Playing Horizon Zero Dawn On Story Mode
Am I a monster for playing on the “easy” setting?
I have a confession to make…I’m playing Horizon: Zero Dawn on story mode. But why do I feel so guilty saying that? I feel as though subscribing to an easy difficulty setting is going to be accompanied by the notion that those who select them are either bad at games, or playing them wrong. In gaming there’s always been a pervading lexicon that brazenly singles out easy difficulty modes as the weak, feminine or inferior version of the experience, be it Wolfenstein 3D’s ‘Can I Play Daddy? Or Wanted: Weapons of Fate’s ‘Pussy’ easy mode. But why all the animosity?
I think at a glance the logic goes like this. The harder a game is, the more time is takes to git gud at it. The more time you sink in makes you more experienced, and the more experienced you are with a game, the more you understand it. That’s fairly simple, but how does playing a game on easy effect that logic?
The whole point of an easy setting is that it takes less time for the player to beat the game (or at the very least streamlines the experience), therefore your understanding is significantly truncated to make way for a more accessible playthrough. And maybe that doesn’t matter all that much in the eyes of gamers. Maybe most gamers are like that really supportive friend you have who says it doesn’t matter what everyone else thinks, it’s about what works for you.
Sadly, I don’t think gamers see it that way for the most part. Look at a game like Dark Souls, which has one very hard, very demoralising difficulty. When gamers swap anecdotes about their heroic victories or frustrating failures, they do so all within the context of the same experience. If I was to talk about fighting giant mechanical crocodiles in Horizon: Zero Dawn with a player using the ultra hard difficulty, versus myself on story mode, we’d have a wildly different story to tell.
Their story would involve a frantic mix of dodges, precise aiming and general mastery of the game’s mechanics. My story, on the other hand, would involve half a dozen arrows that I shot while standing completely still, on-route to my next quest marker. On the hardest setting you’re the hunted, while in story mode, you’re the hunter. It’s a fair argument to make that my playthrough is ultimately a reductive deconstruction of what more-skilful players experience. We’re playing the same game, but with different gameplay.
The deactivated challenge of combat has a more negative impact on the game’s progression system than it does on gameplay, though. Because the damage you deal and absorb becomes seemingly irrelevant in story mode, the desire to upgrade your weapons and armour instantly evaporates. Acquiring new gear often requires you to trade elements of the mechanical beasts you encounter in the wild, which is supposed to motivate you to hunt certain enemies for their respective loot. Because you don’t require new weapons or armour in story mode, you have no need to go hunting for trade-able parts, meaning a significant proportion of exploration becomes meaningless.
More to the point, as you come to face larger and more hostile enemies as the game progresses, you never feel scared or hesitant to engage in combat. In a world where machines control the landscape, you somehow have all the power. This drastically changes the tone of the world, from untamed and dangerous to relaxing and anodyne. Difficulty is ultimately the mechanism which activates Horizon’s brilliant open world.
To close, I think difficulty is in the eye of the beholder. Developers provide these challenge modifiers to make their games more accessible and to cater for a greater variety of play styles. As a university student who doesn’t have the time to gallivant around a fictional world for 25 hours, a mode that focuses squarely on the story provides the Horizon: Zero Dawn experience I want to play. Even if that means my time with the game means less than someone else’s.
This article was written by Super Jump contributor, Don Sheil. Please check out his work and follow him on Medium.
