Typically I skip hard modes. Sometimes I see the difficulty modifier and I’m like “What is this?” I want to play the game as it was meant to be played, the way it was envisioned, and I want to be able to tell others that I played it. I want to play “the game” and nothing else. I don’t have to make something that is supposed to be enjoyably challenging into some strenuous labor just to stroke my ego. It seemed all hard modes would accomplish would be making challenges take longer, requiring faster reflexes or more accuracy, requiring carrying more potions, or making you memorize a needless amount of details about game minutiae. I would rather pass.
Now let me introduce you to two well-known games: Kingdom Hearts and Diablo II. They are two examples of how hard mode can be done right. After beating Kingdom Hearts on the Normal mode I decided to start a game on Expert difficulty. The experience was completely different, even with the game being exactly the same. Suddenly I wasn’t just slashing baddies—I was watching their moves, taking evasive action, giving different threats priority. I became more involved in the game and began to see the depth of possible interaction.
Without the difficulty there was no drive to reach these levels, no motive to strive for anything higher. At lesser difficulties there was no need to develop these skills, and this lead to complacency.
In Diablo II’s Hardcore mode death becomes permanent. This in turn demands a play style that is categorically different from normal mode. Where death used to be just an inconvenience suddenly it meant the end; no longer was it an option, no longer was it a risk that could be taken. That meant instead of building up mana reserves I was giving my necromancer more armor and life. And by having less mana, I was forced to do other things differently: spamming spells at my enemies would have drained too much mana, I had to find more efficient ways to handle them. By making the game less forgiving the very nature of the game was changed, the result that I had to adapt and grow. It was a change I think was well done.
That these two games did so well in accomplishing the task of providing a harder difficulty setting I would attribute to two primary factors. The first is depth. The two games had enough rules and variation in mechanics that the player could continue to explore and analyze them, whether it was anticipating an enemy’s attack or discovering that poison resistance could be quite useful, Hard mode’s demand for greater attention brought the realization of these details, and thus the ability to respond to them.
This leads to the second characteristic these games share: good conveyance. In simple terms this means you need to tell me about how your game works if I’m going to know how to play it well, and conversely, if there is no way for me to really know all of the rules then don’t expect me to utilize them. Your game can be filled with depth but if your player can’t see how anything affects anything they won’t see any depth. You can have tons of hidden stats and checks and if the player doesn’t know they exist it will just seem arbitrary. Derived from this is Intuitiveness: the rules need to make sense in a way that the player sees how they are connected—it will make memorizing the rules much easier and feel more natural. So depth, conveyance, and sort of intuitiveness, I guess that’s more like 2.5 principles. With Kingdom Hearts a huge factor was watching the enemies movements, tracking their formations; this lends itself to be visually understood so they player gains knowledge of the rules through the senses. In Diablo, everything was explained to some degree in text: you could read the stats of an item or spell and then look to see how it affected your character. Sure, there is much more to these games, but this is just an overview.
In essence these games allowed for meaningful choice and situational analysis, and in their Hard modes there is then the need for the player to do these, an extra effort that was not necessary in the normal modes. The player does not have to so much react faster, just to figure out how to react smarter.
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