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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.
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Ninja Gaiden. If it were mentioned in the Bible, the passage would be, "And then God said, '**** THIS GAME,' and promptly threw his controller across the room."
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...
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.
You know what else never ends? A hamster wheel. The inability to win, beat the game, or just finish is the reason MMOs never interested me.
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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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Games where you have to string a dozen random actions together half of which are timed actions (oh and the controller has eight miles of slop) that need sub pixel accuracy just to get to the next part.
Folks when you design a game do me 3 things
1 put some logic into the puzzle (how does actions a-j fit together)
2 make more than one solution (example have a switch that reveals a ladder to bypass a climbing puzzle)
3 make it worth it to do the hard way BUT NOT REQUIRED
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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.
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!?!
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When I think of games, for me, I think either adventure, first person shooter or arcade, because to me, that's what I like most on computer games.
What I want in an arcade game is: fast, fun, you should be able to start easy to play, but must become skilled in order to reach higher levels, and must have a strong level of unpredictability in the game. Avoid games designed in such a way where one can learn patterns in order to beat the game. (original PacMan comes to mind..)
What I want when I play an adventure game is: a compelling story, a diverse world to play in, the complexity comes with experience of play, the rewards are new skills and most of all, the ability for the game to expand into new modules, allowing you to bring your characters into them. if You can play a game where you don't need to be forced into any scenarios, but can explore the "environment" and play based on the encounters, even more fun! :)
For a first shooter game: wicked weapons, all kinds of abilities to display and use, incredibly hard odds to beat, amazing graphics and sounds, the visual and auditory offers clues to the environment, out of the box effects and storylines.
It would be fun to have your character evolve and take him to future levels, but most of the time, the whole point of a first shooter game is to start with modest abilities and weapons and acquire more as you go.
But, if a Doom like game would create expansion packs which would actually build on the experience and game play you have, and your character starts with whatever he's finished with from a previous module, thus, getting into even harder game play, that would be wicked too!
There's different kinds of frustration. There's not knowing what to do next (Myst). Perhaps worse is knowing what to do, but not seeing how you're meant to be able to accomplish it.
Sometimes the game engine is a little bit broken - it used to annoy me no end in Perfect Dark that sometimes (just sometimes) a weapon would be at your feet and you simply could not pick it up. Maybe the boss monster has an unusual attack pattern and is only vulnerable to having acorns thrown at his toes, while, mysteriously, a rocket launcher to his face has no effect.
A lot of the stupid frustrations have been taken out of play by the internet - "How do I do X"-level frustrations are mostly taken care of by walkthroughs. It's handy to know that you're failing because the only way to kill the vampire is with the Holy Stake, which you forgot to pick up on Level 3.
I think sometimes difficulty-level frustrations can come about because of play-testing. If testers have been playing the game for months, they may have gotten significantly better at it than most people would ever do in normal play. Consequently, they can find levels easy to complete, and bosses very straightforward. So the difficulty level gets ramped up by doubling the hit points for all enemies, and suddenly the game is too hard for 95% of the final audience.
The worst frustration is when a game goes on the shelf, or back to the shop as a trade-in, because it reached a certain point, which was simply impassable - a race I couldn't win, or a boss I couldn't beat, and that's it - the rest of the game is forever closed to me. I'm tone-deaf - finally managed to get to the second island in Myst, listened to the musical tone key for the bunker and realised I was never, ever going to be able to finish the game.
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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Intro screens are usually not considered cutscenes, the "cut" part is understood to mean "cut away from the game".
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Cutscenes yes, but never un-skippable cutscenes, never. Better hope I never find out where you live if you're the man who rubber-stamps an un-skippable cutscene in a game I play. Case in point...Resident Evil. I've played several of the games in the series more than once. In fact all of them reward you with enhanced gear for your next play-through when you beat certain time-limits or what have you. So, on the second or third time through a game, when all I'm trying to do is waste zombies and solve puzzles in the most efficient manner possible, if I'd been forced to sit through cutscene after cutscene, then I would have been plucking eyeballs.
Cutscenes are great and they can be awesome, but unless there's something in there that is absolutely essential to my progress, there is no way I should be forced to watch it. The one time I could forgive an un-skippable cutscene would be if it was only un-skippable on the first run through, and then allowed skipping on subsequent attempts/runs through...
I sincerely hope that Blizzard doesn't add any aspects of WoW to Diablo III...
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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.
The inability to win, beat the game, or just finish is the reason MMOs never interested me.
MMOs never define a "win" condition. They leave that up to you the player. But most players have misconceptions that "winning" in a video game means completing all content available in the game just because that's how the "old" video games started.
My recommendation to both players caught in an MMO treadmill and players who simply see ALL MMOs as useless are to reconsider what it means to "win" in a game. If you want to stick to the definition, "winning means completing the last level of the game" then fine. All you are asking for are PvE treadmills.
Personally I either play a game to have fun or have a challenge with other human players. Some game content might be interesting from a PvE perspective. And in those cases I might define "winning" as simply completing the last level of the game because in doing that action I might be entertained. But in most cases I define "win" as having a competitive game with other human players where the challenge and randomness of other player's actions creates a sense of fun or excitement.
If you are able to do that, the sense of "winning" and being tied to a game will no longer affect you. Instead you'll only be after the next close "fight". Of course getting to that next fight might be frustrating if you are too good or too bad for the game and the game has no good method of dividing players into appropriate skill levels.