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Is there any shame in playing on Easy Mode?

I usually always play a game or normal, however if it's a game with quite a cinematic experience, I'll sometimes play in on easy just so I won't die and keep the game flowing so it plays out a bit more like a film.
 
sturmdogg said:
Well, for me playing video games is supposed to be fun. So if you're having fun playing on Easy Mode, then who's to say you're doing it wrong?
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First reply gets it right. Between work and kids I have enough frustration, I play games to have fun and unwind. If that means playing on Easy, so be it.
 
Being a father of two, one of them a newborn, my game playing time is at a premium. I always play on easy, I don't have the time to dick around with multiple attempts at a single boss/choke point. Plus, I never understood the "hardcore" crowd anyways. I enjoy a decent challenge, but retardedly frustrating stuff is annoying.
 
On shooters I play them on easy. Don't really like most and I'm not very good at them.

Some other games I'll play them on normal. Never put it on hard quite simply because I don't have the time to make my playing time longer.

Co-op games are on easy but that's because my son is young and and it makes it more fun for him sand he doesn't get frusterated.

I play the games to have fun, dont care what other think about that

TheUglyDrunk said:
Being a father of two, one of them a newborn, my game playing time is at a premium. I always play on easy, I don't have the time to dick around with multiple attempts at a single boss/choke point. Plus, I never understood the "hardcore" crowd anyways. I enjoy a decent challenge, but retardedly frustrating stuff is annoying.
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I feel your pain, my wife and kid like to watch me play and get into the stories too and it gets boring for them watching me have to redo something to much. Worth it in my opinion
 
There's no shame in playing on easy. But, depending on the gametype, since you're not really seeing all that the game has to offer, your opinions and impressions of the game are largely worthless.
 
TheUglyDrunk said:
Plus, I never understood the "hardcore" crowd anyways. I enjoy a decent challenge, but retardedly frustrating stuff is annoying.
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I am old, slow and not very good but I play every game on hardest setting that I can. I die 100 times on each level and curse at my TV but I can't help it. For some reason, I get no sense of achievement from playing on easy. My son plays games on Easy and I almost envy his ability to do so.
 
I play on easy all the time. I'm 32 and don't have the tolerance for replaying bullshit levels or fights over and over that I had when I was 12.
I only wish I could skip stupid QTEs that leave no error for slow reflexes and ROTATING SPIKED COLUMNS!

So basically easy mode allows me to actually see the whole game/experience the whole story without getting hammered so bad that I give up and not make it that far.

Now if I just had more time to get through my giant backlog. Anyone want to borrow a 2yr old and a 6 month old to clean their garage or something so I can play?
 
If a game can't be enjoyed on all difficulty levels, its the dev's fault and they shouldn't have put it in there in the first place. MGS games are fun in different ways on every difficulty. You could dick around for hours in the tanker on Very Easy, but be freaking out all the way through the hardest modes.
 
It's been a while I matured as a gamer and I'm way over that ego-side of it. I mean, I play games for fun, I don't give a crap about other player's taste and accomplishments. The difficulty setting (or any setting really) at wich you play doesn't concern me and you shouldn't be concerned either about other's opinion. It's YOU who's gaming so you're doing it as you see fit. I also don't care about any other form ego driven and shallow "showing off" bullcrap. I don't care for achievement and trophies either as they serve nothing else than showing off anyways.

Only thing I know is that I will play the game at its default setting as its supposed to be the most balanced and well done way to play. If you game gets cheap and suffers from bugs or bad design decision making it's difficulty "unfun", I will drop the difficulty.
 
It depends on your desire as a gamer.I play for skills mastery and I will normally start on hard mode.Once a game or my k/d ratio or w/l record is too high I lose interest.For rpg's I know ill play multiple times so I will go normal or hard.

My brother on the other hand only plays maybe 2 games a year so he just wants the fun.I see no shame in easy mode.If you brag about beating games and you are playing on easy mode then there is a problem.Also if you complain about game lengths but play on easy mode then that's lame too.

I had a friend that beat COD4 the night it came out on easy mode and was angry.That is a problem and lame to me personaly.No shame as long as you don't brag or complain.Easy means shorter game.
 
As a developer, no.

As a lifelong player and a developer, absolutely yes.

Balancing between Easy and Normal is always very difficult. My experience is that even in the industry most people who claim to be big gamers are in actuality terribads (except programmers, and I'm not just saying that because I'm a programmer).

The difference is, programmers are smart enough to understand that playing a lot of games or "trying" doesn't make you a good gamer just like "trying" to be a good programmer doesn't make you one. There are no points for trying, only for results.

I think that normal should have some challenges but nothing that sticks the average focus test player for more than 3 deaths or so in the same spot or makes them answer, "No!" to the question, "Do you want to keep playing?"

Games should offer the ability to switch difficulty on the fly. As long as I am working at Visceral I can assure you Dead Space 2 will include this option.

My dream is to have easy be easy enough for my wife to finish the game without getting frustrated, normal to provide a challenge for people who think they're good but actually suck, hard to be normal-ish for someone who is actually good, and then impossible I don't even want to be able to finish it myself (all that is needed is one person in the entire team who can finish it).
 
I would have to say that it depends. If you need to get through the game as fast as possible like I do most of the time (due to having wife and kid), then I think it's okay. But I'd rather play it on normal more than anything.
 
PTCoakley said:
As I get older and I get a bigger backlog, playing on easy has become the norm for me. It honestly has let me beat longer games that I otherwise wouldn't have had the patience to beat otherwise. I've beat Mass Effect 2 twice on Casual, and while I could have done it on normal or higher, my frustration was at a minimum, I was able to focus on the universe/etc, and I'm able to move on to other games.
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I've been thinking of doing this with Mass Effect 1 just to finish it. I enjoy the gameplay but I really just want to finish it for the story at this point so I can be done with it and remove it from my list games I need to finish.
 
codecow said:
As a developer, no.

As a lifelong player and a developer, absolutely yes.

Balancing between Easy and Normal is always very difficult. My experience is that even in the industry most people who claim to be big gamers are in actuality terribads (except programmers, and I'm not just saying that because I'm a programmer).

The difference is, programmers are smart enough to understand that playing a lot of games or "trying" doesn't make you a good gamer just like "trying" to be a good programmer doesn't make you one. There are no points for trying, only for results.

I think that normal should have some challenges but nothing that sticks the average focus test player for more than 3 deaths or so in the same spot or makes them answer, "No!" to the question, "Do you want to keep playing?"

Games should offer the ability to switch difficulty on the fly. As long as I am working at Visceral I can assure you Dead Space 2 will include this option.

My dream is to have easy be easy enough for my wife to finish the game without getting frustrated, normal to provide a challenge for people who think they're good but actually suck, hard to be normal-ish for someone who is actually good, and then impossible I don't even want to be able to finish it myself (all that is needed is one person in the entire team who can finish it).
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I very much dislike games that allow to change difficult on the fly. I think it banalizes the choice and the very puporse of having multiple difficulties, unless it was done like Bayonetta that tracks every different stage for each mode. (but not exactly 'on the fly')
 
No shame at all. I used to play everything on easy also, just to be able to experience as many games as possible (can't move on to another game if you're stuck on the previous one).

I've kinda gone the opposite route now because of trophies though. If there's a trophy tied to higher difficulties I'll at play through at least on normal, if not the hardest necessary for a trophy. I'm not great at games (probably due to all those years of playing on easy :lol), but I'll at least give normal + a shot now.
 
I dont think there is any shame in it. However, when playing through the god of war collection I got asked to switch to easy mode (I wasn't stuck on combat but rather one of the puzzles) and I accidentally pushed yes. I immediately made sure to load my last game so I wouldn't be on easy mode anymore. So, subconsciously I suppose I do feel some shame from it.
 
I play all of the MGS games on the easiest difficulty because I don't have fun playing them at all. I play them because I enjoy the characters and the crazy ass story and cut-scenes and basically rambo my way through just to get to them.
 
codecow said:
As a developer, no.

As a lifelong player and a developer, absolutely yes.

Balancing between Easy and Normal is always very difficult. My experience is that even in the industry most people who claim to be big gamers are in actuality terribads (except programmers, and I'm not just saying that because I'm a programmer).

The difference is, programmers are smart enough to understand that playing a lot of games or "trying" doesn't make you a good gamer just like "trying" to be a good programmer doesn't make you one. There are no points for trying, only for results.

I think that normal should have some challenges but nothing that sticks the average focus test player for more than 3 deaths or so in the same spot or makes them answer, "No!" to the question, "Do you want to keep playing?"

Games should offer the ability to switch difficulty on the fly. As long as I am working at Visceral I can assure you Dead Space 2 will include this option.

My dream is to have easy be easy enough for my wife to finish the game without getting frustrated, normal to provide a challenge for people who think they're good but actually suck, hard to be normal-ish for someone who is actually good, and then impossible I don't even want to be able to finish it myself (all that is needed is one person in the entire team who can finish it).
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The last paragraph sounds good.Maybe even some extra things unlocked if you come back and run the game on the harder modes.If I beat a game on normal I want a reason to come back and try again.And I don't like being able to switch difficulty on the fly either.And yes everybody is hardcore at home with nobody looking.The truth is different most of the time.
 
Having fun playing on easy? Then play games on easy because in the end games are about having fun. People saying otherwise just need something to boast there...whatever it may be they are lacking. Some games are more fun for me when i´m challenged and the probability to fail is always at hand (Halo for example), but when i play Call of Duty i don´t care about the difficulty because for me it´s just "supposed" to be a smooth ride for me.
 
No shame at all. I like playing higher difficulties for the challenge but some games get worse on higher difficulty, which ruins the fun. Usually the default "Normal" setting is the best mix of the two.
 
Yes. Man up and play normal.

Games were always meant to be challenging. If you lose once and already want to put it down to easy that is sad IMO.
 
Only shame is if you complain its too easy and you are playing it on easy. I hate people like that. They play it on easy, finish, then feel dissatisfied that the game was a pushover.
 
No shame, but on some games it can totally ruin your perception of the game. A lot of games treat easy mode as "No Way To Fail"-mode, which removes a lot of the reward of dealing with a tricky boss. I generally stick to normal and above, but have flipped to easy for specific games or sections in which the alternative is giving up and not playing anymore. I'll usually go back and beat them on normal/hard later.

I do still think easy mode is the best way to play Mirror's Edge. The actual point of the game (running/jumping/climbing) is the same, it just makes you able to stand up to more gunfire. And since the combat in that game really, really sucked, the less I had to deal with it the better.

I also flipped Bayonetta to Very Easy to get the achievement for platinum on the first two sections of chapter 14. Had they been combat based I'd have left the game on hard and toughed it out, but for a random throwaway parody/homage I wasn't beating my head against the wall indefinitely. Couldn't ever get a hang of the controls on that thing.
 
I try to play whatever a game's normal mode is, which is becoming increasingly difficult, because I'm finding more and more developers are actually hiding their easy mode under the Normal name and Normal mode under some other name.

I'm looking at YOU Gears of War (Hardcore = Normal), Halo (Heroic = Normal), and Dragon Age (Console Hard = PC Normal).
 
After having given this some thought, I feel playing on easy often comes close to passive consumption, which is the opposite of what I wish to take from the medium.

There have been some voices saying that they play on easy because they have little time due to obligations but still want to complete games. This is the precise reason I more and more play on hard from the outset - I don't have the time to replay a game on hard after completing it on normal or easy anymore.
 
Yopis said:
The last paragraph sounds good.Maybe even some extra things unlocked if you come back and run the game on the harder modes.If I beat a game on normal I want a reason to come back and try again.And I don't like being able to switch difficulty on the fly either.And yes everybody is hardcore at home with nobody looking.The truth is different most of the time.
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The reason why the on the fly difficulty setting is nice is because it allows someone to back down from something that is pissing them off (briefly). Take the asteroids section in Chapter 4 in Dead Space. A lot of people were frustrated by it and if they had been able to back the difficulty down for that one sequence many might have not been as frustrated and actually enjoyed the game more.

Yeah, it's a cop out. But I have to say I used it myself on Dragon Age for the PC. A couple of the encounters I party wiped on maybe 5-6 times and didn't see a way of beating it with the characters and equipment/money I had without doing a bunch of farming or side quests to get health/mana pots. I just wanted to finish the game so I could play MW2, so on anything I had to try more than maybe 5 times I just skipped the difficulty down, passed it, then turned it right back up.
 
Usually the easier it is, the less I feel like I'm making any sort of worthwhile interactions with the damn thing. So I do write off easier modes most of the time. And yeah, I'm gonna write off the opinion of the dude that decided to beat a game on Ultra Easy or whatever.
 
I really don't recommend playing easy, since it's usually so easy that you're not even given some kind of challenge, and you don't really get the most out of the game then. Challenge is part of the game - but that said, while I don't recommend it, I can see why people play on easy. However, what's really annoying is when people who've played through the game on easy laugh at me for taking so long to finish it.

I never choose easy the first time through though. For me, the first time through should be the most important one, and playing on easy will leave me a sour taste in my mouth after finishing it. So I usually play on Normal/Medium/Standard/whatever difficulty the first time through, and eventually turn the difficulty up or down (mostly up) for subsequent playthroughs. If I turn it down, it's because I just want to mess around and speed through the game to update myself on the story for an upcoming sequel.
 
In some cases you also get a better ending and rewards if you play on normal or a higher difficulty, but if that's not the case and there's no trophy/achievment involved then easy is fine.
 
codecow said:
The reason why the on the fly difficulty setting is nice is because it allows someone to back down from something that is pissing them off (briefly). Take the asteroids section in Chapter 4 in Dead Space. A lot of people were frustrated by it and if they had been able to back the difficulty down for that one sequence many might have not been as frustrated and actually enjoyed the game more.

Yeah, it's a cop out. But I have to say I used it myself on Dragon Age for the PC. A couple of the encounters I party wiped on maybe 5-6 times and didn't see a way of beating it with the characters and equipment/money I had without doing a bunch of farming or side quests to get health/mana pots. I just wanted to finish the game so I could play MW2, so on anything I had to try more than maybe 5 times I just skipped the difficulty down, passed it, then turned it right back up.
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I did the same thing with DA:O. I played on hard until the last battle, where I kept on dying. By that time I'd gone through nearly every side quest and invested 70 hours in the game and I wanted to move on to other things, so I went ahead and kick the difficulty down to normal, killed the final boss and finished the game. Was very glad that Bioware gave me the option to do this and I wish more devs would. If they want to link achievements/trophies to not changing the difficulty level, they can go ahead, but I wish they'd let people who can't get past a sticky point in a game to at least have the option of notching down the difficulty so they can finish the game w/o restarting.

*edit* - would have loved that option for the annoying DS1 asteroid gun too. So glad that Visceral is aware of the fact that that segment was extremely annoying and doesn't need to be repeated in DS2. *crosses fingers* <3
 
TheUglyDrunk said:
Being a father of two, one of them a newborn, my game playing time is at a premium. I always play on easy, I don't have the time to dick around with multiple attempts at a single boss/choke point.
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I'm with this guy.
 
I'd personally feel a little shame in myself for playing on and easier setting. Most easy modes are pretty boring stoo. reducing the number of enemies and making then as thick as a plank aren't conducive to an entertaining gaming experience.

demon arm said:
After having given this some thought, I feel playing on easy often comes close to passive consumption, which is the opposite of what I wish to take from the medium.

There have been some voices saying that they play on easy because they have little time due to obligations but still want to complete games. This is the precise reason I more and more play on hard from the outset - I don't have the time to replay a game on hard after completing it on normal or easy anymore.
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This. at lower levels it feels less like playing a game and more like padding inbetween cutscenes.
 
There's no shame in it, but it would make me wonder what it is about Normal or Medium settings that would frustrate someone to go the Easy route.

I do enjoy games on harder difficulty levels now and again, but sometimes things hinder the progress that what once might be challenging just degraded to frustrating. My friend and I dove headfirst into Army of Two: The 40th Day on the hardest difficulty. We died a lot towards the end, but what was pissing us off were in some instances, where we had to sit through the same unskippable cutscene over and over.

Plus some games don't really challenge you so much as they just look to screw with you, like Call of Duty on Veteran. The only way to succeed is to push through enemies that are perfectly honed in combat to some really shoddy checkpoints because otherwise they infinitely respawn. Granted, this is remedied somewhat in MW2.

Then again, the same can be said for Easy mode in games and thus some people look less at it as just an easier alternative and more as just a really dumbed down approach.
 
codecow said:
Games should offer the ability to switch difficulty on the fly. As long as I am working at Visceral I can assure you Dead Space 2 will include this option.
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This is great design and I hope you guys will be able to stick to it.
 
There's no shame, especially if you have a big backlog and just want to get the "flavour" of the game before moving on. In regards to the hidden difficulty levels and "normal is the easy mode/normal is the hard mode" more games should be clearer. I liked how Half-Life 2 said the easy mode was basically normal with the computer helping you aim, and hard meant more and tougher enemies or something. Bioshock said "easy if this is your first shooter, normal if you've played shooters before, hard if you're a veteran at shooters." Great! (I picked Normal but since I hardly ever play FPS I probably would have been justified with easy, too.) Games should have less of this "guess what the programmers are thinking" business. One example of this: Kane & Lynch. Aspirin/Codeine/Morphine? I get that it's supposed to be easy/normal/hard, but how is this supposed to explain anything?
 
I always start on easy if you cant change the difficulty while playing, after the first stuntman on ps2 I just cant take frustrating games anymore.
 
Are you kidding? Easy should be renamed "shame mode".

Ranger X said:
This is great design and I hope you guys will be able to stick to it.
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I don't like this I'm afraid I'll change it by accident and not get the trophy for beating the game on hard/impossible.
 
The Quiet Man said:
Play the game how you want to play it. Who cares about what anybody else thinks?
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This is true too.

It's much better to cut down a challenge than not finish a game.
 
I used to play games on easy when I was younger. Found them too hard and didn't finish many of them.

Nowadays I'm capable of handling the challenge unless you ask me to play Ninja Gaiden.
 
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