Last year someone finally (after 22 years!) made a patch to disable the broken adaptive scaling algorithm from Max Payne's starting difficulty setting. Playing the game with it is like playing it for the first time. Final levels are no longer an exercise in patience and savescumming. I recommend it highly. https://www.moddb.com/games/max-payne/downloads/mpadaptivedifficultyremover
@dosnostalgic I mean, I cheat a lot in games just to get through them, and as far as I recall I didn't need to in order to get through the game... I just gave the difficulty scaler enough data that I suck.
@dosnostalgic So why is it broken? Because you have basically two kinds of players:
careful, not too good players, who save and load a lot
Not-careful, possibly good players who don't save and load a lot.
From the scalers point of view, group 1 never dies, so... they must be great! Up the difficulty! And group 2 dies every now and then (because, honestly, some rooms are total BS) so, drop the difficulty.
Group 1 complains the game is too hard, group 2, too easy. Nobody's happy.
@sol_hsa It's broken because it gives you an option AND A PROMPT to reload before it counts your death towards the adjustment. That's why it's broken. Otherwise it wouldn't be an issue.
@sol_hsa So its intent is quite literally broken. Because in order to meet the condition for lowering the difficulty you have to die FIVE times within 180 seconds, and you have to watch the 10 second death animation to the end & not press any keys, despite the game prompting you, every single one of those times. What human being would do that?
For those who don't know:
Max Payne's initial difficulty has 7 different levels that affect enemy & your damage factor, hit points, pickups, etc. You start in the middle (level 4), & if you're doing good the game ups the level. If you die quickly, it drops it. BUT in order for it to determine you died the entire slow mo death animation has to play out. That never happens. So by the mid point one ends up with difficulty higher than the highest manually selectable one. That can be really annoying.
It's somewhat okay now when it takes a second to quickload, but I really could have used this patch back in the early 2000s when Max Payne took actual minutes to load on my Cyrix machine. 😭
@dosnostalgic Oh man, that must have been hell. Max Payne was the last time I ever had a top-tier PC that could handle it maxed out -- PIII 1GHz and Voodoo5500. Of course, I've never been able to afford an up-to-date computer since and play games on a decade-long delay :P
@dosnostalgic WTF!!!!
I eventually learned that this was a thing, but I just replayed Max Payne a few months ago without this patch it is almost unbearable. 😬
@dosnostalgic ah. But it only applies to the "Fugitive" difficulty. So it wouldn't have fixed the issue of enemies one-shot sniping me with shotguns across a shipyard in act 2. 😅
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