Any gamer worth their measure in salt can defeat any game you put in front of them.

It may take discipline, patience, and time (or not having a job in some cases) but, more often than not, that statement is true. What’s changed more and more in the life-cycle of gaming is that the difficulty rationality has changed. The strife to get from beginning to end has lost some if it’s potency. Some would say for the better and some would say for the worse. Is it that we as gamers want the satisfaction of entertainment by sacrificing the strife that it would take to get there? Or that we, over the years, accept the lack of challenges in a title and would rather have the ability to ramp up difficulty at our leisure?

After the few trickles of difficulty that have come into gaming recently (Dark Souls, Diablo 3 Inferno Mode, Hardcore Mode in Fallout: New Vegas, Witcher 2 Combat) amongst the popularity of other games, it came to my attention that gaming wasn’t what it used to be. In the past, titles didn’t come with an easy, normal, or hard mode. They had one mode you could play and that was it. If you couldn’t beat it, tough nuggets. Keep trying and don’t give up and eventually you’ll come out of top (or keep grinding if we are talking of RPG’s). And that is how gaming was. There was no, “wow this game got super hard all of a sudden” or “Should I take a nap during this finale sequence?”. It was always that difficult and you had to zip up your boots and trudge through the onslaught to see the end of the tunnel.

Now fast-forward to today and look at the more recent Fallout series (3 and New Vegas). This is a game that seems to do difficulty wrong, in my opinion. Fallout scales difficulty in damage dealt and resistance to damage in the player only. No slew of enemies to compensate, you just have to use your Terrible Shotgun at least five times on a humanoid’s head to achieve a kill. Why not just add more enemies to the mix, re-scale damage, and also some fudge room in regards to scoring shots versus misses. In my opinion, difficulty shouldn’t be how many shots to the face it takes to down a single human, but that there are more human heads I need to be shooting. And that would also work against the player in difficulty because more enemies would add more weapons to be used against the player, in turn making it harder to survive.

Now I will point out that the “Hardcore Mode” was one of the more fun aspects of New Vegas if not for the realism of just having to drink and eat and health not be immediately refilled at the first sign of a health pack or food. Difficulty was scaled there against the environment, but not against the folk.

There are a bevy of different changes to the difficulty market and it seems like games earlier in history were tougher. But look at Binding of Issac (PC indie title), with a similar play style to Zelda meets Bullet-Hell, you have a game that offers no help in the way of difficulty. You play and if you die, you get back on the horse and do it again. Of course as you play it more and more, you unlock better items to use and in turn you get farther. But as the game progresses you fight bosses as regular mobs. Seriously frustrating times, but still reminiscent of a time I remember loving.

Now, even games like the Demon’s Souls games have the basic difficulty system right, where it is about your moves against the enemy’s, not just a barrage of flurries until you spent all your wad and reload. You prepare, you quarrel, then you regroup. And I am pointing out some very specific titles here, but the gaming scene still resonates this in other titles as well. Call it main-stream controls or user applied difficulty settings, It feels like the gaming community has gone softer than what once was.

Then Diablo 3 Inferno mode shows up and kicks everyone in the appendix.

Now, I will say that the difficulty in D3 is not the only thing that hinders progressing in Inferno. The Auction House is rife with bots and ridiculous prices for gear that is required to progress unless you would rather grind for hours on end in the previous difficulty to acquire that one trinket or bow that would finally do you some good. And you would counter, “But isn’t the game a grind anyway? Isn’t that the difficulty in of itself?”

Yes, it’s a game based on grinding. Endless hours of grinding for the right gear or the right amount of money to purchase said gear. But is that where the difficulty lies? Many players would claim yes, that and elite mobs that are sometimes utterly impossible to defeat. Now this contradicts my comment in the Fallout subject and I submit to double standards. But is there any kind of gaming that does difficulty right?

I think there’s a rise of it coming back. Some games make you work for your difficulty doing a series of tasks in game that antiquated your skill with the difficulty to match. Max Payne 3 is my definition of well placed difficulty. I didn’t change the difficulty once throughout the game, rocked Free Aim, and if I had issues that were consistent then the game dolled out more bullets or more pills to compensate for my lack of abilities in a certain area.

Difficulty is a subject that brings up more than just playability, it brings up if a game is worth the frustration to consider. But there could be a better solution that would bend the hardcore and the softcore gamers to a nirvana that everyone could enjoy. A way to offer a challenge against the common winning regime, and yet provide difficulty in the face of dull victories. Effort exhumed and the thrill of success aplenty without the idea of a speed run being the first thing sought after.

Max Payne did it well, but if it’s too hard or too easy would anyone want to fight for the prize?