Artificial difficulty is a method of increasing the challenge within a game by simply buffing the enemy's health and/or damage, while other aspects remain the same. An example of this would be the AI within most RPG and/or MMO games.
The opposite of this, which I will call genuine difficulty, is where enemies will begin to behave in different ways and employ different tactics and smarter play as a method of increasing difficulty. An example of this would be the AI within most RTS and Fighting games.
What's your opinion on artificial difficulty?
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Edited by FrostD: 6/23/2016 8:59:40 PMBehavior changes on higher difficulty leaves a lower difficulty such as "normal" with a sub standard A.I. compared to "Hard" It's easy to see "genuine" difficulty as "adding" things, but in reality what takes place is the dev ends up "subtracting" something that was already in place to create an easier difficulty. F.E.A.R. did this. While in the middle of combat you could switch the difficulty on the fly. On Hard the A.I. darted around, flanked you and charge in when your health was low. Flip it to normal and the enemies literally stood up from behind thier cover and let you shoot them. In Oddworld: New and Tasty "Hard" is actually the original difficulty setting, its what the game was designed to be. The lower difficulty slows down timed puzzles as well as increasing the reaction time of enemies making it easier on the player. What you want then is a genuinely difficult game with an option to tone it down.