Hear me out. A few games have shader installations that will usually apply any new settings you put down AFTER you restart the game, and a lot of other games have graphics settings that will only apply after you’ve rebooted the game.
I don’t think it would cost developers ANY amount of money or any significant development time to add a “Reboot game” button (or toggle) every time the player presses the quit button, or give the player a prompt every time they change a setting that requires a game restart (like in both PC versions of GTA V).
I also think ANY game should have a “full potato” mode capable of running in older computers with NONE of the fancy graphics stuff that we have access to today, despite having a decent computer now.
I think it’d be better to have assist modes than difficulty options. As difficulty is traditionally associated with changing things like health and damage (or worse, opaquely disabling mechanics) that are fundamental to game balance I think it is too easy to be abused as a cop out from having to balance the game.
Things like slowing the pace of the game, adding aim assist, visual indicators for audio cues, more lenient hit boxes, more frequent saves would be way more useful imo. Optional mechanics or modifiers can exist, but they shouldn’t be bundled with other random stuff.
I completely agree that accessibility/assist modes are more important and if I had to choose I’d go with that. Since we’re in a fantasy land however I’m still going to advocate for customisation because, let’s be honest, most of the difficulties (besides “the main one”) are usually not that great.
I’m speaking from a perspective of someone who tends to go for the higher difficulty options which extremely often go with the laziest possible decisions like turning enemies into damage sponge and increasing their attack power. That’s it. Stuff like improved enemy awareness, faster reaction times, smarter tactics aren’t exactly common and that’s my main pain point when selecting difficulty. There are also other things like ammo/loot scarcity, need drain in survival games etc.
Having an option to tweak at least some of these things could help folks like me who often end up in a situation when one difficulty is piss easy and the other feels like a drag. Peoples skills and expectations vary way too and there’s simply no way few basic difficulty settings will be right for everyone. And if someone damages their experience? Oh well, let people make mistakes and take responsibility for their choices. Inform them that changing this stuff will affect their experience and leave them to their decisions. We can’t (and shouldn’t) baby-proof everything, in my opinion.
I’m fine with that, dishonored 2 did a really good job of this with its custom difficulty option. I’d argue that games should just have 1 difficulty, developers can balance around that. Let people mess with any of the easy values difficulty modes usually change
I’d be down with that. Or at the very least give us modifiers like skulls in Halo games - dunno if that’s just Master Chief Collection addition or if they became a thing after 1 but it’s better than nothing.