PieFedWould you rather stop playing a game than lower the difficulty? The First Berserker: Khazan devs reckon you would | Eurogamer
coyotino [he/him]www.eurogamer.net/would-you-rather-stop-playing…
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This easy mode gate keeping idea needs to die. Git gud needs to go with it. I'm glad that there are games that give a challenge to those that want it but there should be a happy medium between "Mash attack until victory" and "memorize every attack pattern and still get stomped." Or at least a setting that most games have that let's you experience the story while playing.
Kirby does this in a lot of games. The main game is beatable by a child, but the more extra stuff you do, the harder it gets. And the secret bosses like Morpho Knight and Chaos Elfilis feel like straight out of DarkSouls or the Sans fight in Undertale.
Oh, and in order to fight them, you need to have finished everything else that the game offers and defeat all the games bosses beforehand - with limited healing options.
Yeah, exactly. People should have fun. In fact, I wish all games would include cheats. Sometimes I want to go crazy.
starman2112It was great back when they did. The ability to press a bunch of buttons and get a jetpack and an uzi and an airplane only improved GTA
sorrybookbrokeIf the intense and strategic combat is the gameplay a person dislikes then what's the difference between you playing the game for the story or watching a play through?
Lies of p has a difficulty slider that decreases damage from the enemies and increases the party window. That really doesn't do much. You still need to "memorize" the moves no amount of button mashing saves you even on easy.
The only way to really give an easy mode while not throwing combat out the window would be to heavily slow attacks, lower complexity, and decrease damage while changing enemy placement and consistancy. Sure, a game could do that no problems with that, but that's a lot of dev time to build something against the games ethos. Every map has two or more varients. Every boss two or more movesets. If this is a devs vision fuck yeah but that's a lot to put in when the issue is people don't like the core concept
Do we argue horror games should have options for low horror so we can enjoy it without the horror? puzzle games should have a second set of easier puzzles for those who find them too hard? Story centric games should have low-story varients for those who still want to play? That dating sims should have aromantic varients for those who just like the comedy? Sure, if a dev wants that, good on them. Current games don't need to change though.
The intense strategic combat where numbers change little and skill changes everything is the point. That's what these games are built around it's their fundamental concept. If you don't want to engage with this and still want the story do what I do with the Warcraft series. Watch playthroughs, or story breakdowns. I hate their gameplay but will never argue they need to spend dev hours catering to me by making something antithetical to their core MMORPG concept.
Edit: with lies of p people complained that the difficulty slider didn't do much as they still had considerable difficulty. They were right and this displays my point. To make an easy mode work there needs to be considerable effort put in. Otherwise it doesn't fix the core issue. The entire point of the system is that numbers mean little to difficulty but skill, rhythm, and practice mean a lot. Changing the numbers will thus not have much effect. New movesets, enemy placement, and quantity must be adjusted for each level of difficulty. This is a large task with little benefit
Do we argue horror games should have options for low horror so we can enjoy it without the horror?
Yes! A huge number of games have toggles that allow people with specific phobias to enjoy the rest of the game. The most common example is a spider toggle. Since up to 6% of everyone copes with arachnophobia.
I almost added this to my reply to them, but it was already getting kind of long-winded. Yes, actually, accessibility settings in horror games is amazing. If the point is to achieve a certain level of scary, and the game is too scary for me to play, then giving me the option to reduce the scary will make the game the right amount of scary for me. Accessibility settings don't give me an easier experience than yours, they give me an equivalent experience to yours.
Can you name horror games 2ith this toggle? I see this in factory games all the time. Horror games though? Pure curiosity personally.
Are the devs lazy for not including it? If people didn't want to implement, are they game keeping? No, they're focusing dev time on things that matter for their horror game. The horror of it
Story centric games should have low-story varients for those who still want to play?
This one made me laugh, thanks. That said, we do have entire comedy genres making fun of "Unskippable" cut scenes.
A skip button feels like a basic courtesy, but what I really want is a pause button. Life happens, and I can't count the number of games that I've just stopped playing because the only option when my dog was throwing up was to skip the cutscene.
VCRs were invented a long time ago. I find it wild that game developers haven't figured out how welcome pause, rewind, restart, and skip ahead would be. I'm not dropping quarters into most games to play, anymore.
I agree with pause. Though I wouldn't use it I also don't do a lot of things in the game to increase difficulty.
On the story but, I mean visual novals or games entirely story centric. Games where the story is central to the game
This pause button feature is why I prefer PS5 and Switch/2 over PC.
I just put the PS5 into sleep mode and when I’m back I press the PS button and resume. Same witch the switch power button.
I don't mind strategic combat (I play Civ, BG3 on harder difficulties) but I hate grinding combat and play those games on easy.
What that means is I don't play walking simulators. If I'm railroaded into a story, the combat better be damn good or I'm refunding the game or at best uninstalling it. I'd rather pay $100 for something like the outer worlds with a really interactive and replayable story than $20 for something like greedfall where it's just a tv show with spamming buttons every so often.
Slowing the game down and reducing the damage done by bosses isn't rocket science. It's like ten lines of code, which have been written so many times an AI can probably provide them.
Different people have different capacities to engage with a game. The world is a better place with some simple accessibility concessions.
We don't need to make excuses for game developers who don't even do the minimum, unless it's their first game.
Edit: To me, the "Watch a playthrough" argument misses something fundamental about why people choose games over movies.
Aight I see aim not getting through to you. Let's try though.
No, lowering damage and slowing attacks is not all I proposed nor would that fix the issue. Complexity in move-set must also be decreased. Also in the game world enemy placement and quantity must be adjusted to lower dificulty. Otherwise it'll be, mostly, just as hard
No, properly slowing attacks is not easy to do. You are not programmer or an animator. No, AI can't magic this up for you either a month ago I saw an app hobbled together with AI that had three whole stacks in it with three seperate apps because somebody tried to add a new view with statistics on it with AI tooling.
Once more, for accessibility, should we have low to no horror settings in horror games? Low to no puzzle options in puzzle games? Etc.
You call these people lazy but don't have any clue what they actually do. No. It's not lazyness. They could make shitty difficulty settings that don't fix peoples problems or they could spend many hours doing it right.
Edit: To respond to their edit, I think the just add a difficulty slider argument fundamentally doesn't understand why people play these types of games
Um, Actually, I am a developer.
I agree with you that it's not always enough. But you're making an all or nothing argument. I find it disingenuous.
Developers with more experience throw in some accessibility features.
It is a hard problem, but that's no reason not to make an effort.
I find the whole "purity of artistic vision" argument privileged and ableist.
Software can do better than other art mediums. Accessibility is worth striving for.
Developers who don't add accessibility aren't some high minded artists, they just haven't fully mastered their craft, yet.
Disingenuous? I think that's projection.
Not once have I stated it was high art to not add this in. That's a wild statement.
I'm simply stating not doing so isn't lazy, or gate keeping. The devs ar e focusing elsewhere. To focus here, they spend more money or take something else out. As a dev you should know this.
This is a feature. You can focus on a subset of all possible features. Not implementing one does not make you a worse dev your code is what matters. A dev should know this. You have x amount of time (money) a dev thus can implement y features.
A house should have a garage. Not building one doesn't make you a lesser builder you just didn't have the finds and chose to build a nursery instead with the money. Focus was elsewhere.
Edit: It's clear to me this persons not going to engage. They ignore my arguments, make up new ones, and don't seem to care for the discussion. I'm going to disengage
As a dev you keep throwing around the word accessibility very loosely. This is very weird. Are we talking about accessibility for disabled people or for people who simply find the game difficult? The latter is the main conversation here. The prior is ableism through low expectations. You're nolonger talking about an "easy mode" either. Accessibility settings aren't "easy modes" disabled people don't need to be coddled.
Also, as a dev, you should know seemingly simple features are not commonly simple. Any dev past junior should know this. No Dev past junior should make these claims unless speaking directly about tech.
Edit: On top of this, I've made no all or nothing argument. Lowering damage and speed does very little to help. Essentially nothing.
Please, under any engine of choice, give me a top level on how you're implement variable speed.
You throw a lot of hatred towards devs (calling them lazy gatekeepers who are poor in craft who can't implement something AI can) what are your creds?
I'm a fullstack software dev with 7 years experience and a specialization in accessible ui (disability, not dislike for the combat system) and multiplatform codebases. You?
Once more, for accessibility, should we have low to no horror settings in horror games? Low to no puzzle options in puzzle games? Etc.
The way you have phrased the question indicates there's much you can still learn about modern accessibility approaches.
Horror games can provide toggles for particular kinds of elements.
Puzzle games can have more hints.
Great developers know this, and use these approaches.
I am not saying every developer must implement accessibility options.
I am saying I won't listen to them brag about their skills, if they do not.
BryceBassittYes, horror games should have settings to lower the horror because everyone has different preferences and tolerances.
Horror devs are lazy and gatekeeping for not implementing this? That is the original statement from the thread.
It is a horror game. The point is horror. Sure, if a Dev wants to add the slider, full send. Thats a positive. Devs who want to focus on the fundamental concept are not lazy. They have different priorities.
Not all games must cater to all gamers. Sometimes a game isn't for you. You have different prefferences, that's ok. Different games cater to your preferences.
Some games don't cater to mine and that's fine too
Yes, they are lazy and gatekeeping. Difficulty options are accessibility options and development who don't include those are worthless.
Complexity in move-set must also be decreased.
No? Increase time between moves that are difficult to dodge or parry, reduce damage that those moves deal. Difficulty is reduced while complexity remains the same.
Also in the game world enemy placement and quantity must be adjusted to lower dificulty. Otherwise it'll be, mostly, just as hard
I've never met anyone who actually has trouble with normal enemies in these games, it's always bosses that give us trouble. But also, see my first point.
Lies of p has a difficulty slider that decreases damage from the enemies and increases the party window. That really doesn't do much. You still need to "memorize" the moves no amount of button mashing saves you even on easy.
It sounds like that's a happy medium between "Mash attack until victory" and "memorize every attack pattern and still get stomped."
Do we argue horror games should have options for low horror so we can enjoy it without the horror? puzzle games should have a second set of easier puzzles for those who find them too hard? Story centric games should have low-story varients for those who still want to play? That dating sims should have aromantic varients for those who just like the comedy?
None of these are analagous to the accessibility options people want in soulslikes. None of these are literally unplayable for people who simply don't like the genre. If you don't like the horror aspects of a horror game, you can look up when jump scares will happen. If you can't figure out a puzzle, you can look up hints. There's nothing preventing you from sitting through a story you aren't interested in. Contrast all of these with Remnant: From the Ashes, which I desperately wish I could play because I like the story and the gameplay, but I can't because there isn't a single boss I can beat. I can't just look up the answers to a puzzle online, I can't just sit through a story that I don't find interesting, there is literally nothing I am able to do to progress. Giving me the option to reduce the insane health pools on bosses would take nothing away from the people who like chipping away at a brick wall for half an hour.
The intense strategic combat where numbers change little and skill changes everything is the point. That's what these games are built around it's their fundamental concept.
What an insult to the writing teams. The only game I can think of that this actually applies to is IWBTG. Numbers change little? The game you're describing is Sekiro. Every single other soulslike in existence relies heavily on boss enemies having really big numbers and the player having really small numbers. What "strategic combat" is involved with killing the Orphan of Kos? Hit enemy, don't get hit, repeat.
I enjoy Lords of the Fallen because when you die you are not immediately dead but in the Umbral World where you can continue to fight mobs/bosses and only if you die there you are really dead. So kind of having 2 lives in Mario :) the first hours or so it feels like a solstice that has a balance between button mashing and hard-core boss training.
whotookkarlCan't read the article without accepting sending cookies to thousands of companies. The only time I can remember having to restart was god of war 2, I was playing on hard and there was a boss I couldn't beat after about a week of multiple gaming sessions. It wouldn't let you charge difficulty on the fly so I had to restart the game on medium.
I've beaten dark souls 3, most of elden ring and the first dlc, Bloodborne, play fighting games, etc. I also like point and click adventure games with little or no control challenges that focus mostly on plot and character development through story events.
I'm okay with some games not catering to everyone as long as they are transparent about it, just like I wouldn't expect white knuckle challenges that take practice and fast reactions from a cozy comfort game like animal crossing.
misk
Can't read the article without accepting sending cookies to thousands of companies.
In the EU you can’t be legally opted into tracking without explicit consent so it’s usually as simple as pressing „confirm choices” or similar option. I can’t believe people don’t use adblock and deal with this everywhere though.
I use dns ad blocking so some of the cookies popups from the same host show up. This site either wants you to subscribe or accept ads and sending cookie trackers to advertisers, sure I could accept and assume my browser will successful block the third party cookies, but I don't consent so I won't accept.
Only souls game I beat is Elden Ring. Only by modding an easy mode into the game. I loved exploring in the game, especially the lore without worrying about dying because of my lack of skills.
If anyone says that a souls-like is only fun because of it's difficulty is wrong, at least in my experience.
I don’t mean to gatekeep because boss fights in From Software games are getting ridiculous but I think wandering into dangerous areas and overcoming challenges by cheesing things and even grinding level and gear is part of the charm.
I understand that it is for many. Just not for me. I prefer exploring lands and it's many wonders.
I would also rather not play a game than pay money for something infected with Denuvo. I wish the Kazan developers would reckon that.
Looks like I'm not playing The First Berzerker: Khazan then. If the only draw to your game is how hard the combat is, then everything else probably sucks. Maybe make a good game instead of a hard game. I had no problem dropping the difficulty on Clair Obscur or Horizon or Mass Effect.
Mortal Kombat's approach is flawless and every game needs to copy it. Keep the game at full difficulty until a particular enemy kills you a few times, then gradually make that enemy slower or reduce its damage output or make it use easier attacks. Give the sweatlords an option to disable that difficulty adjustment so they can die to the same boss a thousand times, as is their wont
I just want more granular difficulty/accessibility settings. Give me more sliders to tweak my experience. I know it might be greedy and asking for a lot but Easy/Normal/Hard or whatever is just so clumsy.
Imagine we had sliders to tweak dodge i-frames and parry window lengths? I might actually dare pickup Sekiro if that was the case.
i would kill for parry window length settings!
Just give me explicit visual cues on when I'm supposed to party and I'll be happy. I hate when devs assume I understand what "just about to hit" means.
To your point, the easy-hard concept is so vague. What does that mean? Less enemies? The same amount but they have less hit points? I take less damage? Longer time before enemies react? It can be literally anything.
Let us control the settings like you said, and then have some presets for easy configurations and starting points.
I think a special shout out needs to be made to the sniper elite series, which let you reduce the difficulty of the enemies but keep the difficulty of the sniping mechanics.
Yess! Bloodborne parry windows for everything
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I'm usually a normal-difficulty gamer and usually don't turn down the difficulty from there. However, as the article says, If I started on a higher difficulty, I'm more open to go back down to the default.
The difficulty of a game I've found to be separate from whether it's fun or not. I'll play a game till it's end if it's fun, even if it takes me a long long time. If it's just difficult, but a bore, dropped.
I set every game to the bare minimum floor difficultly. If I find success at that difficulty for a full playthrough, I'll up the difficultly on my second playthrough, if the game merits one.
My life is hard. I have very little free time. My games should be fun.
Edit: Also I proved my gaming prowess back when easy games had not been invented yet.
Excellent. We should play games on our own terms. I’ve hit skill barriers in many games, set them aside ‘for a short while’ and never returned to them. I bet I’ve missed so many great moments due to this so now my policy is to lower the difficulty if I’m getting too frustrated.
Also, difficulty levels can be quite arbitrary especially in games that have a particular play mechanic and then introduce something complete different for one level. (My pet hate is token platforming inserted into shooters.)
I remember one game (Indigo Prophecy I think) had a tiny segment that required subtle joystick control to get the player across a narrow beam. Nothing else in the game was like this. I couldn’t do it, countless fails. I asked my young nephew to have a go and he got it on the first try.
This is so true lmao. Every time I play old NES games I'm dumbfounded. It's like half because they're hard and half because the design is wonky. So much has changed since then.
I guess part of it is because arcade games were meant to drain your quarters and older games sort of followed that style to an extent.
I feel the same way. I've won my golden joystick. I don't need to "prove myself".
It’s not a pride thing, it’s just that I’m so used to not thinking about difficulty modes that they don’t occur to me as a solution in the moment. I straight up forget that the game is more than the version of it I’m currently experiencing.
Games can't be easy enough for me. I like playing with dolls essentially. pew pew. that being said I firmly believe elden ring leaves a lot of cheese to give folks an easy mode without having to put in an easy setting. Sorta a cake and eat it to or official deniability.
There are a few games/genres like this for me. Like the Anno games, whenever I play one, I just turn it down to the lowest difficulty, and just build and expand. I kinda treat it like an idle/incremental game. That's also why I normally don't play any of the survival city builders, like Banished or stuff like that, it's just not what I'm looking for.
Banished is so nostalgic but replaying it is so bad lol. I love colony management games. Probably my favorite genre. Rimworld is my favorite at the moment.
Eh, not really. If it's not fun, I'll lower the difficulty or refund if this is not an option, I don't care.
I play all of my favorite games on the hardest difficulty because the challenges they throw my way are a big part of why I find them fun—why would I bother with higher difficulties if I'm not having fun?
Conversely, why should you bother with lower difficulties at all if you're not having fun to begin with?
I think that comes down to the genre and game. I've definitely played games where I was enjoying the story and wanted to see its conclusion, but couldn't be bothered with a boss rush in the middle of the game. In a similar vein, games with sudden difficulty spikes in the mid- to endgame portion might benefit from it.
At the end of the day, I'm a working adult, trying to fit in having some fun with all the other crap I need to do. I don't have time for games that need me to treat them as a second job to get good enough to make any progress in them, but games with random difficulty spikes or boss rushes that just serve to pad out play time by making you grind for levels or the ideal equipment or skills/summons out of nowhere feel like an annoying bait and switch to me.
Right, I can see that. I tend to have less patience for (what I consider) annoying gameplay despite good stories, therefore I wouldn't try lower difficulties if it's a hassle to me.
I tend to move on / abandon games quicker than I would have done when I was younger, and I know what genres I tend to favour.
Artificially padded games are usually a pass for me too.
I don't play too much in the way of action RPGs, but it's definitely an annoying thing that tends to pop up in JRPGs, though less so nowadays. Still, I do appreciate being able to dial the difficulty down as an option if I'm enjoying a game, get 30 hours in, and run into one of those two issues. If it's not an option, I'd just drop the game, but it gets annoying when you've sank in a month or so of free time, only for a game to pull that on you.
Hmm… I think of difficulty, or lack thereof, as integral part of the fun. I think they're inseparable, essentially.
I don't really enjoy the process of learning and getting better at 3rd person shooters, for example, so I don't typically enjoy playing those on higher difficulties. If I pick one up, I know I'll most likely have more fun playing on lower difficulties because it eliminates a process I don't really enjoy. In other words, shooting shit is still fun, but I need the difficulty toned all the way down to enjoy it.
Conversely, I love learning the intricacies of combo systems of action games and figuring out how to exploit enemies and whatnot, so I have to play those on the highest difficulty to get the full experience and have the most fun.
Interesting, thanks! That's not quite how I approach fun, or difficulty, in a game.
I'm happy playing on higher difficulties so long as the gameplay loop is interesting (to me), and that's how I go about shmups for instance, gradually increasing difficulty as I start to "master" the game (as if), however if the "default" gameplay isn't fun to me, lowering the difficulty is not going to help.
Yeah, I play shmups the same—still stuck on arrange in Crimzon Clover, haha. Gotta put more time into practicing the TLB.
What are your favorite shmups on Steam?
GL! I certainly have to give Crimzon Clover a fair try, I liked the few runs I did so far.
Favourite would be DoDonPachi Resurrection / DFK, but I have to practice more for the 2nd loop / TLB as well haha.
I like to set the difficulty high enough to where I don't feel the game is too easy, but low enough so that I'm not getting frustrated and feeling like the challenge is bullshit.
Some developers are kinda bad with balancing though, there are definitely instances where I lowered the difficulty and just went through the game.
I'd definitely lower the difficulty first.
A game that comes to mind for me is Frostpunk. It has easy, medium, hard, and extreme. Naturally I selected normal at first.
Normal difficulty Frostpunk is not for beginners. I learned that very quickly. That game was basically the dark souls of city builders. It was a super fun game though, and probably near the top of my list of best games I've played.
They changed the difficulty names in FP2 to citizen, officer, steward, and captain. I believe the default is citizen there. I guess even they realized there is nothing easy about that game. FP2, while a drastically different game, was also hard.
In my experience, the really difficult part of frost punk is initially just understanding the shape of the situation the player is in.
Like, like most will fail on normal because they just don’t know what options are available to them and what pressures they’ll be put under over time.
After one successful play through I found the game a lot easier just because I knew what I was up against and what resources I had at my disposal to deal with it.
Yeah. Like... Uh. Major spoiler. Don't open if you haven't finished.
Frost Punk 1 spoiler
The sheer length of the end game freeze was crazy. Of course, if you knew just how long and how intense it would be then it wouldn't really be fun to encounter. The fun of that is the surprise of how long and intense it is, even with the game telling you that you need tons of food it's still crazy.
But even apart from that, there are times when you make decisions based on limited information only to realize there is something that gives you more options soon after, and if you'd pursued that other thing you wouldn't have needed the first thing. These was a bit of that in FP1 and FP2. I liked 1, didn't finish 2 but I still liked it. My main complaints about 2 were the UI being wonky and a few mechanics not being very clear.
I appreciate the devs of FP1 making it so buildings didn't need to be smushed. There used to be this way you could trick the game into shoving more buildings in than it typically allowed, but they just made that happen by default. Changes like this deserve praise. Pointless micromanagement should always be eliminated.
this was my experience as well. took me like 6 tries to do the first mission on normal. then all the others i did first try (although not exactly optimal).
a few months later i did the first mission on hard - first try.
its almost a bit dissappointing, because FP is a lot of fun, but once you "get it", it kinda feels like a lot of the challenge you feel early on is gone.
@theangriestbird
In addition to ego (which I'm sure plays a role) I think I would find myself reticent to lower the difficultly to "Easy" for a couple reasons
1) The default difficultly, which is typically "normal" is often the intended experience, and if I can play like that, I see value in it.
2) Related to (1), difficulty settings are often poorly thought-out; it's quite common for hard mode to simply make enemies bullet sponges or for easy to turn them into cardboard cutouts, which is a disappointing experience.
I've played and finished a lot of really brutal games on brutal difficulties.
If you think, in the situation where a game is simply too hard for you to progress, that dropping the difficulty so that you can experience the game you paid money for is giving up your "dignity", you have a really fucking toxic relationship with your ego/self image/self worth, and with all the care and compassion in my heart you need to take some time to look inward. I do not say that as a judgemental statement. I say it because you will be happier and more satisfied if you can unlearn that.
Allow yourself the compassion to not reach your goals. Pursue your goals with fervour and drive and passion, of course - but be compassionate enough to yourself to let them go when they do not serve you.
It's hilarious to me when people whine to devs that changing the difficulty is bad, because what, do we really want to view beating a single player game as competitive? It's single player. Who cares.
I would if I could, but Dying Light didn't have that option. It also didn't have the option to let me quit a mission after I got softlocked behind a room full of bullet sponge enemies, having run out of every resource because those stay gone for good even when you die and reload.
So yeah, I quit that game.
I stopped playing Remnant 2 because it wouldn't let me change the difficulty. Played on the "normal" difficulty, whatever it was called, flew through the game with no problems, got to the final boss, and just died over and over and over again. The spike between everything else in that game and the 2nd stage of the last boss was unreal. Went to change the difficulty and it said lowering the difficulty will reset the campaign progress. Quit at that point, but I really would've rather been able to lower the difficulty.
Depends on when I hit that difficulty spike and how changing the difficulty works. If I can change the difficulty at any time and not lose progress, I'll do it and not think twice.
I was playing the evil within 1. I was at the end of the game right before the final boss. The game up to that point was balanced on hard. It gave a good survival horror experience. Every boss fight or mini boss felt reasonable.
At the end of the game, they suddenly throw you into an arena with a ton of enemy waves that wouldn't drop enough ammo to deal with them all. Looking it up online, the recomendation was to save ammo the whole game specifically for this fight. But nowhere prior did i feel like that was needed
Suddenly, the game went from being fun to frustrating. I didn't wana have to replay the level so at that point I hung up the towel and moved on.
Great game otherwise! Might replay it on normal one day lol
Let me arbitrarily change the difficulty whenever I want. I hate games that don't let you do this. The worst offender was Resident Evil Village. It let me lower it but wouldn't let me increase it back without starting over.
i usually go with the default and rarely turn it up. Sometimes I turn it down. Some games are just brutal unless you turn down the difficulty.
Im playing WarTales right now and that game is unforgiving. Fuck your party. Not only are you going to have some deaths but it goes even further that your dead friend is now in your loot.... you can even bury them and leave a gravestone which doesn't go away!
You could always eat them if you take the cannibal trait
I would change the difficulty and then regret it later, which I did with Furi and Jedi fallen order.
Furi's combat is so good, and the easy mode is well designed too (still challenging, enemies just have less complex movesets and possibly fewer phases), but I wish I had taken a break and fought through the game properly. Now that I've finished the game on easy and seen the ending, I don't think I ever will revisit it.
I usually set it to the hardest difficulty mode unless it’s really asinine like iron man or turning off the ui etc. Usually the challenge adds to the enjoyment if it’s done right so if I’m having trouble I’d rather just come back to it another time when I have more energy to throw at it or whatever.
Not a matter of "dignity", but for me it depends:
Chances are though, that changing the difficulty after some time playing, would feel like a total nerf, and I would abandon it anyways.
Same way I feel about non-cosmetic purchases. I made the mistake of falling for some back in the day, and shortly after abandoned the games... because they felt much less like a challenge, and too much like a pointless money grab. My current limit on micro-transactions is either fewer than 3, or $1.