Well, when you say difficulty do you mean something that's hard, or something that's challenging? I love a good challenge, one where if I fail I can see what I did wrong, understand it, and correct it. Thing is, that's a hard thing to do so most games are just hard. They cheat.

I think there was a discussion about this on the GWJ podcast, right? Their conclusion (and I'm inclined to agree) is that there is no "right" difficulty setting and when people tell you a game is "meant" to be played some way, it's because they want you to have the same exact experience they did. Making games so difficult no one can ever beat them made sense in arcades but I find forcing a player to become a master is now something of a relic. There's nothing wrong with someone playing a game on easy just to see what it has to offer. I like a bit more of a challenge but that the easy setting is THERE doesn't diminish my experience any.

I always start games on "Medium" or "Normal" and then in the middle I regret it when I have to load some savepoint for the 15th time to kill some retarded Boss that has a special hidden insta-kill move. Then I curse the planet of the game designers pandering to their hardcore audience and set the game on Easy and get on with my life.

For skill-based games, I definitely appreciate having options, as long as they're not cheap. When done properly, they can help you get through a game without excess frustration, while giving you a good reason to replay them. Halo 3 is a good example I think -- I had great fun playing through on Normal, but from the small bits I've played on higher levels, it feels like a totally different game, since the enemies have a lot more intelligence, rather than just a bunch more hit-points.

Super Mario Galaxy may not have a difficulty slider, but it still has pretty significant difficulty scalability by offering 120 stars, and only asking you to collect 60 of them to finish the game. If you just want to beat Bowser, you can skip the harder levels and go for the low-hanging fruit in other worlds instead. Getting all 120 stars, though, is a real challenge, and some of the hardest stars are remarkably difficult to get. Getting all of the stars also unlocks something that's slightly akin to a more difficult play mode, too.

I don't think puzzle-based games really benefit from it, though. Braid is a great example -- I'd hate to neuter its difficulty, since you just feel so damn smart when you solve one of its puzzles. You can't really get stuck in the same way you can in a skill-based game, either, since none of the puzzle solutions are that difficult to execute.

Exactly - the average level of difficulty isn't what causes me to get frustrated with a game, it's some idiotic skyscraper of a difficulty curve mixed in down the line. That's fine if I can adjust the difficulty on the fly, but I'm not going to start the game over because the designer couldn't get over their Super Awesome Boss Encounter fixation.

Instead of a slider, I wish they'd set it up so that, after the Xth time you've failed a particular boss fight/required mission/etc., it just said "Looks like you're probably not having fun. Want to skip to the next section?" The l33t can get their masochistic groove on by saying No, and I can actually enjoy the game by saying Yes.

I read the other day that Heavenly Sword and Uncharted do a subtle auto-adjustment on the difficulty. If you're doing well the bad guys in HS will mob you, but if you're struggling they'll attack one at a time. Uncharted apparently does things like detect if the player is really bad at hitting fast moving targets and adjusts the enemy behaviour accordingly.

I'm not sure what to think about that, really. I mean, I enjoyed HS a lot and it felt like the perfect level of challenge for me, but finding out about the auto-balancing cheapens it somehow.

Ugh? Surely if you enjoyed the game and felt that it was the perfect level of challenge for you should mean that it was good for you? It's not like the game makes it so you can win no matter how bad you are (though some others could depending on the level of auto-balancing) so in fact you experienced a game all the way through that met your level of difficulty at all points. There were no insurmountable difficulty spikes like in Metroid stopping you from progressing and completing the game for instance...

I like both ways of doing it though if auto-balancing were a perfect art then i prefer that over a traditional easy/difficult/hard. This allows all players to enjoy a game without becoming overly frustrated and doesn't limit a game's appeal to a certain segment of the audience: experienced gamers can enjoy the game at their level while beginners can enjoy it at their level though there is generally a certain lower limit on the game difficulty e.g. a platformer's levels do not change.

Instead of placing such importance on difficulty and not experience greater challenges should take the form of Time Trials, finding secrets and such things through being able to replay segments of the game over and over again: e.g. the latest two Lara Croft endeavours. This is a perfect way to satisfy any e-penis mentality, the completionists (as it allows completion without having to restart the entire game from scratch) and the more casually minded gamers.

[edit] Oops! OT: I usually play games on medium difficulty. With the exception of 4xRTS games such as Civ and Gal Civ 2 types... The only other game i've played on easy in my memory has been Gears of War. Found it impossible to get into due to the game mechanics and had to quit out the game and restart on easy just to be able to enjoy it..... not that i have.

I've experienced both good and bad things with difficulty session. Call of Duty 4 is a particularly lame example of crappy gameplay design to artificially ramp up the difficulty level. There's the exact same number of baddies, in the same places, but they are all instantly blessed with x-ray vision, superhuman reflexes and extra-hurty bullets, meaning (especially in the later, checkpointed, timed levels) that completing the game becomes an almost balletic exercise in hitting very specific points at very specific times and knowing almost to the pixel where you need to aim and shoot. While there's a certain satisfaction in finally getting through it, it can become frustrating to the point of punching things.

I really like, in contrast to that, the difficulty curve in the Brothers in Arms series. On highest difficulty, the enemies become more aggressive, actively try to flank you and you lose the handy indicators telling you exactly where they are. A rifle bullet to the head will still kill them the way it does on Easy, but there's far more chance that they'll grenade your position, rush in and try to bayonet you or even just show up on your flank where you didn't expect them. I'm really hopeful that the new BiA will improve on this even more.

I'm with Lobstermobster on this one: I like challenge, I don't like cheap.

Racing games are my bain when it comes to difficulty. In the podcast one of the fellers said he got to the point in GT4 where you have to beat some fabulous muscle cars while driving a tricycle (not having played GT4, I can only assume he was being hyperbolic). I don't mind a challenge, but if one mistake is going to cost me the race... well, let's just say I'm all out of perfect.

As for setting the difficulty slider, I realized a few years back that nobody I cared about was going to think I had small... thumbs because I never finished Viewtiful Joe on hard. I play games to have fun. If a game isn't going to be fun, then I don't want to play it. So I start pretty much every game on easy. If I like the game enough, I'll come back to it at a higher difficulty. If not, then I'll be glad I didn't subject myself to the frustration. There's no reason to-- especially since game designers stopped pulling the "Oh, izza widdel baby pwaying on Easy? Well, den widdle baby duzzent get to see the end" bullcrap.

Difficulty settings are a tough call. What I really like is when the game designers make my preferred setting the default. Unfortunately, the world is rarely designed around my unique needs, so I prefer to have an incremental slider. I'm pretty much a game tourist, so I usually prefer to play on less brutal settings, but there are games where difficulty makes a HUGE difference in how much fun the game is to play. I'm mainly thinking sneaker games like the Thief games, NOLF, or STALKER. Playing these on hard difficulty makes it impossible to just FPS your way through scenarios and really makes learning the game dynamic mandatory, which in turn makes playing much more fun. This is why NOLF is remembered as a classic and Contract JACK was quicky forgotten.

Portal is a good example of how a game can not have a difficulty setting, but still be very focused on the gamer. The game teaches the player how to navigate the puzzles and provides many layers of scaffolded instruction to support learning how to think with Portals. For skilled players, there are timed and fewest portal challenges, but for wimps like me, there is a well designed learning environment.

Discussions like this just make me want Left4Dead now. The game is supposed to have a good AI for difficultly setting. I believe they call it "The Director". It's supposed to monitor how you and your friends are doing and adjust difficultly and pacing in game.

In theory it sounds amazing I'll have to wait to see how it comes out in practice.

COD4 had a cool function of making you do a quick test to determine your best suit for difficulty. Unfortunately, I did too well on it and ended playing it up on a lower difficulty.

As long as when I die I can see how I screwed up and can do something better I'm fine with it. If I die repeatedly and can't see a better way of doing it. I tend to rage-quit.

My problem with adaptive difficulty is that it tends to flatten out the dialogue between player and game. Paradoxically, by reacting to the player more, the game creates an equilibrium state in which the mechanics of play and the actions of the player, rather than informing one another, cancel each other out and deliver a singular experience that is roughly the same for everyone. On the one hand, this allows that singular experience to be very well honed and never frustrating, on the other hand, it reduces the interactivity.

Left 4 Dead looks like it is approaching this problem in a fascinating way, considering that (as I understand it) the game is designed to be replayed multiple times and give a different experience each time, and that they are allowing other humans to control certain enemies and throw a wrench into the player's progress. It could very well hit that sweet spot where the game reacts to the player enough to accommodate everyone, but still requires the player to react to it as well.

Devil May Cry 4 did that - on Human difficulty (Easy) the jumping puzzles were easier. Jump targets that were moving in the Normal mode were stationary in the Easy mode. At least, they were in the small bit of the game I played before I got bored.

I tend towards agreeing with you here, if we're talking about the traditional approach to scaling the encounter in the background by making enemies pushovers or hyper accurate. To me, that's just not honest. It's telling me as a player that I have overcome an obstacle when in reality the obstacle shrank. It limits my ability to accurately judge my own growth in evaluating my surroundings, and I don't appreciate it.

Another aspect of the Director that has me looking forward to this game is that the background evaluation isn't adjusting the difficulty of the individual enemies, but the overall size of the encounter. They've released a video of two groups hitting the same encounter, where the first group is a shambles and manages to fend off some zombies, and the second group with their act together has to deal with swarm of the undead that ends in a huge explosion. So the game can be seen as rewarding the badass players rather than punishing the novices. The size of the next encounter is a judgement on the players' performances in the last. In that way the dialogue between the player and the game is preserved, heightened even. That's my hope, anyway.

As far as more traditional difficulty options, where the game isn't adjusting it in the background, I prefer it when a game feels like it was built with the hardest difficulty in mind and the lower difficulties are meant for learning the in's and out's. Good examples here being Guitar Hero and Halo. You're supposed to start on Normal or Easy - no stigma attached - but the point of the game is to progress.

Another thing I like is when a game allows me to customize the way in which it becomes more difficult. The best example I can think of is the skulls in Halo 3 that augment mostly how the enemies behave. I can't think of another example, except maybe Goldeneye where you could customize the experience like that. Then there's the addition of all the honor rule handicaps the player can put on themselves, like Chiggie's Gunslinger (revolver only) run through Resident Evil 4.

Making a single, rigid standard like that is a little silly. There are all types of gamers and game developers, and it is hardly a duty to make a game as accessible as possible, especially if it starts to compromise design or intent.

Ninja Gaiden for the xbox! That game angered the crap out of me. I had to return it to the store for credit because I was afraid I would smash my xbox. I would get to this one part where you fight this female pink/purple demon in a church, and everytime I would figure out how to counter her ungodly super abilities there would be another one that I would have to spend hours trying to wrap my brain around. For those that don't know I absolutely hate having to look at a guide to complete things and I often flat out refuse to do it, but for this boss fight I had to look up the guide on how to beat her...and I still couldn't do it. That chick had my number every damn time.