Topic: Modern GameCube games Need Difficulty Settings

[Ian Sane]

"With Zelda I'd change the number of initial hearts (as I said in the first post)... depending upon if you are a Zelda God (1 heart) or a Child (10 hearts)"

Ten hearts?  In most Zelda games I beat the game with like 15 hearts tops.  Ten hearts would make it WAY too easy.  I much prefer the idea of having two quests (like Ocarina/Master Quest) with rearranged dungeons.  The difficulty is still greater and the player doesn't have to play through the exact same game.

[ShockingAlberto]

Uhm, has anyone actually complained about the difficulty of these games?  I remember being so engrossed with Zelda that I never really cared how hard/easy it was.

And yes, like someone said earlier, puzzles are harder to change.  Can you imagine a different difficulty setting in Ocarina and the whole game turning in to Master Quest?  It's simply not that easy (pun!).

-- ShockingAlberto

[theaveng]

Quote
Originally posted by: Ian Sane
"With Zelda I'd change the number of initial hearts (as I said in the first post)... depending upon if you are a Zelda God (1 heart) or a Child (10 hearts)"Ten hearts?  In most Zelda games I beat the game with like 15 hearts tops.  Ten hearts would make it WAY too easy.

For you, but not for my 3-yr-old nephew.  He'd need all the extra hearts.

And yes, I've heard a several people complain that modern PS2/GC games are too easy.  

[Hemmorrhoid]

well that really depends

see most or many of you guys are hardcore gamers that are partly real pros
but i can tell you the mainstream gamer has difficulty beating metroid prime on easy
or even with Starfox Adventures

i think you guys played too many REALLY HARD games in the SNES era and now most games are too easy for you
most games are quite easy for me, but, face it, if you see casual gamers play you sometimes wanna kill yourself seein how much
they suck

[Nintendork SP]

Well I havn't had a real challenging paltformer in a few years so I am gonna play the next playformer I find with difficulty setting on hard.  

[Hemmorrhoid]

so getting all the shines in SMS was easy for you?

[ShockingAlberto]

I wasn't saying a generation of games, I was mainly referring to the most popular games mention, namely Zelda and Metroid.  As I've already explained (and has been mentioned by other posters previously), Zelda is not really about battling.  Hell, you could quite easily go through an entire dungeon without taking a single hit (use of magic, dodging, basic skills).  The difficulty in Zelda is the puzzles.  You can't change those around on difficulty settings without major work and setting the game back five or six months.  Zelda is not Final Fight, a difficulty setting would be pointless.

The same goes for Metroid, to an extent, but it can be argued that Metroid is more battle-intensive.  The thing is, Metroid had difficulty settings.  You could easily turn the hint-system off and wander through Tallon IV yourself.  In addition, once you beat the game, you could make it more difficult by accessing the "Hard" setting.  I suppose one could argue that it's not the same as the old Metroid where you'd only have 30 health and save stations (which weren't there, obviously) could not heal you.  That would also be morbidly insane.  Most people who didn't play the game as kids would be so frustrated that they'd give up and recommend to their friends not to buy it.  Face it, when kids beat a game, they enjoy it.  That enjoyment figures in to Playground logic where you tell your friends about this awesome game you just beat.  The same idea works for all age-groups.

There's also the opposite end of the spectrum, where the game is just ridiculously easy.  Take, for example, Final Fantasy X.  Keeping spoilers to a minimum, I'll just say that it is impossible to die in the Final battle.  Impossible.  I could have slept and still won.  This made me really dissapointed in the game and I gave my friends a cautionary warning to not expect too much from the end.  If someone told me this, I might have been turned off from the game and not played it.  However, FFX is an amazing exception.  I never came in expecting it to be difficult.  I haven't played a difficult Final Fantasy game since FFV.  If, in Metroid Prime's final battle, I was incapable of dying, I'd be livid.

The general points that I'm trying to make are

A) Difficulty levels are not always possible
B) They're sometimes there, you just have to be experienced enough to deal with them
C) I have no idea what that last paragraph was about

-- ShockingAlberto