Cheap Attacks on Hard Difficulty

[Scabadus]

I've made my Insanity playthrough on the Mass Effects over the past few weeks and have moved on to S.T.A.- STALKER and it's sequal, and I've noticed that the games do one thing almost exactly oppositly: cheap attacks.

Mass Effect (1) was full of very cheap attacks on Insanity; people would levitate me off the ground helpless for a good ten seconds at a time, shots would blow me out of cover and hit me through cover and those darn snipers would insta-kill you in the beginning levels (though at least you got warning they were about to fire, looking at you Halo 2: 'Off the rock, Through the bush, Nothing but Jackel'). And so I reloaded a lot from autosaves that were, frankly, crap and from quicksaves yo couldn't use in battle and hence were even more crap and eventually won the game and got the girl (the second bit was actually an accident, long story).

And so I grudgingly booted up Steam again and started up Mass Effect 2, expecting a few more hours of keyboard-punishing frustration. I was plesently surprised. The insanity difficulty really showed up the faults in the game (the amount of times I vaulted over cover instead of diving behind it...) however these were faults in the programming, human errors instead of somebody planning and coding an attack that effectivly instantly killed you.

The STALKER games do, as I said earlier, almost exactly the opposite. I don't normally play games on hard difficulty or online, a good medium against the computer is what I find fun and STALKER was no different. Medium difficulty. And it was hard. You had to scrounge every rouple possible at first, scavange weapons and negotiate dangerous landscapes. you'd kill a man hoping he has a single bandage, or a handful of bullets, of a bottle of vodka on his corpse. Then, as the game progressed, you start getting a nice little hoard of bullets and med kits set up. You have some money. After a difficult mission you restock from your stashes and save money, knowing that overall you've got more items coming in than going out. And it was damn satisfying.

STALKER: Quick Loa- erm, Clear Sky goes back to what Mass Effect 1 did: enemies can hit you over rediculous distances and for a lot of damage, they can take a Spaz-12 round to the face at five feet and your character appears to have some sort of gravitational field around him that make bullets fly off at random angles instead of down the damn barrel of the gun. Then there are the anomolies (that's not spelt right, but it's my third go and it's not getting better), nigh invisible areas of deadly radiation and forces that can rip you apart. Instantly. Stumble into one of these and you're a dead man (you can't choose your gender or indeed customise your character at all, so that's justified). Well, you would be a dead man, but after five minutes of Clear Sky you learn to quick save so often that it's like you have the dagger of time strapped onto your belt. Dead again? Rewind. Shot in the head by a pistol at 200 meters? Rewind. Stepped into a whirlygig and insta-died? Rew... you get the picture.

This quicksave, die, quickload, die, quickload, die, quickload, success attitude is not fun, and it's not challenging. There are two points in Clear Sky that strip you of all of your items and equipment unless you (surprise!) quickload back a few seconds and drop it all before it happens. This is not good gameplay, this is not inventive, it's not a struggle. It's not a particularly clever level because you have to switch styles until you get your equipment back. And most importenttly, so importently I'm going to repeat myself, it's not FUN! I can press the F11 key all day long if I want to and I don't have to spend £30 for the privilage. Heck if I put my mind to it I could even rig up a program that said "You Fail" 90% of the time and "You Win!" the other 10% if I had the mind to. But I havn't had the mind to do that, I've given my money to another company and I expect something more.

So I believe I've made my views on cheap attacks abundently clear, what about you? Are they an excusable option to make a game hard? Should they only be excusable on the very hardest difficulty? Or should the developers spend their time working on challenging game play that's possible to beat the first time, instead of memorising the map by suicide cartography? Not that I'm trying to influence your desision or anything, oh no....

 

[Lord Beautiful]

It should never be excusable. When a player dies in spite of doing nothing wrong, that indicates pitiful decisions on behalf of the designers.

For example, let's look at Ninja Gaiden II. Is it your fault you died because a bunch of explosives were just launched at you from off-camera? No. It's Team Ninja's fault for not doing its job right.

 

[Ironic Pirate]

I have this problem with many boss fights, they're just cheap. I can't tell you how many times other cars in racing games suddenly shoot ahead as soon as you get to close, "Oh, THAT'S the gas pedal. Alright" *vroom*

 

[Alarien]

This is why I liked Demon's Souls vs. other games that think they are "hard."

Programmers frequently mistake the concept of "bad coding" and "shitty controls" for difficulty.

Very few games really nail the difference between frustrating difficulty and frustrating stupidity. I didn't really care a lot for Bayonetta, but I would definitely say that that game on it's hardest settings really goes for "hard" but gives you all the tools to overcome it, rather than other games like Uncharted, inFamous, and God of War which mistake bad priority coding, sniper bot level super-shooter enemies and general improbability for "hard."

 

[CheckD3]

This is the problem I had with Bioshock, enemies could absorb damage like a rubber man (if anyone gets the reference) and you took a single shot and died...it was just not fun dying every second and having to walk back to the battle to HOPEFULLY kill them this time...

God of War on the hard modes was hard, I concur, having started both games on the hardest setting (God and Titan), and found it controller snappingly frustrating and difficult, but that was because I hadn't yet mastered the combat, so when I did and was flowing combos and dodging rolls with perfect timing, it got easier (until the 2nd part of Ares or when you have to protect the prophet in the games, that's just messed up), and I had fun. Though Dante's Inferno, a literal clone to God of War, had a difficulty curve that was fine on normal until I got to the final area. The section with the blowing winds was horribly difficult and caused me to want to rage quit. But when I finally got it, and got to the final boss, he had an attack that sent a tornado at me and no matter what it hit me about 90% of the time, and bothered me SO much that I HAD to decrease the difficulty to the easiest just to beat the game.

I know games have the option to change difficulty, but you know what, I don't WANT to HAVE to change difficulty because they're too lazy to tighten up gameplay and keep the difficulty curve on track. But changing difficulty mid-game feels like cheating, like in CoD:MW2, where I COULD change the difficulty from Hardened to Easy, but I don't want to, because I CHOSE to play Hardened and no Easy because I wanted a challenge, not my hand held for a walk in the park

 

[BlindMessiah94]

It should never be excusable. When a player dies in spite of doing nothing wrong, that indicates pitiful decisions on behalf of the designers.

Truer words...
I think the whole "select a difficulty" is handled poorly.
Very few games do more than increase enemy health while decreasing yours and increasing the damage you take while decreasing the damage you give.
It's a lazy way to increase difficulty and only makes the game frustrating.
I tried ME1 on Hardcore and gave up after a few hours and switched it back to Normal. Getting sniped or shot by a rocket and insta-dying with no warning whatsoever is not my idea of fun. It got increasingly frustrating since it would pop you back at the beginning of the level, often taking another ten minutes just to get back to where you were. I was getting tired of saving like I had OCD and wanting to throw my controller at the TV.

Then there's a game like Resident Evil 4, which does it well. It keeps the game challenging while still making it playable.

 

[Proteus214]

I don't mind difficult games. I think that completing a challenge can be really rewarding, but I hate it when certain difficulties can be a bit "overtuned." One such example was God of War's God Mode where I got stuck on the final gauntlet in the Temple of Pandora because Rage of the Gods wasn't ready and I didn't have a full magic bar. The worst part was that there was no way to backtrack to remedy the situation. I essentially was backed into a corner and had to start the game all over again.

PS: I HATE HARPIES

 

[Alarien]

The problem with God of War, for me, is bad command priority. A beat-em-up action game's difficulty is only as good as it's ability to give the player the ability to deal and avoid damage, if they are skilled enough. Bayonetta got this. If you are attacking in that game and you hit dodge or block, regardless of what she was doing, Bayonetta would dodge or block, dropping whatever else was going on. That's good command priority because it doesn't dick over the player for deciding to use some sort of slow-wind-up attack and not being able to stop it when an enemy randomly charges into him. Most modern games, even Darksiders, do this pretty well.

God of War doesn't do this. God of War 1 is particularly bad about this in that Kratos only registers a block or a dodge if he's inbetween parts of a combo or doing nothing at all. In God of War 2, I've noticed an improvement. Kratos will pretty much throw a block or dodge as soon as his current animation is up, which is usually pretty quick, however, it means that a lot of more hard hitting abilities, I never use in combat ever, because Kratos has to pause long enough to ponder them, usually resulting in him getting beat down. It would be better if he would simply stop doing it and go into a dodge or block.

Alas, David Jaffe, is one of those self-indulgent developers who is good, but can be so blinded to whether he "should" do something that he stops asking if something in his game is working correct, and whether it is fun, as he ham-handedly smacks down more tedious time-based platforming with endlessly respawning bad guys. Oh, yay for making a 5 hour game artificially longer.