Yeah it is a personal pet peeve of mine when people complain about artificial difficulty because enemies get higher health and damage and act like this is an invalid way to add difficulty. Pretty much every game in existence that isn't an RTS or stealth game is "artificial difficulty" on higher than default settings then.
Enimies hits harder= less room for mistakes, more health means you have to be more efficient at dealing damage and able to keep performance up for longer. That is the foundation for increasing difficulty. There is absolutely no point in adding in some extra behaviors to a boss if a good player who has optimized their build, consistently hits weak points or knows how to combo effectively and doesn't need to back off can burst them down in 10 secs.
Developing AI and unique features/attacks is expensive, it's probably not something you want to spend a lot of time on if most players won't see it and do you really want enemies to have neutered behaviors, less variety and seem stupid on lower difficulties when the player really only need more room for error?
FatesVagrant t1_iy6x0fs wrote
Reply to comment by SepticKnave39 in Can someone give me a brief explanation of "Artificial Difficulty"? by ShrankNutz
Yeah it is a personal pet peeve of mine when people complain about artificial difficulty because enemies get higher health and damage and act like this is an invalid way to add difficulty. Pretty much every game in existence that isn't an RTS or stealth game is "artificial difficulty" on higher than default settings then.
Enimies hits harder= less room for mistakes, more health means you have to be more efficient at dealing damage and able to keep performance up for longer. That is the foundation for increasing difficulty. There is absolutely no point in adding in some extra behaviors to a boss if a good player who has optimized their build, consistently hits weak points or knows how to combo effectively and doesn't need to back off can burst them down in 10 secs.
Developing AI and unique features/attacks is expensive, it's probably not something you want to spend a lot of time on if most players won't see it and do you really want enemies to have neutered behaviors, less variety and seem stupid on lower difficulties when the player really only need more room for error?