I really don't like when games have a difficulty slider unless they are sports games. I don't really like them then either but at least with sports games there does seem to be some actual AI built in rather than just making the enemies much faster stronger or having more HP or doing more damage.
I'm talking about adventure or RPG games in my example because recently I stepped back to Ender Lilys sequel Ender Magnolia because I reached a part of Silksong that I found too hard and it was making me mad.
I only played for a little while though before this game kind of pissed me off with the difficulty spikes again and so I dug into the options and found the difficulty settings.
I feel that in a Metroidvania like that that about 25 % of the way into the game there should be some challenge by now, but not something absurdly difficult. Unfortunately the devs over there must not have gotten that memo because there was a boss that had 3 stages all of which were different and all of which required a different strategy in order to get past him. They were not hugely difficult jumps that you had to make but this beast was chasing me around the screen and sending waves out to the side and also had a rock throwing portion that is easy to avoid except for the last one that heads right for you wherever you are standing.
Garm is the bosses' name and compared to others you have faced up to this point he is kind of full of doo doo. You see, they got rid of damage to you on all contact, which is good, but in lieu of that they have more difficult to avoid swings. Which again isn't that big of a deal. One thing that makes Garm full of doo doo is that in his 2nd stage he has an area of effect swarm spell of sorts that you cannot block and if he gets you with it, there is a good chance he is going to one-shot you.
I don't really care what kind of game it is, unless it is some sort of trolling like you are not supposed to be at that boss yet, I cannot stand it when bosses can EVER one-shot you. To make this boss more infuriating, he does this AOE spell right after an attack that during his 1st phase you would normally jump over it and strike him a few times. So if you do that again, as I did, he melts you HP.
He also starts moving a lot faster towards the end of his health to just when you think you are going to get him..... no you are not.
I wasn't in the mood to be fighting this guy for a 12th time so I went and looked in at the difficulty settings and saw this
You can go into the settings and basically make your enemies useless and incredibly easy to conquer. This would be the "story mode" of the game I'm guessing.
Now unless I missed something major, I don't recall the first installment of this game having a difficulty selection at all. You got it how difficult it was and that was that... just like Hollow Knight and Silksong. If the base game was too difficult for ya, you just stopped playing.
In Ender Magnolia you do have the ability to grind for levels too so I think having a difficulty slider is kind of lame to begin with but it was lame so I'll not lie and say that I put all the difficulties to their lamest and then Garn just basically sat there and let me kill him.
I wanted it to be fair... not a cakewalk.
I'm thinking that these controls can break a game. It's kind of like discovering a cheat in Fallout that gives you unlimited XP... now there's no real reason to explore anymore. You've destroyed the game and I feel like they have done this with Magnolia as well. Sure, you can just pull the difficulty back up after this one fight but lets be realistic, who is really going to do that.
I wish I hadn't looked for it and discovered it because now I already know I am going to go back to it and turn it all the way down whenever a boss gives me a hard time.
The thing is this: all the stuff after Grom wasn't even difficult, nor was the stuff leading up to him including the bosses, it was just that Grom's difficulty spike was IMMENSE to the point that it felt like I was playing a different game all of a sudden. To me, this shouldn't happen and when the devs discovered this I think they were faced with choice of either completely re-tooling him, or putting a difficulty slider in. I think the difficulty sliders were the easier, lazier route. They no longer needed to tweak his damage output or attack patterns anymore because the user could do that on their own.
How is that fun?
I think this is lazy programming and if they do bother to make a 3rd game (this one didn't sell very well) I hope they get rid of this slider and instead just focus on having a constant ramp up of difficulty, not something that goes from no challenge to near impossible and then back down to easy for the next hour. It doesn't make sense.
I'm gonna trod on and see if I can resist putting the slider back down because that makes the game absurdly easy. I guess it is just getting too difficult to please everyone these days. Some people want everything to be Soulslike and others, like me, never want games to be that way.