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Now, there's a quote from a podcast I listen to, 3 Moves Ahead. It's a podcast that focuses on strategy games and the hosts of the show had a conversation about what defines a strategy game. The shortest version of the answer that they could arrive at was, paraphrasing here: "A sequence of interesting choices."
Their point being, the intrinsic part of what engages the player is the act of considering options, selecting one, then dealing with the results. To have a choice be interesting, there needs to be balance. If one is obviously more powerful than the second, that's not an interesting choice. That's deciding whether to apply a handicap to yourself for no good reason.
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You mean like having more health is ALWAYS better than having less health? So choosing "Hard" difficulty is already applying "a handicap to yourself for no good reason". This is what pisses me off so much. They always claim that not using a stronger option is "artifically handicapping" them and yet THEY ALREADY DO THAT!!!
So why is "artifically handicapping yourself for no good reason" by choosing "Hard" difficulty considered to be different from " artifically handicapping yourself" by not or rarely using "stronger than others" options????
They are ruining the fun for OTHER players because they are TOO STUPID to get that!
And apart from Chess there is NO game where this handicapping the player is NOT done.
Also even IF an option is clearly better people are still capable of CHOOSING THE OPTION THAT MAKES THE GAME FUN FOR THEM PERSONALLY, e.g.: Playing a sorcerer makes "Dark Souls" much, much easier than playing a melee fighter. And yet thousands of players are playing melee fighters. Are they "artifically handicapping themselves" or are they "playing the game how it is fun for them"??? It is clearly the latter.
