>making players think they're skilled at a game
vs
>actually making a difficult game and requiring players git gud before they can win

Which is the better game design

I feel like the answer is too obvious, so I have to question the reason for this post

>making players think they're skilled at a game
Above. It doesn’t matter what’s “better game design”. The only thing that matters is if it sells and the player is happy. Helldivers 2 is proof of this. Players got mad and started leaving the game when devs kept making the game harder. So, devs made the game easier and now players started coming back more than ever because they think they’re skilled for beating missions on super helldive

It's making players think you actually made a difficult game that requires players to git gud before they can win but it's actually babby tier easy

>>716451516
It's less about difficulty and more about design in Helldiver's case. Helldivers 2 can be hard, but the tools to combat that hardness aren't fun, and usually boils down to ass scooting from one objective to another stealthily. Give you an example, I recently tried to download an absolute asston of modded shit for Skyrim. Several of the mods added weather debuffs and other tedious bullshit, basically making the game harder in the name of "immersion", but not giving you tools to deal with that difficulty. Sure, it makes sense that deep tundra water is deadly. But I have to go there because the game has several quests, even tied to the main one, there. I have fire magic does that help? No? Oh I have to buy warm clothing and eat hot food? Okay where do I buy that? The main city? You're telling me these inns don't sell shit to survive in the environment they're in?

Basically difficulty and immersion can be fun, but difficulty for the sake of difficulty usually results in people just abusing the AI to cheese it.

>>716452035
Dude, all higher difficulties require you to optimize the way you play in a way that’s usually not fun for the casual. You’re just feeding yourself copium because you’re secretly a casual who wants a delusion that they’re good at the game because your useless ego can’t handle playing on easy mode

>>716452407
Anon saying "git gud" when you're talking about how fun a game is is copium. If high level play of a game isn't fun then the game isn't fun. Why in the ever loving fuck would you waste your little time on earth putting actual work building a skill in entertainment that isn't fun? To flex for other sad cunts? I hope you grow in life anon.

>>716450874 (OP)
The former is just way better for business, see: soulslikes in general.
You fight enemies with incredibly slow and telegraphed attacks. You spend half the time rolling around with invulnerability windows 10x longer than something you'd see in a fighting game. Ultimately it's a rote memory game too so even the biggest retard will be able to brute force a fight and feel accomplished. And it sells like hotcakes.

>>716450874 (OP)
a while ago i realized that the more important dichotomy between players is less "hardcore vs casual" and more "wants to feel like they're doing cool thing" vs "wants to actually do cool thing"

Some people don't give a fuck about how hard the gameplay is as long as they're sold the spectacle of being cool. Other people sneer at being told what they're doing was cool unless they've had to put in convincing effort. It's like a spectrum.

>>716452035
Except it clearly wasn't, because instead of saying "I see what you're trying to do here devs but I'm not having fun with it" and offering suggestions within the purview of Helldivers 2's original design where you were individually weak and couldn't just brute force every encounter, they went absolutely nuclear on the developers whenever they did anything other than juice the living fuck out of every weapon in the game, which they eventually did. Now Helldivers 2 is utterly uninteresting, it's just a fun solid co-op shooter.

>>716450874 (OP)
is there a meme with this template that isn't fucking awful

There's room for both, since either method has pros over the other. Fake difficulty for the sake of a power fantasy can be very fun if it's convincing/immersive enough, but you don't get the satisfaction of overcoming a real challenge. True difficulty can be very fun when your skills finally get good enough or you come up with some clever strategy that works in a clever way, but by definition you'll never get to having a full on power fantasy

>>716452530
My post struck a nerve huh? So, it’s the truth. You are simply a bitter retard who can’t handle playing on easy mode :)

>>716452921
I don't at all agree- an effortless power fantasy is, to me, completely ineffective. If I'm not putting any effort in I'm bored. The strongest feeling of power comes when you're sweating your ass off and still winning handily.

>>716453013
Yes and it definitely depends on the person and how willing they are to be immersed/how tolerant they are of challenge. For example I get nothing out of Uncharted despite its acclaim but I can see why people like it. I think a good example of a fake challenge would be most JRPGs. There isn't much actual strategy to something like Earthbound after you've figured out what moves to cycle through every turn and there isn't really any physical execution to speak of, but I still really liked how the stakes kept rising throughout the game and ultimately had fun with it.

>>716452407
i understand that u are upset that people would prefer to choose to be challenged without unfair difficulty when u had no choice but to be both at birth

>>716454098
>wants to be challenged
>doesn’t want to play on an unfair difficulty
Thanks for telling me that you are another bitter casual retard that has to lie to himself that he beat the game on a hard difficulty

>>716454098
u know there's an entire genre all about managing a lack of fairness and it's one of the most popular genres on the planet

>>716452684
I think this is an interesting take.

>>716450874 (OP)
Making a game hard deliberately often means you can only beat the game with some hyper-optimized autism-sperg method of playing, which renders 90% of the game content pointless.
>Bro what do you mean you lost to that boss? Just use the triple weapon swap grenade-skip method and he's a piece of cake
>You tried using *90% of game's content*? Bro that's never going to work!
It's why difficulty sliders/options are also a dumbass idea, who the fuck wants to play Skyrim when only a handful of really boring builds work on legendary?

>>716456127
>Making a game hard deliberately often means you can only beat the game with some hyper-optimized autism-sperg method of playing,
name the game and explain yourself

>>716456194
Literally any game with the 'cock and ball torture' style of max-difficulty.
What's the point of introducing a difficulty that is less of a skill filter, and more of an ingame-content filter.
>BRO WTF YOU OBTAINED THE STEEL DAGGER OF FIRE? YOU NEED TO GET THE IRON SHIELD OF ELECTRICAL HARDENING OR YOU'RE FUCKED!

>>716456650
This along with other realizations made me quit most vidya. There's something to be said for having game knowledge be a component of strategy in a system for the sake of replayability, say "If I take the steel dagger of fire I will have an easier time with X content but have less options for dealing with Y content" but game design as a concept has just rotted away completely since the 2000's. There are exceptions obviously, but when you begin to look under the hood of most videogames and hold them to a similar level of scrutiny of games of old such as chess, go, poker, etc. you can't go back.

>>716456194
Not him but you play enough games that offer different methods of tackling problems and you'll eventually find at least one that has "the right way" with everything else being either inferior or outright impossible to complete with. This is especially noticeable with all the shitty roguelikes that have release in the past half decade, where if you don't get hyper specific drops/rewards/upgrades on the harder areas, the game becomes a complete wash and you may as well reset.

>>716451516
>>716452407
>>716452857
Fuck em. They nerfed guns everyone had already stopped using after they already been nerfed. People started using flamethrowers because they were literally the only weapon left that could reliably kill multiple chargers in a row and then they "fixed" them so bad everyone stopped using them, even casuals. The nerfed good guns and bad guns and even the silly ones people just used for fun.

They just flat out didn't want players to have tools. They wanted everyone with peashooters with no ammo running from point to point with one guy playing artillery distraction. Which still works, btw, nothing changed that. It's just now you also get to fight enemies.

>>716450874 (OP)
>make a hard game
>people complain it's too hard
>make it harder