Difficulty levels, choice or progression?

It’s been a while since I’ve updated my blog, and most of all it was on time that I removed my old self and updated it with a newer, cataclysmic me. For those of you who don’t know, I transferred my undead priest over to a new realm and had to race change into human because the guild I wanted to join was Alliance. This was a tough decision, as after five years of playing the same character you really get attached to it. The new guild turned out to be a great success though, so I’m not regretting the decision one bit, and I still think human males have some of the coolest animations and poses in the game, so I’m pretty happy overall.

Today I want to write about hard modes and how different games utilize them. I’ve written about a similar topic before where I complained about the lack of quality when it came to the hard modes in Icecrown Citadel, but that was solely a complaint about Blizzard being lazy and not utilizing their tools properly to make high quality content for their subscribers. That was back in Wrath though, and we all know it was a lackluster expansion from the start. Cataclysm is yet to be a Wrath 2.0, and I’m pretty happy about that, but sadly we can never know what the future will bring.

One thing that bothers me about hard modes in their current state is not their difficulty level, but the way Blizzard is using them to make them a higher level of raid-progression, instead of offering an actual choice to the player-base.

We’ve all played those good old games with the easy, medium, hard and possibly expert difficulty levels. These levels in their various shapes and forms, allowed players to challenge themselves depending on their current skill level. For new players, beating the game on easy would probably be tough, while for the experienced veterans; the game could only become truly challenging on the hardest difficulty available.

It is quite normal for players, when they are new to games, to start on the easiest difficulty level and then work their way up to the top. This is the most normal form of progression, since it’s like climbing stairs of sorts. This is fine, as long as the players have a choice to actually skip some of the difficulty levels and climb straight to the top.

A good, personal example would be when I first bought Dragon Age 2, which comes with four difficulty-levels, casual, normal, hard and nightmare. Since I played the crap out of the first game (probably somewhere around 200+ hours of gameplay), I was so familiar with the Dragon Age play-style that I started my first play-through on hard, even though I was completely new to the game. It was tough, but I made it. This was a choice I made for myself, and the game did not hinder me from doing so, although it did severely punish me by killing me over and over again until I got better and finally beat it.

According to Blizzard, their hard modes are an “alternate progression path”, which is a statmenet made out of festering piles of filthy garbage. There is no alternation about the current hard modes, because they require gear from the normal modes to even be beatable. Even if they had removed the requirement to actually kill the final bosses in each of the raid-dungeons to unlock the hard modes, your raid would be completely slaughtered if they walked straight into the heroic raids without acquiring any gear from the normal ones. Because of this, Blizzards idea of hard modes is simply for the raiders to have something to do once they’ve beaten the content, it doesn’t actually provide the players with any kind of choice, unless they are already farming normal modes and are getting bored of it.

My idea of proper hard modes would be first of all to add multiple difficulty levels. This is nothing new to World of Warcraft; they did it in Ulduar, plenty of times in fact. Remember Flame Leviathan? You could either leave all four towers up, or none of them, that’s a total of five difficulty levels. The fun thing about that encounter is that it wasn’t even all that gear dependant, meaning a fresh raid could actually have a go at the hardest difficulty from the get-go, now that’s giving your players a choice!

While I do enjoy the hard modes in Cataclysm quite much, there is no excuse for the current use of the mechanic other than Blizzard being lazy. Hard modes are simply an excuse to provide the players with more content without having to spend all that much development time doing so, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want them there, I just wished it would have been done differently, like in Ulduar.

Come to think of it, it wouldn’t really be that much effort for Blizzard to give a boss multiple difficulty-levels. Simply give a boss a ton of abilities, and remove one of them for each difficulty level below the hardest one. On the easiest difficulty, the boss could perhaps only have one to two abilities, while on the hardest one; the boss could have five to six. It wouldn't even be needed to increase boss health and damage output (which becomes a gear issue), the fight would just need to be more complex. This would make it less gear-dependant, and I actually think it would make raiders happier overall.

Mangs wall of text crits you for 258926824181

I’ll stop now