Define Artificial Difficulty in 3 words or less

Not my fault.

There is no such thing as artificial difficulty. It's a meme word made up by bad players to divert the blame away from their lack of skill to the game design.

Soulslike as genre

"I got filtered"

platforming, poor controls

I PRESSED BLAWK

Wrong, because then any game where enemies take more than one hit to die are artificially difficult.

It takes more than three words to create a definition that successfully removes the "wahhh I'm bad" while keeping reasonable complaints.
It's any aspect of a game that increases the "Difficulty" without actually increasing the skill required to beat it.

Rubberband AI

Wrong. The "just" implies relativity to something. I was referring to games in which there are multiple difficulties, but all they actually change is "the enemies take more damage and deal more damage".

Buzzword for faggots

too many enemies

Player handicapped bullshit

Normies cry

Did it in 2

"Tedium, not Skill"

Still doesn't invalidate the fact that HP values do not constitute artificial difficulty.

millisecond reaction times

Complete utter bollocks

Iron keep (spawns)
Love the game but cmon

When it's the only thing that changes in between one difficulty and the other, yes they absolutely do. If it's not harder but just takes longer then it absolutely is, unless you wanna start getting pedantic about definitions while ignoring the idea behind it, which I'm not gonna do.

op is fag

Wrong. Take any rpg game, make every enemy 1hp. Game becomes trivial. Even your mom who doesn't play videogames could beat it.

Now increase the HP dramatically, back to their original values, which might be hundreds of times larger than 1 HP. Game becomes difficult and complex.

>Now increase the HP dramatically, back to their original values, which might be hundreds of times larger than 1 HP. Game becomes difficult and complex.
No? It all depends on the other mechanics that are in the game. Raising the prices of grandmas in cookie clicker doesn't make the game complex either. Fiddling with numbers works if the rest of the game is interesting (Character action games for example). But if you're playing some shitty one-note rpg giving enemies 200% extra hp just makes it tedious.

bullet sponges

Skill doesn't matter

I have pictures.

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If every enemy ship in Starsector was 1hp, I could play the entire game with just the starting ship for combat. I would never need to upgrade or get new ships.

But since every ship has varying levels of HP, I have to field a variety of ships, manage my fleet composition, order my ships, think about my resource usage for these ships, evaluate tactical options, and then when I'm actually in combat have to worry about whether the other ship will succumb to my weapons.

If everything just had 1hp, the game would have almost no depth and I would be bored. This applies to almost any game.

git gud

Different math numbers.

big number bad

SELF IMPOSED CHALLENGES

the fact that everyone is wrong in this thread is fucking sad.

Difficulty without skill

Now give every enemy ship 15000000 hp and your ships only deal 1 damage to them. Does that make the game deep and complex or just tedious and boring?

Why do people keep saying this dumb shit? If it takes longer it is harder. Surviving against an enemy for 10 seconds so that you can kill it is harder than surviving for half a second while you one shot it. If the enemies take so long to kill that every level feels like a tedious drag then yeah that's bad design but you can just call that bad pacing rather than calling it "artificial difficulty"

OP is fag

Perfect play fails.

arbitrarily difficult

Yeah, that's bad game design. Just like 1hp is bad game design.

Makes you weaker, makes enemies stronger.

>Hard: enemies have 200% HP and 100% damage
>Hard: enemies have 100% HP and 200% damage

only one of these is artificial difficulty, can you figure it out Yea Forums?

Wow you mean making the game impossible is bad design? What a genius you are for figuring that out. Not him but if you up the hp a reasonable amount then, while it won't make the game more complex, it will make you have to use the complexity more and form better strategies in order to win. You're insisting on using only ridiculous examples where the game becomes impossible to beat and then acting like that's proves anything. Nobody is arguing that you can increase the HP to literally any amount no matter how absurdly high and the game will still be fun

Need Better Gear

Bullshit like this

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Never question design

dark souls 2

First?

Selection Societal Sanity

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Bullet sponge enemies

Just More Health

Bullet Sponge AI

Because shooting an enemy for 4 seconds to kill it on a medium difficulty isn't any more difficult than shooting that same enemy for 8 seconds to kill it on hard, it just takes longer.

Dark Souls Two

persona 5

unavoidable beginner challenges

AI is cheating

rubber band AI

>Just Add Numbers

Fuck Off Faggot

This.
Fuck gear/item gates
Games should be beaten with starting gear.

You can't force the player to "Keep up to date with the newest shit" Just to get through the game in the next century

So much of my issues with certain games come from that shit and I can't understand how everyone just eats that kind of design up
"But without all the item upgrading/progression the game wouldn't be as satisfying" bullshit, You're playing a badly made game, fuck off.

Any time a game starts asking me to go upgrade otherwise it's player damage and enemy damage numbers get ludicrously mismatched I fucking drop that shit.
I'm done with RPGs because I hate that kind of design. I mostly play action/strategy/puzzle/fighters now because Level/Item progression is so fucking predatory.

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INPUT READING FAGGOT

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Defiled Chalice Dungeons

>just it takes longer
>an enemy that has a hard hitting attack if you don't kill it fast enough with double hp
>not harder

fucking brainlet.

Great

If fighting an enemy for twice as long isn't harder then that's a sign that your combat system is shit. Seriously what games do you play where this is the case? Shitty AAA open world games with bare bones shooting mechanics shoe-horned in?
In most games with good gameplay surviving for longer is harder because enemies fight back. And it increases depth because now you actually have to think about DPS, in most games with good gameplay there are ways to increase your DPS and kill things faster so you don't have to survive them for as long.

Don't like it.

Can't we just call it "bad/lazy difficulty"?
It's not wrong to say there are better ways to do difficulty in videogames than shit like doubling enemy HP and calling it a day.

How is it impossible? It just takes longer. Sure it might be on the same level as Desert Bus but you could win eventually. Maybe.
The 1hp example is just as ridiculous (and stupid, since it doesn't take into account damage dealt could be less than 1 but still not 0). My point was that adding more hp doesn't make a game more complex if the other mechanics in the game don't hold up.

Making something more difficult by adding obstacles that the player has no ability to mitigate or anticipate. Whoops 3 words.
G itg ud.

Call of Duty

Damage Sponge Bosses

Tedious damage sponges

Not his fault you're so predictable

No available counter

Eventually, I realize all I need to do to never get hit is just keep pressing the same buttons in the same order, not even paying attention to how I'm moving just as long as I repeat the same motions over and over.
Take Dark Souls, or even the original Doom. All it comes down to is repeating the same things over and over again, eventually it stops being hard and just becomes tedious.
>Hard-hitting attack
Where did you get this from? Either way read above

Bad at game

Artificial Difficulty doesn't exist in the 21st century. If something has more health and damage, it just makes it a form of difficulty you don't enjoy, not "artificial" or "fake".

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Veteran Difficulty in those games pre-MW2 pussy shit was great though. Really made you feel like just another guy

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HP in games isn't always just for mistakes. In fact I'd argue it rarely is. Plenty of games HP is just a resource you have to manage. This is especially true for strategy games, in most strategy games it's impossible to beat even a single level without taking damage.
And of course it doesn't make the game more complex, it's not supposed to, it's supposed to make it more difficult. The point of difficulty is to make the player use the complexity that's already in the game. If your game isn't complex then you should make it complex before you even think about difficulty. Obviously your game needs to have mechanics that hold up. That's completely separate from difficulty. No sane game designer would wait until adding multiple difficulty selections before making sure their game has mechanics that hold up and have complexity. That's like the very first thing you do.

The first doubles the amount of time the fight takes, giving me twice as much time to make mistakes. The second punishes my mistakes twice as hard, meaning I can make half as many. The "mistakes per minute" I'm allowed is the same, but the second option delivers it in a more time-efficient manner. If you factor in, for example, a CoD-esc "hide behind a wall to regenerate" then the 200% HP option doesn't actually increase difficulty at all while the 200% damage at least increases the chance of taking a lethal burst of damage. I really can't think of a situation where the more HP option is favorable beyond weird "the boss one-shots you regardless" edge cases.

You'd be surprised at how many games have fuck in terms of combat complexity and interesting mechanics yet still have enemies with truckloads of health. WRPGs are very guilty of this from my experience.
A lot of platforming games have boss health set at 3 for a reason. Making Bowser from Mario 64 require 10, 15 or even 20 throws off the platform instead of 3 wouldn't make the boss harder, just take longer. The mechanics just don't really lend themselves to longer bossfights. Wish some devs would realize the same about their games' mechanics