Difficulty levels in video games. Which one to choose?

While I have been playing video games since the early 1980's, the question of difficulty levels didn't really come up until I bought my first PC in the mid 90's. Many PC games from the time (one of the most notorious examples being Doom) had difficulty levels to choose from.

For a quite long time I had the principle that I would always, always play with the hardest difficulty. After all, I paid a hefty sum for a video game (especially since back then I was just a university student with a bugger-all income), which made it quite an expensive commodity, and I wanted it to last for as long as possible. I hated games that were too short, especially if they were full priced, or even nearly full priced.

With some games choosing the hardest difficulty actually made a lot of sense because it was not artificial difficulty. For example, some point&click games of the time had (usually two) "difficulty" levels, which meant in practice that on the "harder" level there were more puzzles, and some puzzles might be a bit more complex, or involved more steps. Which was absolutely perfect for me. I would have hated playing those games with less or easier puzzles.

Back in those days I was also more invested in beating games on the harder difficulty levels, even when they were at least approaching artificial difficulty. With some games it truly made them more challenging in an enjoyable manner. For example, I remember Midtown Madness having difficulty levels, and the harder levels meant that you were racing against different, more powerful cars, than the easier levels.

By the time I played Half-Life 2, I still had this mentality in full force, and I played it on its hardest difficulty. It was perhaps this one that finally made me lose that principle (or, at the very least, it was one of the last games I ever played on hardest difficulty due to wanting the game to last longer and be more challenging.) In this game the difficulty really is quite artificial, and borderline makes the game only frustrating rather than challenging.

My mindset has changed quite a lot from those times. I have become a huge consumer of video games, and I purchase tons of them. While I enjoy a very long game (those that take over 50 hours to play through) from time to time, if really well made, I prefer a video game to be enjoyable rather than it lasting as long as possible. I don't mind if a game lasts only 10 hours, if it's a really enjoyable experience (although, to be fair, that's already starting to be on the quite short side, especially if we are talking about a full-priced game; for a 20€ or cheaper game that's completely fine. I have played 2-hour games that have been absolutely marvelous, and the length has been completely fine.)

The drawback of buying so many games is, of course, that there are only so many hours of free time in my life to play them. Thus in many cases I actually prefer games to be shorter, so that I can get to play more of them. A game needs to be really epic and exceptionally well made for me to want to play more than about 30 hours of it. (There are examples of this of course. For example Steam reports that I have played Skyrim for 110 hours, which is quite unusually long. For Fallout: New Vegas it reports 60 hours.)

In general, I thus nowadays prefer playing such games in their "normal" difficulty.

I have, in fact, noticed that the "normal" difficulty tends to be the most balanced one in most games. Sort of like the intended difficulty designed by the developers (as in that it feels like they designed the game from the ground up to be played on that difficulty, and then only in the very last stages added the other difficulty levels as an option.) Choosing a harder difficulty very often makes it feel artificially hard, as in the enemies being "unrealistically" hard to kill (if you can talk about "realism" in such video games; it may be more accurate to say that it starts breaking willing suspension of disbelief when enemies are too hard to kill.) These harder difficulty levels are often not as enjoyable, as they feel unbalanced and needlessly difficult. This, in fact, goes all the way back to Half-Life 2 (and probably beyond).

Some games, however, entice the player to choose the hardest difficulty level. I have sometimes been suckered into choosing it because of that, and regretted it later. As a recent example, Battlefield 4 has this to say about its hardest difficulty level:

Well, I'm quite an experienced player, so I decided to choose that difficulty level. I stopped playing the game somewhere around half-way through, out of sheer frustration, as enemies were way too hard to kill, and it was way too easy to die. I tried a bit of the beginning of the game with the normal difficulty, and it immediately felt a lot more balanced (enemies actually died from a moderate amount of gunfire instead of having to empty two clips into them). I might some day restart the game on this difficulty level and play it through like that.

A few games, however, are quite different from this, and "difficulty level" means something quite different. An interesting case is Alien: Isolation. While there are enemies to kill in this game, the main focus is the alien, which is unkillable (this is more a horror survival than a first-person shooter). Thus "difficulty level" means something else entirely than how hard enemies are to kill. In this case it affects the behavior of the alien, which is an interesting deviation from the standard formula.

Also this game entices the player to choose the hardest difficulty:

And here, too, it's not quite clear whether this really is the best way to play the game or not, regardless of what the developers are saying there. The reason, however, and perhaps obviously, is quite different from your ordinary first-person shooter like Battlefield 4.

In the "hard" difficulty level, in the levels where you are trying to hide from the alien, that's chasing you, the alien will constantly be in your vicinity. You don't have a moment to take a breath. The alien will always be there somewhere, ready to jump at you at any moment you make the tiniest of mistakes. It never wanders off too far. It's like it can constantly sense your presence in the vicinity and never goes too far away. Your tasks thus indeed become a lot more difficult, as you must watch for the alien much more closely, and time your movements much more precisely.

Many people report, however, that the game is actually best played on the "easy" difficulty level. That it's actually much scarier and has much more ambience to it. That's because now the alien isn't actually constantly in your vicinity but can wander off somewhere else, even to the opposite side of the level. What makes this scarier and more immersive is that now you truly don't know where the alien really is. It could be just around the corner, or it could be on the other extreme of the level. You can't know. And thus it becomes much more surprising, and terrifying, when the alien suddenly jumps at you when you least expect. In the hard difficulty level you just know that the alien is just a couple of corridors away at most, so there aren't many surprises. In the easy difficulty level the anxiety is much higher because now you really don't know where the alien is or when it might turn up.

I have yet to play the game through again (I very rarely play games twice), but if I ever do, I will most certainly try the easy difficulty.