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Kids (and teens...and adults) react to Persona 4 Golden's Easy and Very Easy modes
So Atlus recently released a screenshot of P4G's difficulty select screen, which includes two tiers of difficulty not present in the original: Very Easy and Very Hard. Already people are talking down to people who don’t play on Normal or above.
I made the mistake of reading players' reactions to seeing a Very Easy Mode, which include gems like:
why pick very easy? its not a hard game guys, you just have to learn how to play. go normal
"If you have to play on "Easy" or "Very Easy", you have no business playing a Persona game (which was M on PS2 no less). I'd rather have a Japanese setting. but I guess that's asking too much from you people."
FUCK. OFF. GO THROW YOUR VITA AND YOURSELF OFF A 300-METER CLIFF, PLEASE.
More seriously...
Okay, so you think the game is easy. That’s your opinion. Hell, I thought P3P was very easy on Normal. But not everyone is as well-versed in SMT tactics, and some just want to leisurely blaze through the game.
Also, if you don’t like the Very Easy or Easy modes, DON’T FUCKING PLAY THEM. THERE ARE TWO HARD MODES. PLAY THOSE INSTEAD. Atlus is being nice enough to allow players of all skill levels to enjoy the game; yes, they’re infamous for balls-hard games, but it doesn’t mean they have to make their games as inaccessible as possible, and I’d rather have a quality game that’s a bit on the easy side than a subpar and difficult game. (This coming from someone who likes to make infamously hard danmaku and rhythm games his bitches.)
Look at CAVE. They’re infamous for having true last bosses that threaten to drown out 98% of the background. Their 360 ports have Novice modes so that players new to the danmaku subgenre can enjoy the games at a leisurely pace. Also, their mobile ports are toned down in difficulty—Normal mode is actually easier than arcade difficulty on DoDonPachi DaiFukkatsu, for instance.
Yet I don’t see CAVE fans (or at least more than three of them personally) complaining about novice modes. (Then again I haven’t been on the forum that shall not be named very frequently, mostly due to apathy.)
Hell, look at the Bemani franchise as well. You’ve got your IIDX 12’s and Kuro Anothers, Pop’n 43’s (soon to be upper 40’s and 50’s), and GitaDora 99’s (and GFDMXG 9.xx’s)…and then you have their various beginner modes. Again, most of the higher-tier players simply mind their own business instead of saying that beginner modes should be abolished.
See, if CAVE and Konami can appeal to new players, so can Atlus.
If appealing to new players means my less RPG-competent friends can get into P4 so I can have more friends I can talk to about vidya I care about, then I’m willing to accept this “dumbing down” of Atlus games. Hell, I'd hardly call it dumbing down in the first place if Atlus is still appealing to the hardcore crowd by adding a Very Hard mode, something not in the original P4.
We were ALL beginners once. Me? There was a time when I played games on Easy, and even sought out the codes for the “easier than easy” modes (lol Streets of Rage 2) just so I could tear through the games. So I kinda know what it’s like to be new to a game or genre.
Thank you for your time, you may go back to fusing Mara.
Comments
Haven't played Persona 4 because I'm waiting for Golden, but really, given that Persona 3's fighting is the least interesting part of the game by a very, very large margin, if P4 is anything like that, I can see why someone would want to make it easier so they can at least just blaze past it.
Eh, I actually liked P3's dungeon crawling and fighting better than P4's. P4's is simplified and not in ways I like. Regardless, I do dread going into Tartarus or the TV world, especially on NG+ when I just want to check out the social links.
I'm just waiting around for SMTIV at this point.
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I guess I'm not like, mad or anything that there is a very easy mode, but even on Normal the game wasn't any harder than any other JRPG (that is, it was really easy once you got past the first dungeon), and so I can't imagine that there's much of a need for a difficulty below Easy...
Obligatory:
That already exists, it's called Strange Journey.
You know what could have used a very easy mode?
DEVIL SURVIVOR.
A couple of the missions I fought were incredibly luck based, especially Okuninushi.
That's more of a mission design problem than a difficulty setting problem.
Fair enough, but it's probably be less bullshit on lower difficulty.
I almost always pick Iisi modo or norumaru modo in vidya in my first try. Feels casual.
But I guess I compensated by picking German over Catalan or Italian in Uni
There's always the possibility of using emergent difficulty; basically adding or removing game systems from the player's grasp in order to adjust the difficulty of any given task. This is a common alternative to modal difficulty, and tends to feel more organic. One example might be in Dark Souls, where you can summon phantom NPCs or other players to help you throughout the world and especially during boss battles. If you get a good helper or two, the difficulty is drastically reduced. The reverse is also true; being invaded by another player increases the game's difficulty because, hey, another player is trying to stab you in the junk and the regular enemies don't care about them.
I consider this kind of thing a better approach than difficulty modes, because it usually ties increases and decreases in difficulty into the narrative of the game and ensures that everyone is having the same essential experience. Remember that each difficulty mode is a balance task in and of itself, so a game that has three difficulties needs to be balanced three times. But a game with emergent difficulty needs to be balanced only once, with its difficulty mechanics influencing that singular set of balances. So not only is the experience more natural, it's more convenient for the game developers and frees up time and resources for other tasks.
I don't see what's wrong with difficulty modes. I think they're pretty elegant provided the A.I. and game structure are competently done.
Development time is the issue, given the amount of time that has to be spent rebalancing the entire game. They can also be misleading -- what's "normal" to me might be "easy" or "hard" to someone else, depending on their experience. Emergent difficulty allows players to customise the difficulty as an organic factor of gameplay, though, which strikes me as about as elegant as a solution could ever be.
There's no hard answer to that, because emergent difficulty can take so many different forms. I suppose an almost universal example might be a consumable or regenerative resource that, when used, renders the game easier for some time for some reason. A person who wants to take it easy might lean heavily on said resource, while a person who wants extra difficulty might use it only when absolutely necessary.
A good example of this might be healing factors in RPGs. In a turn-based JRPG, most battles are generally very easy if you have a good supply of healing potions or a well-defended cleric-type character. If your characters have a constant supply of HP renewal, there's seldom much opportunity to actually lose a fight. Another example from the same sort of game would be experience rewards -- you can do sidequests for addition experience, thereby empowering your characters and making upcoming challenges easier.
^That's simply a part of the natural difficulty curve that any game should have in the first place. A difficulty level system simply determines how high the bar is set.
That's not mutually exclusive with emergent difficulty. In fact, I'm glad I used the RPG example now, because RPGs tend to use emergent difficulty almost by default. While many Western RPGs do have difficulty settings, that option is much rarer in Eastern RPGs, so you can look at those for how emergent difficulty tends to work.
The thing is that difficulty settings usually only change the relationship between numbers rather than actually increasing how difficult a game is to play, at least usually. Most development studios have neither the time nor the resources to make significantly different AIs for different difficulty settings.
For most games, if you have a strategy that defeats Enemy A in normal mode, it'll still work in hard mode -- it'll just be more tedious and take longer. This kind of thing is especially apparent in first-person shooters, where higher difficulties don't test your skill as much as they test your patience. Not surprising, though; emergent difficulty is much easier to implement the less linear a game is. In any case, this kind of numerical difficulty isn't really a new level of difficulty so much as the facade of one, because it doesn't require a further development of skill and approach -- all it requires is the fine-tuning of things that have proven effective thus far.
The purpose of emergent difficulty is to deepen and diversify gameplay by providing a deeper challenge to those who want it while also providing the option for an easier time for those along for the ride, but all within the organic gameplay experience. It's why certain games don't even need difficulty settings -- again, many RPGs fall into this category of difficulty, as well as many other kinds of games that fall outside of traditional "arcade" types of gameplay.
uhhhh
That's one thing I rather like about Gradius Gaiden and ReBirth; subsequent loops (as well as higher difficulties in ReBirth) actually change around parts of the stages and enemy patterns, rather than just "hey let's add more bullets and speed them up and call it a day".