Difficulty Settings

Every game worth playing out there has varying degrees of difficulty. The way difficulty is implemented varies greatly though. Some games choose just to change the time limit for completing a task, while some will make the task harder to complete.

With the popularity of cooperative gaming increasing, many game developers are choosing to make difficulty levels so hard you almost require the coop play to finish it. But at the same time, developers don't raise the difficulty based on the number of people in a game, so playing with 4 people in a game (like Halo 3) makes the Legendary difficulty almost a joke to play through.

Not every game has cooperative play though. So developers find other ways to make this insane difficulty easier for you. In Mass Effect, you can start a new character on the Insanity setting, but it won't be easy. So, the developers made it so that once you've beaten the game on any difficulty setting, you can start over with the same character. You get to keep all their stats and equipment. After a few times through on the lower difficulty settings, playing on Insanity isn't all that hard either (provided you're using a previous character).

One game developer that refuses to make it easy for you to beat their game on the highest difficulty is Infinity Ward. Playing Call of Duty 4 on the Veteran difficulty is hard. They don't give you extra help, you don't get to play cooperatively with a friend, and you can't use experience from a previous game to help you either. They made the game AI a lot better aim, so if you step out into the open, odds are you're going to get shot. I give props to Infinity Ward for not making it easy for us to beat the hardest difficulty. By definition, it should be hard.