Let’s take Elden Ring as an example: how do you scale poise? Is the player harder to stagger? Are enemies easier to stagger? How about status effects? Can you trigger hemorrhage with less hits on low difficulty? Dodge frames? Parry timing?
That’s just off the top head, there’s tons more mechanics I’ve never even touched in there.
Combat systems (which is 95% of what difficulty affects) can get so much more complicated than just HP/Armor. And that makes scaling more them just percentages of damage in/damage out.
I’m not saying it can’t be done. But it’s a gross injustice to blame lazy devs for not implementating a system that probably takes weeks if not months to create and balance.
Sure, a complex difficulty system that the user can tweak is nicer to have. But making the player take more hits to kill is pretty simple and could be argued as an accessibility feature.
Depends on how it’s implemented. Just give the player more/unlimited HP or armour would be easy.
“Game designers should include cheats” is a take
All of them did before, so why not?
No, they didn’t?
Yes
And should be the bare minimum of a game
Let’s take Elden Ring as an example: how do you scale poise? Is the player harder to stagger? Are enemies easier to stagger? How about status effects? Can you trigger hemorrhage with less hits on low difficulty? Dodge frames? Parry timing?
That’s just off the top head, there’s tons more mechanics I’ve never even touched in there.
Combat systems (which is 95% of what difficulty affects) can get so much more complicated than just HP/Armor. And that makes scaling more them just percentages of damage in/damage out.
I’m not saying it can’t be done. But it’s a gross injustice to blame lazy devs for not implementating a system that probably takes weeks if not months to create and balance.
Sure, a complex difficulty system that the user can tweak is nicer to have. But making the player take more hits to kill is pretty simple and could be argued as an accessibility feature.