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Comment by nkrisc | Hacker News Reader

This will depend on the game of course, but the best is when you can adjust the difficulty of mechanics individually.

City builders do this a lot where you often have lots of difficulty settings you can adjust to tailor the game to your preferred playstyle.

I’ll also say this: if you’re making a game and you add in a mechanic or mini-game that is not typical of the genre, make it optional or provide a way to skip it. Few things things in gaming piss me off more than a memory or Simon Says puzzle in an MMO or similar. If I wanted to play puzzle games, I’d be playing a puzzle game, not your game.

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This works for sandbox or simulation type games, but otherwise I think difficulty sliders are like going to a restaurant and getting all the cooked ingredients in separate plates for you to combine. While that can be fine and cater to the maximum number of people, it's a safe approach that wastes good opportunity cost of a great plate of food catered by someone with the skills to do it.

If a game can afford a designers to really think what the experience should be, I think the gold standard should be no difficulty slider. Playing the game should be a self-consistent experience that gets more difficult as you get better at the game, and gating the final content with skills is very rewarding and makes the experience feel more "real" than if you just get a super configurable game where everything can be turned on/off.

I’m not suggesting you hit a new player with a wall of configuration options. Guide them into the gameplay experience as you intended it, but also allow them to make changes to settings as relevant to the game.

I liked when games used to include cheat codes or debug commands. Let me trivialize the game if I want to. I paid for it and it’s my time I’m spending. Not once did I ever play The Sims as intended. And enjoyed it enough to buy another version or two. I used cheats all the time in WarCraft 2 and StarCraft single player.

And when games don’t include that, almost always someone will create a hack or mod that does do that, because there is a demand for it.

That's fair, but I think each difficulty level needs to be designed as its own challenge, as oppose to the developer exposing the internals of the game so you can turn all the nobs and make anything trivial.

In short, there needs to be intention and design, and not just exposing the developer tools, generally speaking.

Ghost Recon Breakpoint is a good example of lots of difficulty settings. You can turn off some annoying parts of the game, set enemy tactical difficulty, disable some survival aspects of the game if you don't care about them, and adjust the amount of on-screen information in several steps. For the latter part, you can have a minimap that shows the location of enemies once you've seen them, or not, and you can have waypoints that show the direction of some objective, or not. With all of the on-screen stuff disabled, there would be an awful lot of searching required to find objectives. It's pretty cool that everyone can have the amount of difficulty/frustration they desire.

> You can turn off some annoying parts of the game [...] cool that everyone can have the amount of difficulty/frustration they desire

Depends on the type of game, but I'd generally prefer those decisions be made by the game designer. If there's frustration I want it to feel like overcoming a concrete obstacle, rather than it being self-hindering that accomplishes nothing and that I could've just avoided.

I remember there were some complaints about the puzzle sections in a recent-ish God of War game where they had clearly tried to avoid this problem but by essentially having NPCs spontaneously tell you the solution to the puzzle at some point, which then just annoyed people who wanted to solve the puzzle themselves.

seems like this is more of a personal taste issue. I rather enjoy little surprise minigames like this.

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