaws become irrelevant. The camera is not battling to keep up with the action. The targeting is under control. You aren't using the broken attacks. The game?

Spoiler Alert, click show to read: 

Star Wars: The Force Unleashed. When being Vader's flashy attack-pitbull assassin won't work, be the stealthy assassin who is at one with the basic force powers. Be the wiser, less ostentatious Jedi of the original trilogy, not the showboaters of the prequels. Hide. Sneak. Skulk. Divide. Bypass. And when you fight, fight smarter instead of harder. Shame that the good version of the gameplay was entirely unintentional!

The people I overheard were panning it as rubbish, a waste of anyone's time. I was tempted to tell them about Sith Lord mode ...

All the same, I wouldn't call it great and I wouldn't play through again. Some of those sections were downright gruelling, with many repeats before I found a way to survive.

What games do you think belong in this category?

[econ21]

I can see why Bioshock 1 is in this category. I loved System Shock 2 and Bioshock seemed to have all the elements I liked in that title but it left me cold. I suspect it was purely a function of the difficulty level. Whereas in SS2, you lived in fear, scrimping and saving ammo, hiding around corners, in Bioshock you just walked around blasting everything to pieces. I should try it on the higher difficulty level, but I found the original experience so disappointing I have not had the motivation to return.

I confess I tend to play games at default difficulty levels, for various reasons:

1) Aversion to reloading saves. In RPGs/Shooters, you have to reload if you die, which is a great immersion breaker. In strategy games, I can't bear to lose favoured elite units, wonder races etc and so reload. I know it's a big character flaw and I should be more self-disciplined.

2) If it is too hard, it stops being fun. In some games, at higher difficulty levels, the experience becomes closer to work than play and I am out. If I want to invade Poland in WW2 in Panzer General, then I want a beer and pretzels lightning war - not to refight WW1 in the trenches against pumped up Polish infantry. If I am a heroic knight starting off on my quest for glory, I don't want to be struck dead by the first irritable specimen of wildlife I encounter.

3) Higher difficulty levels encourage "gamey" play. For example, if the stats are rigged to favour AI in melee, you shoot them to death, or you use grenades or camp behind corners or lure and kite etc. Or in strategy games, you become ultra aggressive and rush the enemy (Civ, I am looking at you). That's the reason I prefer TW battles on "normal" as it can permit more use of "normal" tactics and Civ on middling difficulty, so I can engage in a form of diplomacy other than that espoused by Shaka and Ghengis etc.

My pet peeve is where "normal" is actually biased to the player. And the next difficulty level up favours the AI. So there is no "normal" anymore. Recent TWs and Civs have tended to be guilty of this.

[frogbeastegg]

Agreed. I play on normal/default most of the time. If a game is heavily story oriented, or is one where I want to enjoy the atmosphere and relax, I'll play on easy so I can soak up the experience without needing to worry about being stuck on a boss or whatever. Strategy games are the exception to this: I'll take the hardest difficultly level before the AI begins to cheat in a way I find off-putting.

Now and then I do enjoy a challenging game - provided it is the right kind of challenge. I love the infamous Demon's Souls on PS3, for example. When I die I want to know that it was my fault, not because the game caught me in some cheap way (control failures, bad camera angles, bad frame rate, etc), stacked the odds against me in overly cheap ways (hello Civilisation!) or because I can't smash buttons quickly enough. I know when a game has it right because I'm immediately able to say "I should have X instead of Y" while the game over screen loads.

Bioshock on hard with vita chambers disabled reminded me more of SS2 than my initial run did. The medical area is by far the hardest part, and IMO the most enjoyable. Two or three hits will kill you, and you barely have any resources to work with. If you can scrape a victory against the first two Big Daddies the first time you encounter them then the situation brightens as you can buy a good set of survival based upgrades much sooner than if you returned to battle them with better weapons. I didn't die many times, which surprised me considerably. I'm lousy at FPS games and expected to give up early on, same as a lot of other people do. Instead I survived, thrived, and breezed through some of the parts commonly found to be difficult. I actually found the final few levels to be easier on hard than I did on my original run. Bioshock 2 was such a disappointment after this; it felt like most of my preferred gameplay options were missing, I disliked the weapon selection, and the atmosphere was a complete miss.

[Kekvit Irae]

How about a "hardcore mode"? Not a difficulty, per se, but it acts like one. Dungeons of Dredmoor has three difficulty levels, and a hardcore mode toggle in addition. If you die on any of the difficulties while playing in hardcore mode, your save is deleted. You also cannot just save; you have to save and exit if you want to save, preventing save-scumming. This restriction is not present in non-hardcore mode.
Hardcore mode in DoD makes the game more strategic in that you cant just blindly run from room to room, unless you like rerolling a new character.

[Major Robert Dump]

Fallout 3 and 4.

[frogbeastegg]

Hardcore mode aka blast from the past mode. Many of my first games were, essentially, locked into hardcore mode unless you learned to create backup save files via DOS and over-wrote any save where your character was unfortunate enough to die. I used to dread seeing the prison and funeral scenes in X-Wing and TIE Fighter!

The Mount & Blade series has something similar. You have to choose whether you can exit the game without saving or if everything is saved. I suppose Shogun II's legendary mode also counts. Diablo 2 too, very famous for it.

[johnhughthom]

Fallout 3 and 4.

Turning the enemies into bulletsponges improves the game? Perhaps it makes it challenging, certainly doesn't improve them as RPGs.

[CountArach]

Brothers in Arms: Road To Hill 30. Turning it onto the highest difficulty and turning off the crosshair makes for an immensely difficult game that requires you to really ensure that you get the most out of both of your squads.

[Crazed Rabbit]

Mass Effect, turning from normal to hard makes gameplay a challenge. Turning on the no-save-unless-quitting choice in M&B makes it a much more tense game. One small screw up and in game months could go down the drain.

CR

[a completely inoffensive name]

Demon/Dark Souls.

[Fragony]

Demon/Dark Souls.

it did *ahum* get on my nerves sometimes though. Maneater burn in hell.

[frogbeastegg]

Crysis.

It goes from being an average game you can Rambo through to being a very good stealth game with Korean-speaking guards (they speak Engrish on the lower settings) who you can't overhear the tactics of. When your cover is blown you have to use your suit powers smartly to get out of some situations.

I shall have to remember that. I picked Crysis up when it went on sale for a couple of pounds and have not got around to playing it yet. FPS aren't my cup of tea (with a few exceptions) but the possibilities the suit and stealth offered made me think it was worth a try at that price.

Thief of course, not being allowed to kill completely changes the game, it should not be played any other way.

As soon as I coshed someone with a blackjack in the demo and realised that they were unconscious instead of dead a big smile spread across my face. I replayed that demo level multiple times as I waited for release. It was one of those defining lightbulb moments in my gaming life.

Demon/Dark Souls.

As excellent as they are, the Souls duo don't really count for this topic because they don't offer a choice of difficulty. New game plus ramps up the difficulty, but again it's not optional if you want to continue with that character.

Which reminds me, why is there no Dark Souls topic?!

[naut]

Bioshock 1. My hard/no vita chambers playthrough was tense, exciting and atmospheric. Best of all, it forced me to improvise, to scramble, to scrounge, to wring every last advantage out of stealth, and - finally - become an unstoppable dealer of death. On lower difficulties you can simply walk through shooting everything, barely exploring the systems the game has to offer.

For myself that game was easy/boring on all difficulties. The first 2 levels/areas were pretty decent and difficult (no ammo, interesting, tense). After that the game got lazy, pedantic and easy. One of the worst games I've ever played, just a lazy linear shooter.

Not to sound mean, I just freakin hate that game. =)

[frogbeastegg]

For myself that game was easy/boring on all difficulties. The first 2 levels/areas were pretty decent and difficult (no ammo, interesting, tense). After that the game got lazy, pedantic and easy. One of the worst games I've ever played, just a lazy linear shooter.

Not to sound mean, I just freakin hate that game. =)

The game should have ended shortly after the golf club IMO. The later levels were not much fun on either playthrough. Too many obvious fetch-quests, one really annoying gimmick, not much interesting material for the story, most of the decent characters were gone, dull level design, all culminating in a terrible escort sequence and lousy boss. The combat balance completely fell down; I had become so powerful that giving splicers electrified weapons and more HP was not enough to slow me down, despite some of my weapons suddenly becoming useless. Unfortunately the second game moulded itself on this half of the original. Blergh.

[phonicsmonkey]

For myself that game was easy/boring on all difficulties. The first 2 levels/areas were pretty decent and difficult (no ammo, interesting, tense). After that the game got lazy, pedantic and easy. One of the worst games I've ever played, just a lazy linear shooter.

Not to sound mean, I just freakin hate that game. =)

I thought I was alone in the world in not liking Bioshock. I got bored of it after the first level...

[Fragony]

I thought I was alone in the world in not liking Bioshock. I got bored of it after the first level...

//raises hand

Add another one to that list, it bored me to tears. It doesn't really do anything wrong, besides boring me that is

[Kekvit Irae]

I'm going to continue the trend of voting for the Thief series. Difficulty means more than just dealing less damage and taking more damage, it's about drastically altering your playstyle to match the difficulty curve. Unless you're playing on the hardest difficulty and playing "Lytha Style", you're not playing the Thief series right. :P

[Fragony]

Without saving.

[Fragony]

I thought I was alone in the world in not liking Bioshock. I got bored of it after the first level...

//raises hand

Add another one to that list, it bored me to tears. It doesn't really do anything wrong, besides boring me that is

[Syl]

Most of these points have already been discussed, so I'm not sure if I'm bringing anything new here , but I have to agree with Fragony on the Thief series. The non-lethal requirement on hard fits the storyline and Garret better ("I'm a thief, not a murderer"), makes your heists feel more professional, and the increased gold quota makes you have to explore more . Then again, not getting freaked out by the sound effects in those games alone qualify it as hard in my book .

System Shock II's natural difficulty made the game feel so immersive for me. The feeling of claustrophobia, desperation, and trying to hold onto just enough supplies to survive feels like you're running down those corridors yourself. I appreciated that so much of the challenge came from your approach and materials available instead of just how difficult an enemy was.

This isn't a difficulty mode, but playing the original deus ex with a more thief-like stealth approach and trying to be as non-lethal as possible was fun and challenging. That was the approach I definitely favored in Human Revolution as well, however the melee nonlethal takedowns (being an almost instant cinematic move now) are so effective and fast it almost makes many parts of the game seem quite too easy. I'm almost not sure why anyone would try to shoot anyone in that game when you're pretty much batman ....

I also felt increasing the difficulty slider in the Baldur's Gate series added to the gameplay. I think enemies suffered a damage handicap on the default. It also added a few rare but frightening elements (such as an ally who died from a bow could be revived, but a character blown away by a fireball into many pieces couldn't be salvaged back to life and was gone for the rest of the game.) I can't say that bit little bit made you happy when it happened, but it made the world feel more scary and real