So I'm at an interesting point with my games development and I've been grappling with a question of how do I handle my game's difficulty? I've got all my code set up and I'm ready to go nuts with my level design however is there such a thing as making a game too difficult especially for release?
Then I realised I'm slowly building a following so it would be nice to get some feedback on this issue, do you prefer way more difficult games? Or do you like something fairly standard where there's the option to up the difficulty later. I'm not talking about doing stupid stuff like making health go to 90000hp or anything like that but creating extremely challenging levels where you can die a hell of a lot like in Dark Souls.
This is the dilemma I'm facing for launch, if I make the game too easy, it will flop and people just won't be all that interested in it. I could then release a patch which I'm set up for where I add some extra hard DLC levels for people to play through which will do the job but then the damage will have already been done and people will have been bored with the release and moved on. I actually play and enjoy games so I know how fickle gamers can be, I saw the release of No Man's Sky and what happened during that where it got something like 40,000 negative reviews and I really don't want ot have that happen to me.
So what do you think? I'm honestly searching for the feedback, because I really could now make it as extremely difficult as Dark Souls or even Contra and give my audience credit as gamers or I could soften it a bit and create a seperate load of hard difficulty levels perhaps after that people can play. I'm a bit constrained by development time you see so it is probably best to focus on one option otherwise I'll be spending months developing really hard levels and playtesting them for release even though I have the standard game finished.