So! Fun thing we learned about Max Payne 1 today: the default āFugitiveā difficulty is actually seven difficulties in one. It works a lot like Resident Evil 4: you die a lot, you get dropped to 1. If you survive for a long time, it can ratchet all the way up to 7, the equivalent of playing the game on Dead On Arrival.
But! The difficulty setting only registers deaths when you let the whole āMax Payne crumples to the ground and diesā animation play out. We never saw a reason to do that, though: itās a game built around quick saves and quick loads, after all! Any time we died, weād mash F9 and get back into it.
Which means, for all these yearsā¦weāve been playing this game on the hardest fucking difficulty available. And we just thought the game was JUST THAT TOUGH. The good news is weāre now aware that weāre very good at this classic third person shooter. But we canāt help gnashing our teeth at all the times weāve died, unaware that we were accidentally telling the game to ratchet the difficulty as far as it could go.
Anyway, Remedy is very lucky that we love them as much as we do, and that this wonāt dampen our enthusiasm for Alan Wake 2.
If anyoneās curious, hereās more information about the in-game timer that decides what difficulty youāre on at any given moment.
