148: Hard Times
- Thread starter Kieron Gillen
- Start date
I can only guess the banner art for this article is a reference to God Hand, mentioned throughout the second and third pages =P
Regarding 'the path of least resistance'.. No? I cannot speak for others, but I tired of easy games a long time ago, and find myself far more likely to quit an easy game due to boredom than a hard one.
For many years, throughout my younger and mid teens, I was the kind of individual who considered cheat codes -part of the experience-, who enjoyed a game far more if I could just eliminate all challenge and resistance and run around playing with the game mechanics.
Ghost mode in Unreal to let me explore the beautiful enviroments and not experience cardiac arrest when the Skarjj jumped on me.
Spawn cheats in Half-Life to watch Barneys fight masses of Zombies.
The same in Baldur's Gate, pitting armies of demons and the undead against a legion of the flaming fist, on the streets of Candlekeep.
Grand theft auto? Give me all the weapons and god mode, I want to see just how many cars I can blow up before I get bored.
Oh my dear Hitman; absolutely everything, especially ip_timemultiplier 0.3, let me watch those early, beautiful ragdolls fly.
Now..?
I play all of my games on the hardest possible difficulty setting just to keep myself amused.
It's.. Immersion. Having spent years playing games against real players, AI becomes increasingly unconvincing, and aside from it's unpredictable behaviour is relatively easy to defeat. To feel like I'm really there, in the world created by the developers, I need the game to be as punishingly close to realistic as possible, and to force me to concentrate, to focus.
Otherwise, I'm usually too bored to continue by the end of the second act.
Am I the only one?
Toss some realism mods onto STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl if you want to know the meaning of difficulty *grins*
AI that know how to flank, how to sneak, how to aim for the head, where one shot kills.
Ooh. Joy.
Regarding 'the path of least resistance'.. No? I cannot speak for others, but I tired of easy games a long time ago, and find myself far more likely to quit an easy game due to boredom than a hard one.
For many years, throughout my younger and mid teens, I was the kind of individual who considered cheat codes -part of the experience-, who enjoyed a game far more if I could just eliminate all challenge and resistance and run around playing with the game mechanics.
Ghost mode in Unreal to let me explore the beautiful enviroments and not experience cardiac arrest when the Skarjj jumped on me.
Spawn cheats in Half-Life to watch Barneys fight masses of Zombies.
The same in Baldur's Gate, pitting armies of demons and the undead against a legion of the flaming fist, on the streets of Candlekeep.
Grand theft auto? Give me all the weapons and god mode, I want to see just how many cars I can blow up before I get bored.
Oh my dear Hitman; absolutely everything, especially ip_timemultiplier 0.3, let me watch those early, beautiful ragdolls fly.
Now..?
I play all of my games on the hardest possible difficulty setting just to keep myself amused.
It's.. Immersion. Having spent years playing games against real players, AI becomes increasingly unconvincing, and aside from it's unpredictable behaviour is relatively easy to defeat. To feel like I'm really there, in the world created by the developers, I need the game to be as punishingly close to realistic as possible, and to force me to concentrate, to focus.
Otherwise, I'm usually too bored to continue by the end of the second act.
Am I the only one?
Toss some realism mods onto STALKER: Shadow of Chernobyl if you want to know the meaning of difficulty *grins*
AI that know how to flank, how to sneak, how to aim for the head, where one shot kills.
Ooh. Joy.
I unfortunately fall into the category of the "plays on heroic every day because he dies often on legendary", but recently I've been trying to get out of that (particularly with "I want to be the guy", one of the most obnoxiously hard freeware games out). It's more fun, but I also fall into a sense of frustration pretty often, which is how games should be (not controller throwing frustration, mind you).
I like hard games. Sorry, let me correct that statement: I liked hard games. This was back in the days when I had more time to play. With practice came mastery, and the challenge was its own reward. These days, I don't have as much time to play games, and so the worst thing a game can do is waste my leisure time by forcing me to repeat something I don't want to repeat. Unskippable cutscenes are by far the worst offender, but having to repeat a tedious gameplay sequence is just as bad. Maybe this just reflects poor design, since the gameplay itself is supposed to be the reward. If the reward only comes at the end, I'm going to find the most time-efficient way to get there, and if that means playing on "easy," so be it.
- Alan
- Alan
This is why I devote most of my gaming time to TF2, despite the fact that I have yet to finish Half-Life 2 or any of its sequels, all of which I have paid for. I just don't have time to devote to a difficult game which requires repeated attempts at a segment before you can move forward, especially an on-rails shooter like Half-Life 2 where you don't have any real choice as to how to deal with a situation.
Last time I played HL2 a few months back, I ended up with low health at the square where you have to fend off several waves of Combine soldiers while Alyx takes her sweet time hacking some shield generator (near the end of Anticitizen One). I got so fed up with replaying this segment (and yes, I kind of suck) that I turned the game off and haven't gone back yet. It just wasn't any fun.
So, while I feel a bit guilty, and am resolved to actually FINISH HL2 and its sequels someday, I just can't be bothered right now. TF2 offers a great mix of frustration and exhilaration, is frequently hilarious, and is never quite the same from round to round.
EDIT:
Also, Okami. Not a particularly hard game most of the time, but it's so LONG that I got to the point where I just wanted to finish the darn thing. So when I got stuck about a year ago on one of the game's incredibly irritating jumping puzzles (the platform spiders where you have to use the ice brush to freeze them at just the right spot to land a difficult leap), I just stopped playing. I'll finish it at some point, but ... but TF2 calls me!
Jumping puzzles are THE biggest game-enders for me, with pointless level bosses coming hard on their heels. I actually enjoyed the boss battle at the end of Portal, but most of them just seem like they're there because that's what games do.
Last time I played HL2 a few months back, I ended up with low health at the square where you have to fend off several waves of Combine soldiers while Alyx takes her sweet time hacking some shield generator (near the end of Anticitizen One). I got so fed up with replaying this segment (and yes, I kind of suck) that I turned the game off and haven't gone back yet. It just wasn't any fun.
So, while I feel a bit guilty, and am resolved to actually FINISH HL2 and its sequels someday, I just can't be bothered right now. TF2 offers a great mix of frustration and exhilaration, is frequently hilarious, and is never quite the same from round to round.
EDIT:
Also, Okami. Not a particularly hard game most of the time, but it's so LONG that I got to the point where I just wanted to finish the darn thing. So when I got stuck about a year ago on one of the game's incredibly irritating jumping puzzles (the platform spiders where you have to use the ice brush to freeze them at just the right spot to land a difficult leap), I just stopped playing. I'll finish it at some point, but ... but TF2 calls me!
Jumping puzzles are THE biggest game-enders for me, with pointless level bosses coming hard on their heels. I actually enjoyed the boss battle at the end of Portal, but most of them just seem like they're there because that's what games do.
Yes DMC4 was stupidly hard on DMD mode after playing each level a minimum of 20 times each it finally got done. That for me was as far as i was prepared to go difficulty wise.Saskwach said:
So very true. A game needs progression and challenge, otherwise frustration or boredom set in.ccesarano said:
DMC4 on Devil Hunter is tough. The first real boss fight with Dante, I'm not talking about the begining, was button smashing hard. I havent tried on easy because I played the first three on easy and thats what they were, easy. Plus the fight with the priest guy was agrivating.Saskwach said:
For the Dante fight spam pistol fire while moving in close and then when he's in range grab him with buster. Works on Son of Sparda too, works occasionally on Dante Must Die but most of the time you'll take a shotgun to the face. DMC is really just figuring out the best way to exploit all the situations and from then on it's cake on any difficulty.Igoram78 said:
But yeah, as for the general topic, I'm a fan of difficult games. God Hand is in my collection, a game I loved every finger blistering second of. Third person beat em up is my favourite genre probably because what I like most about games is finding a way to abuse their mechanics, and it's one genre built entirely on that principle. God of War, DMC, Godhand, Ninja Gaiden, there's just a certain thrill about beating these sorts of games on their highest difficulties that you can't get anywhere else. I just wish they made more of them, instead of the unending spam of FPS games that want to hold your hand the whole way.
Hmm. I was hoping for more of a discussion of the actual intrinsic value of difficulty in games in the first place. There are always going to be people who play for a challenge, and always those who just want to see the game, but is it really a shame that games have got easier? A good discussion of the various types of gamer that have emerged is at http://insultswordfighting.blogspot.com/2008/01/new-taxonomy-of-gamers-table-of.html and it makes all this talk of the hardcore v.s. the not-hardcore look a bit old fashioned.
As for me, I like my games easy enough to not demand a lot of do-overs due to failure, but difficult enough so that it actually engages my attention. Which, it turns out, is not particularly difficult. I'll tend to select 'normal' difficulty even if there is an easy option, except for Halo because the 'Hardcore' difficulty level just seems to play better.
As for me, I like my games easy enough to not demand a lot of do-overs due to failure, but difficult enough so that it actually engages my attention. Which, it turns out, is not particularly difficult. I'll tend to select 'normal' difficulty even if there is an easy option, except for Halo because the 'Hardcore' difficulty level just seems to play better.
i think games are often too easy nowadays, thats why i loved God Hand, frustrating in a good way. it's also why i praised the DMc games, not afraid to be hard, you have to beat them and it feels great when you do. i never get that type of satisfaction from games that are baby simple cause i feel like i should have done it rather than i worked for it.
oh and the article image is from God Hand's original box art, see no one even knows what God Hand's box art look like, that proves next to no one bought it!
oh and the article image is from God Hand's original box art, see no one even knows what God Hand's box art look like, that proves next to no one bought it!
I clicked around for a good while trying to figure out which article was using the God Hand art. All hail God Hand, beautiful love of the world.
But, I again agree with the thing about gamers taking the easiest path. I almost always play on Normal, and I love having the choice. Easy should stay easy, as sometimes people just want to play on Easy. I remember playing Stranglehold on Easy, not because I was afraid to be challenged, but because in that one singular case I didn't care about challenge. My favorite part about the game was bullet timing and blowing guys away a hundred at a time, so that's what I went for.
But, I again agree with the thing about gamers taking the easiest path. I almost always play on Normal, and I love having the choice. Easy should stay easy, as sometimes people just want to play on Easy. I remember playing Stranglehold on Easy, not because I was afraid to be challenged, but because in that one singular case I didn't care about challenge. My favorite part about the game was bullet timing and blowing guys away a hundred at a time, so that's what I went for.
Instead of difficulty being the thing that made me slow down to a near halt in playing games, it actually was the general entertainment value. I was playing Windwaker on my GC one day, trying to do I believe the "take a color photo of every game model" quest and then I realized, "Why am I doing this...and actually why should I? Am I going to get anything that I can really use? No. Am I going to feel proud of myself after this? No. All that doing this will do is make me feel better around a relatively small group of people who probably generally won't care that I did this anyway and this is certainly NOT fun at all. So why am I breaking my back, bending backwards, just because some game development company in some town I've never been in made the game this way?" So I'd probably be one of those half people who would play Half Life Episode 1 and not complete it. It's probably not the difficulty, the game would probably just bore me and give me no reason to want to play besides the idea of "Just Because".
I agree with Tohoya, you're entirely wrong on that point. If someone considers themselves skilled, they're going to want to want a challenge, that challenge itself is a reward. Also, people do complain about games being too easy precisely because a game that's too easy isn't fun, just as a game that's too difficult probably isn't fun either. Gamers do not choose the path of least resistance, they choose the path that is the most fun for them.
Good riddance, I say.
If I had my money back for every time that I have almost reached the end of a game, only to find an incredibly difficult and cheap boss at the end, I would have probably retired on the proceedings from console-game bundles.
My notable hates include the final bosses from the Onimusha series, the Snipers-from-nowhere sections of FPSes (Medal of Honor series 10 years after people complained about the first instalment) and the "whoops, you'll have to grind for ten more hours first" RPGs (Dragon Quest at least gave me a chance to grind, Baldur's Gate expected me to pull experience out of the aether). The worst part about all of these is that, when I buy a game, I'll never know whether I can finish it or whether I will be stuck at the final boss forever because I didn't conserve every single health potion along the 30-hour way and now have no way of buying new ones.
Difficulty is the lazy man's version of size and variety. So your game is less than 6 hours long and you can't be bothered to include new levels? Just bring in an incredibly cheap final boss and you're done.
If you look at some of the best-reviewed games in history - the Mario and Zelda franchises, the Half-Life series, Okami, Psychonauts, Res Evil 4 etc, all of them were incredibly easy. However, they were so much fun, none of the reviewers noticed, and they made up for the rate at which players would burn through the missions with old-fashioned size and variety.
DISCLAIMER: Having said that, I don't think that the examples that The Escapist gave were truly hard. DE: Invisible War was, to me, quite easy (I played it on the PC, so I'm not sure how it would have worked with checkpoints) and my only challenge was trying to complete the game without killing anyone - ie through pure stealth. Ditto Planescape: Torment - the amount of side-quests that I did raised me to the level of a demi-God, (btw, I love having that option in an RPG) but I understand that the ending would have been nigh-impossible if I chose the wrong conversation option without knowing it and had to SPOILER.
If I had my money back for every time that I have almost reached the end of a game, only to find an incredibly difficult and cheap boss at the end, I would have probably retired on the proceedings from console-game bundles.
My notable hates include the final bosses from the Onimusha series, the Snipers-from-nowhere sections of FPSes (Medal of Honor series 10 years after people complained about the first instalment) and the "whoops, you'll have to grind for ten more hours first" RPGs (Dragon Quest at least gave me a chance to grind, Baldur's Gate expected me to pull experience out of the aether). The worst part about all of these is that, when I buy a game, I'll never know whether I can finish it or whether I will be stuck at the final boss forever because I didn't conserve every single health potion along the 30-hour way and now have no way of buying new ones.
Difficulty is the lazy man's version of size and variety. So your game is less than 6 hours long and you can't be bothered to include new levels? Just bring in an incredibly cheap final boss and you're done.
If you look at some of the best-reviewed games in history - the Mario and Zelda franchises, the Half-Life series, Okami, Psychonauts, Res Evil 4 etc, all of them were incredibly easy. However, they were so much fun, none of the reviewers noticed, and they made up for the rate at which players would burn through the missions with old-fashioned size and variety.
DISCLAIMER: Having said that, I don't think that the examples that The Escapist gave were truly hard. DE: Invisible War was, to me, quite easy (I played it on the PC, so I'm not sure how it would have worked with checkpoints) and my only challenge was trying to complete the game without killing anyone - ie through pure stealth. Ditto Planescape: Torment - the amount of side-quests that I did raised me to the level of a demi-God, (btw, I love having that option in an RPG) but I understand that the ending would have been nigh-impossible if I chose the wrong conversation option without knowing it and had to SPOILER.
I think this is lies. No games have come out in the last few years that I can't complete. Back in the day there were tons. I certainly think they've been dumbed down and eased up to be more accessible.