Tell us your prefered difficulty setting!

Sometimes I really wonder which difficulty others Gamers like or enjoy to play.
Some games change drastically when using different difficulty settings, wonderful examples are Silent Hill 2 & 3(not only monsters, but riddles become very hard!), Crysis(KPAs start speaking Korean) or Project Zero 1 - 3 2(aka as Fatal Frame; You need to be more careful of Ghosts and most of all, you will get new items and in some parts a different ending).
Ofc, there're many other games which have great additions when playing them on easy or hard

So, what is your preferred Difficulty? And which game do definitely recommend playing on hard?


I'll start, I picked Nightmare cause this makes some games really interesting. You need to become a scavenger and ration every item you can get. Especially situations in which you have to e.g. take down an overpowered enemy with poor weapons is great and basically give me some sort of kick.
Some games which become great on this setting are Star Ocean 2 & 3(in the 3rd part, the secret boss Freya will have 60.000.000 lifepoints and is able to wipe out your entire party with Ether Strike. But you have to get that far 1st, normal enemies are more intelligent, faster and stronger!) and of course the above mentioned games^^(except for Crysis which I don't have).
There are some other games I like to play on hard(since it's the hardest setting you can pick): Resident Evil DC/Rebirth/Zero, BioShock and some others I cannot think of atm, they all have some "surprises" when taking the dangerous route^^.

In general I always start a game on normal so I guess I'll vote for that. Once I become used to the game that's when I either raise or lower the difficulty. Oblivion I currently play on 100% difficulty. Pfft yeah I bet you have a hard time buying that based on my videos. The thing is as I mentioned in the cheat poll. I do kind of cheat in Oblivion by pre-building my characters a certain way. Making them insanely skillful in one area like Blades for example, but handicap them in other areas.

Llunette for example as you no doubt noticed in the MAO video's hits insanely hard and fast with bladed weapons. What you don't know is she has a rather low health bar for someone of her estimated level. So some NPC's can be very, very hard. I bet you didn't know how hard it was to kill those four Imperial Palace Guards in the first video. :P It took my 5 takes to get it right. They killed me the first 3 times, which taught me a lesson. Don't let them gang up on you and instead kind of kite them around and try to break them up then go for a well placed power attack. The fourth take that I never put in the video I won, but it wasn't good eye candy since I spent like two minutes running then hitting once then running again. The final take that made it into the video I wanted it to look good for the viewer obviously so I took my kiting technique, but at times took some really risky moves getting in close every so often to make it look good. I almost died in that fight, actually if I were hit one more time I would have died. That's why I showed off my condition with personality idles in that video. Kind of esoteric gesture saying, "They almost killed me AGAIN!" When your health is next to nothing with Personality Idles 4 your Idle goes into that wounded pose. :P

Also in the most recent MAO video I underestimated just how insanely hard the Gray Prince hits, and I didn't heal enough. This lead him to killing me in the first take. In the second take, which made it into the video you can see I heal like crazy. That's because I upped his attack power and on top of that put a nasty fire enchant on the sword he's using. So even when I block a hit from him it still hurt! So yes lots of healing to make sure I didn't die in my own video. :P

So yeah I guess I'll choose normal. I tend to play every new game on normal until I get used to it, and then adjust the difficulty however I feel works best.

i voted normal - i like more complicated games but i have spoilt some by playing them on easy - much of the games i play these days are against humans so difficulty does not really count much

i start games on easy, to enjoy the story line and get used to the style of game play, then i start to work my way through the difficulties if i liked the game from normal, to hard, to the hardest