Games- shooters, in particular- need to get better at balancing difficulty, I've noticed

I actually think the difficulty levels in Halo are perfect, brilliant really.

>Easy
>Perfect for children, or extremely unskilled game players. Game just lets you feel like a God.

>Normal
>The perfect difficulty of having some minor challenge where being too reckless will get you killed, but also is fair enough to let you do bold Halo actions like taking over a Wraith that's being piloted, or running in and melee stronger enemies.

>Heroic
>The "true" difficulty for accurate Halo lore. You are a super soldier, but the enemies are still very tough. Reckless actions will get you killed, will have to take full advantage of shields and weapons. Still you can get away with doing some cooler actions, but takes a skilled player

>Legendary
>This mode makes you feel like a regular foot soldier, against the power of the covenant. This mode will normally wreck your shit in at every turn, you've got to be a skilled player and know the battlefield to complete this

And this. It's really great because easy difficulties means you can somewhat cruise the levels. But on harder, you have all the additional objectives. It really ADDS to the gameplay and fun factor to play on harder levels, because there is more to do, and makes you feel more like a secret agent.

I think the best max difficulties in games allow you to make full use of the game's options and still have a good time with it.

It just annoys me when a skill-based game limits your options at higher difficulties, personally.

Fallout 4 on survival remedies this a bit. You die in a handful of shots, but so do the enemies.

It reminds me of Golden Bullets mode in WET.

I know what you mean, which is why I think Heroic is the best difficulty.

Another game with that example is Vanquish. Even on the hardest difficulty, you still play it exactly the same way. Because of the boost and slo mo, it almost doesn't matter if you basically die in a couple hits.

Doom 2016 has great difficulty.
The entire game has no hitscan enemies or invisible enemy projectiles except the last boss's lasers, but the laser take some moving around before reaching you so you can still avoid it. Enemies either appear before you or take sometime to warp in. Enemies dont gain health on higher diff, they just attack faster and hit much harder. Personally I think it could have been a lot harder with less open arenas and more monsters but the way they approach difficulty is. Unlike old doom, meta knowledge of items and spawns arent neccessary to play nightmare.
on survival it's just about who see who first.

SWAT 4 difficulty was good. It only increased the rating you had to get to pass a level AFAIK, the AI were just as deadly as they'd be on normal, but you had to get mostly arrests to get your points high enough to succeed. If you killed too many suspects or lost an officer you failed.

Also what he said about halo is good.

Fallout 4 on survival also adds a bunch of stuff I don't really want like thirst, no fast travel, and everything being really heavy.

If they'd added a difficulty with modifiers like survival or a difficulty where enemy health is the same as normal but you die faster, I would almost certainly play that.

I've got a weird stigma about playing using mods that significantly modify the game like that on my first run, so I didn't really want to do that.

DOOM 2016 has very good difficulty, yes. Almost all of the weapons are usable to some extent.

>DOOM 2016 has very good difficulty
Nah, UV is too easy and Nightmare is artificial difficulty.

I don't like most difficulty mechanisms in shooters:

>enemies more aggressive on higher levels
>more enemies on higher levels
These ones pointlessly suck out lots of a game's appeal for less-skilled players, as well as creating an unnecessary, artificial barrier to the improvement of their skills. Some narrow forms of higher aggression, like enemies firing more projectiles, are acceptable.

>enemies take more damage on higher levels
Inevitably makes enemies too spongy, taking out some appeal for more-skilled players. Beyond a certain point, more enemies is always better than more sponginess.

Good ones:

>player can withstand less damage on higher levels
>less ammo available on higher levels (depending on the game)

These simply tighten the player's economy of action. They don't throw off the balance of the entire game.

>slow first person game
>based around hitscan (or incredibly fast projectiles) which means the game revolves around actually taking damage and not avoiding it
>difficult to balance

Well no shit sherlook

Ninja Gaiden

If you read some Bungie interviews from shortly after the original Halo launched, they talk about how they had focus groups playtesting the AI, and it turns out that one thing they discovered was that players generally get the impression that the AI is smarter when it does more damage and has more health, even when the actual AI behaviours remain consistent.

>Complaining about difficulty in a mainstream genre
If the games were more challenging, they wouldn't be so ubiquitous. I like a challenge as much as any game enthusiast, but we are the minority and most games are not catered to us.

Mat Buckland said the same in Programming Game AI By Example. So did Jeff Orkin (who did the AI for F.E.A.R.) somewhere or other. It's a common finding.

I suspect part of the "more health = smarter" side is just that if the player shreds through enemies like paper, they never get a chance to observe much AI behavior per enemy.

I didn't think Nightmare was that bad at all, there were only a few points where I got messed up repeatedly.

Yeah I was just bringing up a Halo-specific example. But from what I can gather, it's less about observing behaviours and more about the 'feeling' of 'challenge.'

>He doesn't hijack Wraiths on Legendary
Scrub, gid gud.