PSA: Not All Difficulty is Good Difficulty

[Ray]

Most of us who dislike the patch do not dislike it because it makes the game hard. It's because it's hard *in the wrong way*. Think about how difficulty is done in Doom (2016) vs. how it's done in Skyrim.

Doom: monsters do more damage, health and armor pickups give less and there are more monsters. Upshot: fights are more intense with less margin for error. You feel like a bamf when you're done. This is difficulty done right.

Skyrim: Player deals less damage enemies do more. Upshot: everything takes longer; Dovakin feels weak af. This is terrible.

Notice: there's no one alive who would say Skyrim is a difficult game. It's just not. There are plenty of harder games that are fun. But the way Skyrim *does difficulty* is not fun.

And the way Shadow Warrior does difficulty is in an important respect like Skyrim's: it cranks player damage down and cranks out more enemies that have through the roof HP and against whom player spells are ineffectual. The result is the same: battles take forever and our chi-bending super-powered ninja feels powerless.

This is the problem. I don't play Shadow Warrior on normal because it's soooo much harder than Doom. I play it on normal because I'd rather be OP as hell than deal with the bullet sponges. But even on normal it takes multiple shotgun blasts to take out a mook from six feet away.

Now, I'm sure someone's rushing to respond on a line-by-line basis. Before you do, understand this, you don't have to agree, but understand this is what a lot of us "crybabies" hate: not the difficulty, but the way it's done. You want to disagree, fine. You want to criticize me, fine. But at least criticize me for disliking bullet sponges, not for needing to "git gud" at what frankly ain't that hard a game.

[<:)]

I was taking my time with the game, got to around 70% complete before this patch dropped, so i never experience absurdly OP weapons/gems. Having confirmed that elites are now even spongier than before, i'm not even going too bother updating. I can get my fill of repetitive grind/upgrade with the new diaablo 3 season.

Shadow Warrior started as this awesome, brutal, first person ninja combat, but the lack of variance in skills and the repetition in combat got old reaally fast.
Honestly i would refund if i could. I feel totally ripped off for the 50 aud i paid for it.

[Sceles]

There's no difficulty difference between SW2 and Doom... of course if you're too dumb to upgrade your skills and weapons or don't know how to effectively utilize each weapon type, then you might run into some problems.

Originally posted by beeflot:

yes;it's hard and boring.

if i want a challenging game i can play dark souls

If you have any idea how to play them, even Dark Souls games are not hard. It's all about optimizing your build and playstyle, just like this game.

[gameragodzilla]

Originally posted by comeuppance:

I heard GOG lets you play on the original release, and not upgrade if you do not want to, Steam though always updates your game!

Yup, there's a rollback feature. So I just rolled back to version 1.1.2.0 and am having a blast. :D

Had to get my skill points back, though, but it wasn't too hard considering I had the normal NG+ rather than the godawful karma only system. Doesn't matter if it was a bug or not, it made the game more enjoyable and was how Shadow Warrior 2013 did it. Literally no change was needed whatsoever. ♥♥♥♥ "build diversity".

Originally posted by Sceles:

There's no difficulty difference between SW2 and Doom... of course if you're too dumb to upgrade your skills and weapons or don't know how to effectively utilize each weapon type, then you might run into some problems.

Originally posted by beeflot:

yes;it's hard and boring.

if i want a challenging game i can play dark souls

If you have any idea how to play them, even Dark Souls games are not hard. It's all about optimizing your build and playstyle, just like this game.

Doom doesn't increase enemy health. An imp is just as strong at the beginning of the game as it is at the end, and it takes just as much damage on the lowest difficulty as Nightmare. They only hit harder, you gain less health/armor back from pickups, and the AI is better. Basically, it's the exact same game from easy to Nightmare, just with the latter having far less room for error, as the post explained.

Shadow Warrior 2 decided to just make every enemy soak up damage like a sponge, which doesn't do anything but make the higher difficulties a tedious grind. Forcing people to play on that difficulty level for a higher skill point cap is complete and utter ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥. The previous system was balanced enough, so all you had to do was put more enemies and decrease how much resources helped you. Would've been awesome to fight a large number of enemies with a small room for error.

[Izanami]

I haven't finished my first playthought yet, so I'm not really qualified to comment on this, but I'm hoping the devs patch this out before I'm done. I just got the game and am rather disappointed to hear that the endgame has been turned into bullet sponges. People online were saying the endgame was really fun and I'm kind of disappointed to hear this now that I've bought it.

I like the idea of rebalancing it into a system similar to DOOM though, but so far it has been amazing. The bullet sponge enemies were what I hated about borderlands, and if this turns into that it would really suck.

[gameragodzilla]

Originally posted by Izanami:

I haven't finished my first playthought yet, so I'm not really qualified to comment on this, but I'm hoping the devs patch this out before I'm done. I just got the game and am rather disappointed to hear that the endgame has been turned into bullet sponges. People online were saying the endgame was really fun and I'm kind of disappointed to hear this now that I've bought it.

I like the idea of rebalancing it into a system similar to DOOM though, but so far it has been amazing. The bullet sponge enemies were what I hated about borderlands, and if this turns into that it would really suck.

It's not just the end game that has been ruined, it's NG+ now. One of the draws of NG+, which was also implemented in Shadow Warrior 2013, was the ability to replay missions, continously picking up upgrades and such until you completely maxed out your character. That's why you had a NG+ feature in the first place rather than simply starting over from scratch. Here? Since they removed getting skill points from missions in NG+, that completely removed any incentive to actually play in NG+. Might as well just run around freeroaming after the final mission killing stuff over and over again. And combine this with the fact that enemies are now much bullet spongier and you also lose all karma upon death if you play on the highest difficulty (which you have to due to the incredibly terrible skill point cap), it becomes a completely and utterly annoying grind. Terrible system, so I'm glad I got the GOG version which has rollback. Feel sorry for the Steam users.

[Pinhead Larry]

Originally posted by Ray:

Most of us who dislike the patch do not dislike it because it makes the game hard. It's because it's hard *in the wrong way*. Think about how difficulty is done in Doom (2016) vs. how it's done in Skyrim.

Doom: monsters do more damage, health and armor pickups give less and there are more monsters. Upshot: fights are more intense with less margin for error. You feel like a bamf when you're done. This is difficulty done right.

Skyrim: Player deals less damage enemies do more. Upshot: everything takes longer; Dovakin feels weak af. This is terrible.

Notice: there's no one alive who would say Skyrim is a difficult game. It's just not. There are plenty of harder games that are fun. But the way Skyrim *does difficulty* is not fun.

And the way Shadow Warrior does difficulty is in an important respect like Skyrim's: it cranks player damage down and cranks out more enemies that have through the roof XP and against whom player spells are ineffectual. The result is the same: battles take forever and our chi-bending super-powered ninja feels powerless.

This is the problem. I don't play Shadow Warrior on normal because it's soooo much harder than Doom. I play it on normal because I'd rather be OP as hell than deal with the bullet sponges. But even on normal it takes multiple shotgun blasts to take out a mook from six feet away.

Now, I'm sure someone's rushing to respond on a line-by-line basis. Before you do, understand this, you don't have to agree, but understand this is what a lot of us "crybabies" hate: not the difficulty the way it's done. You want to disagree, fine. You want to criticize me, fine. But at least criticize me for disliking bullet sponges, not for needing to "git gud" at what frankly ain't that hard a game.

I whole heartedly agree.

Flying Wild Hog, if you guys are reading this, higher difficulties shouldn't increase monster HP, but increase attack speed, damage, and reduce effectiveness of consumables and powerups.

Make the monsters become more like the player character and less like just a regular old enemy with a ♥♥♥♥♥♥♥♥ more numbers than what the player can pump out in a reasonable time frame.

[Sephiroth]

higher difficulty should increase amount of enemies and have better AI. Make them a threat not a chore. if you increase HP make required effort be effectively 2x with all the other stat increases per difficulty lv. at least thats what i like.

TLDR higher difficulty should be just less room for error with max difficulty being 1 lv before actually insane, like halo2s legendary vs halo2s slaso

[Kawaii-Masta]

Agreed, How2RuinGoodBalanceInANutshell

[Ray]

Originally posted by Sceles:

There's no difficulty difference between SW2 and Doom...

Except for the differences I explained in detail in the post. And also that Doom's harder. But yeah, it's cause I don't know how to play this game that I prefer the pre-patch version. Obvs.

[omegaskorpion]

I think Killing Floor 2 did difficulty scaling much better han most games.

With each difficulty, the higher the diffictulty the more faster the enemies move, they will dodge attacks and roll to mess your aim and learn new attacks, they even learn to cover their heads with their hands and metallic weapons. Only enemies that get more health are the medium and mini boss enemies but its not big change, the change is only big if there are 6 players.

Now if they did balance all weapons and enemies like in KF2 the game might not have bullet sponge problems on those really high difficulties (notable weapons that suffer from this are smg and all rapid fire weapons).

[CoffeeCup]

While I agree, the latest patch fixed a MAJOR problem; Serene Mind made the game impossibly easy. And that has been fixed.
I'd rather take a a grindy-difficult game over a game in which you put absolute zero effort.

[Tirigon]

Originally posted by Unnoticing Senpai:

While I agree, the latest patch fixed a MAJOR problem; Serene Mind made the game impossibly easy. And that has been fixed.
I'd rather take a a grindy-difficult game over a game in which you put absolute zero effort.

Dunno what the problem with Serene Mind was, tbh. Even at 10 per second it is lower than what you get from Chi-Drain. Damage you deal is so huge that even a measly 2 or 3% Drain will fill your bar with 2 Vortex attacks.

[Toast]

Out of all the posts talking about the new patch, this is by far the most civil and well explained one. I'm in agreement with OP, artificial difficulty isn't fun. That's why games like Dark Souls appeal to me so much. If I die, it's 99% likely due to something I did.

And honestly, if someone wants to feel super balls to the walls overpowered, they should be free to in a game that has no competitive multiplayer. It doesn't hurt anyone else that they can go through the game killing everything easily, just like how it doesn't hurt if someone plays on a higher difficulty than someone else.

[Crit]

Originally posted by Tirigon, the darkest soul:

Dunno what the problem with Serene Mind was, tbh. Even at 10 per second it is lower than what you get from Chi-Drain. Damage you deal is so huge that even a measly 2 or 3% Drain will fill your bar with 2 Vortex attacks.

It's bigget problem was it made every other chi regen effect meaningless. Once I had it I never thought about chi restrictions again. I could vanish repeatedly and kill everything with a sneak attack then mop up the lower tier baddies afterwards if I wanted to or could just spam full upgraded grip of darkness. CC was pretty much free all the time.

On topic of the OP, I fully agree.

[Tirigon]

Originally posted by CriticalVoid:

Originally posted by Tirigon, the darkest soul:

Dunno what the problem with Serene Mind was, tbh. Even at 10 per second it is lower than what you get from Chi-Drain. Damage you deal is so huge that even a measly 2 or 3% Drain will fill your bar with 2 Vortex attacks.

It's bigget problem was it made every other chi regen effect meaningless. Once I had it I never thought about chi restrictions again. I could vanish repeatedly and kill everything with a sneak attack then mop up the lower tier baddies afterwards if I wanted to or could just spam full upgraded grip of darkness. CC was pretty much free all the time.

Yea but the same is true for me and I only have Rank 3 Serene Mind (for the Chi drain) and 1 gem (3.3% or so in total). Still pretty much free poweruse forever. Only vs single huge enemies with resistances Chi-Drain is not enough, and that means the final boss and maybe 3 or 4 minibosses across the entire game.