Quote Originally Posted by zlefin View Post
Yeah, I like having games with hard options and settings at least. Another problem is that for strategy games; it tends to require good ai to make an interesting hard challenge; but doing good ai is hard. So you mostly just get piles of ai bonuses to compensate for a poor ai. The number of people who want a smart ai challenge and are willing to pay for it, are just too few to support the cost.
Actually creating smart AI is supposedly easier. The problem is creating AI that doesn't completely demolish the player while still challenging them.

The problem with difficulty sliders is that for a lot of games increased difficulty=numbers bloat. Making me tediously shoot a boss 500 times while they 1 shot me might be technically more difficult, but it's not in a satisfying way. Compared to something like Sekiro that's fine tuned to be difficult but satisfying when you master it, I much prefer the latter.