re: Man Xbox is not welcome here

How pathetic are people that care how someone beats a damn video game

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How pathetic are people that care how someone beats a damn video game

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I mean the shoe also fits on the other foot. It's equally as pathetic to require validation for the difficulty you decided to play a game on.

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Nothing is more pathetic than how PC gamers treat console gamers.

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The only instance I can think of PC gamers actually paying attention to console gamers are when console gamers get aim assist so strong that it breaks cross play

Or when you get cool exclusives that don’t get sent to Steam

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I almost always pick the toughest difficulty because I crave a good challenge

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Go rock crushing on Uncharted 1 and have fun w/those endless waves of bullet sponge eating mofos.

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It’s absolutely ok to play a game on the easiest difficulty; no, that is not the same thing as beating the game.

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I agree - the easier levels are there to allow a new/inexperienced player to learn game mechanics and controls without the frustration of failure. To "beat the game", you would have to complete it at least at the standard or intended(by the creators) difficulty level.

Arguably you would have to either earn all possible achievements and/or at the highest difficulty level. I don't agree with that because I'm not a masochist, but it is more arguable than saying you beat it by completing the game at the easiest level.

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Arguably you would have to either earn all possible achievements and/or at the highest difficulty level. I don't agree with that because I'm not a masochist, but it is more arguable than saying you beat it by completing the game at the easiest level.

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While I would understand the argument, I would disagree with it as well. Difficulty levels are a relatively modern thing to begin with. Which is why modern players, and especially speed runners, will add handicaps to artificially increase the difficulty of older games. In my view, achievements and difficulty settings are really more of a codification of those previous artificial handicaps in order to increase replayability. To keep in theme, I absolutely say that someone who beats the original Zelda beat it, even if they didn’t do some artificial handicap like never acquiring the red or blue rings. But did they really beat Contra if they used the Konami code? Or beat the AoEII campaign if they had missile launching cars racing around the map?

That’s the best corollary I can think of regarding difficulty settings vs achievements. But again, if someone wants to wipe out the Mongolian horde with missile launcher, rock out with your cock out, man

I meant more in the context of more linear games, but point taken

Starting with the NES, difficulty settings were very few and far between.

Personally, I feel like playing the game on easy isn't experiencing the game as intended by the developers

That said, if someone needs to or wants to play on easy in order to enjoy the game, more power to them.

There are honestly some games out there that are more fun on lower difficulty settings.

I’ve spent a bit of time thinking about what constitutes good difficulty to me, at least in a standard first/third person narrative game. Surprisingly, it didn’t have much to do with how much damage I could dish out. The short version for me is how much damage my character can sponge, relative to how possible it is to avoid being hit. If it’s well within an expected skill set to be able to get behind cover, or dodge/block/parry, etc, good difficulty will expect you to do so. If you can just stand out in the open sponging bullets, or just mash buttons in a fight simply because you can do damage faster than your opponent, then at that point, the gameplay is pointless. But from there, the difficulty slider should establish how many times you can frick that up in a fight before you lose. At low difficulties, you should only need to do it successfully once or twice. At high difficulties, you have to do it perfectly every time. You tip into “bad difficulty” for me if at the high end, you have to do it correctly over, and over, and over again, because you’re doing so little damage. That it becomes just a test of endurance as opposed to skill.

Now, all of the above is just personal preference. That’s to say nothing about someone choosing to ignore gameplay for the sake of focusing on the story. And while I might think that bottoming out the gameplay reduces the impact of the story, that gets to be left up to personal preference.

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the first God of War were the only modem era games that I didn't use any assistance.

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