Someone who sneaks through the game unseen by anyone isn't going to give a damn about their health, or their enemies' health, is going to care less than most about the number of items available, but the number of enemies might make a huge difference since a larger crowd is harder to evade. Partially because even for a single person certain changes might cancel out (maybe making yourself and your enemies more durable leads to the same difficulty for you but longer battles) but also because it varies from person to person. Obviously the easiest possible is when you have the most health, your enemies have the least, you have the most items to find, and there are the fewest enemies, and the hardest possible is the opposite, but it's probably impossible to classify all of those that fall in between on a linear scale of 254 difficulty levels from least difficult to most. Loot quantity: Not sure but I think this might be the Jedi Knight way ( Jedi Knight is the sequel to Dark Forces).Īs I recall (I haven't re-installed TNM since my hard drive was replaced) each slider had 4 settings meaning that there were 256 possible combinations. The Nameless Mod (TNM) a modification for Deus Ex, had preset difficulty levels like its parent game, but also included the option to have a custom level at which point the player was presented with four sliders:Įnemy health: Can't think of a game off the top of my head that does this. Getting shot in easy was not the same as getting shot in hard or realistic. It might, possibly, have also had the number of items changed.ĭeus Ex (which I've been writing about) took a completely different route, it changed the amount of damage the player could sustain. Hardest difficulty and every enemy that was programmed into the game was there, easiest and there were a lot fewer. So, I was going to be waiting around in school for a while and re-installed Mirror's Edge * to pass the time, Ended up not using it much because I got distracted by something else, but I played it afterward and it got me thinking about difficulty settings, and graphics settings, but this will be about difficulty.Ī lot of things can make a game difficult, and thus a lot of things can make it easier or more difficult depending on how they are tweaked.ĭark Forces, if I'm remembering correctly **, had only one thing changed by changing difficulty level: The number of enemies.

Deus ex too dark