GAME PET PEEVES

Ah, I was gauging difficulty as knowing how to play the game and giving it your all to beat it. For somebody new to the game I agree that FF6 and FF7 are definitely easier.

post=140911
Sure, but when I was referring to difficulty, I was meaning how difficult it is for the average player to progress through a vanilla game, without finding the game breaking Blue Magic or advanced strategies. Hell, almost every game I know of has an eclectic way of vaporizing the difficulty, so I don't consider that when thinking of how challenging a game is.

If a game has an eclectic way of vaporizing the difficulty, then that is how easy it is. Playing it suboptimally and saying it's hard should not count. If you want to consider it in any way hard, you have to be playing optimally and have it still be hard.

The fact that you're good at RPGs doesn't make the game's easiness less authentic. It makes the game easy to people who are good at RPGs. Which is really the same thing as being easy in general, since RPGs are dreadfully simple to be good at.

On the other hand, if a game is easy to people who are bad at it, then it doesn't even qualify as a game. To be a game, the player has to be able to win or lose. If you pretty much can't lose, it's pretty much not a game.

On-topic: games which have eclectic ways of vaporizing the difficulty are one of my pet peeves. Though, I realize that getting rid of all such ways requires an amount of testing that RPG Maker games cannot afford to undertake.

Yes, that's... basically the definition of lowering the difficulty of the game.

post=141881
So is selecting "Easy" at the start of the game. Not everyone will do this, given the chance, will they?

I actually did for a game here of a genre in which I suck as a player. It turned out to be irrelevant. For an RPG, I won't even consider it unless I was convinced that normal was actually very hard.

I like the squaresoft way of doing things. You're not expected to go off the linear path placed before you, and the difficulty is curved as such.

So when you show up at Sephiroth, he really isn't expecting you to bust out an omnislash or a doubled knights of the round. When you meet Lavos face to face, he's not expecting you to have a Rainbow Sword with prism specs and yadda yadda yadda.

Anyway, I think there's some value in allowing the player to become massively overpowered. There's something to be said about doing tens of thousands of damage in a single attack.

When the evasion percentage of enemies are high and/or the accuracy of your heroes is low

Drives me absolutely nuts.

post=141873
Would you consider an optional character that joins the party with a blatant disclaimer that they are superior to everyone else and basically an Easy Mode/gameplay skip option to lower the difficulty of the game? Just curious.

This is a curious middle case.

Normally there's a definite mental division between two tasks: deciding which game you're playing, and playing that game. (Part of what's called the magic circle in some places - the inside/outside game divider.) So you can choose Easy mode, or not to buy any items, or to play with only Samurai starting at Dorter, or whatever. And even once you start the actual game you may have some options that you can segregate out as not being part of the game - a menu option labeled "Difficulty Mode", or whether or not to go to GameFAQs.

But when you're playing the game you're looking for the best, easiest way to beat the game, even if that's something totally uninteresting like "Choose Attack 50 times" or "Push W then I then N". And the more complicated an option is and the less foreknowledge you have about it, the harder it is to pull yourself out of playing the game to decide that you want to exclude it from the game you want to play, instead of just taking advantage of it.

So if it were a blatant disclaimer, and I had some warning, the situation you describe would still be pretty tempting. Especially if I had to do anything to get that character, making them a reward in some way, or if they have cool special attacks, or dialogue anywhere... But rather than just showing a warning, putting the choice as clearly outside the magic circle as possible might be somewhat more effective.

"You now have the option to use T.G. Cid! To do so, go to the team menu, move the cursor to him, and select 'I would like to enter Easy Mode, please!'."

I think such a choice still feels like it's what you're supposed to do.

When you get an option at the beginning of the game regarding your difficulty level, they're clearly both different options for gameplay. But when the game gives you the Ultima spell, you're... supposed to use it. The game is not telling you that you have a new difficulty option, it's just making you more powerful. That is how it feels. It feels like not using it would make any perceived difficulty be my own stupid fault, instead of the game actually providing difficulty.

Oddly, I think that if you simply add an achievement for not using the overpowered ability, then I would consider it to be a real challenge that's being provided by the game, instead of me just being stupid on purpose to give myself a challenge. Hmm.

post=142460
I hate reaching a new town, spending nearly all of your money on new gear, and then discovering a new town with even better gear within the next 10mins or so..

As an extension of this, shops in towns selling gear that gets outclassed by gear found in the next dungeon,
which is outclassed by the next town, etc, etc. It's especially annoying when the dungeons take very little time to clear...

Or have difficulty levels. ::D