I have been playing Gears of War 2 with a friend for hours each evening at Insane difficulty. Considering that I have done this with Halo 3 and other games I have begun to draw upon some interesting observations.
Consider how one may make the experience more challenging. We got the simple ways of boosting the health of enemies, boosting weapon damage, making you weaker, doing less damage etc.
And then consider how you sit for half an hour, emptying clip after clip of an assault rifle into a couple of Covenant Brutes, you get to notice that any fuck up your side will mangle you. Also, any glitch and bug, any fuck up on the side of the designers need will also kill you. And this presents a a second level of difficulty of - you are handicapped, the enemy boosted to Godlike levels, and now you are also fighting every little miss, every little lazy bit of code the programmers left untouched during debug and play testing.
This puts you, as a gamer at some disadvantage, apart from the chosen handicap. And what can you do to amend this? Well nothing apart from filing bug reports and complain. It can also serve as a better way to judge the character of game and how robust it actually is.
Regardless, though, I howl like god damn banshee when a grub spawns beside me and procedures to kill me by mere touching.
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If I'm playing on Hard, instead of being swarmed by more enemies that are harder to kill, give me a better AI to play against. Instead of having it be an extended survival horrorfest, I'd rather it be an entirely different experience that is difficult, but not generally impossible. I don't want masses of pseudo-godlike things zerging me. Make them work together. Flank me. Use the environment against me. Improved stats and junk are better suited to RPGs, but come on.
There's a broad line between "hard" and "this shit is unfair" after all.
If they wanted to make it unwinnable, they should just put you before the final boss, Level 1, and he has initiative. =P I seem to remember one of the Devil May Crys having a difficulty where you died in one hit (but so did everything else). That doesn't seem too bad, since the playing field is even compared to the other modes.
And yeah, I realize that these impossible games are still winnable, but am I really going to want to keep playing after my 100th death on one section? If I wanted frustration and crying, I'd date, not play video games (which I do for fun as most of us should).
Each time a type that I get a flash of the boss battles in Last Remnant... *brr*
I'm going to go with either Halo or Doom being responsible, or whichever you pick. I mean, companies saw how well-received games with impossible difficulties were and decided to follow suit in their own games, right?
And RPGs...I'm having trouble with one on Normal of all things. If the enemy gets the first turn in battle, my chances of getting a Game Over go from 5% to 75%...I understand the desire to make a game not extremely easy, but going off the deep end in the other direction is bad too. Having scaled difficulty is fine as long as it's logical, but it doesn't sound like that's too apparent these days.
I just realized you're playing on Insane difficulty. Appropriate name, huh? When I make a game, I'm going to call the final difficulty "controller-breaking" or something like that.
But comparing with Halo 3, which truly was something completely bat shit crazy on Legendary. I mean, of you look at one of those small gibbering things, they will eat you and your mother and punch themselves in the belly just to underline the point.
With RPGs, I am like you, Normal is the very limit of my abilities - yet I love the to play RPGs. As I am currently playing Disgaea on my PSP, I begin to hate developers. They make their games to attractive and fun, when it flows, but when you hit a bump - it all goes to hell.
I have suggestion: Make a tutorial, a sort of psychological evaluation of the player before he get's to play "Controller-breaking". If he passes, you know he will be able to handle the pressure of getting killed every moment, cooping with a awful checkpoint system without killing the neighbors.