Some thoughts on Hard Mode in games and Hard games in general.

Want hard game? Play the attack on titan fan made game (browser game, requires unity player).
For a free game its better and harder than the actual real game on steam despite the graphics.

Edit: I played both. The game which is supposed to be worth 60$ isn't worth a thing. All enemies act the same on any/all stages despite difficulty. On the otherhand, the free game is a lot better and harder modes changes how enemies react (which is what you ask for) and not basically repeat the same thing.

The very definition of something being hard is that mistakes are more severely punished and that's basically what every game does. I've seen these very same complaints about difficulty levels over and over but I can't recall ever reading a resonable alternative or even someone giving an example of where it's implemented in a good way.

I had this feeling playing Wolfenstein: The New Order

Started already in the Über difficulty [Hardest], and it didn't feel like a challenge or problematic, even on the so called "boss battles".

But, there's a catch: If you got all the Enigma codes, there's 4 new gamemodes:

999 mode: life starts on 999 but slowly falls to 100. Infinite ammo and granades. Piece of cake, even with the Über difficulty.
Walk in the park mode: No HUD, I am Death Incarnate! difficulty. A little more challenging, but still not that much.
HARDCORE: Über difficulty, no health or armor pickup. That's more like it, if you are a masochist like me.
IRONMAN: Über difficulty, only one life. You die, it's over. You quit the game, it's over. No checkpoints. I didn't dare to try this.

Reminds me of all the oldschool RTS which gave the AI just more resources and shorter build times, so that they could spam you into oblivion. That's what I'd call a cheap way to 'raise' difficulty :>.

I didn't know about voice acting, it's a good incentive... However, the game looks very repetitive. I played it in normal and it was normal. Som bosses were hard and all that. Most of the time, the "hard" part was when you were surrounded by enemies, not because they were better than you.

I was going to harp on about how Dark Souls 1 isn't a good example but what I will say is a game being 'hard' is subjective but more or less should have a reasonable way to get through an obstacle. Telling someone to "get good" isn't a reasonable solution because "getting good" isn't a flick-of-the-switch decision and with most games that claim to be hard, spending hours and hours trying to get good at the game isn't a practical plan. Most 'hard' games don't give you a situation with several ways to accomplish it and constant opportunities to do so. It's always a "you're either able to do it or not, no alternatives". Games with stats are guilty of this because a hard mode is always artificial - the odds are objectively stacked against you because stats aren't skill-based, they're a fixed factor. This is a big reason why RPGs(a genre that heavily depends on stats) can almost always sometimes be too difficult and not fun to play. BG1&2 in a nutshell, even levelling up once in 1 can boost your party by a lot just because of the boosted stats from a single level up and the hard modes in BG1/2 are bullshit. There's even a joke about how the rats in the hardest difficulty in 1's tutorial can end your game but not kill you, meaning your game essentially freezes up. The rest of the game is just a save scum contest, as ironic as that is because people shame save scumming.

Souls is less hard if you know how to exploit enemies and attack patterns, but the exploiting either requires you to learn it through all of the dying(aka you won't learn because you keep on dying) or just be told it / look it up. I had too look up how to exploit Four Kings, as well as Seath, and then there's the fact that you can parry Gwyn to death and it's very easy compared to parrying most other enemies. You can essentially lock Seath into a useless state by triggering his close-range crystals attack... Over and over. Four Kings is just a damage race and fighting them at range is just not a thing you can reasonably without the skill to do it. Perfect examples of Dark Souls exploiting.

i remember there was a game Blade of darkness - there was no difficulty settings at all, but you managed to get ranks for how often you save the game - like if you save often its a easy mode and if you not saving - hardcore (there was a lot of traps that can insta kill your character)
it feels like you determinatig how hard game suposed to be

This is quite interesting topic. I often think about it nowadays. I always played games on normal, but nowadays, I play more and more games on hard. It's because a lot of games have cool features which one never use on normal difficulty because they simply don't need it. Or in worse case, one will start to be overpowered and the game will start to be boring. Not just one doesn't need to use some advanced features, but they even don't need to use basic stuff such as skills or the best possible equip.

There is not a problem if one can change the difficulty during the game play, but it is worse if one is playing a game where you cannot change it during playing and even worse if the game has only 1 difficulty.

• Rogue Legacy's Game+ - Bullet Inferno

• All the bandages on Super Meat Boy. That's a nice challenge.

• VVVVVV 1 life mode, all trinkets. That's hard. Don't know if there's a human being capable of doing it.

• Desktop Dungeons - The difficulty in the last levels is insane.

I think that the best "hard mode" is the one that you can create. Games that let you push your own limits through mechanics and fun gameplay. Now I don't have the time to master my games, I'm OK with a single run. But I don't find the gameplay in general that compelling either. (except the ones that I listed, that games hooked me up for hundred of hours)

The way you describe is indeed, the cheapest.

Myself, I prefer nice and easy games over the hardcore ones. The worst thing about difficult games is that most of them rely on blind jumps, precise timing and cheap deaths. I call bullshit on that, heheh.

By the way, I can recall one game that handled its hardmode really well - Deadlings. They just added some more spikes and saws into the levels, making them much more tricky to pass, but if you died, it was because you made a mistake, not because the game wanted you to die.

This is something that's bothered me for a while about "hard" games. It becomes less about genuine challenge and more about repetition and memorization. That's particularly bad when they're unforgiving with the save points. It sucks to have to memorize 3 minutes of a level and execute it perfectly to be able to beat it, it's downright infuriating when it's more like 20 minutes. That said, there are a few difficult games that I found to be fantastic and fun even when the grind was somewhat present. I think it's an interesting and difficult balance to strike in game design.

I think games like Forza Horizon 3, Darkest Dungeon, and Sniper Elite 3 exemplify what is best way to handle difficulty settings because each of these games lets you customize how difficult you want certain aspects of the game to be. For example in Sniper Elite you can choose how advanced you want the AI to be separately for how complicated the ballistics are, as well as how much information the game gives you with the HUD and whatnot, so you can make the game hard in the way you want it to be.

I'm not a big fan of grind, so I usually avoid "hard mode" in games to avoid that grinding. The exception to that is FPS games, where it usually just tweaks bot accuracy, AI , and damage. The kinds of things I like to see added to increase difficulty include:

• Better AI
• New enemies
• Lees information for the player
• Increased details for the player to worry about (e.g. now you have to worry about "cold" in your survival game)
• Reduced recovery for the player
• Additional game knowledge required (my personal favorite)

That last one is probably the most rare, but it is also the most rewarding. Beating a game because of your skill and game knowledge is highly rewarding.

I don't look for challenge in games so I never play hard mode anything.

You can try out Alien:Isolation on nightmare mode if you want. I'd highly reccomend it. Ammo and crafting items are limited (there is just enough but you need to be really looking around sometimes) to the point where if you aren't using stealth and avoiding most conflicts then you most likely wont win the game. Your hud is gone so you need to guess your health bar and ammo (though your menu tells you the latter). The ever present alien AI spends the entire game literally dry humping you, seriously the bugger is always hanging around. If he buggers off into a vent then you can probably expect him to come back almost instantly. And the best part? Your saving grace, the motion tracker, is broken. Distorted, fuzzy and non-accurate readings punctuated with frequent error warnings that cover the sensor readout. Oh and turn your gamma down to basically zero. Way more challenging when you can't see to save your life (literally).

There are also some games where 'hard' mode means enemies using map hacks (they know where you are) and you not having much info yourself. Especially frustrating in rts games

What games, in your opinion, have a really good "hard mode?" :)

And damn it's hard mode is shit. This is not how you do a hard mode. And great deal of games are guilty of this - just bumping stats of enemies

I so, so so agree on this. Victor Vran's combat is a beautiful choreographed dance of death where weapon attacks have massive synergies that you need to use together - and then hardmode just sends 4 champions at you at the same time with lasers, meteors, shockwave and an invulnerable mist along with the 2 dozen other, smaller enemies that takes 2-3 hits to kill and do way too much damage.
Hard mode bumped up maybe spawns, but generally what it did is making enemies so much harder to kill, while you taking more damage. And it really went into the extremes, new enemies oneshotting me, or literally throwing so much shit at me that the game lags unplayeably (not a really strong laptop, but I can handle bigger fights well. But the giant spiders dozens of eggs hatching, spawning fancy champions that tanked my FPS to 10 and below - that was just cheap) - also "don't take damage" challenges where enemies have a chance to be champions who turn into a damage-decreasing, mildly damaging cloud that's practically invulnerable. Instant fail.
I love hard games if they are consistent or need skill to play them properly (Dust the Elysian Tail is pretty easy, yet it's so much fun to play glasscannon full offense on hardest and melting everything, while everything kills you in 2 hits anyways :D) but Victor Vran is one of the best examples of games with tagged on hardmode.
Oh, also Shank - screw Shank's hard mode. No checkpoints, random hp drops, somewhat inconsistent enemy spawns and movements and super-punishing high-damaging, stunlocking enemies. I really loved it's combat but at half-time in a hard campaign it just became pointless. So much unfair struggle.
+ fuck bulletsponge hardmodes. (Like how Bethesda loves to do, but Spec Ops on hard was such a terrible experience that I still didn't finish it.)

Apparently Resident Evil 7 does hard mode really well as featured here

The perfect hard mode should provide more of a mental challenge and faster reflexes, not just increasing the HP pool and decreasing your character's HP. Things like smarter enemy AI work well. That's why the Souls games are brilliant; they're designed with the 'hard mode' baked into the formula.
The worst hard mode I've experienced is Arcanum, where it simply increases the amount of XP required to level up. That's the only change. So basically it just takes forever to level up your character and you're constantly underpowered unless you go and grind your levels.

I like Hard Reset - on heroic mode - no checkpoints and enemies are bullet-sponges +you die really fast.
Only way to survive is to learn how use environment efficiently.

Probably only game with different approach to enemies was first Unreal. I'm still impressed how enemy could escape when on low health, hid and backstab me when I didn't expected it xD

1) Completely agree that when all the difference between difficulties are enemy:player ratio multipliers for stats/experience etc, it can be uninspiring and ultimately boring.
When it is done in a boring, simple way, it means that developer doesn't really care.

2) There are other widely used methods, each having flaws: giving enemies more resources/buildings/units in the beginning (in strategies for example); giving enemies additional or 'cheater' abilities such as extremely good vision or accuracy, not obscured global map, better cards in deck / spells etc.; changing mechanics of player skills to less powerful (now player needs more AP to use overwatch, switching on fog of war etc.); These don't explicitly change base stats but add difficulty. Again, these settings, when abused too much [by developer] can lead to similar complaints from players.
Despite cons, I think this is a decent way of increasing difficulty. I approve this <3 The challenge and fun of most scenario-based games (strategies, tactics, some action games) lies in controlling initially 'weak' position of player to winning one through constant struggle for survival, clever management of resources, clever decisions. If this 'stage' of match can be enhanced and prolonged, why not. Just test it not to make it boring.

3) The superior change-maker would be introducing really clever AI, e.g. having different levels of enemy action policies. It seems to me, that nowadays programming a clever AI player is still a challenge for most of the game developers, because at the best it involves fine [scientific-level] knowledge of good old model-predictive control, algorithmic programming, and to make it better, even modern machine learning. People who know these, don't go into game developing (unfortunately..), and a lot of current developers are nowhere near proper level. Mostly devs try to hardcode the best they can and plug it in all the difficulties so that players don't get bored with even worse enemy decision-making.

I guess for now combining 1-2 would do the trick for most games, if set carefully.
Unfortunately, these days developers don't invest much time (and money) into large testing phase to polish gameplay, as it was in times when products needed to be published in final state (yes, there were bugs and imbalanced difficulties on early consoles too, but their small number only proves the observation).
Quite opposite, modern developers, including number of big companies, tend to completely miss/save money on the testing phase, in the best case collecting feedback from early access players, and in worst case just not paying attention at all, starting as soon as possible the next money grinding project (probably thinking that they earned tremendous amount of money, tricking people into supporting their last game with lies, or even justificating these acts of thievery with even more lies for themselves).

Instead of editing previous post I will add new thought here because bump

I hate when games can't even make typical bulletsponge + higher dmg enemies hard mode. Like witcher 3 - even on hardest diff - it's easy as cake... And I'm not even using advanced potions or change my build (not at all) - according to description on hardest diff I should be forced to use all witchers abilities and prepare to each fight separately.

Best hard mode (actually Expert, and not that hard :) I remember was in Thief and Thief 2, which doesn't allow any human killings, gives extra objectives and loot to find (thus you need to explore a lot more). So far I haven't seen anything similar in video gaming.

I really like it how Rabi-Ribi does difficulty- it's a bullet hell game so of course it's hard by default, but it's also a metroidvania game so you could have found different stuff and items when facing pretty much all the bosses and can face most bosses in whatever order you choose. What hey did was they made the bosses become stronger as you gain more stuff and progress more in the story. That increases their damage (to compensate for you getting more health and defensive "badges"), their health (to compensate for your increase in damage and known attacks) but also makes their patterns more complicated (so, for example some bosses will start using patterns that would be impossible to dodge unless you had some specific mobility item that you now have and just generally makes all their attacks more complicated). That makes it so no matter how strong you are- they are all still challenging. The "Difficulty" that you choose at the start of the game determines how quickly the bosses become stronger as you progress.

Borderlands 2 (and The Pre-Sequel) does the bullet sponge-y thing at the highest "difficulties" but also makes new enemies show up, enemies to drop better loot and increases the chances of elite enemies spawning. In Borderlands 1 since enemies that use guns are using the loot that they drop they are stronger since they have higher quality stuff.

In FTL: Faster Than Light on higher difficulties you get less resources and enemies have better equipment. Ships still have the same pre-set health and weapons still act exactly the same as on other difficulties but you'll find yourself more on the enemies' power level (or lower). There's also a... surprise at the final boss on Hard mode.

In Broforce you die in 1 hit either way so Hard mode makes the enemies faster and more aggressive (with the occasional other small change here and there on some levels).

In the Orcs Must Die! series the most common basic enemies get shields that can soak up a hit, you get barely any downtime between waves and I don't remember for sure but I think some enemy waves were buffed up with more powerful variations of enemies.