• Melonpoly@lemmy.world
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    26 days ago

    You don’t have to play difficult games. Not everything has to cater to a wide audience. Most of today’s re-boots and sequals were from stories that catered to a niche audience only to lose its appeal by going too mainstream…

    • Honytawk@lemmy.zip
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      26 days ago

      Adding a difficulty slider is easy, doesn’t take much time, doesn’t change much about the experience, and allows more people to enjoy your media.

      So leaving it out is lazy game development.

      Niche audiences is fine, gatekeeping isn’t.

      • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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        25 days ago

        Adding a difficulty slider is easy

        [CITATION NEEDED]
        It seems pretty clear you don’t have any idea what you’re talking about from a game development standpoint. Difficulty is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay and you can’t just add multiple versions of that trivially. Even Bethesda’s classic “bump up the health” stuff isn’t a trivial thing to implement. Just come on with this.

        • Korhaka@sopuli.xyz
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          25 days ago

          Depends on how it’s implemented. Just give the player more/unlimited HP or armour would be easy.

        • Honytawk@feddit.nl
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          25 days ago

          My citation is myself as amateur game developer.

          Game design is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay. Difficulty just plays around with the variables that you already have made for said game design.

          Do you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?

          It is balancing at most.

          • iegod@lemmy.zip
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            24 days ago

            Sir you must be a very niche or inexperienced game developer because there is more than tuning variables to impact difficulty especially from genre to genre and game to game. Level design alone for platformer’s can introduce degrees of difficulties. Puzzle games’ difficulties revolve entirely around the puzzle design. You can’t adjust a variable and tune that. These are just two of countless examples.

          • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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            25 days ago

            Game design is the entire driving mechanism behind gameplay.

            Been a while since I’ve seen a good old fashioned tautology. Stop trying to be disingenuous, ‘difficulty’ (or if you prefer, ‘challenge’) is the #1 factor in game design. You either should know this, because it’s patently obvious, or you should just stop talking about this subject like you have any idea what you’re talking about.

            Do you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?

            Strawman me harder, zaddy!
            No, they don’t redesign a game for every difficulty - that’s absurd. But it does have a huge impact on every aspect of gameplay, and like I said, it’s far far from trivial to alter the abstract concept which defines things like the core gameplay loop.

            My citation is myself

            Yeah… Okay.

      • iegod@lemmy.zip
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        25 days ago

        This way undermines the effort required for developers, and will drastically vary from game to game.

      • Melonpoly@lemmy.world
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        25 days ago

        I see you have no idea what you’re talking about. Do you think it’s a simple as reducing a health bar? Because games that do difficulty scaling like that are not fun at all and I would consider that lazy.

        How can you be niche without a “gatekeeping” to some degree? Again, not every game or piece of media need to cater to everybody.

        • Honytawk@feddit.nl
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          25 days ago

          I designed games myself. It is very easy. Just switch around some variables.

          Every game does it like that, whether it is HP, damage, enemy spawns, probability to take a specific action, … it is all just playing around with variables.

          It is neither lazy nor not fun.

          Did you really think they completely redesign a game for every difficulty?

          It is you that has no idea what you’re talking about.

          • Warl0k3@lemmy.world
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            25 days ago

            I designed games myself

            How do you do, fellow game designers.

            it is all just playing around with variables

            “All game design is just changing numbers” sure, and all programming is just manipulating two values over and over and over. But the difficult part isn’t changing the numbers, the difficult part is the mechanisms that define how those numbers interact with other numbers. “Magic Numbers” have a place in game design yes, but they are not by any stretch how those systems are defined. If your game was created like that, it cannot have been very good…