What if you are undead and dying just makes you more hollow but you being undead allows you to not die for good? And when you die, your undead body crawls back to the nearest source of life energy? You die, but its part of the lore. Makes sense amiright?

And ofc, no easy mode, 'cus this game is Dark Souls where everything is skill based and the only customization you get over difficulty is increasing it.

An interesting take on it. However, I feel if dying (=failing) would be abnormal, then the game would probably feel too easy to me, boring. A walking simulator. I actually liked it how I had to figure out a working strategy to killing my first dragon in Baldur's Gate 2, and all the good that came from that (like getting a kickass sword as a reward).

Or then failing should come some other way, without dying, but that doesn't really change the fact that I'd probably want to load a savegame at that point.

Yeah I know at least TES Arena and Daggerfall manuals suggest you shouldn't care of seemingly negative things happening to your character (other than actual dying), but simply continue playing with all the negatives without loading a save game, as then you get more immersed to your character and the negatives may bring new aspects to the game etc. etc. etc...

I guess they are referring to becoming e.g. a vampire or a werewolf in the game (which to my understanding may seem negative, but may end up making you much stronger), but I seriously don't want to continue playing the game with a character whose major stats have suddenly been heavily decreased due to some illness I didn't detect early enough, losing all those stat points that I've used several weeks to gather, and which make rest of the game very hard to finish. Hence, I WILL always reload Daggerfall from an earlier save if I find I've contracted some stupid stat-reducing illness. I hate those.

Actually, if that happens in Daggerfall, you can recover from this in 2 steps:
1. Cure the illness.
2. Use Restore [stat] spells to restore your stats to their normal values. Alternatively, apparently being a high enough ranking member of a temple can also be used to restore your stats.

Ok then, for some reason I didn't know that (maybe I didn't read the whole manual). Makes sense then. I thought those stat-reductions due to illnesses are permanent, and I just couldn't wrap my mind around how that is supposed to make me enjoy the game in any way.

At one point I almost stopped playing the game already as I thought I didn't have a save game before contracting such an illness.

Ooh, good topic!

I must mention Kingdoms of Amalur: Reckoning. Game overall is really really good: rich and beautiful lore, gorgeous even; a bit cartoony-like style sort of relieves the player from seriousness and possible stress; While there is basically a certain set of weapons in the game, the stats vary so much, that if you got two swords by the same name in your inventory, they would actually be completely different weapons; fighting is fun - I am playing rogue, with daggers and bows, finding it all amazing.

Main story is interesting, world is big, faction stories are also interesting. Everything just raises a question - what's there not to like about Amalur for an RPG lover?

Well, the balance of levels is where the game is crippled. Playing on Hard mode is like playing any other game on a level between "easy and normal". It is somehow made that the player gets overpowered easily and soon. The challenge of combat is soon gone and this is a problem. Enemies do not level up. They just stick to their initial level and stay so. So if I step into a new area, I may have some decent combat for a while, but as soon as I level up - every enemy gets too easy to defeat.

Moreover, game offers many ways to improve yourself. I mean, leveling up just by itself makes a player stronger. Then it's a variety of weapons, armor, accessories to choose with an enormous variety of their stats. If that is not enough, player can use many different potions that enhance certain abilities for a time limited. Not only that, but the player may also choose certain Fate card to be present, which gives certain buffs like an invisible hand of God. Abilities by themselves are amazing. As I said - I am playing rogue style, with daggers and bow. I prefer bow. I am able to shoot 7 charged arrows at once, with additional buffs that add poison damage to my arrows and increases their critical damage. I was standing still, ready to shoot and shot just when the mad troll is a hand away in front of me - all seven arrows hit this one target, damage is quite big, troll dies.

And if that wasn't enough, there is a special power where time sort of slows down and damage I inflict is even higher. Very useful to kill bosses in a matter of seconds after the battle starts.

So... There is a huge problem with balancing in the game.

I believe I saw somewhere an unofficial mod that sort of "fixes" the balancing problem, experience and gold gain. For the moment this would be the only solution. But it would be nice if developers themselves released an official mod concerning these things. Not a patch, but a mod. For some players around the world may enjoy the game as it is now.

I've earlier complained about the difficulty level of the Freespace campaigns, when playing on the hardest difficulty.

It is interesting to note that the additional 30 or so user-made missions, which you can play in the game in a mission simulator, are much better in that regard. They usually feel quite hard and challenging in the hardest difficulty, but not frustratingly so. Even if I keep failing a mission miserably at first, I always seem to make better with each retry, especially when I come up with better tactics.

I feel this is probably because each mission is apparently made by different people. They have play-tested each of their missions much more carefully to get the difficulty level just right, and getting rid of things that they felt annoyed themselves while playing their own missions. Ie., they tried their best to make their missions FUN, even if you play on higher difficulty levels.

The most notable thing being that I think all those Freespace simulator missions I've played so far (15 or so), none of them have a seemingly endless supply of enemy fighters where you'd have to fight endless waves of enemies, while trying to do something else at the same time. Many missions have indeed lots of enemies, but you know there are only certain amount of them coming, not making it feel fruitless trying to fight them.

Another thing that those user missions seem to be mostly missing are tight time limits, and also I don't recall being in a mission where I end up having to shoot at some enemy mothership with my lasers for an whole hour just to kill it.

It may well be those user-made simulator missions are the most enjoyable missions in Freespace + Silent Threat, as far as gameplay goes.

I just played Dark Souls 2 and what a bad game. I can understand making the game hard but how are you supposed to figure out how to fight when the first enemy kills you all the time. Its not balance its just crap. I play games when I want to have a fun enjoyable and challenging experience. The people that people those games are the same that enjoy hurting themselves and are masochists, lol.

I actually recently tried playing Wizardry Summoner (GBA) and found out that the game is poorly designed. The game gives you too little experience (<30 isn't unusual when the first level up takes ~1000) and expects you to deal with enemies using spells like Nuclear Blast way too early. Incidentally, the game gives you far more gold than you can realistically use.

Wizardry Gaiden 4, on the other hand, is much better; the game starts off relatively easy and feels more balanced. (I should point out, however, that Dracon breath does seem rather powerful at the point I've reached.)

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Interesting thread with a lot of quality posts.

I believe you can justify literally any in-game difficulty if you compassionately design the game around it, by providing reasonable consequences for failure, and always ensuring that the player understands what they did wrong, so that even the act of dying makes players feel like they've progressed mentally.

It's when you perceive a cycle of trial and error as a lack of progress that feelings of frustration starts to set in, and if the game developer can't address these feelings by rebalancing the cycle, then a difficulty setting is the next best compromise. There is literally nothing worse than making a player feel like they're wasting their time; that's a fast track to getting your game refunded.

I almost always play on the hardest difficulty level, because i like if a game is challenging :P