Slashdot Mirror
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.
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.
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)
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.
> 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.
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
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.
"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
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.
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.
In Demon's Souls, if you react a split second too late to the enemy hiding behind that dark corner, you die. In Demon's Souls, when you die, you not only lose a lot of ground, but the game actually makes itself harder. In Demon's Souls, you cannot revert to an earlier save, or even pause.
It's a lot of fun though! Really!
Sure, a middle ground with the option to go go left for harder or right for easier. I don't usually get much fun out of games without difficulty settings. As a kid there were games I was never going to complete. Now I'm in my forties there are probably fewer games like that but it still irks if I spend forty quid on a game and can't get out of the first few levels. Honestly I don't want to be challenged so much as I want to be entertained. And it helps if I feel like a mighty god. My job challenges me already and improving my hi-score at work has more material benefit. Games, for me, are to unwind. YMMV.
I got annoyed at the first boss because I didn't manage to get past the third part and every death meant I had to repeat the first and second parts which were pure puzzle parts that are trivial once you know how to beat them. Hard is fine, wasting my time with piss-easy stuff before the parts that actually challenge me is not.
Justice is the sheep getting arrested while an impartial judge declares the vote void.
People complain that the game is too easy (even if they never tried the hard modes).
The problem with World of Warcraft is that the last expansion truly made the game too easy in several ways.
Outside of dungeons, mobs have simply become ants. Annoying but 100% non-lethal. You almost have to disconnect while fighting multiple mobs to even have a chance of dying. In normal dungeons as well as heroics to some degree, the preferred strategy has become to basically collect as many mobs as the tank (and healer) can handle, have him keep them occupied (which is very simple nowadays) while the rest of the party uses multi target effect to kill them all at once. You have mages who have leveled all the way to level 80 and don't even know how to use the Sheep spell in dungeons, not to mention more advanced skills such as counter spell.
For leveling characters, they have made leveling easier, not only by reducing experience needed (which is a good thing to reduce boring grind) but also by improving gear rewards and reducing effort needed to clear a dungeon while simultaneously nerfing any challenging mobs outside of dungeons so that a monkey could level a character to level 80 using only his tail. This wouldn't be so bad except if you could only challenge yourself by fighting more difficult mobs. But the experience as well as level system in WoW highly encourages people to fight mobs that are at most the same level as yourself, or preferably one or two levels below if they want to level quickly.
Right now I am not subscribed, but depending on what I hear about it, I may join a month once WoW:Cataclysm comes out to see if it is fixed. But I don't have high hopes. The Blizzard WoW team has lost touch with reality when it comes to providing difficulty in many aspects of the game.
sleeper hit means it sold well, just not right away.
Personally I liked the Lost Levels a lot. But only in the setting of All Stars where you got a couple extra lives and could save. That made for a good challenge and balance. If I had the original 3 lives and start over version, it probably would have gotten smashed to bits.
If it's not on fire, it's a software problem.
Excuse me, stewardess. I speak Excited Nerdling.
Making a game insanely hard "just because" does not teh fun make.
1. Always have some way to move the game forward. For example, have several answers to "what do i do next??" available to the player at all times.
Please note that enabling a wall decoration as a "grabbable item" only after a player reaches some other point, and has already passed it, is rather irritating. It was not "takeable" when they first encountered it, so it would not be obvious to them that they should re-scour that area.
2. Special ways to kill particular opponents should be discoverable. For example, standard "houses of magic" enable various spell styles, some of which may have a greater effect than others. Also, don't forget about the rock-paper-scissors concept when designing different styles of attacks. It's also a good idea to have clues to what the more productive attacks or spells might be, rather than the player having to figure it out the hard way by trial and error.
Note that obscure attack chains as a requirement to kill someone is difficult for the player when said chains are not an easy discovery. Adding the requirement for high skill or a lucky shot as an intermediate step is also infuriating since, when that step misses, the player must start all over again.
3. Tools and upgrades should be findable, and in general, it's good to always have at least two ways of doing anything. Be careful not to cause the player to get de facto stuck because they have to plow through a "Get to da choppa!" number of baddies to get the required magic trinket to advance the game.
4. Have plenty of ammo, health, and power packs available so players aren't chronically running on empty, but don't have too much so the players don't just run around ignoring the dangers because they can chain-chug dozens of healths and have nigh infinite ammo. This isn't to say you can't have a huge topping off station just before big encounters, where the challenge is just surviving in all-out mayhem.
5. I know "hint guides" are profitable accessories for many games nowadays, and that therefore you have enticement to put a few goodies into them to justify the buy, and I'm fine with that. However, if you do have such hidden goodies, and do not produce a hint guide for sale, could you remember to include it in the in-game journal or something?
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
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.