What difficulty do you game on?

Easy. Normal. Hard. Insane. There’s a ton of difficulties in gaming now, and every gamer has an idea of what their ideal difficulty is. For some, the challenge is the way of life and only beating the game on ultra hardcore, no deaths, no magic, no summons is the only way to go; for others, it’s strolling through the game on easy mode, just living in the world and taking in the story.

Now let me preface this with the obvious: there’s no right or wrong answer to this question. Myself, I play a lot of games on easy or normal; I want to see the story, wander around the world, find side quests and see neat things — but I also want to feel powerful, and sometimes that just means mowing down a bunch of bad guys without much thought. That said, I am also a huge fan of the Souls genre, so it’s a balancing act for me: I play a lot of games on easy so that when a new Souls game comes out, it can be crushingly difficult and I don’t feel burned out by always being challenged.

This topic came up in regards to the upcoming Dragon Age: The Veilguard, as some reviewers were talking about the game’s difficulty (or lack thereof). Conversation within the Blizzard Watch Discord turned to discussing difficulty, and I was reminded that one of my favorite games of the last few years — Marvel’s Guardians of the Galaxy — had pretty mediocre gameplay, but a great story. Guardians, as I have said in the past, is a game that is best played on easy so you breeze through the combat to get back to the good stuff: the story.

I’ve found, over the last year or so, that my enjoyment in the challenge of gaming can sometimes just be replaced by “challenge runs,” where maybe instead of putting the game on the most insane difficulty there is, you simply make a set of rules to follow: “shields only,” “spells only,” “no stat upgrades,” those sorts of things. Some of my favorite YouTubers thrive in this environment, and while yes these are Dark Souls challenge runs for the most part, the point still stands. Yet it’s not always action games that get these challenges: even Final Fantasy 5 has the Four Job Fiesta.

So Watchers, I put it to you: what do you do when you play games? Is it the easy road? The challenge of a no hit, fist only, armor-less challenge? What gets you excited to log into your favorite games?