Death of difficulty in games.

[Avaholic03]

I decided to pick up Madden 25 (Shut up I like football) cause why not? I played the game for 1 hour and found it to be too easy. I kicked up the difficulty up a notch and guess what? It didn't make the the opponents smarter, it made my guys dumber. I would get intercepted cause my guy would be too stupid to know where the ball was and the AI looked out for my ball more than my own damn team! And this is something that has pissed me off about modern gaming. The lack of difficulty in games. In my opinion a difficult game is one that makes you think over your strategies and forces you to push harder. Not making an enemy that take 100,000 bullets to kill, but one that can outsmart me and force me to do better. I can't remember that many modern games that are difficult. I don't know. Is it just me? Or are games getting easier? What do you think?

Don't generalize just because the AI in one game sucks. It's not like older games had better AI...they were difficult because they just threw a bunch of nearly impossible situations at you. That's because they were based on arcade games that were designed to suck quarters rather than necessarily being enjoyable. Now, with games designed for home players who aren't going to cough up money every time they die, the emphasis is on getting the player to enjoy the game so that they'll buy the sequel, rather than punishing them for not being perfect.

Also, the problem with game AI is that there's a limited amount of compute cycles per second, as well as a limited time and money budget for game development. If you devote more effort and CPU processing to AI, then you take it away from graphics, level design, etc. It's very hard to justify sinking resources into improved AI that not every player is even going to notice.

 

[WouldYouKindly]

We'll get a lot better AI once the new consoles launch. More processing power to be used to fuck around with you in increasingly more intelligent ways.

Games relatively descended from arcade games which were designed to be as difficult as possible so kids would keep feeding the machine money. This is why nintendo hard was(nintendo games are now not really difficult) a thing. It was the only way they knew how to design games. These days, game designers typically want everyone to be able to experience all the content they bought, so games have variable difficulty. Admittedly, many games even on the hardest difficulty can still be fairly easy. The ones that aren't are often artificially difficult. Even PC games, who don't have the excuse of a lack of processing power, can fall victim to this. Happens in the Total War series. On harder difficulties, the AI is no more clever, it just makes better troops and they get ridiculous morale buffs.

 

[Abomination]

I would rather not have to replay content I have already passed again and again before I am able to attempt content I could not.

The part that is difficult is the important part. Having to repeat areas I have passed is quite literally a waste of my time and a game that does that to me will find me not purchasing more of its ilk.

A game should test skill, not patience.

Translation; savescumming should be a feature.

Part of the challenge is being able to do a complete run without dying. Being able to do one small part once on a lucky try doesn't make you capable of doing the whole thing decently. If it's too hard you turn down the difficulty.

Yes, savescumming should be a feature. If you don't want to savescum then don't savescum.

I don't have any issue of 'gaming pride' when I play games to enjoy them. If I'm not enjoying them and I can identify why I'm not enjoying them then by all means I'm going to want to save scum.

Just turn down the difficulty isn't an answer when you want to defeat a boss on the hardest difficulty but do not want to have to slog through all the trash before him. The trash isn't important, that's why it's called trash.

 

[FireAza]

I personally don't miss it. Sure, I don't like games that are a total cake walk, but I don't have the patience or time for games that require you to die over and over and over and over and over again before you finally beat the level. So for me, a lot of classic NES games are right out, along with modern games like Super Meat Boy. I have too many games to play, I can be wasting my time getting no where fast on a single title, especially if it's going to frustrate me in the process.

What we're all forgetting is the main reason old games were hard is because they had to be. Due to both storage limitations and small dev teams, games with 100+ hours of content were just not possible. And consumers would be pissed off if the $100 game they just brought was over in a few hours, so you had to make them last. Making them baby-punchingly hard was the easiest solution.

 

[Souplex]

Funnily enough, I saw this thread while playing a new game of Dark Souls that I started after giving up playing impossible on XCOM because I simply couldn't hit anything in-between getting critical'd across the map by the starting aliens and decided I needed to play something more forgiving.

 

[WanderingFool]

I decided to pick up Madden 25 (Shut up I like football) cause why not? I played the game for 1 hour and found it to be too easy. I kicked up the difficulty up a notch and guess what? It didn't make the the opponents smarter, it made my guys dumber. I would get intercepted cause my guy would be too stupid to know where the ball was and the AI looked out for my ball more than my own damn team! And this is something that has pissed me off about modern gaming. The lack of difficulty in games. In my opinion a difficult game is one that makes you think over your strategies and forces you to push harder. Not making an enemy that take 100,000 bullets to kill, but one that can outsmart me and force me to do better. I can't remember that many modern games that are difficult. I don't know. Is it just me? Or are games getting easier? What do you think?

Honestly, I cant think of a single game that has the enemy AI actually get smarter with difficulty increase. Usually its just make the player die fast/ make the enemy take more bullets/ add various amounts of "The Computer Is a Cheating Bastard" [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheComputerIsACheatingBastard].

Also, older games are not harder than modern games, it just seems that way. IMO, most of the older games, the difficulty was there because without it, games would be done in 20 minutes.

Me, I dont care for trying to show off by playing a game on the hardest difficulty. Im playing the game to be entertained. And that means playing it on a high difficulty so as to be challenging, but not punishing or annoying. So you will almost never see my with any achievments for better COD on Harden or Halo on Legendary, or any other game with some max difficulty.

 

[Ihateregistering1]

I decided to pick up Madden 25 (Shut up I like football) cause why not? I played the game for 1 hour and found it to be too easy. I kicked up the difficulty up a notch and guess what? It didn't make the the opponents smarter, it made my guys dumber. I would get intercepted cause my guy would be too stupid to know where the ball was and the AI looked out for my ball more than my own damn team! And this is something that has pissed me off about modern gaming. The lack of difficulty in games. In my opinion a difficult game is one that makes you think over your strategies and forces you to push harder. Not making an enemy that take 100,000 bullets to kill, but one that can outsmart me and force me to do better. I can't remember that many modern games that are difficult. I don't know. Is it just me? Or are games getting easier? What do you think?

You have to look at it from a designer and programmer's point of view as well: it's WAY easier to change the program and simply increase the enemy's health on each difficulty setting than it is to program new AI routines for each level of difficulty.

For the most part, I find game difficulty to be relatively good these days. There's only a handful of games where I beat it on the hardest difficulty and said to myself "really, that's as hard as it can be?". Sure we can look back with rose-colored glasses at ye olden days of Nintendo games, where some games were so difficult that you had only heard a legend of some kid who had actually beaten it, because no one else could. That was cool when we were six, but now the idea of spending $60 on a game that I literally can't complete would just be sort of absurd.

To me, the last game I played that I thought had a perfect difficulty curve was "X-Com: Enemy Unknown", because it was hard enough that you relished your victories, agonized over your defeats, and had more moments of "oh God if this doesn't work I'm screwed" than any game I can remember.

 

[Yopaz]

I recently completed Tales of Graces F on hard. I originally tried to beat the game on Evil, the second hardest difficulty. Evil was brutal. I died in normal encounters several times. Bosses were extremely hard, but I did somehow manage. Then there's Chaos... I managed to win a few of the normal encounters by a hair. It was insanely hard.

It changes the move pattern and attack patterns on the enemies a little while also increasing their attack, defence and health.

 

[Erttheking]

I find it kinda funny because a few hours ago I was ready to blow my top because I had just lost an hour's worth of grinding in Persona 4 when one enemy hit me with an attack that took my health down to 1 and then another guy blew up. There are hard games out there, you just need to know what you look. It doesn't help that most of us have been doing this for years and we've gotten pretty good at it. I recall plenty of people not liking Dark Souls because it was too crushing, make every game like that and the gaming audience will be reduced to a fraction of what it is.

 

[Rack]

I would rather not have to replay content I have already passed again and again before I am able to attempt content I could not.

The part that is difficult is the important part. Having to repeat areas I have passed is quite literally a waste of my time and a game that does that to me will find me not purchasing more of its ilk.

A game should test skill, not patience.

Translation; savescumming should be a feature.

Part of the challenge is being able to do a complete run without dying. Being able to do one small part once on a lucky try doesn't make you capable of doing the whole thing decently. If it's too hard you turn down the difficulty.

Yes, savescumming should be a feature. If you don't want to savescum then don't savescum.

I don't have any issue of 'gaming pride' when I play games to enjoy them. If I'm not enjoying them and I can identify why I'm not enjoying them then by all means I'm going to want to save scum.

Just turn down the difficulty isn't an answer when you want to defeat a boss on the hardest difficulty but do not want to have to slog through all the trash before him. The trash isn't important, that's why it's called trash.

If the trash doesn't isn't important then it shouldn't exist.

I feel like games design fell into something of a trap with regenerating health. Repeating content is no fun so save points got closer and closer together. Eventually any repetition of content just felt like a waste of time, especially with all the terrible cutscenes and tedious story content jammed into games. But with the tiny distance between checkpoints pretty much anyone can blindly stumble from one checkpoint to the next.

The solution that seems to work best that I've seen is to dial it back a bit and give some space between savepoints. If the content has enough depth then repeating it won't be a chore and if there's an element of resource management between checkpoints then you can't so easily get into a position where you are repeating trivial content over and over before dying to the same difficulty spike. Dark Souls does this really well but it could probably stand to have just a few more bonfires near certain bosses.

 

[BloodSquirrel]

I decided to pick up Madden 25 (Shut up I like football) cause why not? I played the game for 1 hour and found it to be too easy. I kicked up the difficulty up a notch and guess what? It didn't make the the opponents smarter, it made my guys dumber. I would get intercepted cause my guy would be too stupid to know where the ball was and the AI looked out for my ball more than my own damn team! And this is something that has pissed me off about modern gaming. The lack of difficulty in games. In my opinion a difficult game is one that makes you think over your strategies and forces you to push harder. Not making an enemy that take 100,000 bullets to kill, but one that can outsmart me and force me to do better. I can't remember that many modern games that are difficult. I don't know. Is it just me? Or are games getting easier? What do you think?

There's a general decline in the AAA gaming industry of games that focus on having a ludically or kinesthetically pleasing base, substituting instead "cinematic" set pieces and skinner boxes. The gameplay isn't something that's meant to be engaging on its own, it's just a bland base on which to slather cutscenes and an upgrade system.

 

[LAGG]

Here's the truth, in Dave Mark's won words:

http://intrinsicalgorithm.com/IAonAI/2011/06/flanking-and-cover-and-flee-oh-my/

 

[ssgt splatter]

Well, to me, Insane difficutly and Veteren difficutly for Gears of War and Call of Duty are pretty tough and thought provoking. Gears of War more than Call of Duty though since in COD the only real significant change is the fact that the enemy soldiers seem to have a surplus of grenades.

 

[Thr33X]

It's not the fault of the developers that this is the case, contrary to most people's opinions of why AAA cater to the broader audiences...believe it or not it's the players. I'm not sure how many people are aware of this, but earlier this year during a stockholder meeting at Nintendo, this very topic was brought up and current president Satoru Iwata stated that they had to make games easier because people simply couldn't play them.

Source:
http://www.p4rgaming.com/majority-of-gamers-today-cant-finish-level-1-in-super-mario-bros/

But if you don't wanna read through that, basically the did a research playtest with "modern" gamers of Super Mario Bros. 1, and 90% (90 PERCENT!!!!!!) of them couldn't even get past Stage 1-1. 70% of that number died TO THE FIRST GOOMBA. 50% of that 70% died TWICE. Many thought the coins were enemies and avoided them, and many even complained that there was no in-game tutorial and didn't even know they were playing an already released product (they thought it was some Nintendo 3DS project, and hence complained the graphics were too pixelated). Now bear in mind, every one of the people they used in this test were given the original instruction manual for the game and left to their own devices, and still all but 10% couldn't even get through the first stage (My personal best is like 35 seconds for Stage 1-1)!

This isn't the only case of this dumbing down of games either. In the comments of that article I read of playtesters for Dishonoured not knowing what the hell to do unless they had their hands held...

Source:
http://www.lazygamer.net/xbox-360/without-clues-dishonored-was-too-difficult/

...and of content in Portal 2 that was completely scrapped because playtesters had no idea where to go or what to do. They literally walk around in circles for hours. I mean we all get stuck every now and then in certain games, but not even knowing how to navigate!? After reading this information I can't help but reason with why the "hardcore" gamer hates the "casual" gamer with great vengeance and furious anger. It's as if companies now have to develop to the lowest common denominator, and make games as thoughtless as possible in order to ensure people will play them to completion.

Mind blowing stuff I tell ya.

 

[suitepee7]

just started playing through the witcher 2 now my pc can actually run things, and on hard it's proving to be a fair challenge, and is pretty unforgiving at times

 

[Lightknight]

We should begin to see some improved AI in the coming generation with more hardware. I know games like COD caused bad lag if you turned on all the bots at once with a room full of players.

I will say that it is more important that games have a truly easy mode than it is that they have a true hard mode. Especially games that are story driven with excellent writing.

 

[Bombiz]

Total War has some cheap tricks at least in Medieval 2. I would Kill an enemy faction and immediately after they would spawn a horde out of the same city i just conquered. It makes no sense at all. If the faction is going to spawn a Horde it should at least take a couple of turns and not spawn from the city i just conquered.

 

[laide234]

Don't generalize. Difficulty will vary on a case-by-case basis.

I beat The Last of Us on Hard and found Survivor to be a walk in the park - albeit with less ammo.
I beat Mass Effect 2 on Veteran and almost threw my controller through my TV an hour into my Insanity play-through. Ignoring the fact that the enemies actually wore shields and used powers (like you would do), the enemy spawn points were now random. The AI would also draw my fire and then flank my position.

If you haven't, you should Try Mass Effect 2 on Insanity. Difficulty in games is alive and well.

 

[Thr33X]

Don't generalize. Difficulty will vary on a case-by-case basis.

I beat The Last of Us on Hard and found Survivor to be a walk in the park - albeit with less ammo.
I beat Mass Effect 2 on Veteran and almost threw my controller through my TV an hour into my Insanity play-through. Ignoring the fact that the enemies actually wore shields and used powers (like you would do), the enemy spawn points were now random. The AI would also draw my fire and then flank my position.

If you haven't, you should Try Mass Effect 2 on Insanity. Difficulty in games is alive and well.

Both of the cases you point out are OPTIONAL scenarios. We're talking about a game that challenges you on it's base level without having to unlock particularly more difficult settings to do so.