Death of difficulty in games.

Thr33X

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Retrograde said:
Dragons Crown is actually bastard hard in the same way that Dark Souls is, and can be even more punishing if you have to come across a certain bunny after a deep run on a higher difficulty with your bags running low and your gear is close to breaking. Theres rewarding preparation and punishing overextension for your ass.
Screw Honey Badger. KILLER RABBIT don't care. Best boss fight in the whole game.
 

Thr33X

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SilkySkyKitten said:
Oh look, it's this thread again. You know, the one where "hardcore gamers" complain about games being "dumbed down" and "filthy casuals" supposedly "ruining" games...

I'll just post this fantastic Jimquisition episode on the subject and leave it there:
Good video, but would you rather us necro bump an old thread from months ago so you can whine about that as well? It's a forum, people will talk about what they want to. If it's something you've heard before then why not just turn your attention elsewhere?

Oh wait, it's the internet. I forgot.
 

MCerberus

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Three star difficulty rating missions from Payday 2 I think are pretty decently set up (except Ukrainian Job). You need a balanced team, and something WILL go balls up. The guards will freak out if you destroy cameras, civilians will sneak out and call the cops, and at some point you have to 'go loud'. The game tells you what to do but not how to do it.

Good teams will be on their way out or drilling into the vault by the time the cops get word. Bad teams run out of ammo about the time the specials come in.

And surprisingly, Splinter Cell still knows how to hurt me so good.
 

elvor0

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Ehh I've had some ask why dying sends you back, on the basis that "I've already done this, why should I have to start this boss fight again because I died?"

Essentially they wanted every game to be like Fable 3. A game where if you run out of health, you fall over, blast every enemy around you, lose about 4 xp points then get back up again and regain your lost xp by pulling a funny face at the nearest NPC. I ask what is the point in enabling your character to die, if there are no consequences? Why bother with a health bar in the first place, just let em be invincible. Heck, ammo? Infinite! You might run out at a crucial moment otherwise!

I'm all for difficulty settings like in Bayonetta/Mass Effect 3 (baby mode for people who ain't very good or just want to plow through the storyline), but we all know what happens when you turn on God Mode right? Sure it's fun at first, but after a while it becomes pretty stale. There's no tension, no parameters for failure lead to a stale experience.

Of course Kirbys Epic Yarn is the anomaly here, because the way the mechanics and scoring works.

Plus we're all a lot better at games than we were as kids, I'll wager a vast amount of the escapist play on hard due to having played games all their lives, because that's the level that brings it up to what could be considered "normal" difficulty for us. We've all replayed games from our youth remembering certain areas as being hard as nails then breeze through them.

On the flip side of that, Abes Odyssey/Exodus can fucking do one. I have no idea how I managed to get all the Modukons as a kid, those games are SO. FUCKING. HARD.

The Feast said:
I don't know if you guys remember a game called Supreme Commander which have the AI of a Skynet from Terminator. From the PC Gamer, three guys aim to annihilate a single AI opponent but always being outsmart by the strategy that the AI make. AI isn't hard to be apply to games, it's just that game developers always encourage people to make their games easy to beat just so the player doesn't experience frustration, unlike Dark Souls.
Was it actually that intelligent though, or did it just have AI hacks? Most RTS AIs do. Because aside from pro pro pro level players playing against some pretty bad people, I'm not sure how you'd manage to beat 3 people in any RTS. You just wouldn't have the resources, even if you're a micro king, their armies are controlled by 3 people and likely outnumber you 3 to 1 in unit count.
 

josemlopes

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Thr33X said:
laide234 said:
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.
Thank god for optional difficulty, I have been playing Splinter Cell on Perfectionist (the hardest) and loving it but I wouldnt be a douche and force everyone to play on that difficulty.

If you can play like you want why not let others play like they want?

For me the perfect difficulty slider would be from "Way easy that even a 4 year old can beat it" to "So fucking hard that not even the devs know for sure if its possible to beat". There is fun for everyone.
 

Mister Chippy

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I had around the same amount of trouble beat HL on hard mode as I had beating SS3 on normal.

Red faction took only 2 play sessions to complete. I have yet to complete Bioshock Infinite on it's hardest mode.

I beat the original Advanced Wars pretty damned easily. To this day I have not managed to survive more than halfway through Level 14 of Days of Ruin.

Battletoads was and still is completely fucking impossible.

Personally I find that any well designed games not specifically designed to be nearly impossible in order to pad the game time have an fairly equal chance of giving me trouble or being really easy no matter when they were made. One of the reasons that people feel like older games were harder is because they either were very short and padded their difficulty with unfair enemies or they were just poorly designed. Yes, lots of games back then were poorly designed and thats to be expected considering gaming was still kinda new back then (although plenty of the same problems still exist today too :p). They often took longer because you would get lost due to poor level design, and yes if people get lost easily that counts as poor level design no matter how well designed the levels were when it came to other things. Sections only completable through trial and error due to hidden traps with unexplained disarming mechanics, scripted enemy spawns, or because you had to jump into goddamned portals blind when there were some that would just kill you instantly *choughcoughHalfLifecoughcough*.

Not saying that these problems don't exist in games today, just whenever I play a game that I think "wow, this is hard" its normally due to artificial difficulty instead of ingenious design. Also HalfLife is amazing and does lots of things right, but it has no shame in making sections completely impossible to complete the first time around. It normally warns you before you walk into a sniper's line or fire or into a minefield, but it's horrible about actually telling you how to get through them. It also has to be the biggest douche of a game when it comes to spawning enemies in unfair places. It spawns them in your face a few seconds after you turn a corner, behind your back, and surrounding you as you walk down hallways.
 

briankoontz

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There's tons of difficulty in many lower budget games, but very little in high budget games since the design philosophy centers around plot progression, and difficulty hinders the player from progressing through the plot.

Imagine if you were watching a movie and every 5 minutes you had to complete some complex puzzle to be allowed to watch the next 5 minutes. Those movies would not be financially successful.

Lower budget games have the advantages of not necessarily being plot driven in the first place, and secondly even when they are plot driven they don't have to get nearly as many sales to be successful, allowing them more design freedom.

The underlying reason why so many big budget games are plot driven is because plot is content that is not based on difficulty, just like a movie can be watched by anyone with functional eyes.

Dark Souls actually is not a plot driven game, despite there being something of a plot. It's gameplay driven, and that gameplay never stops no matter how much trouble the player might have in plot progression.

Here's just a few examples of difficult lower budget games:

Super Meat Boy
I Wanna Be the Guy series
Rogue Legacy
Hammerwatch
Hotline Miami

Games not focused on plot progression, like chess for example, benefit vastly from being difficult, since difficulty allows for players to feel accomplished when they progress through the game. Gamers are proud to defeat Dark Souls, while noone is proud to defeat Call of Duty, and a grandmaster chess player who wins an international tournament is extremely proud, while someone who wins at tic-tac-toe thinks nothing of it.
 

Evonisia

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ssgt splatter said:
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.
I agree with this. Think AI need to react faster or not be as thick? Play Gears of War 3 on Normal, then Insane, then try to erase the memory of playing that arse campaign and all the times they perfectly align explosives to land by you rather than in an easily dodged area whilst the shooting enemies fire at you.
 

lord.jeff

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I think the reason that games seem so much easier is the throwing away of lives and including regular check points, mistakes are no longer play a level 20X just because one jump is to hard.
 

Glongpre

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suitepee7 said:
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
I enjoyed the witcher 2 on dark because enemies have the same hp while doing more damage. I hate games that increase hp AND damage, so they are bullet sponges that explode you.

I think the next step for games is more advanced ai. The best I have played was in Ninja Gaiden Black. Each difficulty had new enemies and returning enemies had the same attributes. Each enemy had their own moveset and patterns for the most part but they felt the most alive so far. The difficulty was because of the ai, not damage or health increases.
 

FoolKiller

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Thr33X said:
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.
Regarding the OP. Yes, the problem is that challenge and difficulty are not the same but increasing difficulty is easy compared to increasing challenge. This is why Gears of War on Insane sucks. The strategy didn't change. You just duck and cover more. It's actually rather boring.

People who can't play through the first level of SMB need to learn to play rather than require hand holding.

As for Portal 2, I agree. The second Portal had a lot of times where you weren't trying to solve the puzzle so much as trying to find a visible wall that was "portal-able".

Back to the idea of games being easier now. Here is a theory of mine that I apply to students but it works for everything.

Let's pretend you have a bar about knee high that I ask you to jump over. Assuming no disabilities, most could do this without a problem. Now if I give you a bar that is an inch off the ground, how high will you jump to clear it? Most would just jump enough to clear it.

The point being that if you don't lower the bar, people will jump higher.
 

Vegosiux

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FoolKiller said:
Let's pretend you have a bar about knee high that I ask you to jump over. Assuming no disabilities, most could do this without a problem. Now if I give you a bar that is an inch off the ground, how high will you jump to clear it? Most would just jump enough to clear it.

The point being that if you don't lower the bar, people will jump higher.
Ah, but I have a perfect solution for that. When you lower the bar, instead of jumping, order them to play



By which I mean, switch around the challenge a bit. I mostly like self-imposed challenges. For example, I'm in Mark of the Ninja NG+ these days, and while I could easily get from the beginning to the end by just tripping every damn alarm and diving into the vents fast enough to outrun the enemy mooks on normal (not so much at NG+ as line of sight kicks in - in a 2D stealth platformer, mind - and taking any damage at all kills you), I prefer the stealthy sneaky approach, play with them, then scare them out of their minds so they start firing at each other like crazy... (helps with the score too, I'm quite high on the non-cheating leaderboards).

I can finish the game by just bruteforcing my way though it, and in that regard, I suppose it's "easy", but I don't actually play it that way.
 

Netrigan

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I don't think AI is what makes a game difficult. Some of the toughest games around are just filled with cannon fodder enemies that rush you turning the whole thing into something of a bullet storm where a bit of planning and quick reflexes save the day.

Mostly the entire concept of good AI is something of a pipe dream. Better AI often ends up making the game less difficult since they can't dedicate as much processing power to loading up the screen with enemies, so you end up with fewer enemies with higher hit points to compensate.

But, really, every generation of games sort of molds itself to the delivery system. The early arcade games were like bucking broncos meant to throw off players after a handful of minutes. Later when stories started entering into the equation, they started pumping up the difficulty to keep players putting in more quarters to see how the game ended. Nintendo era games ported a lot of those games over, so you get the concept of Nintendo Hard which also covered up the dirty little secret that there was only a couple of hours of content in most of those games and you got most of your play value from repeating the same areas over and over until you mastered them enough to get all the way to the end of the game.

Today the focus is more and more on story and games are meant to be finished by just about everyone, so we're seeing a shift toward fun game mechanics instead of difficulty. Assassin's Creed and Saints Row might be easy as sin, but they're all about giving you tons of tools in which to over-power your enemy in the funnest way possible.
 

bug_of_war

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gavinmcinns said:
Dark Souls,
Demon's Souls
Total war games can be pretty hard for me but I just kind of suck at rts games.

But for the majority of the market you are 110% right.
In addition to that list: Predator: Concrete Jungle, Mortal Kombat (latest one included), Skyrim (Master difficulty), Resident Evil 4 and 5 were pretty hard on Professional difficulty.

Jack Joe Tip Toe said:
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?
I'm having a hard time thinking of many older games where in which the AI is smarter and not just tougher in terms of their health and my damage output. But, it has been stated before that games have gotten easier, and most people seem to accept this as being true simply because a lot of game designers have come out and said, "We made games harder back then because it would increase the longevity of the game". So yeah, you're not wrong that games have gotten easier, but at the same time I find that most games that have difficulty settings can be difficult if you go for it.

Easier games isn't inherently a bad thing so I don't really get too peeved when a game is easy, sometimes I enjoy feeling unstoppable.
 

Netrigan

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Thr33X said:
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)!

Having sat out various trends only to stumble across them many years later, I can attest that quite often this sort of thing is simple ignorance of the underlying video game convention. The first time you play a particular type of game, you're probably going to be all kinds of baffled. Just recently I started playing the tutorially rich X-Com game and I eventually just quit because I had almost no idea what the hell I was doing. The only reason I got through the first level was because the game told me exactly what to do, because my brain has learned to play that way.

So if someone has never played a side-scroller (and this would likely be a fair number of new gamers), then they're simply not equipped to know all this stuff veterans of the genre instantly know. In a game where stuff kills you by touching you, how logical is it that jumping on them kills them? That's a gaming convention a player has to learn. Collectibles... lord knows I've dodged a few in my life-time, because I didn't realize their purpose in the game.

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...
This goes way back. I forget which game it was, but it was a first person shooter that decided to add waypoints to help players navigate levels because someone invariably gets stuck in a room with one way in or out and can't find the door. I'm a veteran of first person shooters from the DOOM days and rarely get lost in games... but something about Halo always gets me turned around and wandering around trying to figure out how to progress. I can usually figure out how to progress in games like Dishonored, but every so often the most obvious thing in the world doesn't occur to you because you made the mistake of taking the lessons of one game and applying them to another. In most first person shooters, if someone says "you can't go up the stairs", then they mean "you can't go up the stairs" and you shoot stuff until they decide to open up that section of the map. Whereas in Dishonored, they're basically daring you to figure out how to get up there.

It's the old saying, a person is clever, people are stupid. The more people you bring in to play your game, the more likely you're going to be dealing with people who don't quite understand what your game is. If you put a microbiologist, a historian, a race car driver, and musician into an experience which combines all those elements, then you'll end up having to dumb all four elements down because no person has a particularly deep knowledge of anyone else's skill-set. If you want to create something deeper, then you have to narrow your focus and make the project profitable at a lower threshold.
 

gavinmcinns

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CrossLOPER said:
gavinmcinns said:
Total war games can be pretty hard for me but I just kind of suck at rts games.
Play Crusader Kings 2. Total War is babies compared to that game.
The singleplayer is pretty easy but multiplayer can get pretty crazy. There are some pretty cool mods out there too like third age.

I might have to check that out though, it looks kind of intimidating. What race do you play?
 

gavinmcinns

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bug_of_war said:
I'm having a hard time thinking of many older games where in which the AI is smarter and not just tougher in terms of their health and my damage output. But, it has been stated before that games have gotten easier, and most people seem to accept this as being true simply because a lot of game designers have come out and said, "We made games harder back then because it would increase the longevity of the game". So yeah, you're not wrong that games have gotten easier, but at the same time I find that most games that have difficulty settings can be difficult if you go for it.

Easier games isn't inherently a bad thing so I don't really get too peeved when a game is easy, sometimes I enjoy feeling unstoppable.
Games are easier now because we are people who have been gaming our whole lives. People like that are going to want a bigger challenge, and while many of them may enjoy "feeling unstoppable" like you, I just don't like seeing the market overcome by this trend.
 

FoolKiller

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Vegosiux said:
FoolKiller said:
Let's pretend you have a bar about knee high that I ask you to jump over. Assuming no disabilities, most could do this without a problem. Now if I give you a bar that is an inch off the ground, how high will you jump to clear it? Most would just jump enough to clear it.

The point being that if you don't lower the bar, people will jump higher.
Ah, but I have a perfect solution for that. When you lower the bar, instead of jumping, order them to play



By which I mean, switch around the challenge a bit. I mostly like self-imposed challenges. For example, I'm in Mark of the Ninja NG+ these days, and while I could easily get from the beginning to the end by just tripping every damn alarm and diving into the vents fast enough to outrun the enemy mooks on normal (not so much at NG+ as line of sight kicks in - in a 2D stealth platformer, mind - and taking any damage at all kills you), I prefer the stealthy sneaky approach, play with them, then scare them out of their minds so they start firing at each other like crazy... (helps with the score too, I'm quite high on the non-cheating leaderboards).

I can finish the game by just bruteforcing my way though it, and in that regard, I suppose it's "easy", but I don't actually play it that way.
But this is quite rare. It has to be a game with variable playstyles. It's why I loved Dishonored and my favourite series (for the most part) is Splinter Cell. In fact, Blacklist does this beautifully. And to add to it, on Perfectionist difficulty, they don't make enemies more spongy or you less so compared to Realistic. What they do is remove some of the features that make it easier (such as Mark and Execute) which made it too easy for the stealth fans in Conviction.

Also, this is why I don't love The Last of Us. Stealth forced isn't stealth. There was no other option.

The point is that it isn't really a self-imposed challenge so much as being able to play different playstyles. SMB has no other playstyles. It just needs someone to practice and get better at the basic mechanics. Giving Mario invincibility all the time would just ruin the point of the game.