Easy Mode
“Easy Mode” gets a bad wrap. There is a stigma in the gaming community about being “hard core” when it comes to the games we play. For many it’s all about playing through the toughest games on the hardest settings to prove just how awesome we are at pushing buttons on a controller.
I think this is a huge load of crap. People play games for a wide variety of reasons.
If I am playing a game for the first time, I will usually go with whatever the default difficulty setting is. More often than not, that mode of play is called “normal”. My philosophy is that the default setting is the difficulty the game creator intended. In theory, it should be the most balanced for a bit of a challenge without being either too much of a cakewalk, or frustratingly difficult.
I know many gamers that immediately set every game to “hard”. Our very own Dave will switch to hard mode on many games. This often happens when the difficulty select screen makes fun of you for picking any setting but the hardest. If it gives Dave the old “pick this mode if you’ve never played a video game before, you pansy!” when choosing normal, he feels obligated to choose the hardest mode available.
So why choose easy, when clearly it is not the default that I normally enjoy?
Imagine if you will, people in internet land, a scenario where a person who loves video games works full time and has a family. This hypothetical person also runs a blog and often writes fictional works on the side. This, my friends, is what we call a video game hobbyist. This “hobbyist blogger” may end up renting or borrowing many of their games, and wants to get through the experience in the short time they have with it.
This situation just so happens to apply to me. On some occasions, I will flip a game over to easy just to get through it quicker.
Often, I play games to relax. What doesn’t relax me is when one section of a game has a sudden and unexpected spike in difficulty. Here in the “crap level design” scenario, after ten or twenty consecutive deaths, it is nice to be able to turn a games difficulty down a notch, get through a rough patch, then set things back to “normal” where they belong.
One of my favorite innovations in this generation is adjustable difficulty. Getting hours into a game, then becoming permanently stuck kills the experience. Back in the day, you would end up starting over and losing all of that progress. Today, many games allow you to adjust the difficulty on the fly, which helps to eliminate that scenario.
Easy mode has it’s place. While it will never become the default setting for me, I am glad it is there.
Tags: adjustable difficulty, easy mode, Editorials, innovations
This entry was posted on Thursday, April 15th, 2010 at 9:43 am and is filed under Articles. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
April 15th, 2010 at 10:49 am
Jesse "Main Finger" Gregory says:I would agree that the ability to change difficulties on the fly is one of the greatest things to happen in modern gaming.
That being said, easy mode is something developers handle with varying degrees of success. Sometimes the core of the game remains perfectly intact, but sometimes you have games like Mega Man 10 which just takes it too far. Mega Man 10′s easy mode kind of ruins the level design. I think in that game, people having trouble are better off using the challenge mode’s mini stages to tighten up their skill so that they can have more fun playing on normal.
April 15th, 2010 at 3:22 pm
Cory is Super Special Awesome says:I normally play on normal mode the first time through, but I’ve found myself playing on the hardest difficulty games allow a lot more recently. It has nothing to do with being hardcore, but since I’ve been limiting myself to one game a month, I’ve had a lot more time to focus on a single game. Thus, playing on hard elongates my experience with the game and tends to give me a sense of accomplishment (plus sweet cheevos).
April 15th, 2010 at 3:32 pm
Jonah "spambot" Gregory says:That’s a good point, Cory.
If you are focusing on one game, making the experience tougher would work well. I like how Fallout 3 handled it. The tougher the setting, the more experience points you were given from defeating enemies.
Also, an awesome game with tons of stuff to do if you haven’t already played it