For context:

https://www.gog.com/forum/general/preferred_way_of_handling_difficulty_levels/post51

Do you remember some notable PC/video games (let's leave e.g. arcade coin op games and multiplayer games out of the discussion) that did not include different difficulty levels that the player can select, nor seemingly any kind of dynamic auto-difficulty either which would change the difficulty automatically based on how well or poorly you play (e.g. I recall Sega Rally and some other racing games are like this, the computer players drive better if you drive better, and slow down if you don't, which feels fake as heck).

And did that lack of free choosing of your difficulty level bother you, ie. you felt the game was too hard or too easy with the one difficulty level, even as much as you stopped playing it due to it?

(You don't have to google and list all "no difficulty levels" games you know, but some examples that you have played yourself, and whether you felt it was a good or bad thing it didn't let you choose the difficulty level yourself.)

Some notable games where I recall there not being difficulty levels:

Dungeon Keeper (also 2?).
Magic Carpet (I think both 1 and 2).
Super Mario Bros games (all of them? NES, SNES, N64...?)
Blood Omen: Legacy of Kain
Legacy of Kain: Soul Reaver
Starcraft

E.g. those from the top of my head. I've barely started Soul Reaver so I can't be fully sure whether it will too easy or difficult for me, but for the other games I can say I didn't find them "too hard" or "too easy" and I didn't wish to be able to select an easier or harder difficulty level myself.

Maybe the closest is Magic Carpet with two hard levels: the water level where there are masses of those lightning-spitting "black horses", and another level with lots of wyverns (dragons). Also with this particular game I do remember people complaining about the difficulty.

However, even those two hard levels were quite manageable and in the end ejoyable to me because:

1. The hardest part with both was right at the beginning of the level, and the longer you survived, the easier it became. So if you died and had to restart the game, it usually (always) happened in the early parts of the level, no need to replay the whole level over and over again.

2. At least with the water level, I recall those lighting-horses would not attack you unprovoked. So it was up to you when you felt you were ready to start fighting them for real.

3. If you felt you were overwhelmed by the enemy, you always had the option to flee, revise your strategy and try again. You were never really cornered, having no choice.

Settlers 2 doesn't have difficulty levels either. Many adventures don't (understandably enough, since it would require creating extra content in the form of harder puzzles, not just adjusting some variables).
You mentioned Starcraft yourself. Same with the Warcraft games.
I think it's also the case for many older rpgs. E.g. Albion, and iirc Dark Sun: Shattered lands.
So in general it seems to be more a thing with older games from the 1990s. Personally I can't think of a case where it bothered me, so I'm agnostic on the issue.

I grew up with games without difficulty levels, that was a concept that was introduces quite late and only became popular during the last 20 years.
If you are good at Turrican, you can beat the game. If not, then not (it's not a super hard game, the key is to collect as many extra lives as possible for the last stages, if you tend to die a lot then).

Story driven games don't have difficulty levels anyway (except experiments like Monkey Island 2 "I want all the puzzles", where it was possible to bypass some puzzles, but thereby missing out on the game content).


Auto difficulty ... I still have to find a game where that really works.

You can add pretty much any soulslike you can think of to that list.

Edit: I've never made much use of difficulty settings that are not the default, so I don't have strong feelings about any of this.

I honestly prefer games without difficulty levels, because if I have to choose the difficulty I always have many questions and have to waste time informing myself on the forums about what is the best choice.

Easy and hard are concepts that vary from game to game, so it isn't always intuitive to choose. Also it's never well specified what changes, and whether the higher difficulty offers more powerful items or additional enemies. Often the higher difficulty consists only of enemies with more HP, which only makes the game more tedious.

Rayman games don't have difficulty levels. The first one is obnoxiously hard (mostly due to being unable to save), the others are a tad too easy.

Psychonauts also doesn't have difficulty levels. While the first game was OK, difficulty-wise, the 2nd was overall a lot easier and hand-holdy.

In general, if a game from ~2000 on doesn't have difficulty levels, I find the "normal" to be too easy 99% of the time. If a game does have difficulty levels, I either play on the hardest or if it's too gimmicky, the one below. Warcraft 3 has difficulty levels. There is normal and hard. Also easy, but to be able to play a mission on that, you have to fail it at least once on normal first.

It's mind-boggling to me how to this day most games don't show what exactly each difficulty level changes in gameplay. I mean, how hard would it be to include some brief and to the point summary instead of cryptic options or vague gibberish like "for seasoned players looking for challenge" etc.?

At least modern games often allow changing difficulty at any moment if you don't like it.

Gothic 1 and 2 had no difficulty levels but did with Gothic 3 if I remember correctly.

Difficulty levels are often poorly implemented, poorly balanced, and make the game unfocused... especially if there's no one true difficulty level that plays "as the game was intended." So I'm fine without difficulty levels, because at worst they just ruin the experience.

I wish game developers adjusted their thinking and stopped treating difficulty as a single continuum. For example, what I want in first person shooters is better captured by the word intensity. But someone who's already beat the game may want some extra challenge or handicaps that don't necessarily translate to intensity; someone who's not so good at first person shooters may simply want aids that make the player sturdier or the enemies weaker, without changing the overall pace and intensity of the game. On the other hand, someone may prefer a slower paced, less intense experience.

I could see making an FPS with perhaps two "intensity" levels with one tailored for the gameplay I want -- the gameplay as I intended it -- and another tailored for somewhat more mainstream tastes. And then, in addition to that, some modifiers that can work as handicaps or aids for players who need help or just want to try something different. And maybe cheats too, for those who are desperate or just not really interested in playing the game the way it is intended. (I'm OK with a game not having cheats, and I'm also OK with a game making it difficult or impossible for the average gamer to 100% it.)

- Plenty of First Person Puzzlers have no distinct difficulty levels, eg, Portal 1-2, QUBE 1-2, Quern Undying Thoughts, The Talos Principle, The Witness. Same with Platform Puzzlers, eg, Lemmings, Out of Line, The Swapper, The Pedestrian, Unmechanical, etc. It makes sense to not have them due to nature of the genre, ie, if you didn't like puzzles / games that made you think, you generally wouldn't be playing the genres that centres gameplay entirely around that.

- Some Point & Click Adventures have Puzzle Difficulty Settings, eg, Thimbleweed Park's "Casual vs Hard", but it's more common for the whole genre to generally not have them.

- Some "shooter" games I can think of don't have them, eg, Giants Citizens Kabuto.

- Plenty of DOS games, eg, Dune. Elite Plus, etc, didn't have them.

Personally I like not having them as it meant games had to be a lot more well balanced than the usual cheap trick of Easy = 50%, Normal = 100%, Hard = 150%, etc, "multipliers" for damage, HP's, etc, that often just make games abnormally more grindy than challenging. Extreme example - set some of the Elder Scrolls difficulty sliders so that you do 1/6th normal damage whilst the enemy has 6x more hit points and enjoy taking 50-70 swipes to kill a sewer rat. That stuff often doesn't make games "hard", just more tedious and I think it's better to not have any difficulty system than a badly done one.

SMB1 and Super Mario Land both actually have a hard difficulty. The catch is:
* You need to beat the game first to play on the harder difficulty.
* The games have no save feature, so you have to beat the game all over again every time you turn on the game to get to the harder difficulty. (In the Famicom Disk System version of SMB1, you could alternatively glitch into the minus world and beat -3, but that involves a glitch and is only possible in that version. SML is worse here, because even though the game is shorter, it lacks warp zones.)

There's a couple other old Nintendo games that have hard modes for the second time through, but have other ways to unlock them:
* The Legend of Zelda has a second quest. Normally, you have to beat the game first, but if you enter "ZELDA" as your file's name, you can skip the first quest.
* Kirby's Dream Land has you enter a button code at the title screen; when you beat the game normally, the game then gives you this code.

Starting with Super Mario Bros.: The Lost Levels, Nintendo started putting in secret optional hard levels. They're lacking in SMBUSA and SMB3, but they show up in Super Mario World, as well as in Yoshi's Island. SM64 instead takes the approach of making it only necessary to get a little over half the stars to beat the game, so you can skip the hardest ones. Reminds me of Even the Ocean, which had a couple interesting options:
* Story Mode: Cuts out most of the actual gameplay, for those who are mainly interested in the story.
* Gauntlet Mode: Cuts out the story, leaving just the actual gameplay, for those who don't care about the story. (I saw a speedrun of this mode.)

This is a good example of why custom difficulty settings are so handy. I've seen this a lot in some recent CRPGs (Fell Seal: Arbiter's Mark, both Pathfinder games, Solasta: Crown of the Magister, and from what I hear, Baldur's Gate 3 all do this). Fell Seal, for example, has some options that affect difficulty in a predictable manner (like giving enemies higher stats), and some that affect it in an unpredictable manner (like giving enemies more random equipment or abilities). There's also an option to weight the randomness in your favor (for those annoyed at missing with a 99% chance), as well as one that affects how often enemies are allowed to use revive abilities (for those who don't like it when enemies keep reviving each other).