 So when as the developer would you decide to not have an easy mode? I wasn't originally going to talk about this today but this point and question was brought up by multiple people last vid and I think it's a genuine good honest question that the average gamer probably legitimately wonders sometimes about their favorite game and if you're an armored core player over the years you probably have felt this answer the entire time but you probably just didn't know how to put it into words so that's what I'm going to help you with today. Now there are two main reasons why as a dev you would decide to not have an easy mode and first really just comes down to a simple matter of resources and time especially if you are paying your playtesters which you should cold one mentioned adding an easy mode is not that hard you just tweak some values to allow players to make more mistakes and he's actually correct from a programming standpoint you do just change some numbers and call that an easy mode however while this is true it's not entirely that simple at least if you want to do your game difficulty properly and there are lots of games that do exactly that they change some numbers and just say okay easy mode is just hard mode but all the enemy attacks just do half the damage or they'll do the reverse and say okay hard mode is just easy mode except now all the enemies have five times as much health then they save ship the game and call it a day but I personally think that most of the time these are very lazy ways to do an easy or a hard mode and most of the time for the player it just feels very artificial and not really fun because when you're a dev and you use this method to create your hard mode you're not actually making the game harder you're just making the game longer if the only difference between easy mode and hard mode enemies is they have five times as much health and do twice as much damage you as the player don't need to make any adjustments to your gameplay you just apply your normal gameplay five times in a row instead of once and you just try and reduce the number of mistakes you make by half when the enemy does twice as much damage the enemy is not more difficult it just means now instead of being able to fuck up four times you can only fuck up two so there is a difference between making something hard and making something long and punishing and one thing armored core has never done is artificially try and extend difficulty by just turning bad guys into damage sponges if you know how to play the game correctly you can beat pretty much any boss in less than 60 seconds with the right build it would be dumb if the devs for armored core just decided that easy mode for the game just means that a good player will be able to beat the boss in 30 seconds instead of 60 seconds and i think most developers worth their salt would agree that in a good game the difference between easy and hard mode is not duration it's actual challenge in a good game your easy mode strategy should not work in hard mode the difference between easy and hard mode should be one where it forces you as the player to come up with a different approach in order to win if you are winning in hard mode with your easy mode strategy that's not harder it's just longer i think super smash bros does an excellent job at this if you're fighting on easy mode against a level one computer you can pretty mindlessly just mash buttons to win but if you're a noob on the first day of the game fighting a level nine computer and you're just trying to mash a button it's going to be significantly more difficult for you to win until you start to understand the fundamentals of how the game works because the key takeaway here is level one and level nine computers have the exact same stats they do the same damage they have the same range the same speed the same power the same health everything is the same the only difference between easy and hard is how the computer behaves that is real difficulty if your solution to defeating a level one computer is forward smash three times in a row i don't think the answer to a hard mode computer should be well now you just have to forward smash six times in a row instead no the difference should be you have to play better better spacing maybe using grabs know your combos know the enemy's combos i think you get the point ideally what you want as a dev if you're going to have an easy mode and a hard mode at all is you want your easy mode to be easy because it requires the player to think less and relax and you want the hard mode to be hard because it requires the player to think more and not necessarily require the player to spend more time to achieve the same results ideally both hard and easy mode should still be fun easy mode should not be easy and boring the same way hard mode should not be difficult and soul crushing they both still need to be fun enjoyable and rewarding and in order to make two separate modes that are properly different difficulties and still fun requires a lot and a lot of player testing every time you change the variables like making the enemy's health five times bigger you as the dev can't just change one to five save and release the game now you change the number you upload the new version you tell all your play testers to give you feedback you wait a few days they'll give you a lot of feedback sometimes you get completely contradicting results people will disagree some people will love the change some people hate the change you'll try a new number like three instead of five then you'll upload it again wait for more feedback and it's a very long and exhausting process every time you change one of these numbers because if you just change them and people aren't having fun anymore then you've officially lost the sauce and you should seriously consider redesigning your entire difficulty system now i'll share a personal anecdote that i experienced firsthand with this problem when i was developing my first game on steam where i tried to mix the black and white polarity absorption features from ikoruga with the rail mode gameplay of star fox 64 which was one of my favorite games and i wanted to make something similar to it but a little more difficult for hardcore players and originally in the game i had multiple different aircraft the player could choose from each of them had a different balance of speed power maneuverability and durability and one of the first big problems that i encountered during this project was deciding proper difficulty for bosses and what made creating difficulty tricky for me was i had no idea what aircraft the player would be using when fighting the boss and i noticed that the more specifically i tuned the boss for a particular type of aircraft the more fun the player of that aircraft was going to have so if the player was using the lightweight aircraft i knew exactly how fast and how strong the player would be so i could design the boss attacks so they would just barely miss assuming the player was timing their moves correctly however when i tuned the bosses in this way it made things miserable for anyone using the heavy aircraft because the timing of the boss's attacks was tuned for lightweights many of the boss attacks just became undodgeable for the heavier aircraft and this same thing happened in reverse if i made the boss for heavies the boss would insta kill a lightweight player in the first five seconds and it was no longer fun for them because it was too punishing and when that didn't work i tried to instead design all the bosses around the middleweight aircraft but all that did was ensure that the boss was no longer challenging for players who were extremely fast because they could dodge everything and it wasn't fun for the heavies anymore because they could tank everything and do massive damage so i encountered all of these problems before i even got to things like easy and hard mode add all of the problems that i just listed now multiply trying to solve boss difficulty for 12 different aircraft and stack easy and hard mode separations on top of that now you can start to see just how fast the workload for a basic boss and filtering player feedback correctly can get in a project in the end i spent a lot of time trying to balance these gameplay elements and it started to negatively affect other parts of the project outside of the gameplay i had exhausted so much time trying to solve this problem that i didn't have any resources or time left to properly flush out and complete the story elements of the game and when i finally really started to run out of time i made the executive decision to trash and drop 90 of all the story elements that were unfinished and cut 100 of all the aircraft customization elements out of the game there was simply no more time to filter through player feedback with different difficulty settings with different aircraft so in the end i just gave the player a single aircraft that was a balance between speed and power and i consolidated on a single difficulty setting which is primarily aimed at a more hardcore audience it really just came down to a lack of time and resources now these are just the problems that i encountered as an indie dev working trying to balance when players had 12 options available now think about how much worse this same problem becomes in a game like armored core six with hundreds of different rifles pistols bazookas machine guns missiles lasers heavy lightweight quad tank shield and assault builds if you were designing bosses for armored core would you assume the player is using a rifle or would you assume they're using a bazooka what if a player decides to use four bazookas how does that change your boss design what if they have four bazookas and they're really fast or what if they have four bazookas and they're really heavy or what if they have two bazookas and two machine guns or maybe they decide to be a savage and not bring any weapons at all and just punch everything to death you can see how this is already a near impossible task to try and solve as a developer and the fact the game as it stands right now has left so many players with extremely fulfilling and enjoyable experiences is truly a miracle to behold because it's not easy to make a fulfilling boss experience across the board for most players who are running completely random and wildly different weapons and frame builds and so adding an easy mode to the equation when the base equation is already a mess is just a recipe for disaster you have to remember armored core is more like from software's passion project it doesn't have the same budget and resources that the souls series have there's a reason why there hasn't been an armored core game in nearly 10 years and that's mainly because it's hard for the company to legitimize spending that much money on a project that ultimately they know most people are not going to play armored core might be a great game but it's not popular and it probably never will be and despite being a triple a company i imagine they don't have infinite resources to just throw at it to make a proper easy mode that is both up to their standards and fun for their target audience to enjoy and when your game is built on a single audience and a single difficulty it's much easier for you to use your time and resources to target that difficulty correctly and a byproduct of that is a shared experience across your entire community every time you meet a fellow raven you know they had to overcome the helicopter when you see someone wearing the shade eye head you know they had to defeat nightfall in order to get it when you see someone with the coral oscillator you know they scoured the entire game to find all the logs there's a shared experience and a weight and a meaning to beating a boss that everyone subconsciously understands when you see players who have gone through the same exact experience you did and that's a very difficult type of community to build and foster unless everyone is playing on the same page and ultimately the ac community is what keeps armored core alive and i think from software really understands this so those are the two main reasons you wouldn't have an easy option in your game it really just comes down to resources and a shared experience so i hope you guys had fun thanks for watching and as always hope you have a fantastic day and i'll see you around