Challenge In Games Is Not A Dirty Word

Thanks to GamerDad for their editorial discussing why there should be more difficult-to-complete games out there. The piece takes difficulty complaints regarding F-Zero GX for GameCube as a starting point, saying "This isn't the first time a top quality, high profile game has kicked people in the butts with challenge and it won't be the last. This kind of challenge is good for gaming and we need more games like it." The article goes on: "Players have grown accustomed to difficulty levels that are far too easy and I think it's contributing to their boredom with many games", but also cites specifics: "The most important thing about challenge, and it's one that F-Zero GX gets right, is that the game must let the player know it was their fault that they lost."

Comments

Adjustable difficulty levels

[neglige]

Players have grown accustomed to difficulty levels that are far too easy and I think it's contributing to their boredom with many games

The real topic is that games should have various difficulty settings: one for beginners, one for intermediates and one for experts. And the settings should be really different. That way, anyone can pick their favourite level of challenge. And after having played through a game on an easy level, chances are that the player will re-play the game with harder settings.

Good examples include System Shock (puzzles? shooter? your choice!), DN3D (come get some!), Quake or Civ 3. Or Grand Prix 3/4, where you could enable several stages of realism.

Also a good choice if your game has levels: first levels are easy, then become more difficult. Baldurs Gate (2) did it like that, although some parts were (for me) extremely difficult. No problem if there is a cheat. And after failing 10 times at the exact same position, I'm inclined to cheat.

Re:Adjustable difficulty levels

[whee]

And F-Zero has just that. From the GameSpy review:

But is the game too difficult for most? That's pretty debatable. I personally found the difficulty curve pretty harsh -- particularly on the harder difficulty settings -- but F-Zero has always been about the overall challenge.

I don't understand this reviewer at all. When the difficulty is set higher, the game actually gets harder! What a concept! This amazing technology should be implemented in as many games as possible.

I think gamers are just getting used to games that are nothing more than busy work and no challenge. Obviously, a few hours of NetHack could solve a lot of problems.

On a Slight Tangent

[NJVil]

When will programmers stop equating difficulty with the computer "cheating" to make it better?

As one example, even on the easiest level of CivIII, the computer players somehow, magically, know more about the map and areas they cannot possibly have seen (even by trading maps with each other). Only by clamping down on the computer players' ability to produce units/buildings does it rein in its knowledge. At the higher levels, not only does it know more about the map than a human player ever could, it outproduces you dramatically.

Would it really have been that difficult to come up with an AI that did not cheat by violating the fog of war? I could understand it if at the highest levels this happened, but when it's pretty obvious on the easiest level, it shows a lack of interest in working on making the AI truly challenging, but rather taking a one-size-fits-all approach and altering the difficulty by manipulating non-AI facets of the game.

Re:On a Slight Tangent

[hibiki_r]

IMNSHO, the main problem is that on many games the enemy AI is coded way too close to the end of developement. If the internal data structures in a strategy game are not designed with the AI in mind, developing a challenging and fair AI is a daunting task. Thus, many strategy game developers end up having to create the enemy AI by reusing code. Yes, the same sub-par code that they created 2 or three years ago for the previous version of the game, or maybe just another game that used similar mechanics.After a week or two making sure that the computer uses some of the latest game features that the previous version didn't have, the AI is done.

Of course, some game makers like Lionhead are making AI in strategy games more of an issue, but many developers are still cutting corners in the enemy AI due to the publisher's pressure.

If you buy a PC strategy game this fall, and you get the feeling the enemy AI is pretty similar to the one of the previous version, who knows? you might be facing the exact same enemy you played 4 years ago.

Re:On a Slight Tangent

[Goldberg's Pants]

Starcraft is the same. The AI knows from the start the entire map layout AND where you are. Easily demonstrated by cheating to remove fog of war, and watching the AI IMMEDIATELY head in your direction.

Cheating AI is something I REALLY hate. It's just a kludge developers use to make the AI seem smarter than it is. Without the cheating, most game AI would be dumb as a brick.

Re:On a Slight Tangent

[FreekyGeek]

Would it really have been that difficult to come up with an AI that did not cheat by violating the fog of war?

Yes.

People who complain about the difficulty of video games (either too tough or too easy) are almost always unaware of 1) how tough it is to have variable "difficulty" settings in a game, and 2) the real-world restrictions that preclude what might seem like "common-sense" solutions to these problems - restrictions that game developers have to face.

First, what does "difficulty" mean? It's a completely variable term, since everyone has different skill levels, so what seems easy to some seems difficult to thers. There's no objective measure of "difficulty". There's no such thing as a "difficulty meter". In some games, difficulty is easy to adjust - in shooters, you give the player more hitpoints, stronger weapons, or powerups. Or you give the enemies less armor, or whatever. But what about an RPG? A strategy game? Should game designers have to come up with three or more seperate puzzles for each place in the story that calls for a puzzle? How does one gague how easy or difficult a puzzle is? Some people can solve word scrambles in a second, while others can hardly do them at all. Some people think very visually and have good spatial relations while others don't.

Second, there are a huge number of restrictions game developers work under - time and money, mostly. Every developer in the world would love to have the luxury of releasing games "when they're done". But unless you're Id, forget it. Sure, if you had a team of ten programmers with three years to do nothing but write AI code, you could come up with some very sophisticated AI for games, but that's hardly realistic. So games only have to have AI that's good enough to challenge most players most of the time. And often that means "cheating" by the AI. Ever tried to write AI? How would you design a game AI that could provide a good challenege to all players, with a variable difficulty level, without cheating, without spending ten years doing it, without requiring a supercomputer to do so?

Strategy AI is hard to write. If it was easy, the military would just write the Best AI Ever and let it run all the wars. Stategy, even basic strategy, is an incerdibly complex subject with a billion variables. Don't believe me? take a look at Chess, a game with extremely simple rules. It has taken decades of time and many supercomputers to write software to beat a human at chess, and even then it is only through brute force, by analyzing every possible move and permutation. Ever wonder why the game of Go doesn't have too many good computer versions? because writing AI for it is so damn hard. he rules are evn simpler than Chess, yet Go makes chess look like tic-tac-toe in terms of strategic complexity.

Second, there are very serious hardware limitations. Even on fast computers, AI chews up a LOT of CPU time. Programmers have to share the CPU time between all kinds of tasks, and the AI can't chew up 90% of the cycles. There's no point having a near-sentient AI if you the rest of the game runs like molasses. And as much as us high-end, hardcore gamers hate to admit it, a HUGE portion of the gamer audience still uses pretty old PCs. And they buy games, too - a lot of them.

As is so often the case, this issue is far more complex than it appears. Game design does not happen by itself, and every hour spent tweaking difficulty levels is one less hour spent making the game better in other ways. Every cycle the AI uses makes the game that much slower and that much less accessible to people on low-end machines. Every minute of programmer time spent on any of these things costs money and adds to the schedule.

In a perfect world, we'd have unlimited game developement budgets and cycles. Until then, compromises have to be made.

One of the reasons reviewers get up in arms

[Kenshiro70]

Quite a few reviewers play games at lower difficulty levels so that they can get a quick sense of the content without having to play a particular level five times just to see the next level. I wonder if that does figure into some of the complaints.

It's the mentality of kids now

[cdneng2]

Ever talk to a kid about how fast they finish a videogame?

Well, if you do, they'll tell you that they play until they get stuck. Then they go the FAQ, or the convenient gaming guide, that comes out at the same time as the game release, and then they continue playing until they finish the game. Kids nowadays almost play the game like a marathon. Kids nowadays don't spend the time to think about that obstacle in the game, and how to overcome it, they take the easy solution, and use the game guide to get through the problem. They'll put the game difficulty to the easiest setting to finish it right away.

Take a look at 'Stuntman', the sequel to 'Driver'. That game was damn difficult, which critics argued was the reason why it did so bad.

Sure I can see making a game difficult, but the attention span of kids nowadays are far too short to make the game popular if that was the case.

Difficult games... good or bad?

[Metroid72]

From reading the very few opinions posted, I've noticed the following:
If you're a casual gamer, you seem to like the *easy* games.
If you're hardcore (and old school), well you like *real* hard games.
Honestly, I'd consider myself an old-school casual gamer, I spent a great deal of time with Fzero yesterday, and one side of me felt good (the old school/hardcore gamer), but the other side felt frustrated (the casual gamer, member of the workforce that has a life).
I personally know that if I spend time with the game I'll master it. I remember my conquering of the original F-zero (familiarize with Novice-Challenge with Standard-Master with expert) - and who didn't feel like a god when conquering King-expert winning all races for the first time. (But two months had gone bye and the day was divided between Mario, Gradius III and F-zero).
This time around is different, you have dates, you have to work, you read (to keep up with technology), if you live alone, you have house-stuff to do.
I believe that a game like this is for the dedicated gamer. I beat a lot of difficult games when I was a dedicated gamer, but Unless I take as a personal challenge, conquering F-zero will be a long, long process...

Happy gaming!!!
BTW, Is it only me or the story-mode level race in the casino (after Beating Samurai Goroh) is REALLY difficult?? - I've been stuck for hours in that sucker.

Disagree

[Kyouryuu]

I've been a gamer since the days of the NES. From my own experience, I would be willing to say that the majority of games I enjoyed were consequently easy games. Why is that? I think it's because I find that video games, as a source of entertainment, are not fun when you're trying to get through the same damned level or boss ten times. RPGs, in particular, are getting so obscure these days that you'd swear they were written around the gamer buying the complementary strategy guide.

Make no mistake, I like games I can sit down and play for twenty minutes and leave without caring much about progress. The idea of fighting a boss that takes 45 minutes to defeat, then dying, just isn't too appealing. I'm not a stathead or a completist in this regard - the kind of person that has to find and battle every last secret character.

There is, as mentioned elsewhere, a fine line between difficulty and frustration. To me, a good challenge is described as one where when the player dies, (s)he can see how it happened and see some route to prevent it from happening the next time. This is as opposed to one challenge after another, to the point where when you die, you blame the game designers for their lousy creation instead of your own skills.