The Worst Difficulty Scaling I’ve Ever Seen

The difficulty spike from normal to hard is so fucking insane.

what's hilarious about replicant is that the damn magic bubble makes magic based fights turn into nothing based fights ☠️

Why tf is nier automata's hard mode so fucking hard in the intro, where players are learning the feel of the game, and with no checkpoints making you look at the damn cutscene over and over.

The Etika clip in the beginning had me absolutely cackling. Rest his soul.

Just finished Rpelicant today and I wholeheartedly agree with you. The gameplay is not engaging at all, especially the combat which feels like you're hacking away at a health sponge with no challenge. It's very frustrating.

That is not the Eiffel Tower, its the Tokyo Tower.... but youcare half right because depending on the language setting of the game it can be Eiffel Tower. The one in the footage you are commenting on is Japan Tower.

Doesnt the game have item scaling though? I dunno, I only played nier automata, but I was under the impression that in replicant, you can also farm some gear, then use things like juggling, and powers. I like how tanky some of the enemies are in nier aautomata, because I get to juglle df out of them. And then they have the less tanky enemies mixed in so you can do the dodge attack stuff, its just so fun to combo in nier automata

I played Replicant on max difficulty and reached all ending includes E. When i start (few minutes ago) Automata i suck some in prologue, robots told me: "get gud". Wth? Oneshot difficulty???
Maybe i used to increased health of enemies...
If i cant finished prologue on hard level (not very hard), I'll just try normal difficulty 😢

Its actually kinda insane how you Automata's hard mode is piss easy cuz I did almost every side quest in the game and alot of enemies and bosses still 1 shot me lmfao. Maybe its because I prioritized attack up chips over defense chips because I like kill or be killed scenarios but even when I wasn't being one shit I was losing well over 50 per hit. I think its fair in a game like that where dodging is pretty crazy to be honest but that was a shock to me lol.

Now play Drakengard 1. It'll be... Funny

How the hell automata's difficulty is normal? I completed it on normal and wanted to rerun on harder ones and... yeah, i fucked up even with hard, where you ara killed with just two attacks from a normal enemy and one attack from the bosses. Combine it with bullet hell moments and not fully understandable collisions(yeah, i'm talking about you, Marx) and you get an almost unbeatable game. I genuinely don't know how is this "normal" scaling. I completed witcher 3 with top difficulty and no newbie to soullikes, but that wasn't Nierly enough for the damned intro of automata. I suppose after that, when you got chips to customize, it will be easier, but intro... just no, for god's sake, no.

oh so thats why everything was so long in replicant

That's Tokyo tower at the start

I am of the belief that, if you are going to increase enemy HP in higher difficulties, you should have a mechanic that allows players to deal more damage if certain difficult to execute actions are successfully executed, like parrying strong attacks or increasing damage as your combo counter increases provided you don't take any damage. Otherwise, enemies are just sponge bullets and not fun to deal with.

Yo We need another Nier Game like Automata please thanks square enix. and I liked seeing the combat in FF16 make me think of them taking it from Nier Automata

Nier Autonoma ???

I've played Automata twice. Both times on normal. BOTH TIMES I have purposefully kneecapped myself (not using most chips, not upgrading my gear) because the game was too easy.
Why not choose hard difficulty you ask? Because that would require I be able to complete the fucking tutorial without dying, which is pretty fucking difficult when:
a) you die in about 2 hits
b) YOU NEED TO RESTART THE WHOLE FUCKING LONG ASS SEQUENCE EVERY TIME YOU DIE

Seriously though, if that wasn't an issue I'd be playing on hard all the time. Throw in a couple chips and we're laughing. But I don't have the heart to restart the same ramble-y tutorial sequence several times over just so I can have a normal-ass gameplay situation afterwards. This could have been solved by placing CHECKPOINTS in that sequence damn it.

Honestly this 90% JRPGS hardest difficulty = Damage sponged. Really good video

Honestly I think more games should follow the example of KH3 and patch in the highest difficulties AFTER launch, rather than trying to do it all during normal development. OR just go down the FFXII / SoulsBourne route by only having one difficulty to begin with and leaving the truly hard stuff as optional content.

autanama?

NieR Autonama? Rly?

Automata ain't fine. The jump between Normal and Hard is fucking insane. I completed it on hard, and don't regret it per se, but man, the game could have really used another difficulty in between. That being said, compared to replicant, it is fiiiiine.

Nier automata takes place in future of nier replicant... Replicant seal the black scrawl, dark scrawl is kind of memories of the dead but compiled and take a new form, emil's form was an expiriment to save him..... But story wise both are good

Playthrough C forced me to quit Automata because I wasn't high enough level to do damage to enemies. It would easily take half an hour for a normal enemy and I was getting one shot on normal, even when the first two playthroughs felt pretty fair to me. Really not a fan of that choice

I played replicant on hard. To do these damage check you have to farm a few levels more, look for good weapons and litteraly live on steroids during boss battles (don't remember how they call the damage boosts you can consume).

Ok increasing raw DPS numbers ALSO doesn't make a game hard, it also just makes it tedious, make the patterns hard to read, but don't reset my run for reacting slow/wrong, I might as well just fight bosses with 10 health bars, both takes about the same time and are both just about as rewarding.

Autanama 😭

Automata dude autonoma wtf?

Yeah, it's a shitty difficulty curve.

If you don't use everything you have.

Play nier on veryhard mode you ll doubt reality

i am also playing nier on the normal difficulty, because from all the long ass quests i don't additionally need long ass fights, if they oneshot me, fine. But i don't need 100x health also applied to the enemy.

I like playing games on hard mode from level 1
But holy sh"t
Playing game on keyboard + mouse was nightmare
But thnak god there is mod to fix it

Real bullshit was playing game on very hard mode
It was pain

Heck even sekiro - dark souls are easier than nier

But game was too good so i sacrificed my ego & played it on normal mode

What a experience
One of the best shit i ever played

I actually have the same issue with games like the New God of War and Breath of the Wild where at a certain level enemies become irrelevant or can one-shot you because of the RPG mechanics

Playing on hard just forces you to play the fishing minigame(impossible not to fall asleep) to upgrade weapons to do damage. Absolutely shit gameplay, 60USD. Casual Square Enix. Story was decent tho.

I loved the boss fights for nier replicant, I just wish they were harder to be honest

ive been watching a 6 and a half hour drakengard-neir lore video since im doing my first playthrough on hard mode. since the only difficutly is HARD=DMG SPONGE

RIP Etika, fuck you for reminding me though.

I only played automata cause 2b haut

This is the problem I have with modern Ys games as well. The harder difficulty modes make enemies damage sponges who deal cheap hits.

Although I do agree, I'd say your not TOTALLY right. In some games, adding a little more health to enemies CAN be a good part of scaling. Taking a target that can be one shot normally and requiring a second massively changes up the flow and timing of multi-enemy fights in most games, WITHOUT dragging things out needlessly. That said, Neir didn't do that, you are right here, but discounting ALL additional enemy health as bad scaling is just not it either.

Also, the strange thing is that Drakengard 3 has better action combat than Nier Replicant and especially Nier Automata.

Nier Replicant Ver 1.22 could have handled difficulty modes somewhat better, but it wasn’t too bad.

On the other hand, Nier Automata has absolutely garbage difficulty design and some of the most broken action game design I’ve ever seen! I actually think Nier Automata has legit low tier action combat.

Levels have been something I always disliked in hack n slash. Thank god DMC5 avoided this feature, but man it either trivializes the game or wastes your time to all hell.

Thought this was gonna be about NieReincarnation's Difficulty Scaling 😂 those first few months before they got the balancing down was a Brick Wall...

skill issue

So the increasing enemy health in higher difficulties, up to certain point it does legitimately increase the difficulty, since the enemy has more time to take advantage of its programming. Tho' admittely, I don't think it applies to nier games. applies more to games with more complex ai's.

one annoying thing about the boss timer thing(apart from things you mentioned) is that the big timer that sea boss has is literally impossible to beat on ng or ng+(as far as I remember). like I think you need to be on like ng++ to be able to defeat the timer.