FF7: Recommended difficulty mod?

[Eevi]

Hi there,

I know there are a bunch of difficulty mods scattered around for FF7, I'm just wondering if anyone has any personal recommendations on which one is actually worth picking up? I just beat the game again today and well.. it was just way too easy for me now. I've played it so many times in the past that I know every little trick and materia combination. When you're able to do over half a million damage per turn and the highest HP an enemy in the game has is one million HP, there's only so much challenge you can really expect to face

I'd appreciate any insight into mods that might make a replay more of a challenge. I want all the effort I put into maxing my characters stats and materia actually seem.. necessary in order to beat the games final bosses. As it stands I was able to beat Ruby, Emerald and Sephiroth with Cloud as my sole party member and poor Yuffie and Cid taking a permanent dirt nap >_>

[Covarr]

It really depends on what kind of difficulty you're looking for. There's one that aims to make it reasonably difficult, on par with other JRPGs, and there are others ranging in difficulty from hard to brutal to masochistic.

[Tenko Kuugen]

I sure hope you're not refering to Nightmare with 'masochistic' :<

[Eevi]

I don't think I'm looking for something absolutely masochistic now. I'm not a big fan of having to grind for hours on end to be able to beat a challenge. But something that ups the difficulty level enough to make it refreshing particularly at the endgame might be nice!

[DLPB_]

None of them.  They all have something wrong with them.  Generally they have misunderstood that "difficult" should also come with "fun".  Not just dump high HP and insane stats onto enemies or make it a grind fest.

[Tenko Kuugen]

I detect someone having no first hand experience with those mods and still spouting opinion like it's fact

[dkma841]

None of them.  They all have something wrong with them.  Generally they have misunderstood that "difficult" should also come with "fun".  Not just dump high HP and insane stats onto enemies or make it a grind fest.

The most suitable difficulty mod like that would be Hay's Reasonable Mod
here: http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=4759.0

[DLPB_]

I'll be making my own soon enough   I'll at least try to make it professional, because the one's I have tried have just been very poorly constructed.  No game designer would do it the way the majority have here because game's aren't about insane difficulty, they are about competent difficulty and clever AI. If you like grind fests and typical stat boosts, then you are going to like most difficulty mods round here.  I don't.  I will look at the one you mentioned also but my own mod will be made mainly for my own tastes. 

I will say that it isn't all negative, there have been some good decisions too, like changing puzzles, making the non battle elements more difficult, and adding battles for the Summon Materia (not that I would do the latter).  But I am talking mainly about the battle difficulty... which on the whole has been disproportionate and lame.

[Vgr]

clever AI

That's what makes a game hard or easy. Not insanely high stats/HP/whatever, but good AI where the enemy is hard to defeat while not having too much HP/MP/stats.

[nfitc1]

That's what makes a game hard or easy. Not insanely high stats/HP/whatever, but good AI where the enemy is hard to defeat while not having too much HP/MP/stats.

I had a good response to this, but I lost it thanks to Google. Anyway, the point was that PrCMDI should be awesome with this.

[Tenko Kuugen]

I'll be making my own soon enough   I'll at least try to make it professional, because the one's I have tried have just been very poorly constructed.  No game designer would do it the way the majority have here because game's aren't about insane difficulty, they are about competent difficulty and clever AI. If you like grind fests and typical stat boosts, then you are going to like most difficulty mods round here.  I don't.  I will look at the one you mentioned also but my own mod will be made mainly for my own tastes. 

I will say that it isn't all negative, there have been some good decisions too, like changing puzzles, making the non battle elements more difficult, and adding battles for the Summon Materia (not that I would do the latter).  But I am talking mainly about the battle difficulty... which on the whole has been disproportionate and lame.

Maybe you shouldn't have stopped playing games in the year 2004 because what you're saying here is mostly bollocks
AI can always, always be outsmarted. There is a reason games like disgaea still sell like cake. sadly there are also reasons final fantasy 13 and above sell and they're the anti-thesis of 'clever ai'
Games that specialize in clever AI and practically abandon stats already exist and yet retain RPG-like features, they're called monster hunter. And last I checked they're only really big in japan.

[ProtoX]

well if Wutai_Chan came back to re-release his gameplay mod i would use that. however since since he stoped that project due to him claiming people not getting involved to test it the link is down and cant be found. as for any other difficulty mods i recommend playing the game as it is first before considering using a difficulty mod.

[Bosola]

That's what makes a game hard or easy. Not insanely high stats/HP/whatever, but good AI where the enemy is hard to defeat while not having too much HP/MP/stats.

I hear this a lot, and I used to believe it, but my own experiences in Rebirth have told me that omniscient enemies aren't actually all that fun to play against. Creatures that exploit status effects and low health end up punishing the weakest players, and creatures able to telepathically defend against a range of options make tactical choice obsolete. What's the point of using a particular technique or equipment combination if AI guarding makes it only marginally better than a simple Attack? In Welder, I tried to work around this by giving creatures a 'stupidity chance', but it was a fudge rather than a real solution.

A fun game must provide balance. Balance is where the game consistently provides meaningful choices - that is, where the player can always see a demonstrably better way of doing things. 'Hard AI' leaves the players with choices, but with no meaningful advantages to any of them.

[DLPB_]

That's right.  Balance is very important.  Not all enemies need to be deadly or have amazing ways to defeat them.  There has to be a balance to that and to everything.

[Eevi]

well if Wutai_Chan came back to re-release his gameplay mod i would use that. however since since he stoped that project due to him claiming people not getting involved to test it the link is down and cant be found. as for any other difficulty mods i recommend playing the game as it is first before considering using a difficulty mod.

Well the problem is I've already played the game 'as it is' to 100% completion like ten times in the past There's only so many times you can play the same thing before you want to consider amping up the difficulty to make it refreshing and new! I did say in my OP that I had played FF7 a lot in the past.

[Tenko Kuugen]

You probably need to un-learn a lot of the stuff you know from vanilla FF7 but if you can manage that, try Nightmare 7
Part of it is a difficulty mod but it changes a lot of other stuff as well. There are 2 parts, the 'full extended' Nightmare which ends when you leave Midgar and the changes for everything else end with CD1.

[-Ric-]

That's right.  Balance is very important.  Not all enemies need to be deadly or have amazing ways to defeat them.  There has to be a balance to that and to everything.

i like how you think. if you end up making a difficulty/balance mod, i'll try it out for sure

meanwhile, i'd recomend gjoerulv's mod -> http://forums.qhimm.com/index.php?topic=6818.0

its fun, surely harder then the normal version but not hard enough that you can't enjoy the game, had lots of fun with it.