Status and Signals: Why Hardcore Gamers Are Afraid Of Easy Mode

Simple tweaks to a game like increasing hit point pools can make the game difficult in meaningful ways if there is additional depth available in the game. If an enemy has 100 hitpoints instead of 10 hitpoints, you may have to learn to anticipate and successfully dodge attacks instead of just ignoring them. Perhaps, God of War developers could have increased the damage output of the enemies or increased the frequency of their attacks instead of increasing their resilience.

However, I agree that I prefer when they add smarter AI rather than just increasing the enemies damage output or increasing the amount of damage they can sustain. In a game like God of War, the depth of the AI in general may be small to begin with, and there may not be much they can do to improve it. I imagine with God of War, the enemies have attack patterns, hit points and damage values for attacks with a very basic AI that begins attacking the player's character once they are within range or sight.

Upping the challenge in a game may actually make the game less fun, in that in order to overcome the added challenge, you have to take the game at a slower pace or resort to exploiting deficiencies in game mechanics that diminish the immersion in the game.

I feel compelled to bring up what I believe to be a solid counterpoint to the "if you don't like Easy Mode, then just don't play it" mantra detailed in the post:

Halo 3's Legendary Campaign vs. Halo 1 and 2's Legendary Campaigns.

For those unfamiliar with the campaign gameplay of the Halo Trilogy (and those who might need a refresher), each of the three titles had four different difficulty modes for campaign play: Easy, Normal, Heroic, and Legendary (order representing increases in difficulty).

Keeping in mind that each of the three titles had these same names for the campaign difficulty level (and that when you play either Halo 2 or Halo 3 on Xbox Live, the highest level difficulty you've completed the entire campaign for is shown to other players in your profile), it's easy to see how the highest level of achievement might become a status symbol of sorts...

...if, that is, it's difficult to achieve.

Sure, once you got to a certain level in multiplayer gameplay on Xbox Live, the majority of players had achieved that Legendary status symbol anyway. But even then, it often simply meant those who hadn't were relegated to a lower echelon of respect.

So there's your status element for Halo's difficulty modes.

Now, getting back to the author's points on Easy Mode, I'll show why his overall argument (though perhaps quite appropriate for many other games) doesn't hold water with Halo 3, which should make the truth of his claim situational at best.

Rather than the author's example of the game developers adding an Easy Mode where there was none in previous installments, Halo 1 and 2 already had Easy Modes, so one obviously can't complain about its inclusion in Halo 3. (Well, to be fair, many have complained that EACH of the difficulty levels was made easier for Halo 3, but I've yet to see objective, rather than anecdotal, evidence for this claim. But even that isn't quite the same as adding an Easy Mode where none had existed before.)

No, rather than that, Legendary was made objectively easier to beat, thus devaluing its achievement and therefore its worth as a status symbol. Let me explain:

Legendary is of course at least as difficult-- and, the vast majority of the time, far MORE difficult-- than each of the other difficulty modes. (Duh, right? That's what a difficulty mode is.) The enemies had smarter AI, they were tougher (e.g., even a sticky bomb, an auto-kill on any other difficulty mode and in online multiplayer, couldn't kill most classes of Elites; you had to inflict even more damage than that), and there were way more of them.

In Halo 1 and Halo 2, if you played co-op campaign on any of the lower three difficulty modes and you died but your teammate stayed alive, you could just respawn back into action. If you were playing alone though, you'd respawn at the last checkpoint you passed. This is why most of the lesser-skilled players completed their campaigns playing co-op: it was WAY easier; there was no real penalty for dying. But here's the catch: the game developers wouldn't let you do that for Legendary. If you played co-op and either player died, you both respawned at the last checkpoint rather than respawning back into action immediately. Thus, completing the campaign on Heroic garnered little respect (but certainly not disrespect, necessarily), because nobody knew whether you achieved it "legitimately" (i.e., on single player, where you couldn't exploit the lack of penalty for dying) or not. Legendary, however, could ONLY be completed legitimately. It meant something concrete.

Except on Halo 3.

For the third game, the developers decided to allow players the same exploit in Legendary that had only previously existed in Easy, Normal, and Heroic-- thus robbing Legendary of its significance as an achievement. After all, the metrics for how good you are at the game in general are a) kills and b) lack of deaths. Remove the latter from the equation, and Legendary becomes...well, no longer legendary.

Prescribe whatever reasons you wish for this decision by the developers, but I'm willing to bet you'll face an uphill battle if your reasons are the same as the author's in his Mega Man X Easy Mode hypothetical.

As you pointed out, the other Halos had an easy mode. Your argument seems tangential to the author's. You just think they made hard mode too easy (perhaps another level of difficulty would have been in order, since they presumably shifted all the difficulties down because of market research).

The article is way too long.

For anyone that bothered to read the whole thing, did he make another point besides "let there be an easy mode and get over it"?

The author closes using another Nerd Culture favorite of Firefly as his example. I watched an bad cam of the Firefly movie on my netbook and the video and audio both kept dropping out. Anyway, I thought it was a terrible movie.

But wait a second, you say, I was watching a bad cam on a tiny screen. Well, yeah, but the story's the same, no? My total experience of the movie, (arg! wtf? stupid half-broken rar files stupid torrent software, etc) contributed to my total impression of the movie. If I'd got to a theater opening night and there a few dressed up in costumes and the crowd was buzzing with excitement, my opinion of the movie might be higher.

Not having an easy mode on video games is like saying 'can only be watched on a big screen'. Theres a sense of accomplishment and pride by the end of the game that, if you were wanting to share in the experience with, that, as some see it, a minimum level of difficulty is required.

(For the record, I did rather like the Firefly movie.)