This was a great way to level up a couple of skills at once, but playing the whole game like this seemed an anathema to me. In Oblivion this meant that a single enemy was actually unable to kill you whilst you used the basic restoration spells. However one thing always irked me вЂ“ my friends insistence on playing with the difficulty slider all the way down to the easiest setting. I have a lot of fond memories of us playing this game together. We would take it in turns to play, whilst the other manned the laptop and searched the wiki for secrets, ways around the all to frequent bugs, and in the end, to hunt down the remaining quests we had yet to complete. A few years ago I was living with a colleague when The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion was new, and between us we must have racked up hundreds of hours in that wonderful game.

ThatвЂ™s not to denigrate those who choose to play this way. So, sometimes I think that by choosing to play on easy mode, you perhaps rob yourself of the games original vision, and in some cases, the complexities of the mechanics too.

Other games such as The Witcher 2 offer a more straight forward approach by simply giving enemies less health and inferior AI, to the point where you can hack and slash your way through them on autopilot, which differs greatly from the fast, movement orientated combat of the normal setting. This encourages a degree of caution before you use large area of effect spells, whilst the easy setting removes this mechanic, thus vastly simplifying the magic system. In that game, whilst playing on normal, spell effects are capable of inflicting friendly fire damage onto party members. Of course some games change completely with different difficulty levels, sometimes introducing new mechanics, and perhaps simplifying or expanding existing ones. I donвЂ™t do this out of any misplaced sense of snobbery about playing on easy mode, but rather because I believe that normal difficulty usually represents the challenge and experience that the designers intended to create, and in good games challenge and experience are linked. Personally, I always try and play games on normal unless I get so frustrated butting my head against a wall that I have to revert to the easier settings. Some always play on hard, some on easy, and I imagine most, playing on normal. Different people have differing approaches and attitudes towards difficulty, both with difficulty settings, and difficult games to learn or master. Difficulty in games is something that has always interested me as a subject.

Mmo with dark souls combat