On videogame difficulty, part 2: the difficulty setting

I should point out that I'm really not going anywhere whatsoever with this. It's a big long ramble without any real editing, and is thus probably the purest look into the warped enigma that is my brain. You're welcome.

It's nice that video games these days (and by "these days" I mean "going back at least to whenever the hell Half-Life came out) have difficulty settings.

As a general rule, when I'm feeling smugly superior about my video-game talent, I like to classify difficulty settings in the following way:

• The highest setting is "Hard."
• The next-highest setting is "Normal."
• Everything below that is "Tiny Baby Mode."

So this holds true for, say Starcraft II and Mass Effect 3.  But it's mainly a joke for myself.

Where am I going with this: let's start with the thing that inspired me to write this post, Half-Life. Having beaten Half-Life 2 (having beaten it more than once, if you count "skipped Ravenholm" as still having beaten it), I figured I could handle Half-Life on the "Normal" setting.  Now, as it happens, Half-Life has three difficulty settings: Hard, Normal, and Tiny Baby Mode Easy.   And on Normal, every enemy is a bullet sink.  I'm pretty sure the ammo pickups are the same, but...

Fairly early on in the "Office Complex" level, for example, there's a security guard who gets attacked by a zombie. If you can keep him alive, he'll open a door for you that gives you a metric ton of shotgun ammo. The problem being, as I mentioned above, every enemy is a bullet sink on Normal.

So that's pretty clever.  The level design is exactly the same, but you're still less likely to get ammo if you play on a higher difficulty.

My problem with Half-Life's difficulty settings is this: Tiny Baby Mode is too easy (well, at least until I got to Blast Pit - now I have C'thulhu's drummer to contend with, and that's not going too well), but Normal mode is too hard. (Yes, I know, I suck at life.) There's really not an in-between setting that is a) enjoyable, and b) challenging.

I love Mass Effect and Mass Effect 2 for having the Veteran difficulty setting, between Normal and Hardcore. Once you're on Hardcore... I'm not going to say it's too hard, because I've beaten every game on Hardcore, but it certainly starts to suck the fun out.  In ME1, everyone gets the Immunity ability and becomes a bullet sink.  In ME2, everyone gets some form of protection. In ME3, it seems like the differences are: your weapons do less damage and their weapons do more damage, and that's it. Now, I enjoy a difficult firefight and a feeling of accomplishment (note to Valve from the Half-Life 1 era: accomplishment, not plain blind luck), but bullet sinks don't really provide that.

...my point there is that ME1 and ME2 have Veteran, which hit that sweet spot of "being more difficult than Normal without sucking the fun out."

ME3 lacks this, because Normal is supposedly now Veteran, but because of certain new mechanics (namely tech explosions and a rework of AP ammo), it doesn't seem as difficult as ME2's Veteran. (Actually, this is probably due to the other mechanics I mentioned in Part 1; I would imagine that ME3's Casual is easier than ME2's casual as well.)

All of that said, I am currently working through ME3 on Insanity and enjoying the hell out of it. I would not want to do this for every playthrough, because I don't think it'd be possible as some classes (cough Vanguard cough*) but also because sometimes I play Mass Effect more for the story than for the challenge.

*To explain that for the uninitiated: on Insanity difficulty, with your shields down you die in about two hits. Vanguard's main strategy is: 1) teleport directly into your enemy's face. 2) Use "Nova," an ability that damages all nearby enemies and knocks weaker ones off their feet... by completely draining your shields. 3) Roll around frantically waiting for the teleport ability to recharge. 4) Repeat.


And then there's Dragon Age: Origins, which just takes the model and beats it to death with a crowbar.  On Casual mode, your spells don't damage your allies. On Normal mode, they do. And you'll run out of health potions much more easily. And... well, see the point with Half-Life and ammo, above. Having to spend more money on health potions means spending less money on the top-tier items. (By the way, BioWare took notice: "Normal" on the console is about as hard as "Casual" on the PC.)
Let's see if I can make something resembling a coherent point here: There are certain points in certain video games where I find myself saying, "I am not having fun." (Cough the Haven mission from SC2, cough.) I like challenges. Especially if those challenges come with rewards for beating them. When playing all the way through the Mass Effect trilogy, I have to decide whether to play Mass Effect 2 on a challenging difficulty (and therefore enjoy it), or play on Normal and burn through the game as fast as possible, being fairly bored for 20 hours, in order to get to ME3 as fast as possible. I really appreciate having a difficulty setting that sits right in the sweet spot between "enjoyable because I can win" and "enjoyable because it's a challenge."