Just to elaborate a bit on what I was saying earlier, there seems to be a point where the difficulty level forces you to play according to a single or very limited set of strategies. If you don't, you lose. One great advantage of a lower difficulty level is that you have more freedom to try many different strategies according to your personal preference.
Compare it to fishing for fun vs. fishing for survival. If you're out there for fun, you will probably enjoy trying lots of different lures, different spots, different casts, etc. Perhaps you are not catching many fish at all, but you're having lots of fun and fishing the way you want to. If, on the other hand, you must catch X number of fish in an hour or terrible things will happen to you, the experimentation ends and you switch to using the "tried and true" (if you have one) or, more likely, do exactly what a pro fisherman does. You can't afford at that point "to mess around," but most place efficiency above all else.
I basically see this division happening between single-player and multiplayer games. In a single player game, the difficulty is usually enough to tolerate many "bad" strategies--but nevertheless, fun strategies that you enjoy using. As you ratchet up the difficulty (or go online), you will more than likely find that only a very small set (or perhaps only one!) strategy has a chance at success, so you must very carefully stick to it.
Examples of this abound. To pull from WoW, there are always many ways to play a particular class. A mage, for instance, can specialize in fire, frost, or arcane. I know many folks enjoy fire the most. However, at least when I was actively playing, arcane was the only sensible option for raiding. If you tried anything else, you would be decried as a hopeless noob (again, when I was playing it was statistically difficult or impossible to do more damage with fire than you could with the arcane spec). Not only that, but you had to spec your character exactly according to a guide. Then you had to move about and cast your spells in exactly the right order, with the same timing. It was like synchronized swimming, for god's sake. So, in short, as you ratcheted up the difficulty or whatever you want to call it, individuality and creativity went out the window and it became about imitation and routine. At that point I lost interest.
Just to elaborate a bit on what I was saying earlier, there seems to be a point where the difficulty level forces you to play according to a single or very limited set of strategies. If you don't, you lose. One great advantage of a lower difficulty level is that you have more freedom to try many different strategies according to your personal preference.
Compare it to fishing for fun vs. fishing for survival. If you're out there for fun, you will probably enjoy trying lots of different lures, different spots, different casts, etc. Perhaps you are not catching many fish at all, but you're having lots of fun and fishing the way you want to. If, on the other hand, you must catch X number of fish in an hour or terrible things will happen to you, the experimentation ends and you switch to using the "tried and true" (if you have one) or, more likely, do exactly what a pro fisherman does. You can't afford at that point "to mess around," but most place efficiency above all else.
I basically see this division happening between single-player and multiplayer games. In a single player game, the difficulty is usually enough to tolerate many "bad" strategies--but nevertheless, fun strategies that you enjoy using. As you ratchet up the difficulty (or go online), you will more than likely find that only a very small set (or perhaps only one!) strategy has a chance at success, so you must very carefully stick to it.
Examples of this abound. To pull from WoW, there are always many ways to play a particular class. A mage, for instance, can specialize in fire, frost, or arcane. I know many folks enjoy fire the most. However, at least when I was actively playing, arcane was the only sensible option for raiding. If you tried anything else, you would be decried as a hopeless noob (again, when I was playing it was statistically difficult or impossible to do more damage with fire than you could with the arcane spec). Not only that, but you had to spec your character exactly according to a guide. Then you had to move about and cast your spells in exactly the right order, with the same timing. It was like synchronized swimming, for god's sake. So, in short, as you ratcheted up the difficulty or whatever you want to call it, individuality and creativity went out the window and it became about imitation and routine. At that point I lost interest.
Matt Barton, Managing Editor
Location: St. Cloud, Minnesota, USA
Email: matt@armchairarcade.com