Statistics released by EA show that players are much more likely to lower the difficulty on Star Wars: Jedi Survivor than increase it to hard.
Now, here’s an interesting thing. EA has just released some statistics about what difficulty level people chose when playing through Star Wars Jedi: Survivor, and comparatively few attempted the game on hard.
The stats reveal that the majority of players – 52.5 percent – opted for ‘Jedi Knight’ difficulty, which is slap bang in the middle of the game’s five difficulty modes, making it the equivalent of ‘normal’ mode. That’s as to be expected, since this is the default difficulty level.
However, nearly 30 percent of players opted for an easier difficulty mode: 15 percent went for ‘Jedi Padawan’ mode, which is one notch down from Jedi Knight, and 14.5 percent chose ‘Story Mode’, the lowest difficulty level.
Conversely, only 18 percent of players selected a harder difficulty mode: 14 percent played on ‘Jedi Master’, and just 4 percent opted for ‘Jedi Grand Master’, the hardest difficulty mode.
The statistics are fascinating because they suggest that despite the online clamour from some quarters for games to be harder and more challenging, more people actually want them to be easier. It’s less a case of ‘git gud’, and more a case of ‘git inclusive’. And it’s particularly interesting that 14.5 per cent of players opted to play on Story Mode, in which the enemies aren’t hostile and can be easily defeated.
This suggests that a large percentage of players are happy just to see the story and aren’t particularly bothered about being challenged. I can certainly see this being appealing to a younger audience or the time-poor (shout out to all the harried parents out there).
Perhaps these statistics might change over time, however, as players finish the game on Jedi Knight mode and then return to play through it again on a harder difficulty level.
Or perhaps, like me when it comes to pretty much every game, they’ll say to themselves they’ll come back and play through again on a higher difficulty, but then play something else instead and never go back to it again. I suspect I’m not the only one in that camp.
Read more: Star Wars Jedi: Survivor review