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Balancing Challenge Against Frustration In Games
Game-ism has an article discussing the balance game developers strive to achieve between making games challenging enough to be interesting, but not so much that they are frustrating. The author points to Assassin's Creed and GTA IV as examples of recent major titles which may have suffered from gameplay that was too easy to master. Conversely, a minor title like Bionic Commando Rearmed achieved more success than expected in part due to the sense of accomplishment that comes from completing parts of the game.
You can just make the game never ending like World of Warcraft. They keep making new dungeons, new weapons, new skills, and the PvP aspect is different everytime. Blizzard nailed it on the head with the ability to captivate the gamers and then keep them wanting better and more stuff. Blizzard will release Diablo III soon, which will hopefully have some aspects of WoW that make people go, well, "Wow!".
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As with most subjective media, people rarely manage to assess games with an even hand. They will criticise one game for something, then praise another for doing the same. This is partly right, some things work in only certain types of games, a lot of the reason for this lack of objectivity is for other reasons though.
I would take a lot of stuff written about games like Bionic Commando with a pinch of salt, because everybody is so caught up in feeling all cool and retro and indie they rarely come up with a judgement unclouded by those feelings. There are a lot of reviewers that wouldn't dare criticise such a game for fear of harming their gaming credentials or angering some fanboys.
Yes the article does hint at the idea that big games, especially open world ones, are harder to tweak difficulty wise. But I think the author falls into the trap of having seen a cool small indie game, and going - why can't massive muli-milion dollar productions with 175 team members be just like this?
Firstly you generally have a tighter demographic for small indie games, despite their sometimes casual appearances, most of the people making them know exactly what their target players are going to like and dislike. GTA4 is played by multiple demographics, tweaking it to fit all of them is a much bigger task. Yup in Braid you can simply rewind and that mechanic works great, but it is much easier to come up with something like that when you have a much smaller, tighter, controlled environment.
Adjusting the difficulty on the fly is a lovely idea, but often hard to put into practice. It can sometimes feel like punishing the player for doing well. Max Payne used to adjust the damage enemies did to you according to how well you were doing. Playing through it, I quickly got to the point where the difficulty adjustment had clearly reached the maximum level, meaning getting caught out just once and taking a few hits killed me pretty much instantly. This gave me no chance to get the difficulty back down, because every encounter I either got through unscathed or died horribly.
A good article notheless, but it's not as simple as looking at small indie games and saying, we need things to be more like this! Different types of people want different levels of difficulty, and some types of games can be harder to adjust than others. Once AI has progressed a bit further, maybe we can do more complex things in FPS and RTS games than just adjusting how much damage enemies do to you.
Game segments where you have to stay and defend against waves of enemies for half an hour, especially mixed wit an escort mission. This is what killed the end of Crysis for me.
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Frustration means not having what you want NOW. A challenge is trying to satisfy frustration. A sense of accomplishment is when frustration ends. This implies that without frustration, there is no challenge and no sense of accomplishment.
The fact is you really want frustration in a game. That's a good thing. Otherwise it is not a game but a pastime. What you don't want is having too much frustration.
I'm just on my twelth attempt this afternoon to get past the Kikimore Queen in The Witcher. OK, she's a 'level boss...', an end of chapter monster (and yes, I do know about collapsing the cieling on her - I just haven't yet timed it right).
But there is a critical difference between 'game design' and 'story telling'. In a game, it's OK to set a challenge that the player may repeatedly fail to get past. But in story telling, if you break immersion you have failed. And every time the player dies - or even has to explicitly save - you are revealing the artifice, breaking the immersion, failing.
In a good game, the player may try again, repeatedly. In a good story, he must never die. When designing an RPG, you have to make up your mind whether you're designing a game or telling a story, because the needs of the two objectives are very divergent.
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If you make it a performance based type of thing like Dance Dance Revolution or a racing game, the person loses and knows if they reacted faster and stuff, they would have done better. They usually don't blame the game for that and get all mad. But if you're playing Splinter Cell and the enemies keep seeing you cuz there's literally no way to not be in the shadows to get past a certain point, that's seem as a game design problem. The most common problem like that is not being able to find a person or item in an RPG. You walk around town for 15 minutes and the person is nowhere in sight. Now that pisses people off cuz they have no control over it.
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The elements that make a game frustrating are often quite different from those that make a game challenging. There are a few very simple design tweaks that can be made to promote the latter at the expense of the former:
1) Make difficulty tweakable and make it a genuine skill range. Gamers these days have wildly diverging skill levels. What's challenging for one gamer is completely impossible for another. Ninja Gaiden is an illustration of how this can go wrong. For me, it was very, very hard. I know a few people however who took it back to the shop because they couldn't get past the first level. By all means, lock achievement points or other inessential goodies away on the harder difficulties. The original Baldur's Gate had the most broken difficulty system ever. Not only did reducing the difficulty level reduce the xp you earned, but if you had to load your game to retry a fight multiple times, the game would spawn even more enemies to make things harder.
2) Do everything you can to avoid making the player replay lengthy sequences. For the most part, this means allowing full quick-saves. I will, grudgingly, admit that there are a few types of game where quick-saves don't fit well. In these cases, regular check-points are the way to go. Even generally very easy games can become frustrating if a single silly mistake means you have to replay 10-15 minutes (or more) of stuff you've done already - perhaps several times. Rockstar games are good illustrations of how not to do this - too often, a mistake that occurs due to the somewhat craperific controls means you need to replay an entire 20 minute mission. Even Bully, which is their easiest outing by far, is prone to this. If anybody on your design team suggests that restricting the player's ability to save the game would make your title "unique" or "challenging", sack them. Note that I'm only suggesting sacking them because killing them is probably illegal.
3) Give the player at least something of a clue as to what he's supposed to do next. There's nothing worse in an fps than patrolling the same few sections of corridor for an hour because you can't see where you're supposed to go next. The AvP games were awful for this - the Alien campaigns were completely ruined by the amount of time you spent searching for some air-vent or grate you're supposed to go through. If I'm playing a 9 foot tall armour plated acid blooded killing machine, I want the option of tearing down locked doors - not hunting for a slightly differently textured great that I can mysteriously break, unlike the 99 near-identical others I passed.
4) If your game is based around "equal" struggle between two or more participants (eg. in RTSes or 1 on 1 brawlers), then make sure that AI opponents are bound by the same rules as players. One thing I absolutely hate are RTSes where I can completely cut off an AI player's resource flow and yet he can still pump out tanks faster than I can.
5) Cutscenes are great, but they should always be skippable. 'nuff said.
I think you're all confusing emotions with containers. Emotions don't have fixed boundaries. As such from varying perspectives frustration is or isn't a part of a challenge. However I think it can be agreed that the definition of a challenge is something that is hard to accomplish and requires personal effort. It can also be accepted that things are frustrating when they are too hard. Essentially they're both areas on an emotional continuum with overlap (with frustrating events being covering those which are challenging and those which are impossible).
The developers want to toe the line before frustration. ie: balance. Tight-rope walkers don't walk on just one half of the rope. In the same vein developers that stay purely below 'frustration' aren't achieving the level of challenge that they could.
I liked how difficulty was presented in the Prince of Persia series (the recent relatively recent games starting with Sands of Time, not the 80s old school). If you die or mess up, you can rewind time back to before you died, giving you another chance. This could only be done a fixed amount of times in the same situation, but was infinitly better than the restart the level method used in other games.
The problem is not so much balancing the difficulty itself but removing sources of frustration such as trial and error gameplay, tedious gameplay parts, control issues, etc. If your game is good enough to keep the player engaged you can have a lot of difficulty, if the game's a fairly monotonous slugfest even moderate difficulty can become frustrating. Especially the death setback is important: What do you have to redo? A long but easy autoscroller before you get to the hard part? Maybe you lose experience that must be regained by repeatedly killing some weak monsters? Maybe it's a difficult platforming section with swarming enemies that knock you off the platforms? A long and insanely hard autoscroller before you reach the even harder boss (welcome to the machine)? What's important is that the parts you redo are not boring, that you don't have to redo them too often, that you have a reasonable chance of progressing through an area without wasting several tries on it just to see where all the invisible spikes come out of the walls and that you can see what went wrong (it doesn't help when you keep dying and don't understand why).
The actual difficulty is less important than the game around it. Of course it can be too easy or too hard but often it's just too sucky instead.
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Exactly, the frustrating part is almost never the challenge itself, but the non-challenging parts that you have to repeat over and over again to reach the challenge. If one would either allow a everywhere-save or have non-braindead reset points most of the problem with challenge would automatically go away, since the challenge never was the problem to begin with. I don't mind cutscenes itself, sometimes they fit sometimes they don't, but non interruptible ones are really one of the worst things one can have before a boss fight.