Realm difficulty should not be able to be freely toggled up and down. Once created, the realm should be locked.
If anything, if you lower the realm difficulty there should be no way to increase it back up.
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Why should there not be this freedom?
Silas
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I think it’s fine that people can change it.
Yes, it’s a bit odd and can be abused to skip difficult parts. Then again, why would you want another player to be hard stuck if they don’t want to be? It’s not a competitive game
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Some people’s entire enjoyment hinges on gatekeeping. They use games as a substitute for a real social hierarchy and think they can replace real life achievements.
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It is like a cheat code.
Having the different difficulty is ok, but changing them whenever you want too, takes out the prestige. I 100% agree with “onelove”.
I read Thomas Maler comment on Larry Puss video about difficulty where his responds was that NRFTW should be for everyone (disability etc). The game will still be for everyone when you have the option in the beginning when you create a realm. It feels like Thomas/Moon studio goes against their own vision with one difficulty. For me it is a huge L.
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Can you explain where there is any prestige for completing NRFTW in hard mode?
I don’t see any competitive angle to it.
The only prestige I see is content creators doing challenge runs or speedrunners doing the game as fast as possible within specific rule sets, and they likely wouldn’t use the feature either
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I’ve always been against having “easy”, “normal”, and “hard” modes.
We need an accessibility mod, not an easy mod for accessibility (like in Celeste, Nine Sols and Another Crab’s Treasure).
Changing the difficulty freely during the game can be a problem.
If you can change the difficulty at any time and you you find an obstacle what do you do?
Do you think that the difficulty you chose is right and then you go explore and do some looting, upgrade your weapons etc. or do you think that you did everything correctly but you chose a difficulty that is not right for you?
For less patient players, who, when faced with an obstacle, instead of learning, decide to lower the difficulty, a choice that can ruin the gaming experience, as the satisfaction of overcoming the obstacle is lost, and all future obstacles in the game, which are increasingly more difficult, will be encountered without the tools (understanding of the game) necessary to solve them (since they did not obtain them before).
And on the completely opposite side there will surely be stubborn players who take it as a given that they are forced to complete the game on hard difficulty, and end up having a poor experience in the other direction, where the game is so difficult and punishing that they cannot learn.
On the other hand selecting a difficulty at the beginning of the game without having tried it is still problematic,
If you heve not already played the game, you don’t know its systems, you don’t know the controls, you don’t know how the combat works, you don’t know if it’s similar to a game you’ve played before, how do you determine what difficulty is right for you?This is part of something I already wrote here: Game Accessibility and Difficulty, Unsolved and New Problems (Breach Refind)
If we want to make the game easier or more difficult, it should be done through items and game mechanics.
As if that wasn’t enough, the promise that the normal difficulty would be the one intended by the developers has not been kept, partly it’s a balancing problem (the fact that the game in the mid game is much easier than in the early game and then slowly becomes difficult again) but looking at my brother’s playthrough, it’s clear that the normal mode is much easier than it was before the introduction of the hard mode.
And even when I advised my brother to try the hard mode, he insisted on the normal one because he wanted to experience the experience intended by the developers as his first experience. But the end result was that he had a worse experience.
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Lombix_4 explains it very well.
It is the core foundation and fundamental cornerstone of the game. This will affect the future for this game and how it will be remembered years to come. I only think this is a problem for more dedicated players. People who only try it once does not care.
Lombix_4 explained it perfectly. I also made a post with the same idea. I don’t think difficulty selectors make games more accessible, as Thomas said. I believe that introducing mechanics like summoning someone to help you and accessibility options makes the game easier in a way that doesn’t divide the community through difficulty selectors. I 100% support your idea.
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