Game difficulty modes should come in Easy, Medium, and 144 frames per second.
Vanquish, an excellent 2010 shooter for Xbox 360 and PlayStation 3 from Platinum Games, finally launched on PC yesterday, and it picked up a glitch in the transition. Publisher Sega and Platinum worked to update the game for PC, which included adding support for 4K and unlocking the framerate. But if you set the game to run faster than 30 frames per second, you are also making it more difficult. That’s because enemies do more damage per attack at a higher framerate, as first discovered by a member of the NeoGAF message boards.
Take a look at the game set to 30Hz:
And here it is running at 144Hz:
Notice how at 30 FPS Sam, the chainsmoking hero in Vanquish, is able to take multiple hits and staggers several times before entering into the flashing slow-motion near-death state. At 144Hz, however, it takes only one hit sends Sam into that bullet-time mode.
And I’ve felt like the game was punishing me at normal difficulties for taking chances and trying to use all of Sam’s mobility options. That’s not something I remember feeling about the game originally, and I think this is the reason. I’m playing at 60 frames per second, and I tested that as well. You can see in the video above that enemies seem to do a lot more damage at that refresh rate as well.
For those of you looking for an extra challenge, this is potentially a cool new feature. But let’s hope Sega fixes this for the rest of us.
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