Viewing a single comment thread. View all comments

SepticKnave39 t1_iy6bity wrote

It doesn't mean anything, really. Basically all difficulty is "artificial difficulty", or at least heavily influenced by it. Games give you a certain amount of health, allow you to do a certain amount of damage, take a certain amount of damage etc... That changes from game to game, and difficulty to difficulty. From soft games allow you to take like 3 consecutive hits and bosses take like 40.

When people say "artificial difficulty" they mean that they made the game more difficult by making enemies hit harder, you take less damage, enemies take more damage. That's it. Which is exactly how every game tailors it's difficulty to some extent.

"Non-artificial difficulty" is when a game is difficult because of mechanics, like a boss having hard to predict movesets that are difficult to dodge. But if you didn't have "artificial difficulty", and you could take 300 hits before dying then you could just ignore the boss movesets and eat the hits and kill the boss.

When people complain about artificial difficulty it's because they feel like it is not tuned correctly. That enemies take too much damage or you can take too little and the game doesn't feel good because of it. But this is obviously subjective, as someone else might love the feel of that difficulty.

But artificial difficulty is really just tuning of a bedrock function of the game. Without "artificial difficulty" there would be no game, essentially. Every game has it. Even from soft games.

What would be more worthwhile to say, is that "bosses need their health tuned down" or "enemies need their damage tuned down". Or "they should add more complex mechanics". Because "this game has some artificial difficulty and it's BS RAWR". Is not descriptive or helpful and just sounds like they just know a buzzword.

3

FatesVagrant t1_iy6x0fs wrote

Yeah it is a personal pet peeve of mine when people complain about artificial difficulty because enemies get higher health and damage and act like this is an invalid way to add difficulty. Pretty much every game in existence that isn't an RTS or stealth game is "artificial difficulty" on higher than default settings then.

Enimies hits harder= less room for mistakes, more health means you have to be more efficient at dealing damage and able to keep performance up for longer. That is the foundation for increasing difficulty. There is absolutely no point in adding in some extra behaviors to a boss if a good player who has optimized their build, consistently hits weak points or knows how to combo effectively and doesn't need to back off can burst them down in 10 secs.

Developing AI and unique features/attacks is expensive, it's probably not something you want to spend a lot of time on if most players won't see it and do you really want enemies to have neutered behaviors, less variety and seem stupid on lower difficulties when the player really only need more room for error?

1

SepticKnave39 t1_iy6xwlc wrote

Exactly. I mean it absolutely is a good thing to have higher difficulty also mean more aggressive enemies and potentially more varied move sets and introduce maybe an additional moveset or more. I definitely think that adds value. But more aggressive enemies really doesn't mean much if the game is ultra forgiving on the "artificial difficulty" and you can take so many hits that the aggressiveness barely makes a difference. Having both forms of "difficulty" is definitely better than just increasing health and damage but there is nothing wrong with increasing health and damage. It forces you to play more "perfectly" which is exactly the point.

1

HellDuke t1_iy7ackw wrote

To be fair it is a valid complaint. Got GOW2018 when it came to PC and was appaled when I saw that the high difficulty setting was just dog shit and all it did was adjust the stats to the point where a basic enemy took several minutes of whacking to kill. I don't call it artificial difficulty, just bad design. Stat increases are valid but only to an extent. Addind a bunch of hp to enemies does jot make the game more difficult it makes it more tedious.

Increasing their damage is fine, but instead of adding a ton of hp it's better if enemies become more aggressive, tightening the parry (if mechanic exists) window, adding more enemies or enemies with some status effect etc. Making the player spend 20 mintes in a fight instead of 5 by HP and damage changes does not equate to difficulty

1