Should games have a "Very Easy" mode?

[Noah]

Yeah a major problem for me, especially over the last year or so, has been having a huge backlog of games.

If one game gets just a bit too difficult, I'll move to the next on the pile and It may take months/years and sometimes I may never get back to it.

Took me bloody forever to finish farenheit because of this blasted windy sequence in the apartment getting so frustrating that I just put it back in the pile.

[Colly]

Is it very easy mode, or just make easy easier? Pretty much a reversal of 'why not just make ten louder?'.

Also, I'd have loved an easy mode on LA Noire where the baddies left confession notes and just told me the truth all the time. I was shit at that game.

[lanky316]

I think there'd be room for a "beginner" mode in a lot of games, now it can be a toned back one but it can be done. I think (as well as "no fail mode") the Rock Band series introduced a mode where for singing it became basically a talky and for drums you pretty much just had to use the bass pedal in time with the song as a basic. I'm sure this could work on other games as well. Batman : Arkham City could've changed combat into fundamentally a reaction game by simplifying the counter system so one counter = one knockout. You still have the challenge of solving the various puzzles but the action is easier to get to grips with for a relative non-gamer. Like with all modes it's optional and in most cases it won't take away from the challenge of higher game modes for the hardcore players as it's all just slight gameplay tweaks. Would it really be that hard to remove the wind from Tiger Woods to make it easier?

[ChrisSteeleAteMyHamster]

Japanese games are already set a level easier, probably for this kind of situation. For example, I've got some games where if you complete it on Hard (Normal) you get to play through "European Hard" and then Extreme.

[Quom]

Lanky, for me it's generally not the mechanics, it's the puzzle that gets me stuck.

Like I can play Super Meat Boy and do quite well and most call that a stupidly difficult platformer. Whereas I'll play another game and not be able to work out some stupid puzzle that was likely only meant to take 3 seconds and I end up just giving in. To me it's worse to look up a guide than it would be for the game to offer a massive hint (or do it for you).

Especially annoying are games that have 'hard' parts that make no sense. Why are 400 enemies already in an area nobody has ever meant to have been to in Uncharted and why does it take 5 shots to kill each enemy even if they're head shots? Surely immersion is already strained because of that bollocks anyway?

[TEOL]

My favourite system was in Silent Hill 2 & 3 where you could set independent difficulty levels for action and puzzles. So someone like me, who is pretty shit at shooting and doesn't want to get killed by monsters every thirty seconds, but enjoys trying to solve the riddles, could set action difficulty to easy and riddle difficulty to hard, whereas someone like Quom who doesn't enjoy getting stuck on puzzles could make them much easier without it affecting the rest of the game. I don't see what's wrong with maximising the parts of the game that you enjoy and minimising the bits that you don't. These days it feels all too common for developers to want to force you to play bits of game you don't enjoy because dammit, they made that bit of the game and you're going to damn well play it, which is stupid. I paid for the bloody game, I can enjoy it however I want.

[EWB's Best Poster.]

Easy mode I agree should be in most games. Most. There are some game billed to be difficult. Created to punish. Dark souls for instance is sold under the tagline "prepare to die" and the series is a throwback to impossible games. In fact the suggestions of thecreator adding in an easy mode were met with such hostilities that he had to rephrase and take them back. Some people just want the challenge as a badge.

[TEOL]

Easy mode I agree should be in most games. Most. There are some game billed to be difficult. Created to punish. Dark souls for instance is sold under the tagline "prepare to die" and the series is a throwback to impossible games. In fact the suggestions of thecreator adding in an easy mode were met with such hostilities that he had to rephrase and take them back. Some people just want the challenge as a badge.

Yeah, but people who don't like getting stuck on video games wouldn't want to play Dark Souls in the first place. Like you say, it's the entire point of the game. Trying to put an easy mode in that would be trying to market the game to both extremes of the gaming fanbase, and that's pretty much impossible. It'd be like trying to attract the hardcore gamers by putting a European Extreme difficulty level in Cooking Mama. They aren't going to buy the game in the first place.

[Quom]

Cooking Mama: The Race for the Third Michelin

[GoN_]

Japanese games are already set a level easier, probably for this kind of situation. For example, I've got some games where if you complete it on Hard (Normal) you get to play through "European Hard" and then Extreme.

Relying on what you read on the web the most difficult should be Asian hard, am I right?

Ok, I've tried. :/

[apsham]

There's no reason at all not to.

[TEOL]

Japanese games are already set a level easier, probably for this kind of situation. For example, I've got some games where if you complete it on Hard (Normal) you get to play through "European Hard" and then Extreme.

Relying on what you read on the web the most difficult should be Asian hard, am I right?

Ok, I've tried. :/

But, somewhat ironically, not tried very hard.

[stokeriño]

LA Noire did something similar that I rather liked:

Most of the game is sleuthy, clue searching, witness/suspect questioning, etc. - however occasionally there are more 'classic' sections of gaming that typically involve a car chase, or chasing and fighting a suspect and so on. They're never crucial to the plot/case in any way, but give a bit more variety I suppose.

If you fail in these 'action-y' sections, it will throw you back to their beginning to try again. If you fail 5 or 6 times though, a message will pop-up asking if you would prefer to skip this sequence or keep trying. In other words, it's saying "...You seem a bit shit of this. If it's frustrating you, we can fast-forward to the end."

I can't recall choosing to skip any of them myself (Stokerina did), but I did appreciate what they were trying to do with the option.

On another note, I remember enjoying Rocket Knight Adventures on the Sega Mega Drive which initially offered you Easy, Normal and Hard modes. You didn't get the full final boss on the easier modes so there was incentive in that... Anyway, completing the game on Hard mode would unlock Very Hard. I can't remember if it was Very Hard or one above it, but the highest mode was "one health point, one life, no continues - get hit and you die".

This would be fine, except of course on the Mega Drive you couldn't save progress, so if you wanted to play the uber-hard mode then you had to run through the game in its entirity on Hard (and possibly also Very Hard) every time - without turning the machine off - before you could even start!

Ah, good times...

[Colly]

Cooking Mama: The Race for the Third Michelin

Buying that right now.

[naiwf]

I find that most of the games that I play have this as an option. What I don't like is when the standard part of the game is so easy that there's no challenge, and then the post game spikes to an insane difficultly. It sucks when you breeze through the whole game and then have to grind for at least a few hours to beat even the "easiest" enemy in the post game. I understand the appeal is that you are willing to put in the extra time if you're playing the bonus content, but it shouldn't be that the final boss is level 75-100 and then the scrub enemies that appear in bunches are levels 150-200 with almost nowhere to go to raise your own level in the interim.

My one real gripe is when RPGs include mandatory portions of "you must sneak from here to here without being seen" or as someone else said the puzzle that only has one solution and 10+ steps to get there. It just doesn't make a lot of sense to me to cross genres for 5 minutes of gameplay in a 40+ hour game.

[King Ellis]

Did anyone play Alone in the Dark on 360? Not sure if it was released elsewhere. I think that was meant to have a weird setup, episodic like but i think it was also billed as DVD like too in letting you skip ahead in the game if you wanted to. Not entirely sure though as I never played it, can anyone elaborate?

[METALMAN]

I think games should have a mode where they let you skip straight to the end credits.

[King Ellis]

A lot of them let you watch the credits from the options menu nowadays!

[METALMAN]

It doesn't feel like an achievement though. I want to know that I've overcome all the obstacles before I see the credits.

[Bobfoc]

Here's another related thought. There were a few 'older' games in which I used to enjoy entering cheat codes when I couldn't get past the more difficulty sections, especially if I just wanted to experience the next part of the story. This was particularly useful in games that had a tendency to punish you for not picking up the 'correct' items or choosing the ideal inventory loadout before getting to a certain point in the narrative, at which stage it became seriously difficult to overcome the handicap you unwittingly saddled yourself with.

As someone said before, though, games that utilise one single difficulty setting that's arguably too easy for the most part, before ramping up later on, annoy me more than anything else. One of the chief culprits for me was Psychonauts, which was fairly straightforward until the final level, which was one of the most frustrating experiences I've ever had in a video game. The insane difficulty spike was annoying enough when I'd been loving the rest of the game, but implementing it when I was so close to the end credits just seemed cruel.