Define "artificial difficulty"

>artificial difficulty
>the phrase a casual cries out in pain as he refuses to improve his gameplay

>Health sponge enemies
>1 hit boss/enemy mechanics
>platforming sections in non platforming games
And my least favorite artificial difficulty of them all
>enemies read player button inputs
This shit pissed me off to no end in ds3, not all enemies were guilty of it but quite a few bosses were. Still a fun game but this really drove me nuts, still finished the game.

>casual
>the phrase a bad developer cries out in pain as he refuses to improve his game

My opinion is that artificial difficulty has 2 forms:
- Intentional artificial difficulty: devs using 'cheap' tricks to make the game harder (timegating, locking content after pointlessly obtuse grind, RNG, paywalls, p2w). Examples of this
>timegating in WoW Legion (you cannot obtain certain item tiers unless a certain time period has passed), timegating in WoW in general (you cannot reset raids)
>Higher DMC difficulties being locked behind needing to complete the game at lower difficulties (looking at you, super-easy-before-DMD DMC5)
>AI cheating in strategy games

and
- Unintentional artificial difficulty - the game being disproportionately difficult because of glitches, careless game design, bugs, non-gameplay related factors like sound and graphics making the game easier/harder. Examples include
>certain FPSs are easier to play at lower settings because you spot enemies easier. Certain FPSs even have locked settings because of this.
>notoriously bad hitboxes in Dark Souls 2

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People need to realize that the "unattainable ideal form" of a video game has no difficulty at all. Difficulty only exists in video games because no game can be perfect.

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give me one example that isn't just you theory crafting.

difficulty that adds nothing to the game I guess

Literally just bad game design
Just look at that one sniper joe in Megaman 2. You WILL get hit unless you know beforehand how to deal with him. And even if you know how to deal with it, the method to kill him damageless is so fucking precise that it's dumb. If you die from it, it's not your fault, it's the game's fault
And let's not forget that your reward for defeating that joe. Literally one of the worst fucking boss fights of all time. You will 100% die if you used one specific a bit too much during the stage. That's artificial difficulty if I've ever seen one

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The tree? Fuck that guy.

damage sponge enemies that can easily kill you

Instant kill mechanics you can't know about beforehand, especially when placed to set you back a lot of playtime to an checkpoint. That's the developer having autism and thinking it'd be fun to kill you and waste your time instead of giving you a challenge that isn't virtually impossible with zero knowledge.

Casual players love souls games because they can just keep trying, and eventually, they'll know the location of every jump scare and enemy death check, and clear the zone, even though they haven't gotten much better at the game and get murdered in PVP by people who did get better.

Sword guy or bow guy?

Example of what? Artificial difficulty? I Wanna Be The Guy is a paramount example. It deliberately misleads you about when you should jump to cross certain gaps.

FUUUCK YOUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUUU

that fag hiding next to vicar amelia in the old hunters DLC. Once you know he's there, it's a trivial fight.

the ogre in Ds2 that just breaks a door down as you're about to open it.

pretty much anything trivial after a first playthrough as a consequence of just anticipating, not as a consequence of having become more skilled at the game.

>Bird is smarter than game reviewer

The real answer is "difficult in a way I don't like" since that's how I see people use it.
I would say artificial difficulty is when a game requires knowledge of what's ahead, like traps in IWBTG.

this and any mechanic that isn't avoidable/counterable

Based birb

It's a term commonly used by casuals and games journalists to explain away their lack of skill.

Enemies or bosses that flat out ignore established mechanics the game has set forth
>Example now retard
Lunastra in MHW/ICEBORNE
You cannot flash pod her at all or she will immediately go into her massive AOE supernova and more than likely kill you if you're too slow
This removes the mechanic of knocking a monster out of the air for a chance to reset neutral AND give the player a damage phase
It still resets neutral, but it benefits Lunastra and not the player
Also her hit zone values being reversed for melee hunters makes it quite difficult to get a hard knockdown state and to reach her wings and tail which take the most damage from melee

same Ai as easy mode, but with 3.0x times the damage scaling.

Artificial easiness is when you can progress through the game without using mechanics you are intended to use, therefore artificial difficulty is when using intended mechanics alone is not enough to let you progress.

Throwing you up against a foe that's 30 levels past the level cap, while you're level 1

Doesn't sound as much like artificial difficulty to me as much as it does just challenging you to take a different approach. Granted I've never really played monhun, so...

Gank enemies, HP padding and increased damage, as opposed to updated mechanics that require the player to think a bit more.

Rubberband AI from racing games, specially kart games.

Lunastra in particular has a few mechanics and bonuses that players have to be way more wary of
Since most player attacks in the game are pretty negative, you need to know which monster attacks you can punish, evade, block or just not be anywhere near
Lunastra moves significantly faster than most Elder Dragons and so finding a proper window can be a real pisser at times since resetting neutral (flash pod) has no real benefit to players
But that's only one tool for players essentially removed and not the whole kit
Lunastra is just really tanky and doesn't suffer KO damage as much as other Elder Dragons, even with hammer/hunting horns

Warframe

Based devs giving us a taste of G*d's power.

Design intended to punish for the sake of punishment, instead of challenging
These are good takes.
To try and put them together
>Developers intentionally punishing players for being unprepared for something that was not in one way or another implied as likely or possible

Breath of the Wild Hero Mode.

Artificial difficulty is when the game cheats on the player in order to create an obstacle, by stepping outside the rules the game applies to the player.

HP and damage just increasing. Bullet sponges that also oneshot you are just tedious as fuck. Devs need to actually add in new things.

2D platformer has you go downward, screen scrolls and there's a row of spikes offscreen. You had to know to hold a direction from the instant you started falling to fit in a small gap. Bonus point if this is right before the end of the stage and it brings you back to the beginning.

3D Action game puts you in a circular room with the camera you can't control in its center close to the floor. Can only see 25% of the area at a time which is where your character is standing. Randomly spawn ranged attackers offscreen that knocks you down.

2D action game autoscrolling stage where you must escape an explosion. Presents you with several forks where one of them is a dead end killing you.

Prey is the worst for it
>low health which is fine
>death isnt the end like souls but those games have punish mechanics
>Stupid dummy thicc AI that has a billion hit points and is retarded
seriously Prey is truly a mediocre mid 2000's shooter with tech demo like world design while unique it doesnt solve its god awful difficulty which say again ISNT HARD because death literally is irrelevant you CANNOT DIE and you get right back on the very spot where you died

Oh and all your guns are super inaccurate have low ammo so you waste a ton of your rounds looking at an enemy dumping tons of ammo into them and the only sniper in the game shares the ammo pool with the standard rifle meaning your always wondering aw fuck what should I switch to.

>Fight enemy, its easy and simple
>Fight lategame enemy, it uses the exact same moves, patterns, etc, but it has more HP and hits harder
The same thing when a difficulty slider just gives enemies more HP.

Difficulty that you can't overcome with skill or familiarity with the game's general systems, only with skill/familiarity with the specific hazard you have to deal with.
A bottomless death pit in a platformer isn't inherently "artificial difficulty" because it's assumed you understand you have to jump over it. If the platform you need to start from in order to jump over it is invisible, though, and the game doesn't generally require you to seek out some sort of hint or extra information to platform (such that finding an invisible platform is fairly standard) that is artificial difficulty.
tl;dr: artificial difficulty is when a game breaks its own rules just long enough to score a cheap failure or two.

difficulty itself is artificial inherently by that logic

Enemies have higher resistances, do more damage, or otherwise spawn in at a far greater rate, but in general aren't any more difficult to deal with through gameplay mechanics.

So called “bad game design” never excuses poor ability, and the onus is on the player to master a game no matter if it perceived to be broken. It is not the developers job to hold the players hands, and sometimes an authentic experience may feel unfair to the unexperienced and weak.
Getting good at a game requires a degree of mental toughness which many simply fo not have, and the best would never chalk up their poor playing to “artificial difficulty”

Ah yes the guy who knows nothing about game design arrives

Anything that filters casuals and "prevents" them from beating a game.

True because most good games do not use artificial difficulty of if they do, they do it in very small amount or as a joke. Scoring cheap shots against the player is not tantamount to skill. And by cheap shots I don't mean frustrating mechanics that you can avoid with talent. I'm talking about getting killed being unavoidable unless you knew in advance what is going to kill you. This is the essence of artificial difficulty.

Not really user if a game is poorly designed its poorly designed its on the the dev to playtest their shit and release a function product, atleast it used to be... il use Prey once again if im being sniped and the only weapon thats feasible at long ranges is using my salt rifle ammo and then I die in a closer engangement for running out of ammo its the devs fault for not giving me proper tools to overcome the challenges ahead. and making the only gun in the game that has good damage a recharge weapon is a slap in the face, the "shotgun" does pitiful damage its inexcusable, the heavy machine gun is useless besides its grenade launcher and the spirit bow has garbage drop and shit ammo.

Nah man that bird is dumb as shit, it could've just fucking flown up there.

Do you understand what artificial means you fucking retard? Rhetorical question, let me spell it out for you.

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It's the developer's job to make a game that people will buy.

Basically an rng gauntlet if you're not spamming pause every frame.

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The way how a word is used takes precedent over how a word is defined in dictionary.
We aren't arguing legal terms, we are arguing a concept in the context of video game culture.
Falling back on a dictionary is a sign of low social intelligence and probably autism as well

Well that certainly looks like a good start. How is he supposed to get over that?

Take your meds schizo.

She's always so cute. Good music and style too.

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A concept that no one seems to be able to define, and instead can only argue what it's not.