The issue is that mechanics for scaling difficulty need to designed into the game from the start, not tacked on at the end of a feature backlog. Making an easy game harder by upping enemy health and damage or nerfing RNGs is lame and often unbalanced. It should be the opposite - the game balance should be designed around the hard mode and than pared back for the easy mode.
The thing that really drives me nuts more than anything is nerfing complex control schemes to target console controls. The best example of this is Witcher 2 having an amazing and complex combat system which lent itself to a huge variety of play styles, enabled by complex controls with a high skill floor. And then Witcher 3 turned it into “spam dodge and counter” because all the richness of the control scheme was dumbed down to target consoles.
For example, shortening delays in boss movements is a fantastic way to distinguish “easy” from “hard.” That doesn’t feel as cheap as increasing health and damage output, but as you said, it needs to be considered from the start.
The issue is that mechanics for scaling difficulty need to designed into the game from the start, not tacked on at the end of a feature backlog. Making an easy game harder by upping enemy health and damage or nerfing RNGs is lame and often unbalanced. It should be the opposite - the game balance should be designed around the hard mode and than pared back for the easy mode.
The thing that really drives me nuts more than anything is nerfing complex control schemes to target console controls. The best example of this is Witcher 2 having an amazing and complex combat system which lent itself to a huge variety of play styles, enabled by complex controls with a high skill floor. And then Witcher 3 turned it into “spam dodge and counter” because all the richness of the control scheme was dumbed down to target consoles.
Exactly.
For example, shortening delays in boss movements is a fantastic way to distinguish “easy” from “hard.” That doesn’t feel as cheap as increasing health and damage output, but as you said, it needs to be considered from the start.