Artificial Difficulty: Biggest Offenders

[Razzle Bathbone]

IMO, Dead Rising is the biggest offender of this I've ever played. I mean, to quote Yahtzee, there's something wrong with a katana that breaks in five or six hits.

Well, what do you expect from a "katana" you found at the mall? Not exactly Hattori Hanzo.

Besides, the need to continuously seek out new improvised weapons is part of the whole zombie apocalypse schtick, and making the weapons disposable allows for differentiation in danger level between areas. So areas rich in weapons are safer than places like, say, the food court. Ugh. Challenging, but not cheating.

Unlike, say, the stuff on that page The Franco was kind enough to link us to.

 

[GloatingSwine]

Here [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty], and also Here [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheComputerIsACheatingBastard] are some prime examples.

 

[Sib]

A lot of capitol offenders have been cataloged here:
http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheComputerIsACheatingBastard

But with that link hopefully placing you deep in nostalgia here is my most hated/favorite Bullshit AI moment:

Mario Party. My friends will hoot and holler to no end when they win, and ***** for hours when they lose. Keep in mind that winning and losing is complete fucking chance in Mario Party unless you're actively trying to lose.

Another troper here on the escapist?

 

[ResidentEman]

I have to respectfully disagree. You have any idea how much you have to go through to get that stupid thing? You have to work between missions to go to only one store on the second floor in the middle of fucking nowhere! And the sad part is, yeah the katana kills in one hit, but knives that kill in 2 or 3 last longer than it! And if it's sharp enough to actually cut through bone and sinew, than obviously it is a high quality katana, so I have to disagree with you on that point also.

 

[Lukeje]

Three words; "Fucking Blue Shells" (quote stolen from xkcd.com)

 

[cleverlymadeup]

1) Grand Theft Auto (1, 2, 3, Vice City and San Andreas): The controls suck, the cars are too weak and the autolock frequently targets the wrong foe. You often end up dying four or five times on a mission because of something stupid, like a random car drives into the intersection during a crucial car chase and destroys you, or the cops are in the wrong place at the wrong time while your doing a mission and you get a 3 star rating like that because of it. GTA has too many random elements and while they do increase the difficulty, the frustration is much greater than the fun. These are not good challenges, these are ANNOYING challenges.

the thing that bugged me about san andreas the most was the cheating the computer could do in the races. i ran a couple of the cars off the cliff and still had to hit all the check points to win the race but the cpu cars didn't have to do that

cept for the targeting the cops being there ads to the fun of it and the randomness makes it a bit closer to real life

 

[fix-the-spade]

It had to happen sooner or later so...
Halo 3.

Most of the levels are filled with spamming/regenerating one-hit-kills-you oponents. Fine until you realise there are more of them than you have amunition for and the best way to progress is simply to run past them and rely on luck.

Its not an issue with broken controls or gameplay, just lazy design.


But by far the worst offender is Need for Speed underground 1 & 2.

You would be driving a perfect race, leading by a good 20 seconds in the last section of the last lap.
Then at a cross roads a car would come out and blindside you, at the same time the computer gets an F1 car and you end up last.
Fine except the crossroad was clear when you entered it, you couldn't see the car coming, you couldn't predict it and you couldn't possibly avoid it.
On NFSU 1 this happened to me around 8 times in a row on diferent sections every time, always an impact on the rear quarter that you couldn't see coming.
The race was against a white RX-7 and thats as far as I got before the game was sent back because it "kept crashing"...

 

[MindBullets]

This is sort of tied in to the ongoing debate about MBS on the Starcraft 2 forums. For the uninformed, MBS is Multiple Building Selection, mechanic that isn't in Starcraft, is in Warcraft 3 and may be in Starcraft 2.

Opponents of its inclusion in SC2 say that having to click more to create many units of the same type increases the amount of skill required to play the game and is therefore vital in making SC2 a successful competitive game. Those in favour of MBS say that this is utter bollocks, as you aren't fighting your opponent, you're fighting the interface.

I'm for MBS, and as such am of the opinion that its absence would be a perfect example of artificial difficulty.

 

[fnph]

The Pokemon games are massive culprits of this. The Gym leaders and Elite 4 have this amazing ability to make their pokemon hit with stupidly powerful, but innacurate moves every time.

 

[Gilgamesh999]

What, no hatin' for Prince of Persia? Talk about cheapest enemies ever. They wait specifically for you to launch into one of those ridiculous five-minute-long combat animations. Then they stack 82 enemies on top of you for no reason. Having a shit-ton of enemies is not upping the difficulty. It's just upping the cheese.

 

[Squarewave]

I stopped playing super mario galaxy about 24 stars in when it became clear the only enemy in that game was the camera.

Another artificial challenged is any game that has snipers that can kill you in one hit. You'll just be walking along then just fall over dead, you'll run back try to find the sniper only to fall over dead again, this goes on for 4-5 saves before you finally find the guy. At least HL2 was nice enough to have the red lazer thing to show you there was snipers around

 

[Singing Gremlin]

Oho, the COD series are guilty of this! Especially COD 3. On vet, rather than just die quicker, the enemies will utterly ignore any friendlies that might be spread right across the map, standing up in plain view, and shoot the 1 square inch of your prone form that just wiggled faintly into sight over a tussock, hurl more grenades than they have digits, and open fire with their homing freakin' bullets at you.

It drove me nuts.

 

[OneHP]

Star Wars Battlefront.

When I up the difficulty I expect all the AI to get better not just the opposing side, and leave my side running round like headless chickens.

 

[Pyro Paul]

GTA 4 has some fake or artificial difficulty in it during some of the chase missions. the car you are chasing is often set on a scripted path and is unable to divate from this path until you reach a scripted end.

the person your chasing will always be faster with you, even if the car he is in is acctually slower than the one you are in at that moment. (chasing an armored car with a SuperGT... and the armored car is out running me...) they will have 100% push, meaning they won't slow or stop when hitting something, but rather push that thing out of the way. 100% control, even with all 4 tires blown, he will drive with prefection. and often complete immunity to all forms of fire as often seen with bike chases where you can easily shoot the rider off of the bike. and after chasing this guy on the bike and unloading 1500 SMG rounds and 700 Pistol rounds Into him he is still riding and out running me on his scooter as i try and keep up with my import preformance motorcycle...

 

[MRMIdAS2k]

GTA 4 has some fake or artificial difficulty in it during some of the chase missions. the car you are chasing is often set on a scripted path and is unable to divate from this path until you reach a scripted end.

the person your chasing will always be faster with you, even if the car he is in is acctually slower than the one you are in at that moment. (chasing an armored car with a SuperGT... and the armored car is out running me...) they will have 100% push, meaning they won't slow or stop when hitting something, but rather push that thing out of the way. 100% control, even with all 4 tires blown, he will drive with prefection. and often complete immunity to all forms of fire as often seen with bike chases where you can easily shoot the rider off of the bike. and after chasing this guy on the bike and unloading 1500 SMG rounds and 700 Pistol rounds Into him he is still riding and out running me on his scooter as i try and keep up with my import preformance motorcycle...

The best bit is, when said car is important (IE. DON'T blow the fucker up) it's entirely possible to completely fuck the mission that way.

I was charged with getting somthing back for my employee, the easiest way I figured would be to kill the bastard who has it by setting his car on fire, thus causing him to abandon the thing where he'd be easy pickings.

No.

He stays in the car, like the dumbass he is and gets blown to kingdom come via his own stupidity.

 

[CatcherJJ]

Oho, the COD series are guilty of this! Especially COD 3. On vet, rather than just die quicker, the enemies will utterly ignore any friendlies that might be spread right across the map, standing up in plain view, and shoot the 1 square inch of your prone form that just wiggled faintly into sight over a tussock, hurl more grenades than they have digits, and open fire with their homing freakin' bullets at you.

It drove me nuts.

Some of the most true words ever typed. COD 2 and 4 aren't bad, but 3 was actually unplayable on veteran. Just moving in that game was disgusting. You couldn't move a fucking foot from cover without getting no-scope ball-shotted from every goddam Nazi in Normandy. And even if you did stay behind cover, they would throw so many grenades at you the entire screen would become a grenade indicator. One of the most frustrating games ever. And it wasn't even good.

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

Lots of interesting examples, and I was unaware that there was an article devoted to this phenomena.

One that is sort of on the line here, but is a personal pet peeve, are bosses in RPG's which require grinding. While I suppose leveling is important, strategy should be more so and requiring the player to be level xx when fighting a certain boss is rediculous and all it does is make the game pointlessly difficult and waste the players time with pointless leveling. Also the "Level 5" Death bosses in some Final Fantasy games can suck it!

 

[Nevada2444]

Halo One when you had to go back through the same levels. I hated that. Although the feeling of 'imma d00m3d zomg' was pretty cool in the library level where with each floor that's passed you're praying for it to end but secretly wanting moar of the same action. It's so bang on the verge of being absolutely impossible that you just love every minute of surviving and progressing through it. Reminds me of HL.

 

[Aethonic]

Another troper here on the escapist?

It's more than twice as likely as you think!

Anyone here played Armored Core? AC Nexus has the most soul-crushingly artificial difficulty in any game ever. Except maybe Red Faction 2, what with the explosive suicide spiders, infinitely respawning zombies, and bosses that kill in 3 hits and die in 300.

 

[tiredinnuendo]

I have to respectfully disagree. You have any idea how much you have to go through to get that stupid thing? You have to work between missions to go to only one store on the second floor in the middle of fucking nowhere! And the sad part is, yeah the katana kills in one hit, but knives that kill in 2 or 3 last longer than it! And if it's sharp enough to actually cut through bone and sinew, than obviously it is a high quality katana, so I have to disagree with you on that point also.

There was a katana on top of an awning right outside Roastmasters. Right at the beginning.

Not saying that the game was perfect, just saying, in case you wanted to play it again or something.

- J