A change of difficulty

Vanquish had been sitting on top of my pile of shamefully unfinished games for around a year now (a totally different pile from those that haven't even been started). It was something that I started on Normal difficulty and I stubbornly persisted with it, despite my usual play session of it being; spend 30 minutes getting used to the controls again, get stuck and repeat a section over and over, get frustrated and quit. Finding myself with nothing new to play I decided to swallow my pride and restart this on Casual difficulty (I don't know which feels more insulting, that or 'Easy'). To be honest, it's been a revelation and unless you find Normal difficulty to be a breeze, it feels like this is the way it should be played - for the first time anyway at least. There is obviously a big high score chasing aspect to it, especially in the tactical challenges and if people enjoy that then all power to them, I probably would have too in the past.

On Casual you will rarely have to repeat a section due to dying (most of my deaths were for stupid or unfair reasons) and you can blast through it so much faster, which helps you to keep up with the story rather than forgetting what's going on. Not that there is much of a story to it really, though I hadn't really picked up on the burgeoning bromance between the main character Sam and Lt. Burns. They verbally abuse each other constantly but Burns often allows himself a smile when Sam's not looking after he does the right thing against his orders, I guess trying to figure out whether he's a government tool or a good guy overall. Despite the way the story goes, I think that Burns was looking for someone to be able to do the right thing when he was resigned to just following orders.

"What are you assholes reading this text for? Get back to the fucking main section!"

As a whole, the story rides the line between being faintly realistic and just out there crazy, which according to this article may have been the intention (there's also an outtakes video with Burns doing a good Donald Duck impression). It felt to me a little like how I wanted Gears Of War to continue - I took the first GOW to be almost parody because of its impossibly meat-headed and OTT characters, taking the idea of generic space marines to its most extreme conclusion. All I heard about the later games suggested that they'd started taking themselves seriously though, so Vanquish definitely felt like a worthy successor to it - especially since I've heard plenty of people describe it as "Gears of War on crack".

As well as Casual mode making the story easy to follow, I also felt that it really allowed me to experiment much more than Normal mode had. I was much happier switching to the more unusual weapons and running in close to use the melee attacks. I still feel like the melee attacks were a bit strange as they were so cool to use but then leave you totally unprotected afterwards. I can understand that they were trying to keep the focus on shooting rather than let the melee be too overpowered, but it always felt like there should be some trick to using it without overheating your suit - like a bonus for a good combo or something. You can use the disc launcher to melee without overheating but I never liked it as a weapon so didn't tend to keep it around, I just wanted to be able to throw a free melee attack out now and then, as long as it was balanced by taking some skill/timing to perform.

The question I've been asking myself since finishing it is whether I will take this approach to difficulty with future games. I've just jumped into Alpha Protocol on Normal and am finding it quite tough, so that niggling feeling of whether to restart on Easy starts creeping into your brain (and not just to make a better attempt at some of the early conversations). I think I will persevere in that case as it feels like something which will become manageable as your character levels up but at the same time I really wanted to play it for the narrative choices so hopefully I wouldn't be missing much on Easy. I also don't want to miss out on whole sections of a game down to picking Easy, which doesn't happen very often but was the case in Resident Evil 4 and I wouldn't have wanted to miss any of that. It's a bit of a strange approach to take I think, it's not like the removed sections would have been impossible to fit into the easy difficulty - it's like making a cut of a film with complicated scenes removed for the hard of thinking.

Most of the time I would say that I lean towards supporting the approach of only having one difficulty really but on the other hand I'm still fearful of starting on Dark Souls, which has one difficulty setting - Bastard Hard. I think that when there is no difficulty option, the game should probably be tuned so that most people could get through it - it's one thing when it's my own pride that's preventing me from seeing the whole game by refusing to select easy but when you don't have the option it feels unfair. I guess it also depends on the game though, would Dark Souls be a fundamentally different game with an easy option? Lots of people have been talking about how the experience of the game is part of what makes it great, the genuine fear that one mistake would lose you so much. Would reviews of it have been different if people had the option to blast through on easy or would they stick to their guns and review the game on its default setting? It's definitely something I plan to look at again once I've manned up and actually played the game, so I can form a proper opinion rather than just making assumptions from what I've read.