A difficulty menu presents a few words, behind which sits a set of numerical adjustments chosen by designers. Which values are altered matters far more than how far they are moved.
Most settings scale numbers, not design
The cheapest approach adjusts damage dealt and received, enemy health, and the resources a player recovers.
These are single values that can be tuned late and tested quickly, which is why they are the most common implementation.
The encounters themselves are unchanged, so the player faces the same situations with different arithmetic applied to them.
Inflated health produces the wrong kind of difficulty
Raising enemy health makes fights longer without making them harder to understand, since the required actions are identical.
Players describe this as tedious rather than challenging, because the additional time is spent repeating a solution already found.
Increasing the damage a player takes has the opposite character, raising the cost of mistakes without extending the encounter.
Behaviour changes are the more expensive option
Stronger implementations alter how opponents act: reacting faster, coordinating, using abilities they otherwise withhold, or exploiting positions they normally ignore.
This requires separate work and separate testing for each mode, which is why it appears mainly in games where combat is the central system.
The result is a mode that asks different questions rather than the same question with less margin, which is what players generally mean by good difficulty.
Hidden assistance is more common than expected
Many games quietly help players who are struggling, by adjusting the first shots taken after a death or improving item drops during a difficult stretch.
These systems are usually undisclosed, on the grounds that awareness of assistance undermines the sense of achievement it protects.
They exist because the alternative, players abandoning a game at a single point, is a far worse outcome than a slightly softened challenge.
Separating difficulty from accessibility
Options such as adjustable timing windows, remappable controls and reduced input demands serve a different purpose from combat difficulty.
Bundling them into a single scale forces players who need one to accept the other, which is why many games now separate them into distinct menus.
That separation has become standard practice, and it allows a player to keep the intended challenge in the areas they want it while removing barriers that were never part of the design's intent.