I have been playing 'Far Cry' recently (third time thru it at 'Easy' difficulty) and was puzzled at how hard playing many of the situations were. Im not that bad and I didnt appreciate having to play the same savepoints a dozen times to beat and progress onto the next part of the game. I started going back and playing the same set of locations on the 'realistic' (hardest) difficulty setting and again was puzzled by it not being all that much harder. The NPCs dodge around a bit more but not all that much else that I could notice. The scenarios that cause the most problems are ones the 'big goons' with the rocket launchers (that have an area effect to do damage) and usually there are a number of them in a limited area so that you get caught in alot of crossfire. They seemed to fire the same whether in hard or easy mode -- and the savepoints are the same (far apart). They didnt eliminate some of the opponents (to make it easier). They (enemies) dont seem to fire any more accurately (maybe a little more damage). The powerups seem to be the same.... In the easy setting some do stand around waiting to be shot quite a bit more (especially if there is blocked visibility -- foliage). They didnt add additional savepoints (which would could have helped). It confuses me what they thought an 'easy' difficulty should be (I consider that a complete lamo should be able to play thru with only a few repeats at the easiest level). What opinions have people heard about a proper difficulty range spread for games??

Quote:Original post by wodinoneeyeIt confuses me what they thought an 'easy' difficulty should be (I consider that a complete lamo should be able to play thru with only a few repeats at the easiest level).

You already have a good idea of what an easy difficulty setting should be, why do you allow the obviously unbalanced difficulty settings of a popular game to erode your opinion?
Just set the same kind of objectives for the other difficulty settings and try to playtest them with many players; don't use yourself as a yardstick.

I thought the Realistic setting was much harder. I couldn't do anything on that setting, especially on indoor levels. As I recall, the enemies were muc more responsive to your actions, much more powerful, more armored, and possibly more accurate. And yeah, those big, hulking, rocket-spewing trigons were freaking impossible (remember stepping out of that broken elevator... right into the path of two of them?).

The easy mode, in my opinion, was a little too difficult, and probably should have been considered the normal mode. That said, I didn't have too much trouble with it on easy (more correclty, it was the difficulty I wanted to play the game at), but I think that you're about right on how tough an easy mode should be.

I did some more testing at the most difficult level and found that it (again) wasnt that much more difficult than the 'easy' (easiest) level. Hardly realistic when you get sprayed with bullets many times and still survive.

I would have had the 'hardest' level have almost no powerups (healkits/armor) and had the weapon hits almost fatal (3 good ones and your dead) to force a much more
realistic game requiring the player to have to make use of the terrain (flank and rear attack moves) and think out the tactics much more (and use the alternate weapons like the grenades etc..) to avoid closerange firefights.


Something else I also noticed was that many of the explosive type weapons (cannon, grenade launchers, rockets) really didnt work as well as you would think they should (especialy when the enemy fired rockets WERE quite effective).
Long range (yet accurate) hits with there did nothing (like the LOD mechanism wasnt doing the damage effects) and in other cases the projectile collision wasnt done right (nailing the big goon trigons in the chest with the rocket launcher or the grenade launcher did nothing - many passed right thru). The 'easy' level would have been ALOT easier if those weapons did work properly.