There are many games that allow you to select a difficulty, and usually there are difficulties that make the game harder. The problem is that some developers get lazy and make hard modes that are just not fun to play; on the other hand, some games do rather interesting things with their hard mode difficulties.

One example of what I would consider a bad hard mode is Oblivion: If you set the difficulty slider to the maximum, your attacks will only do 1/6th of their normal damage, making enemies take too long to kill; the strategy ends up boiling down to summoning a creature (whose damage to enemies isn't affected by difficulty) and running around until the summon eventually kills the enemy. That does not sound like fun gameplay, and videos of battles on hard mode are long and drawn out.

Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne's hard mode is an example of the game becoming not fair. Consider that, in the tutorial, it is quite possible that you will get unlucky and die (it happened to me), and that the combination of instant death being nastier on hard mode and the main character's death causing game over (in a game where you can only save at specific spots) leads to losing progress just because you got unlucky.

On the other hand, I have noticed that Ys games tend to have better hard modes. Enemies may get more health, but the increase isn't enough to make combat tedious; on the other hand, bosses get new attacks that you have to learn to dodge, and your damage output doesn't significantly decrease, keeping the game fun (if you are able to handle the higher difficulty).

One strange implementation of hard mode I have encountered is in the smartphone game Beastie Bay. On hard mode (which is New Game + only and not an option for a fresh playthrough), the power of magic is increased drastically; this includes spells that you cast, making magic spells suddenly incredibly useful. It is rather absurd; the strategy for hard mode is to focus on attack magic, which isn't that good on normal mode.

Any other examples of good and bad implementations of hard mode?

Good topic. The best hard modes, not sure at the moment, but i have a few contenders for worst.

Blood 1: I swear Blood 1 isn't even possible on the hardest difficulty in single player.

Descent 1 and 2: On higher difficulties, the claustropobic areas combined with fast moving enemy projectiles and lots of opportunities to get blindsided made this game a nightmare.

Not sure if this counts but I remember playing a coin op Street Fighter game many years ago. The first fight was easy but in the second fight, it was obvious the computer was cheating. It was impossible for a person to consecutively pull off special moves but the computer was just chaining them one after the other. I never even got a hit in......


Edit: Nevermind, I thought of two games with good higher level difficulties.

The thief games had more objectives to complete rather than just give the enemies more hit points

The curse of Monkey Island was also good as the harder difficulty added more puzzles.

I think Civilization IV gets it right by pleasing everybody: there are 8 "normal" increasing difficulty levels, and beating each one is an achievement of its own. And then there's the 9th level, "Deity", which is absolutely insane and you need a solid strategy, an Excel spreadsheet and knowledge of game exploits to beat it.

The ugly side: as it is the norm in strategy games, increasing difficulty doesn't make the AI smarter, only increases its bonuses (in other words, the AI cheats badly). I wish AI development makes a breakthrough in the next years, at least in the strategy genre.

Hitman games in general have a nice higher difficulty, espcially the later ones. More attentive enemies, less HUD information.

Except for Heroes of Might and Magic 1+2+3. Newer titles 5+6 have next to no AI scripts. Heroes 4 is a strange case in that they added a new mechanic to the game(mobs have a small range of mobility, where as previously, and since this title, they were completely immobile), but because they had to rush the game to market, they didn't have time to change the AI script, so the game is broken. Heroes 1+2+3 also has the Impossible difficulty, which is just like Hard, but with the added rule that the computer player receives additional resources.

By the way, there is no AI in games, at least I don't know to be, or to have ever been. All computer actions, are based on following a very particular script of actions. Heroes has a very advanced script, but the vast majority of games have basic scripts.

HOWEVER lately there has been serious AI development, which can allow for the generation of highly complex AI scripts, which could then be implemented into their particular game. For example the DOTA AI script.

So in the future, there is hope for games to become more difficult, by having a company just generating complex AI scripts using an AI system. But an actual AI making its way into our games, is impossible.

System Shock had a customizable difficulty where you could modify the enemies, the puzzles, the quest (with or without a time limit) and the cyberspace.
That way you could make the game like you want. For example for me, I put all the difficulty to the maximum except the main quest because I didn't want to have a time limit.

WoW dungeons? New game mechanics and boss abilities are added if you run them in Heroic or Mythic+ difficulties.

Exactly the way I played it. I don't like time limits but for the puzzles and enemies I enjoyed the challenge. And yes, it was a good way to scale difficulty.

Ah, my pet topic, as I tend to try to play games on hard mode (because game becoming boring due to being too easy is about as bad as a game becoming frustrating from being too hard; plus, to me swtiching to an easier difficulty level midway feels a bit like enabling cheat codes).

The worst implementation: Forsaken (PC-version, no idea about the N64 version). I am convinced they never playtested the hardest difficulty, and there is no person in this world who has finished the game in the hardest difficulty. I am not even sure if it is theoretically possible to beat the game in the hardest difficulty, due to the tight time limits and the way the game forces you to destroy all enemies before you are allowed to proceed in a level.

It appears the Forsaken developers had issues getting the difficulty right because the update they released for the PC version altered at least the easy and normal modes of the game (making them easier), so at least for them the developers realized only later that the difficulty level was unrealistically hard. I don't think that patch made the hardest level any easier though. maybe they figured out someone wants an impossible challenge.

The best implementation: Thief 1-2. As far as I know, it doesn't do simple changes like making you weaker and enemies harder, but in the harder difficulty levels you have additional objectives you have to finish, you are not allowed to kill human enemies (and especially civilians; but you are still allowed to knock them out, which is just as good as killing them), and you have to find more loot before you finish the mission.


Having said that, I prefer games that don't have difficulty settings. Games like Magic Carpet and Dungeon Keeper. While they felt quite challenging at times, if eased my mind knowing that at least it should be possible to finish the games, something that I don't believe in Forsaken.

Also as far as I can tell apparently Gothic doesn't have any difficulty settings either? (I just started playing the game yesterday.) Good, I like that, then I don't have to decide what is the most suitable difficulty for me. I recall some people bitching that Gothic is very hard at the beginning when you are weak, but I haven't had much trouble so far. I think I've killed like 8 beasts so far without much of trouble, with the two swords I found lying around; there's also plenty of food around to heal yourself. The first beast I actually killed with my bare fists as I didn't right away figure out how to equip the sword properly. :D

I like the creative approach, for example: The Evil Within's KURAYAMI mode in "The Assignment" and "The Consequence" turns off all lights. The game is shrouded in darkness and the only way to see anything is by using your flashlight or light sources from the environment.

(System Shock) Yep, I did exactly the same. I've finished the game twice that way, but in either case I just didn't want to be rushed through the game with a time limit (or finding out near the end that no matter what you do, you will run out of time).

Sometimes, easy mode can be fun. In particular, in Dust: An Elysian Tail, on Casual difficulty, you get infinite use of the dust storm and Fidget powers, allowing one to breeze through the game while having fun using the dust storm everywhere.

Speaking of Dust: AET, Tough difficulty is a little strange. The thing is, if you are above 25% of your total health, any attack that could kill you will leave you alive with 1 HP instead. This means that, if you don't level up your health, you can just use a weak healing item every time you get hit; this, in turn, means that you might not want to level up your heath at all. (You do need to raise it eventually due to the fact that your highest stat can't be 4 more than your lowest.) Hardcore difficulty removes this rule (at least in the current Linux version).

Unepic has a hard mode that I would consider poor. On the hardest difficulty, you do not become invincible after being hit, but you still get staggered by enemy hits. This makes it easy for you to be stunlocked to death, which is never fun. Game developers, there is a good reason that the player becomes briefly invincible after being hit!

Two additional bad implementations IMHO, but not the worst:

Doom 1-2: Making enemies respawn in the hardest difficulty, ie. you'd have endless supply of enemies. I might have found that ok if also ammo and health would have respawn similarly, but I think they didn't, so your only option would be to run through the levels before you run out of either ammo or health.

Serious Sam + Second Encounter: Enemies are semi-invisible in the hardest difficulty. It just... doesn't make sense in the game world. It is a similar way to make the game harder as if the game forced me to play it without a mouse (only using keyboard for aiming), or it constantly reversed the controls every now and then. Yeah, the game would be harder that way too, but come on.

So for Doom 1-2 and Serious Sam games, I chose to play then on the second hardest difficulty level, just to avoid those extra annoyances. Also, I always avoid difficulty levels that affect my ability to save the game, or ironman modes with permadeath. Like Fallout Tactics has the "tough guy" mode which doesn't allow saving during missions; to me that would simply mean having to replay many missions all the way from the start repeatedly, especially as there were instant death encounters as well (good luck with Behemoths).

This reminds me of the thing that made me think of this topic idea in the first place: In the remake of Wonder Boy: The Dragon's Trap, on hard difficulty, there is an hourglass at the top of the screen. Every time it runs out, you take a bit of damage, and the timer resets. The timer also resets if you pick up a heart (which heals you a bit and is sometimes dropped by enemies). This seems like a rather strange mechanic to add in to the game's hard mode. (I haven't bought or played this game yet.)


Orcs and Elves DS (don't know about the cellphone version), on its NIghtmare mode, made it so that enemies come back to life if you don't gib the corpse. The result is that the start is extremely rough (it's necessary to use the elven ale that you start with), though it's not so bad once you get past the beginning.

If you play Dungeon Hack, avoid Hard mode, as that mode enables a partial implementation of permadeath. Fortunately, that game allows custom difficulties, and that particular setting can be toggled independently of everything else. (Unfortunately, there's no option to disable enemy instant death attacks, and IMO there should be.)

I Wanna Be the Guy also changes the amount of save points on each difficulty, and it's the only change between difficulties. The easiest difficulty gives your character a nice bow in his hair, but that's merely decoration and doesn't affect the gameplay. The hardest difficulty, Impossible, removes save points entirely from the game, and there's a reason that difficulty is called Impossible.

VVVVVV has a mode called No Death Mode, in which all checkpoints are removed and one death ends the game. There's one room that is changed to allow obtaining a certain trinket without dying, but otherwise the game is pretty much the same.

that sounds epic