Difficulty is Hard
It's, erm, difficult to balance the difficulty in videogames.
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It's, erm, difficult to balance the difficulty in videogames.
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Difficulty is Hard
- Thread starter Shamus Young
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One game that did good with checkpoints is Infamous. I'd say it has the best checkpoint-system ever. Except maybe the 2008 Prince of Persia at least.
And if you want to see more of Extra Credits, I suggest going through their Youtube Channel to see their earlier work.
And if you want to see more of Extra Credits, I suggest going through their Youtube Channel to see their earlier work.
And this is precisely why Demon's Souls is overrated. I don't want to have to spend 10 minutes trudging through the easy parts only to die again. Yeah, it keeps the tension, but when you die, and when you feel like your death is more luck than skill, why bother to keep playing?
Also, see Super Meat Boy as an example of difficulty done correctly. As well as Kirby's Epic Yarn, which is equally well-designed, but not challenging in the slightest.
Also, see Super Meat Boy as an example of difficulty done correctly. As well as Kirby's Epic Yarn, which is equally well-designed, but not challenging in the slightest.
I agree with you and I'm sure everyone agree's that the reboot of PoP went in the completely wrong direction.
I understand the need to balance difficulty quite a bit. I hate games that use cheap tactics over genuine challenge, but I do applaud games that are really hard while still being fair. In fact, a good fair challenge can give a game alot of bonus points in my eyes. I'm a hack'n'slash lover and I'll give the best examples I can of how to do difficulty.
Terrible and Cheap Difficulty: Ninja Gaiden 2
Fair and Challenging Difficulty: Bayonetta
Developers; take note.
I understand the need to balance difficulty quite a bit. I hate games that use cheap tactics over genuine challenge, but I do applaud games that are really hard while still being fair. In fact, a good fair challenge can give a game alot of bonus points in my eyes. I'm a hack'n'slash lover and I'll give the best examples I can of how to do difficulty.
Terrible and Cheap Difficulty: Ninja Gaiden 2
Fair and Challenging Difficulty: Bayonetta
Developers; take note.
There are so many ways to balance difficulty, and some get it right and some wrong.
I don't like level scaling but Fallout 3 seemed to get it close to right, whereas Oblivion made me feel like I was running a treadmill.
Checkpoint systems work to an extent. I think you already nailed that one.
The more interesting device I've seen is the "new game +" option. I didn't like it in Dead Rising, but in it's sequel I found it to be quite useful. Especially when you can save anywhere and you're not quite sure which missions are a game over condition upon failure. I guess you could say that Capcom didn't need to balance the game through that system alone, but my perceived differences between the two games means they balanced DR2 much better than DR1.
User scalable difficulty (like: easy, normal/medum, hard, etc...) works sometimes, but more often than not the difference between medium and hard could be great and an "almost hard" mode wouldn't have hurt (looking at you Rock Band/Guitar Hero). There never seems to be enough difficulty modes to suit all players, but I think that's a human issue and not a game one.
Sports sims also do something of the sort and generally have sliders for pretty much every aspect of the game and it's AI. I've never played a sports sim where I couldn't balance the difficulty with my ability (I like them hard, but not punishingly so). Though my son can still kick my ass no matter how often I practice.
Great article, it's something I've been pondering for a while now.
I don't like level scaling but Fallout 3 seemed to get it close to right, whereas Oblivion made me feel like I was running a treadmill.
Checkpoint systems work to an extent. I think you already nailed that one.
The more interesting device I've seen is the "new game +" option. I didn't like it in Dead Rising, but in it's sequel I found it to be quite useful. Especially when you can save anywhere and you're not quite sure which missions are a game over condition upon failure. I guess you could say that Capcom didn't need to balance the game through that system alone, but my perceived differences between the two games means they balanced DR2 much better than DR1.
User scalable difficulty (like: easy, normal/medum, hard, etc...) works sometimes, but more often than not the difference between medium and hard could be great and an "almost hard" mode wouldn't have hurt (looking at you Rock Band/Guitar Hero). There never seems to be enough difficulty modes to suit all players, but I think that's a human issue and not a game one.
Sports sims also do something of the sort and generally have sliders for pretty much every aspect of the game and it's AI. I've never played a sports sim where I couldn't balance the difficulty with my ability (I like them hard, but not punishingly so). Though my son can still kick my ass no matter how often I practice.
Great article, it's something I've been pondering for a while now.
I hate that crap where they make you replay through all the easy parts just to take another crack at where you failed too. It's not fun, it's not challenging, it's just frustrating and I'm more likely to turn the game off in disgust than keep trying. I agree with the article when it says games are here to be fun and entertaining, and when they pull nasty tricks like that they are failing to do their job.
The hack n slash genre contains some of the best examples of difficulty in the business.
Bayonetta did it right.
Devil May Cry always did it right.
Ninja Gaiden fucked it up. Thanks to one of the cameras in the business, and horrid platforming controls.
God of War mostly fucked it up by with imbalanced weaponry, and limited experience. Put too many points into the wrong shit, and you are fucked on God or Titan mode.
And...as a bonus.
Megaman fucks it up really bad. Megaman is hard, and unfair about it. It's all PURELY trial and error. And good difficulty will challenge you, but make it more than possible to beat things on your first try.
Bayonetta did it right.
Devil May Cry always did it right.
Ninja Gaiden fucked it up. Thanks to one of the cameras in the business, and horrid platforming controls.
God of War mostly fucked it up by with imbalanced weaponry, and limited experience. Put too many points into the wrong shit, and you are fucked on God or Titan mode.
And...as a bonus.
Megaman fucks it up really bad. Megaman is hard, and unfair about it. It's all PURELY trial and error. And good difficulty will challenge you, but make it more than possible to beat things on your first try.
Very good read. The subject of difficulty in games is one of those pet-subjects of mine. Mostly because I'm one of those idiots who plays a game to have fun and relax when I don't have anything else to do.
This sometimes means trying to beat one of those hard-as-nails games(Ghosts N' Goblins for the NES still being that-one-game), or sometimes just an easy casual thing like Bejewled/Tetris/Whatever. Ok, "Easy" is a stretch but shut up I'm getting to a point here.
I usually load a game up on Easy if the option's there, atleast first time I play it.
The one thing I hate is people who say that unless you play a game on the hardest-possible difficulty it's not really playing it.
"It's how it's MENT to be played".
If that was true, I wouldn't have the option to change the difficulty.
Some games really are too easy though.
Like BioShock which I picked up on that steam-sale over halloween(Still blame Spoiler Warning for oddly enough making me want it).
Doing my usual thing I loaded the game up on Easy for my first crack at it and... Usually that would mean dying once or twice but I've honestly only died once. On purpose. To fast-travel. That was... very disappointing.
Games that just arbitrarily kill you for no good reason on the other hand are twice as annoying. And there I can name quite a few. Like Evil Dead: Fistful of Boomsticks. I really hate that game.
This sometimes means trying to beat one of those hard-as-nails games(Ghosts N' Goblins for the NES still being that-one-game), or sometimes just an easy casual thing like Bejewled/Tetris/Whatever. Ok, "Easy" is a stretch but shut up I'm getting to a point here.
I usually load a game up on Easy if the option's there, atleast first time I play it.
The one thing I hate is people who say that unless you play a game on the hardest-possible difficulty it's not really playing it.
"It's how it's MENT to be played".
If that was true, I wouldn't have the option to change the difficulty.
Some games really are too easy though.
Like BioShock which I picked up on that steam-sale over halloween(Still blame Spoiler Warning for oddly enough making me want it).
Doing my usual thing I loaded the game up on Easy for my first crack at it and... Usually that would mean dying once or twice but I've honestly only died once. On purpose. To fast-travel. That was... very disappointing.
Games that just arbitrarily kill you for no good reason on the other hand are twice as annoying. And there I can name quite a few. Like Evil Dead: Fistful of Boomsticks. I really hate that game.
you just reminded me of why i love "auto save"
remember playing Resident Evil 1 or 2 or even 3, when you forgot to save once?? and you died, and 4 frikken hours of progress where send into oblivion???
that´s some nasty way of making a game "hard" also the limited saves were stupid, only if you had the damn ink ribbon you could save and it took a whole space you could use for more guns or something
that made the game a particular kind of hard, unforgiving, ugly hard.
remember playing Resident Evil 1 or 2 or even 3, when you forgot to save once?? and you died, and 4 frikken hours of progress where send into oblivion???
that´s some nasty way of making a game "hard" also the limited saves were stupid, only if you had the damn ink ribbon you could save and it took a whole space you could use for more guns or something
that made the game a particular kind of hard, unforgiving, ugly hard.
It's true that games can be too hard or too easy, and the nuances between the two can be subtle.
But in this day and age I think it's time for even the blossoming new producers to stop doing the redundant crap like save points, checkpoints that are far too spread, etc. That stuff's not hard to work around with the technology.
But in this day and age I think it's time for even the blossoming new producers to stop doing the redundant crap like save points, checkpoints that are far too spread, etc. That stuff's not hard to work around with the technology.
As far as those bad checkpoints go, I've lost count on how many times the Halo games screwed me over with that on Legendary difficulty. For example, in Halo 3 I was on a mission, trying to have my AI partner kill a scarab with his rocket launcher, while I was driving a mongoose. I was blown of a cliff by a brute, and got a checkpoint just before I died, and this was right at the end of the mission!
Also, in Reach I had to kill a bunch of incredibly powerfull elites with a full rocket launcher and an almost empty DMR. I got a checkpoint, tried killing the elites with my rockets for about 10 minutes, died, reloaded, repeated this process like 5 times, then I got the smart idea of trying to shoot down the Phantom before it dropped them off. All my rockets hit the Phantom, it didn't do any damage, and right after my last rocket hit the Phantom, I got a checkpoint. Impossible mission became even more impossible
.
Also, in Reach I had to kill a bunch of incredibly powerfull elites with a full rocket launcher and an almost empty DMR. I got a checkpoint, tried killing the elites with my rockets for about 10 minutes, died, reloaded, repeated this process like 5 times, then I got the smart idea of trying to shoot down the Phantom before it dropped them off. All my rockets hit the Phantom, it didn't do any damage, and right after my last rocket hit the Phantom, I got a checkpoint. Impossible mission became even more impossible
.
"The game wasn't challenging, it was just punishing. Stupidly, horribly, punishing."
..try again, Shamus. At the time the game was an evolution of the narrative-less never-ending arcade action, and it renewed that without disappearing off the scale completely. I.e., instead forcing you to use cheat-codes to ever get to the end of the game, it had endless lives. That in itself made it "easy".
So to pressure you ahead, you had the 60 minutes before the hourglass ran out. Which really is more than good enough time. But it's likely that people will have to try the game a few times before they are capable of completing it. Compared to other games at the time, though - it was an easy game, and it was designed that way to ensure that people managed to play all the way through it.
Sands of Time was very similar - it drove you ahead in the story, and had difficult battles sometimes in between that would actually challenge anyone. Until they would become good enough at mastering the game that it looked beautiful when you did beat it.
Warrior Within was another good game in that sense. Unlike God of War, which is simply punishing because it gives you no good way to actually defeat your enemies on the higher difficulty-levels, and sets "challenges" for you that are almost impossible to beat without strategic use of the super-power button (there's an escape button you can hit, that charges up once in a decade) - Warrior Within actually gave you the tools and the techniques to win the fights - convincingly, without the bullshit moves. Which of course, once again, helped pace the game through the many story-driven segments.
But both of those games were reviewed by the usual console-press at the time - the people who can not imagine games actually taking much effort to make, and that are simply made to be entertainment. These are the folks that look at Mario and think it's entertaining because it's simple - and fail to understand how much thought actually goes into making the objects interact with each other in the right way, the models skid along with impossible (but believable) physics.
And the same continues now - there's a lot of people who just latch on to something "because it just works" - and let the advertisement campaign decide for them what resonates with "fans". The result being, just as you describe here - that good games are thought to be wrong in all kinds of ways. Sands of Time now suddenly being "too easy" for "real gamers".. seriously, where does that come from? To it also being too hard for the casuals (which it definitively is not, if you compare it to Assassin's Creed or God of War.
There's another part of this that affects "difficulty" as well. In some games, the difficulty is in cheating the mechanics. God of War is a game like that. You can hit things with your blades through other monsters - and finding out when the attack-animations trigger is how you end up beating it. In the same way, the game actually has several uninterruptable attacks by monsters when they attack in series. This happens several times throughout the series - a difficult monster turns up, and their super-attack is possible to defend against once. But if there are two monsters like that, the second attack will happen before you can reset your guard - and therefore you will be hit.
There have been several attempts to solve this problem in different games. God of War gave you the escape-button with the super-power. Assassin's Creed let people stand around you and wait their turn to hit you with the sword.
Sands of Time, just like Warrior Within - just didn't put you in a situation where you could be defeated, and where that would clearly be the result of a cheap move, or a failed mechanic.
And that's something entirely different than adjusting "difficulty". This has to do with making a difficult problem solvable. Or simply making a difficult fight seem difficult - as well as rewarding to win.
..try again, Shamus. At the time the game was an evolution of the narrative-less never-ending arcade action, and it renewed that without disappearing off the scale completely. I.e., instead forcing you to use cheat-codes to ever get to the end of the game, it had endless lives. That in itself made it "easy".
So to pressure you ahead, you had the 60 minutes before the hourglass ran out. Which really is more than good enough time. But it's likely that people will have to try the game a few times before they are capable of completing it. Compared to other games at the time, though - it was an easy game, and it was designed that way to ensure that people managed to play all the way through it.
Sands of Time was very similar - it drove you ahead in the story, and had difficult battles sometimes in between that would actually challenge anyone. Until they would become good enough at mastering the game that it looked beautiful when you did beat it.
Warrior Within was another good game in that sense. Unlike God of War, which is simply punishing because it gives you no good way to actually defeat your enemies on the higher difficulty-levels, and sets "challenges" for you that are almost impossible to beat without strategic use of the super-power button (there's an escape button you can hit, that charges up once in a decade) - Warrior Within actually gave you the tools and the techniques to win the fights - convincingly, without the bullshit moves. Which of course, once again, helped pace the game through the many story-driven segments.
But both of those games were reviewed by the usual console-press at the time - the people who can not imagine games actually taking much effort to make, and that are simply made to be entertainment. These are the folks that look at Mario and think it's entertaining because it's simple - and fail to understand how much thought actually goes into making the objects interact with each other in the right way, the models skid along with impossible (but believable) physics.
And the same continues now - there's a lot of people who just latch on to something "because it just works" - and let the advertisement campaign decide for them what resonates with "fans". The result being, just as you describe here - that good games are thought to be wrong in all kinds of ways. Sands of Time now suddenly being "too easy" for "real gamers".. seriously, where does that come from? To it also being too hard for the casuals (which it definitively is not, if you compare it to Assassin's Creed or God of War.
There's another part of this that affects "difficulty" as well. In some games, the difficulty is in cheating the mechanics. God of War is a game like that. You can hit things with your blades through other monsters - and finding out when the attack-animations trigger is how you end up beating it. In the same way, the game actually has several uninterruptable attacks by monsters when they attack in series. This happens several times throughout the series - a difficult monster turns up, and their super-attack is possible to defend against once. But if there are two monsters like that, the second attack will happen before you can reset your guard - and therefore you will be hit.
There have been several attempts to solve this problem in different games. God of War gave you the escape-button with the super-power. Assassin's Creed let people stand around you and wait their turn to hit you with the sword.
Sands of Time, just like Warrior Within - just didn't put you in a situation where you could be defeated, and where that would clearly be the result of a cheap move, or a failed mechanic.
And that's something entirely different than adjusting "difficulty". This has to do with making a difficult problem solvable. Or simply making a difficult fight seem difficult - as well as rewarding to win.
Always nice to see people making stupid assumptions out of the blue.9_6 said:
I can name plenty of games off the top of my head that managed the balancing act of having easy-mode present a decent enough challenge without being insultingly simple.
First time I play a game I just want to try it out, see what the story's about, learn the mechanics, so on. Then I replay it on a harder difficulty and go from there. It's easier for me to judge if I like a game or not if I'm not getting punked out every time I stick my head around a corner, making me insta-reload.
I don't know if you're aware of this but, some of us play games to have fun.
I must be the only person who enjoyed the combat in Sands of Time. It was simple to pick up and tricky to master, but otherwise felt nice and fluid. The only fight in the game I had trouble with was against sandzombie-daddy, because I'd fucked up some trap dodging right before and been checkpointed at the beginning of the fight with near no health and next to several guys with really big swords. And some silly tart firing arrows at me half the time and getting smacked up the other half.
I loved the 2008 PoP though, with the only game design in it I don't like being the combats eventual reliance on QTEs. Especially against the King, where sometimes I couldn't hit the button fast enough to win them. The combat was otherwise ok. It's just when you hit the 3rd or 4th fight tier on a boss they would usually hit you with a string of QTEs which, if failed, would dump you on your ass and give them their health back. And then god forbid you don't hit them quickly enough after passing through the quick-time quagmire, as the fuckers don't hesitate to start all over again.
Aside from that part of the combat, it was a great game. No idea what's wrong with the people who complain that you can't die. Like I have no idea why they complained about those chambers in Bioshock. If you don't like the mechanic, so what? You shouldn't be relying on it anyway. Never play a game expecting death and so treating lives as an easy commodity. I hate dying in games, even if I know I have a quicksave a few minutes ago. Just exercise a bit of willpower to realise that, while you will be 'saved' at the last minute before death, you should still be avoiding that outcome.
I loved the 2008 PoP though, with the only game design in it I don't like being the combats eventual reliance on QTEs. Especially against the King, where sometimes I couldn't hit the button fast enough to win them. The combat was otherwise ok. It's just when you hit the 3rd or 4th fight tier on a boss they would usually hit you with a string of QTEs which, if failed, would dump you on your ass and give them their health back. And then god forbid you don't hit them quickly enough after passing through the quick-time quagmire, as the fuckers don't hesitate to start all over again.
Aside from that part of the combat, it was a great game. No idea what's wrong with the people who complain that you can't die. Like I have no idea why they complained about those chambers in Bioshock. If you don't like the mechanic, so what? You shouldn't be relying on it anyway. Never play a game expecting death and so treating lives as an easy commodity. I hate dying in games, even if I know I have a quicksave a few minutes ago. Just exercise a bit of willpower to realise that, while you will be 'saved' at the last minute before death, you should still be avoiding that outcome.
Why has no-one mentioned Super Meat Boy in these "difficulty" articles? It's the best example of "pure" difficulty this year, hardcore without being overwhelming or frustrating. I mean, I know it's an indie game but I thought it'd get way more coverage on the Escapist than this.