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Game Difficulty As a Virtue
The Wii and various mobile gaming platforms have done wonders for the trend toward casual or "easy" games. But the success of a few recent titles, despite their difficulty, has caused some to wonder whether the pendulum has swung too far; whether a little frustration can be seen as a good thing. Quoting:
"The evidence is subtle but compelling. For one example, look to major consumer website GameSpot's Game of the Year for 2009: Atlus' PS3 RPG Demon's Souls, which received widespread critical acclaim – none of which failed to include a mention of the game's steep challenge. GameSpot called it 'ruthlessly, unforgivingly difficult.' Demon's Souls was a sleeper hit, an anomaly in the era of accessibility. One would think the deck was stacked against a game that demanded such vicious persistence, such precise attention – and yet a surge of praise from critics and developers alike praised the game for reintroducing the experience of meaningful challenge, of a game that demanded something from its players rather than looked for ways to hand them things. It wasn't just Demon's Souls that recently flipped the proverbial bird to the 'gaming for everyone' trend. In many ways, the independent development scene can be viewed on the macro level as a harbinger of trends to come, and over the past year and into 2010, many indies have decided to be brutal to their players."
Emeril Lagasse suffers from the same problem as the article writer. They both think that one ingredient is the key to a winning formula. BAM! Just add some EVOO or in this case turn the difficulty all the way up.
The secret, which isn't a secret at all, is that balanced gameplay is the true Sangreal of gaming. Pitting a newbie against a grizzled Korean veteran in Starcraft isn't going to give anyone a challenge or make them feel like they want to come back to the game again. It's only when the players are evenly matched or only slightly mismatched that gameplay becomes exciting. It is the thrill of being able to beat a game but with enough challenge that victory isn't guaranteed.
doesnt matter if a game is easy or hard. it needs to be accessible with a good UI and entertaining with a good story.
everything else is irrelevant. trainers are easily available as are cheat codes for those who want them.
It's like just about everything else in life...there is a nice middle ground between difficulty and accessibility. there is no point in playing a game that doesn't challenge at all, whether that challenge is a single player game, or a social experience; likewise there is no point in playing a game that is so difficult (I'm thinking of the lost levels on Super Mario All Stars) that it loses all entertainment value and becomes an exercise in frustration.
a little bit of frustration isn't a bad thing, so long as it is used as a gameplay mechanic, rather than the point of the game.
I haven't played Demon's Souls (hell I haven't even heard of it), but I've been noticing lately that every time I get a new game that I'm excited about playing, it's over in about two days.
There are certainly hard games I've enjoyed, but difficulty isn't really a single-axis thing, so I don't find it that useful to talk about in the abstract, and I certainly don't see any benefit to games that are "hard" just for the sake of it. A game might be hard because it has complex puzzles, or because it requires highly honed twitch skills, or because it requires non-obvious inferences, or because it requires acute observation, or any number of other things. Sometimes those are useful, sometimes not.
Plus, it's not even really something to set in opposition to casual games. It's really hard to get the kinds of low times on Minesweeper that aficionados get, and there are pretty hardcore communities based around such things.
I do agree that not every game has to be for a mass market. But surely, if you're given the luxury of designing a game that doesn't have to appeal to everyone, there are more interesting niches?
10 PRINT CHR$(205.5+RND(1)); : GOTO 10
The point of a game is to have fun. Period.
Some players find difficulty fun, and some players find that frustrating instead. Telling people that they must play on higher difficulties to have fun is like proclaiming that football is more fun than baseball or tennis.
The problem really are those few players who seem to find fun in telling others that they're doing it wrong. People should worry about themselves, not what others are doing.
People like to win, of course. But if that win is easy to achive, the achivement feels hollow. Anyone could have done it. People also enjoy the feeling of being "special". And I don't mean in the PC sense. They want to have the feeling they did something not everyone could do.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Much as comics do not tell a story in the same way a movie or book does, gaming is also storytelling in a relatively new medium.
Nothing dictates that there is one true way to tell a story. Some games are a walk in a beautiful park while picking up and eating sweets on the way, while others are a gymnastic hurdle to perfect or a triathlon to endure. It is all up to the story, the preference of the gamer - much like books span the breadth and width of infinite capabilities.
Thus I find it disingenuous to try to bundle "games" as a coherent subject and comment on their evolution. You may as well lament the book market.
Similar to HOMM, but more of an RPG/adventure. It has difficulty levels ranging from easy to impossible - but many unfamiliar with the genre will find "Normal" to be challenging.
I went with easy and challenged myself to lose as few units as possible. A very enjoyable game.
Right now I'm playing through Torchlight on the hardest difficulty. Good thing there's no death penalty if you respawn in town. ;) I kill enemies in about 4 hits, but they do the same.
Difficulty is different than fake difficulty. I actually hated the xbox360 because all the games were fucking easy. Or they had fake difficulty. And fake difficulty fucking sucks.
What I mean is when they use things like... Computers get psychic powers. Or they can 'cheat'. Like bots in a shooter that know where you are at all times. Or bots that have guns that deal double damage. It is a bit hard to define... but generally speaking, any time the game becomes more about w/e coded in cheats the computer gets than about the goals set out in the game then fake difficulty has been taken too far.
AI can game break in the opposite direction as well. For example... max handicap disadvantage in smash bros melee vs a computer. You are no longer having a match. You are playing a game of fucking with the ai so it falls in a pit (yoshi sucks at this). In many cases, especially games that shoot for some degree of realism this sucks balls. In shooter, base infiltration games higher difficulty should not be merely adjusting their hp level. It should be tightening up their AI, their aim, their placements, hell number of troops and their weaponry. Otherwise the game plays like crap. (Nearly all games do it the crap way)
In my personal experience, anything which is complicated and difficult to comprehend in the beginning, is most thrilling and exciting.
But on the other hand, a large proportion of people will love simple and dumb stuff. And its such a shame that millions of years of evolution has still not decreased percentage of the latter bunch.
Developers have to strike a balance between what makes you go "f- this game" and "YES! I CAN'T BELIEVE I FINALLY DID IT!".
Another problem they face is the fickleness of the community. For example, the Ninja Gaiden games on the NES would not fly in today's gaming community, except among a small, masochistic market segment.
I consider a game to be a failure if I can play through the whole thing the first time through without dying. Final Fantasy VII was this way - I only died and reloaded when taking on the optional challenges like Wrong Number or Ruby.
A problem I've noted more recently is uneven difficulty levels in a game - they're easy hard at the beginning and then trivial by the end (Dragon Age, Mass Effect 1) or games that appear easy in the first couple levels or your first time through so you kick up the difficulty level to give yourself more of a challenge, and they become ridiculous (Halo 3 Legendary Mode).
Some games also conflate higher difficulty settings with "being higher level", and make the game impossible if you think "Difficult" could possibly be played by an experienced player with a 1st level character. Dark Alliance 2 was this way. Sacred 2 and Diablo 2 were as well, but at least they made you beat the game once before you could turn on Nightmare difficulty. While you could still be underleveled for it, at least you couldn't stumble into it with a 1st level character, like you could in DA2. Even still, I hate game mechanics that have a "you must be this tall to play" mechanic in place, like in Diablo 2.
It started off as a cult game that looked really promising in it's original Asian release, then someone in the western gaming community got a hold of it and it became a real bandwagon game, being name-dropped everywhere. With a huge following of people that have probably hardly played it, claiming that they love difficult games, because that's what everyone else is doing. Also see : God Hand. Actually, Demon's Souls owes more than a bit to the Gothic games, for which it plays basically like a linear version of, except with bosses.
Strictly speaking Demon's Souls isn't a hard game, as once you get into the hang of it you'll find that most deaths come from lack of carelessness. You can't simply rush head-long into everything and know that the game won't hurt you for it, like most games. It's just a very punishing one; when you do make a mistake it really does kick you in the nuts. And someone in the design team has confused flawed design with difficulty. No pausing? No ability to save, even to a single constantly overwritten slot, just in case? There is difficult, there is masochistic, and then there is just plain bad game design. I don't regard having to find a safe spot before being able to take a leak or answer the phone to be 'hardcore', just stupid.
Speaking of God Hand, it is a much better example of proper difficulty. In Demon's Souls, if you tip-toe around, you'll go okay most of the time, and most lessons you learn once and you're okay from then on. God Hand kicks your ass early on, and you wonder how it got released in such an unworkable state (also, if you're an IGN reviewer, you'll likely go off and start writing at this point), but if you pay attention to the combat system and start out on an easy level, you'll become comfortable with the combat system, and then eventually you'll start tearing up the place, ready to advance in difficulty, and things that once seemed impossible will now merely present a fun challenge instead of sending you back, tail between your legs. Urban Reign did the same thing. They are great games.
anyone played it ? that is fun. and hard.
seriously.
hardest game ever
I'm in the half of the game. 1091 deaths...
http://kayin.pyoko.org/iwbtg/
try it, and die. many many times.
> The Wii and various mobile gaming platforms have done wonders
> for the trend toward casual or "easy" games.
Yeah. Care to cite specific examples? Because this, here, until proved otherwise, sounds like gamer nerd handwringing over their hobby's new mass popularity, no more.
Have you played the new Super Mario game? Care to name some other Mario games that are harder? Take your time, I'll wait. Heck, has there ever been a Mario game where failing one time too many on a single level, no matter how many lives you have, means you can't reach 100% completion unless you trash your save game and start over from scratch?
Hell, have you played the Wii poster child, Mario Kart? How are those mirror cups going? Unlocked the Rainbow Road expert staff ghost yet? Beaten it?
Just because it's easy to get into for newbies does NOT make it unchallenging. Seriously, guys, this is the same line of thinking that gives us people who seem to think that user friendly and powerful GUIs are mutually exclusive. It's a real design challenge to reconcile both, I know. This makes it all the more important to recognize and laud those attempts that succeed.
-- B.
This sig does in fact not have the property it claims not to have.
From the FAQ:
Q: I keep getting killed. Why is is so difficult?
A: Quitcher whinin', you ninny! It's supposed to be hard! Seriously, the game is intended to be a 15 minute adrenaline rush/mental cleanser. Frequent doses of explosions (even your own) can be very therapeutic.
http://chromium-bsu.sourceforge.net/faq.htm
When I was a lead tester at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, two different owners, multiple identity crises), I was responsible for Men In Black (Playstation). Sony had a submission requirement where they wanted a videotaped play through. Normally, it took me eight hours to get through the whole game. The developers made a change for one level just before the final level that made finishing the game impossible. I told them to change it, they told me to screw off.
I spent eight hours playing that damn level before I could advance to the final level and sent Sony two videotapes with 16 hours of video. My request to duplicate the last videotape and send it to the developers was denied. No one cares about the pains that a video game tester must suffer.
That is no hollow achievement, a total waste of perfectly good time, granted. But boom, dead from food poisoning after getting the amulet. Fifteen years later and I'm still bitter.
Storm
...
Demon's Souls is an extraordinary blend of the old and the new, and the result is so distinctive that it's hard to even find games to compare it to. Yes, it's a hard game. It is ruthlessly, unforgivingly difficult. But it is also amazingly compelling and rewarding, because the tools you need to survive are built into the very fabric of the experience. Demon's Souls is innovative, immersive, and immensely entertaining--and the best game of 2009.
I wouldn't exactly call that 'compelling evidence that hard=good'.
It's almost like they're saying it's good despite being hard, because of all other interesting things in the game.
Either way, gamespot picking Demon's Souls as game of the year doesn't mean squat. Sure, difficulty is important for any game, but it's not the all-important defining characteristic that determines overall success.
bitch you will take that fucking bird to the head and you will like it
you will also like that it keeps respawning every time you run left, then right
you want to make that jump? you're the ninja, YOU make the jump, bird or no bird!
There's a trope for that.
It's called Nintendo Hard.
>> Standing on head makes smile of frown, but rest of face also upside down.
I'd have to agree that in many ways games today are easier than in the past, however I too have noticed a swing back towards difficulty in a few titles. Most recently in Dragon Age Origins. Even played on the easy setting, it can be brutally difficult in some parts, the spikes are enormous. I prefer to play my RPG's in real-time, provided the game has such a mode, and while the easy setting in DAO is supposed to allow real-time battles, it is not strictly true. In many cases it still takes a huge amount of micro-management, pausing and tactics to succeed in certain battles, and party selection can be a critical point. If you have somehow chosen the wrong party members, spells or equipment, you will be utterly crushed without mercy. Re-loading saves and re-grouping and re-arming your party are common, even on easy difficulty.
To be honest, the game would be more enjoyable if the difficulty spikes on easy mode were not so severe; several reviewers have also pointed this out. I cannot see playing through this game on the most difficult setting, it would not be enjoyable to me. I'm not saying it should be a walk in the park, a good challenge is welcome, but being brutally beaten time-after-time and re-loading saves again and again is not a good gameplay experience. Adaptive AI is the way to go here, where the game will recognize you have been killed for the 10th time in a row in the last 60 seconds and ease up the difficulty a bit.
Don't get me wrong, this is one of the finest RPG's in quite a long while, and it has a depth and character development that is very enjoyable. This depth and feeling of character development was missing from recent games like Fallout 3 and Bioshock. While these games have some characteristics of RPG's, they are missing a large chunk of what makes a true RPG, and that's what DAO delivers, despite the difficulty.
Sorry. That's all I wanted to say.
No, wait, one more thing.
The new version of the amazing Dwarf fortress is about to be released.
Now you can keep talking about those other inferior games.
"To vanquish without peril is to triumph without glory."
— Pierre Corneille, Le Cid
"The body may heal, but the mind is not always so resilient." -- Deus Ex: Human Revolution
omg Ninja Gaiden.... i hated that game.
that's teh shizzle bizzle
latest expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, the endgame has been made substantially easier than before.
But has been added the possibility for players to unlock "hard modes" that present in many cases a much greater difficulty.
You know what?
People complain that the game is too easy (even if they never tried the hard modes).
Or that hard modes are too hard.
Or that hard modes are too easy because top world players (not them, someone else!) were able to beat hard modes in few days.
A game might be hard because [list of reasons] [...] Plus, it's not even really something to set in opposition to casual games.
I think Guitar Hero III is an excellent example of this.
If you play at the easier levels, you can have some casual fun with friends (if you have two controllers or can put up with using a wiimote.)
On the higher difficulty levels, you can get some real finger-twitching challenges, topping out at Through the Fire and Flames. I've tried hard, I've only completed it once on Expert. Raining Blood is pretty tough too.
Plus, if you play in battle mode, you get to exercise your brain---the lefty switch and the amp overload (makes all the dots blink) requires you to pay attention, remember lots of data, and think fast.
As a poster above you said: games being difficult is really about being an appropriate challenge. For games of opposition, that means playing against a roughly even opponent. For single-player GH3, you can choose between a wide range of songs, each at four different difficulty levels. I guesstimate that most people can find a suitable difficulty level, where they make progress but not blazingly fast.
Now, the game is buggy, the menu layout is crap, the QA team has done a shoddy job, it ought to have better lag handling and ...; the game design is 9/10, implementation 4/10.
But Guitar Hero really hits both the casual gamers and the twitch lovers, and it hits twitch lovers at various skill levels. Heck, you can even play casually with your friends and you still play at expert.
Or designers making the games to be a struggle in the misconceived idea that people will play it more because of all the retrying and struggle.
Sometimes they are dead right. Nethack, Dwarf Fortress, Mega Man, I Wanna be that Guy etc are all games of this type.
Many casual games are an endless highscore hunt that has you struggling until you die, I wouldn't call that easy. Casual gamers develop extreme proficiency at their games like Tetris or Bejeweled. It's the hardcore games that are easy, they are more designed around the spectacle and story now and that's stuff that you can't make the player replay so having him die often and replay scenes over and over again is seen as a bad thing. I don't know about you but to me a game where even a minimally skilled person can make progress past the next checkpoint and thus beat the game slowly but surely without any practicing is an easy game.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
That's why I love Nethack. The permadeath gives you plenty of difficulty, but the challenge doesn't feel "false" because there's so much tactical depth. Yeah, sure, there are plenty of monsters that are pretty brutal ("go team ant!"), but if that stupid orc has a wand of death, you *get* that wand of death if you manage to kill him without him killing you first and he doesn't have infinite uses of it. And there are usually a dozen ways you could have survived that last death. Contrast this with, say, Angband (or many MUDs, for that matter), where the trend in many variants has been that "we want a harder monster, so let's give it 50% more HP and make it resist *everything*!" But the only way you could have avoided dying was having more heal potions handy or retreating.
I used to be an immortal on a MUD, actually. Nobody knew how to write a mobprog except for random drops, or so it seemed at times, so almost everyone who made hard mobs just set them to aggro and cranked up their HP and armor so that you had to heal via potions for 3 hours while they dropped 1% at a time. I made the first actual mob that used intelligent spell selection to target player racial weaknesses and which used debuffs in a reasonably tactical manner, forced the player to solo it, kept the HP, armor and damage reasonable, gave it a limited number of low HP cohorts that allowed for a flanking bonus, and limited the player's ability to gulp potions so you couldn't just set an autoquaff trigger and watch TV while waiting for it to die.
People had a lot more fun inventing clever tactics to use against it and watching their use of mana for healing vs. damage over a relatively short (~5 minute) fight, vs. other critters where the main challenge was making sure you had enough potions in your bag before attacking and chatting or something while you waited for it to die.
Would I be right in thinking this translates as "Me and my friends liked it, but it didn't sell very well"?
From the movie Avalon... this is delivered to the protagonist by one of the shady Game Masters who control the virtual reality game :
Which is the greater challenge ?
Which is the better game?
Which would you choose, given the choice?
The sort of game that you think you can win, but cannot,
or, alternatively, one that seems to be impossible, but isn’t?
Maintaining a precise, delicate balance somewhere in between, throughout every level of the game – That’s what keeps it going.
And it is all up to us.
I'm not sure I understand what the big deal is with worrying about some "pendulum". Sometimes I have time; sometimes I don't. (Given hard means it requires more time.) I just like games. It's not an either or proposition.
There is nothing to worry about here. The casual game market was just an expansion to reach a previously ignored segment of players: the very old, the very young, and the very busy. Your hard games aren't going away any time soon and neither will your easy games. Stop fretting over it.
Camping on quad since 1996.
This story reminds me of a hilariously hard little gem of a game: I Wanna Be The Guy. It's the kind of game that makes me laugh out loud when I realize yet ANOTHER way I can die on a particular level. Try it out a bit, and have a good laugh if you haven't already.
or example, the Ninja Gaiden games on the NES would not fly in today's gaming community, except among a small, masochistic market segment.
I hear that the newer versions of NG (XBox et all) are insanely difficult, just as the original.
...Some random loser on Slashdot considers one of the most heralded video games of all time to be a 'failure', because he claims that he only 'reloaded' (wtf?) twice.
Anything else you'd like to share, Mr. game expert?
Sometimes pushing yourself to the limit and trying to figure out just how the fuck you're supposed to beat that is a part of the game's fun. Some multiplayer games feel like stupid repetition unless you deal with someone of an appropriately high skill. E.g. RTSes aren't really much fun if all you do is amass a gigantic army and then attack move over anything of a different color, they are much more fun when you have to balance your constraints like resources and leaving yourself open in the hope that your opponent cannot capitalize on it fast enough.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
Congratulations, you have reached level 10... a huge rock falls from the ceiling. You die...
Would you like to see the last messages before your death?
New games need to get rid of auto health regeneration or at least make it a power up / upgrade that uses power.
I don't that deus ex 3 will have it deus ex 1 had a good system it was a upgrade that used up power. IF you don't want people to back track a lot add more med kits / have no limit on how many you can carry at one time.
However, Mega Man is an excelent game. Back then and now. They aren't good because they are difficult, they are good as a whole. The other three games are simple niche games. You can't throw Mega Man in there. If anything, do throw Battletoads.
Oblivion Awaits
Likewise, it's frustrating if a game is so friggin' hard that it simply is not fun anymore either.
But players' skill levels differ. One person's challenge is another person's so hard it's not fun. This is true of DDR and Tetris and even platformers.
making something insanely hard "just because" does not make something fun
1 always have some way to move the game forward (have a couple answers to "what do i do next??" at hand at all times) note going to some distant area of the level ripping a random object off the wall and then using it on some random decoration does not count unless the player could have grabbed it the previous time they saw said object
2 killing any opponent should be discoverable (use "houses of magic" or a rock > paper > scissors system or have clues) note use random object on the opponent (or surrounding items) 9 times in a 4-6-7 pattern then use charging superweapon to hit an area thats the size of a microsd card and repeat 8 times before you can have a DEM effect enable you to actually hurt the opponent is never a good idea
3 tools and upgrades should be findable (always have 2 of everything even if you have to have some DEM move a part of The Ultimate Super Weapon between sites to do this) note having the only place to get a critical tool or weapon a remote/off track area of a level/zone that is a massive shoot your way through "bug out of here" setup
is another "never happen" type thing
4 ammo/health/powerpacks have a reasonable amount findable but don't have enough to allow for "spray and pray"
note having a noticeable cache include a plot device would be very legit and if you take a player to "max ammo" you are allowed to have them need to use said ammo
5 is the game possible without using The Hint Guide?? if not then include the needed hints somehow
(journal pages "sidekick" characters sign posts whatever)
Any person using FTFY or editing my postings agrees to a US$50.00 charge
NG1 was great at balancing difficulty, without being cheap. It never felt cheap (other than a single section of the game where you had to jump like a maniac to stop from being frozen by attacks of ghostfish), and it really is a great example for how to do difficult games without being cheap.
NG2, not so much. It was more frustrating due to bad camera angles, cheap enemy tactics, and broken balance.
Whether or not there is some sort of god, I'm not supposed to say/god is a word and the argument ends there-Smog
Well, that's why I buy games only after they've been out for about a year. That way I get 20h of gameplay for $20 instead.
True, but in that case, you get only 20 hours. After that point, if you try the multiplayer mode, you'll likely get something like "DNAS Error -103: This software title is not in service" after the publisher pulls the plug on the matchmaking server.
These were just picked quickly of the top of my head, but I think you are being a bit arbitrary in your judgment of the games.
The only "simple niche" game in the list is IWBTG. Mega Man was defined by its difficulty, this isn't a criticism and does not mean it wasn't a mainstream success.
Nethack is brutally difficult, extremely deep, and with decades of development is at a level of polish commercial publishers can only dream of.
Dwarf Fortress fits because there is no way to beat it. You are supposed to lose every time.
I guess I don't understand why you are drawing a line under Mega Man here. It may not be the same genre, but it fits the class of games discussed perfectly.
Well, that is one of the things the single-player campaign is supposed to do. It starts with beginner tutorials, and if you can finish it, you should have a basic level of competence.
So I gather that you almost want to make multiplayer unlockable. But if you were designing a video game like Dance Dance Revolution, would you set the bar for completing the single-player campaign to something as difficult as this?
But after you spent months mastering a difficult game,
you can proudly emerge from your basement,
knowing that you accomplished something in life.
I do not know why this post and all sub-posts are marked as trolls but they make valid points. While, I personally didn't think the Lost levels was as insanely difficult as some people think it is, it is hardly a reason to mark the parent and all children posts as troll.
I never get pissed at games, I just can't understand when anyone throws a fit over getting shot or something. I either step away and come back later or push until I succeed.
What's depressing about how I treat gaming, however, is that it's nothing like how I treat life.
"Most people, I think, don't even know what a rootkit is, so why should they care about it?"
Or did he just read some reviews about how difficult it was?
The game isn't difficult as so much as it is sadistic. No pausing at all, not even when checking inventory. On screen elements that totally block 80% of your screen during battle—effectively making you a sitting duck until it goes away. Remember, no pausing during all this. WTF?! No real story or purpose, so only the masochists will continue to play through if only to prove to themselves that they can beat it. The lack of plot elements mean you really have to rely on the PSN feature of the game whereby players on PSN leave you clues about what to do next. You can kill any NPC, including ones critical to the game such as the girl that levels up your character. It's just a poorly designed game. The whole time I was playing, I was like, "Seriously? WTF?"
However, despite all of its flaws, all the reviewers are right about the game having a strong sense of achievement. There were a lot of comparisons made to the old cartridge days when the only way to beat a game was all the way through in one go. Or where you had to collect more 1-ups to prevent death. Demon's Souls is kind of like that. No save points and if you die, you start back at the beginning of the current level and lose all your unspent money/souls.
Dying in modern games isn't as big of a deal as it used to be. You often start off right where you died with all your items and full stats. A lot of games nowadays have auto-regen health so you just wait it out and you're good as new. Demon's Souls makes player really adverse to death.
And lastly, casual doesn't mean easy or unfulfilling. A game doesn't have to be "difficult" to be challenging. For example, my favourite game is and always will be Tetris. Easy to learn, but challenging to get really good at. I can spend hours trying play the perfect game, get the highest score or see how fast I can play, etc.
OK, a game can be very difficult and be considered GOTY.
But what about a game that's easy but sold millions and surely gave mone profit to its company than Demon's Souls? And I'm speaking about New Super Mario Bros. This game is not easy as most 'casual' games, but a gamer can finish it with 99 lives without much effort. And still, it sold a lot, it recieved very good critics, and more importantly, it's fun.
Minti: What's that huge shuriken in your back?! Kin: It's the instrument of my victory.
And yet even within a single difficulty setting some games can have inconsistent difficulty.
I recently finished JK2: Jedi Outcast for the first time - used Jedi Knight difficulty. The early levels were just frustrating, considering the weapons sucked for the most part. The one where you have to protect escaping prisoners was especially annoying, I lost count how many retries I needed there. Fun improved drastically once you got the lightsaber and some force powers (force speed especially), and much more when you got the Force Healing. And yet, Force Healing basically made the game into one of those rather easy "regenerating shield/health" shooters, where you can just charge into the enemies swinging, knowing that you can always just wait in a corner to recharge without having to hunt down med packs.
However since I sucked at light saber combat, the dark jedi (especially the two bosses, and to a lesser extent encounters with multiple black-armored mass produced fodder) fights were always rather hard. I could barely land a hit on the final boss, so I left the game unplayed for a month or two, before coming back and using the cheap trick of "hang back until he throws the saber, then force speed in for the kill" to win. Didn't get a great sense of achievement out of that one.
In contrast to "AI" which is "Artificial Intelligence" I call the thing you're talking about "RC" which stands for "Real Cheating"
Did you know 80 to 90% of the moderators on slashdot wouldn't recognize a troll even if one dragged them under a bridge.
Don't know why this post and all of replies are marked incorrectly as trolls. None of the posts seem to warrant such moderation to me.
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]
I should have the option of turning it down on the days when I want a "bubblegum play" experience where I can play for while and just be entertained. Then on other days, I'd like to be able to turn it up when I want to be "challenged".
Yes, there are times where I don't mind be frustrated a little, (note the emphasis!) but I don't care for situations that go way beyond that. (and I think a lot of other people do as well, judging from the recent wave of 'casual gaming' trends.)
And I absolutely hate it when I'm confronted with a dead end situation, like when I can't complete a game because some game book author made a deal with the programmers to write in special stuff that requires their game book in order to "win the game". (I won't bother mentioning which companies engaged in this behavior because they don't need any more advertising and besides, a lot you probably already know whom I'm referring to...)
So there you have it in a nutshell.
[Now, I'm off to lift my le... Um, visit... at another place.]
There was a wise man who once said "If the game doesn't drive you insane at least once, you're not having fun."
Gentlemen, I give exhibit A, Mega Man 9, WiiWare, a game which I truly think counts as masocore.
Trust me, the Wily Wars never ended.
"MIT betrayed all of its basic principles."
That's what difficult levels are for: Feeling that you could achieve what many couldn't.
One of my personal favorites, is "Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow". You have the normal mode, and the hard mode. But my favorite part is battling with Julius. There are numerous youtube videos of fighting with Julius in restricted circumstances: i.e. no armor/weapons, all abilities disabled, no healing potions, etc. Of course, the Boss Rush mode is a must.
Supermetroid also manages to do this, in the form of Speed Runs. The reward pics of Samus add a lot of replayability, like, defeat the game with less than 10% items, or with 100% items under a time limit, and so on.
Winning the game may be easy or difficult, but the ability to play the game under restrictions, AND obtaining a unique reward for it (even if it's just a praise in youtube calling you "awesome"), is invaluable.
One of the best games I have ever seen was Ikaruga. I had to use a continue on the Training mode set on EASY. The game is freaking fantastic though.
I think difficulty is a good thing, but frustratingly impossible is another thing altogether.
I love Final Fantasy Tactics, but if you forgot about what you were doing and went into a particular mission underprepared, the previous 4+ hours you put into the game were for nothing, since you cant win and you cant leave.
I even got frustrated (after I beat Super Mario Wii) in trying to collect all the coins, that was tough, but beyond necessary.
Im a troll because I disagree with you.
It's likely similar to later Civ games, but if you want to see real CPU player cheating, turn Civ 2 onto a hard difficulty, then enable the cheat to see all the map from the start, then watch the CPU player turns. 2 settlers coming out of a level 1 town on the first or second turn is enough to make you cry.
http://xkcd.com/606/
I realize that games have certain goals that must be finished to continue onto the next puzzle or section or whatever.
One of the problems is that some games have different kinds of goals in the same came, and the various kinds of goals can have hugely varying difficulty to different players.
In both Ratchet & Clank and Sly Cooper, I'm stuck at stupid cartoony races. They're not even good races (e.g. obviously car racing games or even Grand Theft Auto type games with a racing element). Both of them put races in as impediments to continuing. Even though the games in general are 'kiddie' games, the races are pretty darn hard (hard enough that I've given up on them at least for a while), and having things that are THAT much of a pain make games overall less fun. Compare that to something like God of War, which at least in the main game (not the challenges), I got stuck in many places, but trying it enough times, I can succeed. Plus the game itself generally rises in difficulty as you go along.
Psychonauts is another game that's mostly easy but I haven't tried finishing Meat Circus for a few years now. The Escapist's review of Psychonauts is very funny too (http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation/2-Psychonauts).
At least there is one game reviewer that pulls no punches! Here is Zero Punctuation's Review of Demon Souls.
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I agree that there has to be a slight challenge. If I think its hard, and then persevere and beat it, I will feel good about my self. Then I will want to play more and more. Its a basic self-efficacy formula... I have to consider it as a teacher all the time.
No pausing? No ability to save, even to a single constantly overwritten slot, just in case? There is difficult, there is masochistic, and then there is just plain bad game design. I don't regard having to find a safe spot before being able to take a leak or answer the phone to be 'hardcore', just stupid.
How many good multiplayer games can be paused? I think it is safe to say that From may have chose not to include a pause function due the pseudo-persistent world design of Demon's Souls. Enabling/disabling pause every time you got invaded? Sounds like fun. You must be a game designer.
In soul form, you could stand in a lot of places on almost any level and be completely safe forever. It is not that difficult.
Also, from the in-game menu inside any of the five worlds, choose Quit Game or whatever it is called. The game saves your location and progress, and you can pick up right where you left off.
Seems like a single, constantly overwritten slot to me.