Chasing the Difficulty High

Does playing for challenge ruin our enjoyment of games?

Difficulty in games was always a topic when my friends and I used to discuss the titles we were playing. A lot of the time it would be in relation to certain quests or games we were playing at the time. I’ll always remember a friend of mine who would complain about how difficult he found Max Payne 3 and feeling somewhat proud of myself for beating it on the hardest difficulty multiple times.

Being that we were all naive teenagers we always felt the need to one-up each other when it came to things like that. Looking back now, it's interesting to examine how much more I enjoy games now that I’ve stopped caring about difficulty.

I used to make a big point of playing all my games on the highest difficulty. More than anything, I just wanted to see if I could do it. Even games that were already hard like Max Payne 3, I ramped the difficulty right up to the Max (pun intended) every time I played it.

To me, there was a sense of excitement and fun that came along with this. I felt this really weird tenseness and desire to do it just because it would be cool. One game I played a lot at that time was Fallout 3, but the difficulty with that was slightly different. You get an actual incentive to ramp up the difficulty in that it gives you way more XP and enables you to level up so much quicker than you could otherwise. The challenge was ramped up as well, especially with something like a random encounter with a Deathclaw, which still gives me nightmares to this day.

Dark Souls was another game that drew me in with its promise of punishing difficulty. Notorious for its challenge, it nonetheless gave me a great sense of satisfaction. After much time (and even more rage quits) I actually managed to complete it up to new game+7. One of the lasting memories from the game was somehow beating the Four Kings boss fight, all by myself, on New Game+4. I truly have no idea…

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