Change difficulty in game please ?

MooseJam

So I got to the first boss in painkiller and he's a monster, got my ass handed to me a few times last night, will be trying again tonight but don't feel optimistic. I think you should be able to change difficulty in-game, I don't think I've ever come across a game where you could do this though maybe I've just forgotten, sure you'd probably have loads of people wimping out but it's better than the alternative of starting over. So developers please implement this in future games !

c - 13

That option is available in a fair few games, I cant think off any examples off the top of my head though ...

johnny_ultimate

There are plenty of games that offer this - can't think of any off hand (although I think the HL games have always done this), and plenty of others have the option to change at frequent intervals (in a lot of games you can just start a new game when you get to a new section: Gears of War, for example, allows you to start from any chapter at any difficulty once you've unlocked it. Same with CoD, Halo etc...). Others offer the option to change difficulty if you keep getting killed: Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden Black, for example.

And if its only the first boss, could you not just start again?

MooseJam

well he's fairly far into it, maybe a couple of hours at my rate

here he is here, he's a big fella

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GFLcLEGY434

thelordofcheese

MooseJam wrote: »

So I got to the first boss in painkiller and he's a monster, got my ass handed to me a few times last night, will be trying again tonight but don't feel optimistic. I think you should be able to change difficulty in-game, I don't think I've ever come across a game where you could do this though maybe I've just forgotten, sure you'd probably have loads of people wimping out but it's better than the alternative of starting over. So developers please implement this in future games !

I feel the opposite, i think if you change difficulty mid-game then it should send a signal to the developers office so they can dispatch Mr.T to your house in a tank to tell you to man up and "quit yo jibba-jabba!".

MooseJam

by the way the guy in that vid is cheating, he's not that easy to kill

L31mr0d

thelordofcheese wrote: »

"quit yo jibba-jabba!".

^ what he said. How interesting or satisfying would any sport or competition be if you could just make it easier mid way through. How interesting would football be if every time a player missed the goals they could just make the goals bigger.

I was playing some games on my old Atari Lynx recently and they are god awfully hard with no save points meaning you usually had to complete the game in one sitting. I remember being a lot more satisfied when I completed those games, as I had achieved something, whereas now with quick saves and the ability to change difficulty levels it breeds lazy gaming.

The last game I played through that made me feel that same level of satisfaction was CoD4, because I went with the recommended difficulty level in the training level which happened to be the hardest, I also tried to not use quicksave unless my health was nearly gone. Sure there where some levels where I had to redo them over and over again, but in the end I felt I had forced myself to get better at the game rather than wimping out and making the game easier so I could complete it faster

FruitLover

HL2 allows you to change the difficulty at will. I took advantage of this ability to get past that really annoying bit where you have to defend yourself with the 3 autoguns for what feels like half an hour (then raised it once I had cleared that part).

Canis Lupus

The first boss is that big lumbering dude in the graveyard? (cannot access youtube in work).

It seemed difficult till I realised I was trying too hard.

Just bunny hop in a circle around him. Stop, fire (use the stake gun, there is ammo for it behind some of the graves) and bunnyhop again. Keep it up (killing the skeletons if they get too close) and you eventually wear it down. He does have a few attacks towards the end that can hurt and are hard to avoid but mostly it's a piece of piss. There is health bang slap in the middle as well.

Kiith

I'm divided on this issue, as well as whether or not quick-saves are a good or bad thing. How many games have lost their edge because of quicksaves? Kill enemy, save, go forward, save, die, reload, etc...

I like the idea that the AI will automatically get better/worse as you progress, like in Far Cry (Adaptive AI, although i'm not sure how well it worked). At least that feels more real then clicking a button to stop enemies shooting you in the face.

FruitLover wrote: »

HL2 allows you to change the difficulty at will. I took advantage of this ability to get past that really annoying bit where you have to defend yourself with the 3 autoguns for what feels like half an hour (then raised it once I had cleared that part).

Loved that part.

K.O.Kiki

Resident Evil 4 (IIRC innovated in Max Payne) has a lovely feature called "adaptive difficulty".
Everytime you die, there's a chance that the game will load you at the last checkpoint with a lower difficulty level, so that you fight less enemies, or certain monsters are replaced by easier ones.

Oh, and you can buy a rocket launcher to defeat a boss if you really don't want to fight it.

More on this from David Sirlin

*edit* Damn you Kiith!

Kiith

I'm on fire today

mcgovern

Oblivion allowed you to change the difficulty whenever you wanted as well as far as I remember.

tman

Think you could do it on Bioshock as well.

One game that would really have benefited from it is The Witcher... Would've stuck with it if it let me lower the difficulty, but I just couldn't be arsed otherwise and it went to the bottom of my pile fairly sharpish...

K.O.Kiki wrote: »

More on this from David Sirlin

Strange that he mentions Rez... I managed to die twice at the end of the second level and just couldn't be bothered going back to it after that.

Sarky

It's called "hard" for a reason. I don't like adaptive difficulty or changing it on the fly, if you can make it easy for the hard bits then where's the challenge? Where's the incentive to get better at the game? And where's the sense of achievement when you finally blast your way free of seemingly impossible hordes of enemies only just clinging to life with one last bullet in the clip?

Canis Lupus

I'm with Sarky. Nothing has made me happier than clearing a tough section of a game after a million tries.

Anyway, wait till boss two. That pissed me off more although it may be cos I was drunk. The latest levels give the baddies guns. The games level difficulty has ramped waaaaaay up.

Branoic

I like flexible difficulty levels. Sure, I agree that beating a hard section after trying and trying is very satisfying, but as I've grown older I still want to enjoy games but don't have the time to put in to some of these challenges. I've got a job and a wife and all that, so my gaming time is precious.

At the moment I'm playing through Ninja Gaiden Sigma on the easy Ninja Dog difficulty, and will probably do the same with Gaiden 2 if the option is available. I don't want to spend my rare available hour or two the odd evening retrying the same frustrating boss battle over and over again, as when I have to shut down the console I'd just be frustrated and p1ssed off, and not relaxed, which is why I play games.