As an older gamer it almost sounds like something similar to planned obsolescence (for purposes of the analogy).

Like, NES games were definitely way too hard. Incomprehensibly so in many cases. Fortunately you could subscribe to Nintendo Power magazine and hope a strategy guide appeared, or if it didn’t, you could call the Nintendo Power hotline for $4.99 a minute to find out how battletoads is fkng doable cuz I sure as hell still don’t know >.<

So, artificial difficulty might be difficulty for the purpose of making you buy outside resources to mitigate it?

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.

It’s not the cleanest term out there, best way to understand it is to play something like Kaizo Mario.

Thanks this is def the best answer i could have gotten for this. Appreciate it [:

No problem!

A good higher difficulty: Enemies have more and new moves, more aggressive, new mechanics that changes the gameplay while offering more challenging, less resources making you manage your items carefully. The game still relies on your skill.

Artificial Difficulty: Bloated HP, bloated attack damage which makes the fight just tedious because you fight the same enemy (especially common in mobile rpg games where you need to buy boosters to progress faster through this walls or suffer a month of grind). Fuck skill, we will bring you down using one shot attacks with 0.5 sec windup and invisible traps and holes in the area. Oh you didn't do Siegward's quest which is easily missable in the game? Have fun suffering through Yhorm bitch.

Most games have artificial difficulty, but as long as the tuning is not over the top that you have to resort to cheesing, microtransaction and hidden shit then it is fine.

Pretty much stupid ways to bump up the difficulty of a game; instead of unique enemies/behavior on high difficulties, for example, it's just "bad guy hit hard, more health."

So when you are playing skyrim on normal difficulty, things hit you and you hit them equally, as defined by your weapon strength, their armor, etc. when you turn the difficulty up, they get more heath and hit harder. This is artificial difficulty. If, when you turned up the difficulty the AI just got much smarter about tactics and pinch/ flank spots, that would be more of a “true” difficulty increase.

It's the difference between the ai following the rules or getting huge stacks of money every turn.

So for games like civilization or heroes of might or and magic or total war. Artificial difficulty would be when you set it to hard and the ai gets a 200% to gold production and can hire more units than normal.

Basically it boils down to does the ai have cheat codes.

artificial difficulty is something like fighting a tougher version of an enemy where the only change is they have more health or deal more damage to you. Essentially no real change is made to the enemy, they enemy just get's different stats

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?

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.

Where/how can i play this "Kaizo Mario" you speak of? Can i get it on nintendo switch?

It’s a romhack of Super Mario World. PC would be the easiest way to play it, otherwise a hacked SNES mini or possibly if you have a controller on an android phone.

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

When the ai isnt fair and is difficult for the sake of being difficult that makes the game very frustrating

Increases or decreases based on player's actions.