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.

Comments

Assassins Creed

[johannesg]

Too easy? I beg to differ (you insensitive clod!) Sure, the assassinations and missions in the cities aren't that hard. But then... You first get a big battle (the 9th assassination) that is incredibly hard to win and cannot be avoided. After playing through it two dozen times I've finally discovered a tactic that worked.

Then you get another big battle, with about twelve templars, that is nearly impossible to win. And after that, instead of a chance to catch your breath or a checkpoint, you immediately get to fight a mega-uber-baddy! WTF were they thinking? Why is there suddenly such an incredible focus on combat, and why does the difficulty curve has to rise so sharply!?

Besides... The game cheats. Examples:

1. During the battle with the dozen templars, when you perform a countermove, mostly you get your weakest countermove - the one that doesn't do any damage. In normal battles, you get the weakest countermove far less often.

2. The computer plain refuses to let you target an enemy that is on the floor and therefore vulnerable. Very noble of it, let them all just stand up so they can kill me instead! And even if you point him in the right direction, Altair will think nothing of it to target someone meters away and exactly the other direction instead.

3. Maybe you can drop out of combat mode, switch weapons, saunter over to the guy lying on the floor, and stick your blade into him at leasure. But not while you are surrounded by enemies you cannot. You'll be long dead before that happens.

4. If you have a lock on one enemy and decide to attack, quite often it will attack _another_ enemy that is much further away.

5. Halfway through the dozen-templars battle, they all suddenly switch to their "hit your sword up, unblockable strike" move. That _really_ sucks.

6. Not having a checkpoint at the end of that battle is just criminal.

7. Even if you see it coming, there is precisely nothing you can do to defend yourself from attacks from behind. Those occur with regular frequency when you are standing in a circle. It is hard to _not_ stand in a circle when there is a dozen opponents.

I've won that battle with the templars three times, only to be killed by Robert de Sable each time on his first attack. Then I went to GCW and installed a cheat. That worked great.

And don't get me wrong, I absolutely loved this game! I loved sneaking around, doing the missions (even if they repeated), just walking around town and enjoying the views (and finding flags and templars), the climbing, the chases, the assassinations. But I did not enjoy the string of battles at the end, and it would have been a better game without them.

Oh, and a quicker way to leave the game would have been nice (come on, it takes like two minutes!)... And non-skippable cutscenes? What is this, 1995?

Well, I'd better go and download some flame-retardant underwear from GCW so I can fight off the waves of 1337 gamers that are no doubt coming my way...

the demographic has changed

[acidrain]

Personally I'm as hardcore a gamer as they come, and I'm just plain bored of spending more than 5 min on a single challenge. I don't mind if it's hard, but once I start spending 15 min at a time to get past different parts of the game because they are ramping up the difficulty, I'm so bored. I have a job, and I can easily afford to buy a new game at that point, but what I don't have is a ton of free time. The core audience got older and games have to adapt.

After the third time you fail a particular challenge, "skip" and "easy" options should be available. It is that simple. Then they can make it as hard as they want. I paid good money for the thing, why can't I play it the way I want? Sure, keep track of the stuff I skipped and add it to a menu so I can go back and finish it if I want to claim to have completed the game. Heck I don't mind if I have to go to youtube to see the final scenes if I don't feel like finishing every damn' thing.

Seriously. How is GTA too easy? The gameplay gets so repetitive before it is half way over, you wouldn't want to spend entire evenings grinding through it!?!