Difficulty Settings

[RuBisCO]

I often heard now on this forum users arguing over increase realism/difficulty in KSP, the argument being that too much will dissuade new users, too little will be boring for old users. I think this is a false argument: why not simply have difficulty settings? Then everyone could get what they want out of the game. This is basically what people are doing already with mods: tuning the game to the difficulty they want, but then why should squad make life-support, different fuel types, etc, and not instead simply direct players to use the mods?

[m4v]

well, KSP have those buried in the settings.cfg, but is only for toggle crew perma-kill and allow stock craft in career. So later may be more.

[coolitic]

Put a poll. (can we on these forums?)

I would vote no.

[RuBisCO]

Why would you vote no?... see if I put a poll people would be inclined to provide no reasoning.

[Sirrobert]

And how the HELL do you imagine difficulty to work in KSP?

There are no enemys, so you can't boost them.

The only way you can make things more difficult is by changing the very rules of the KSP universe. And that's EXACTLY what mods are for

[RuBisCO]

Well there talk of Squad implimenting Life support requirements for example, and I've seen some comment that "that would make it to difficult for newbies", I was just coming up with a solution.

[Guest]

I think difficulty settings will show up in the game at a later date. Right now they're hidden features that just need an actual GUI element to toggle them, things like:

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• Allow crew respawn (will be a factor when/if crew cost something to recruit)
  
• Allow revert (adds some engineering challenge at the least)
  
• Allow quicksave/load (not so much difficult as forcing you to commit, which might be difficult for some people)
  
  Reentry heat will hopefully be a feature in later version, this would be a good candidate for the much-loved "slider" concept. IMO life support doesn't need that sort of treatment, maybe just a toggle on/off per save. When the rest of the economics are put into the game we could see difficulties based on how much of anything you start with/the rate at which you acrue it (although that would be better named "grind level" to be sure).
  On a side note, when/if the aerdynamic model gets overhauled, that is something I believe should be enabled for everyone all the time since the current one is unbelievably crappy. A better aero model will be more intuitive for new players because it will encourage familiar, realistic rocket and airplane design.