NORMAL DIFICULTY?
Deleted
5 years ago
Florida, USA

I think the reason was the difference between Normal and Easy are rather negligible, overall.

Arizona, USA

ya, I feel like easy would be nearly the exact same routing as normal would be. A lot of games usually have the easiest difficulty and hardest difficulty as categories because more than often those two are going to be significantly different routing and times. Having a category between those two I just don't see it being much different than easy. There needs to be enough variety and unique aspects in a category for it to stand out as its own.

Los Angeles, CA, USA

Another thing to mention is in many games with varying difficulty consider that a category can always become a thing if for some reason there is popularity for it.

Most people won't do Normal because Any% and Madhouse both do their jobs effectively while Normal just seems like a more annoying Any%

United States

Hi, the difference between Easy and Normal is very small. Enemies with slightly more health and a few items that are in different locations. A lot of speedruns dont add the normal category simply because... well, its not the fastest lol. Normal is to much like easy for us to have a need to add it in.

United States

Sorry it took me until now to respond to this, between the holidays and having a baby I haven't been on here much the last few weeks. You're right that Madhouse is a significant change from Easy, but Easy and Normal are so very slightly different that it is just not enough to quantify all the extra categories. You mentioned other RE games with every one of the difficulties being a category, and some of them do that, you are correct. But those extra categories are not helping the games get more runners. Here's a bit of data...

RE3 has 64 categories. 14 (~22%) of those are empty. RE5 has 40 categories (not including IL's). 9 (~22%) of those are empty. RE5 has 328 categories if you do include IL's. 125 (~38%) of those are empty. RE4 has 158 categories (including the new Steam version page on SRC). 75 (~47%) of those are empty. RE7 has 98 categories as it stands today. 4 (~4%) of those categories are empty.

So, adding Normal to RE7 won't necessarily add runners to the game, it'll likely just add categories that will not get many runs and/or leave blank categories like it does in every RE game that does all the difficulties. The best part, IMO, about RE7's 98 categories is that there is such variety from category to category. It makes running different categories a lot of fun. All the RE games are about to take a hit when REmake2 comes out in a few weeks anyways. Lol.

Psarthex likes this
Mongolia

Not really a fair comparison, the reason other RE games have empty categories is for some reason every single platform has its own leaderboards. If you look at a more fair comparison, The steam version of RE4 has 4 difficulties and apart from amateur which I believe is only in the japanese version of the game yet all of them have a decent number of runs under them.

zgl likes this
United States

I'll agree/concede to that. It's not exactly a fair comparison, and it's probably one of the weaker arguments I could have made. My bad on that one. Idk why I felt like finding yet another reason, because honestly all the ones I've explained in the past make enough sense on their own. In the very few times this has been asked before, I've said the difference between Normal and Easy is too minimal to quantify adding Normal as others in this thread mentioned. I've also talked about the whole not being the fastest or the hardest run thing that was also mentioned. And I have also mentioned before that RE7 had Normal categories at one point but no one was running them at a time when this game was at it's most popular so the categories were removed, and that was before I was a mod for the game. It is simply that there is nearly no interest in having it. If we suddenly had an influx of folks asking for Normal, I would be for making the categories, but this is maybe the fourth time since Normal was removed that I've seen anyone ask about a Normal category, and it comes from the fact that Normal is the Easy run with maybe a one or two more shots on a boss or two.