Difficulty is Hard

[WindKnight]

When its beyond your control, or the game outright plays unfair... then its definitely not good difficulty.

I managed to solo Gears of War 2 on insane difficulty. There were many sections I had to restart from the last checkpoint because even though I had found a good cover position and was whittling the enemies down no problem, my AI partners ran into the melee, and one would get 'downed'. Now, I had to try and revive them, because if I didn't within a strict time limit, they died, and I had to back to the last checkpoint. I was being punished for the AI's stupidity, as often the only reason they went down was their own suicidal stupidity, upto and include CRAWLING DEEPER INTO A CROSSFIRE instead of crawling towards me, so if I wanted to revive them I would be killed in their place.

 

[Xocrates]

-snip-

From the moment on that any form of entertainment is in some way story based, making most of your audience being unable to finish it is downright stupid. You'll alienate pretty much everyone who would be interested in the game fiction.

I can sort of understand the desire of being challenged, but I can't understand the desire of wanting a challenging game simply so one can belong to a minority.

You should also keep in mind that the games you mention as having a lot of players were made at a time when the gaming industry was fraction of what we have today. Not only are those "lot of players" comparatively few, many probably played those games because there wasn't any other choice.

Your argument only kind of holds if you want a purely skill based game.

Granted, an ideal game should be able to cater for both type of players. Personally in that regard I liked Diablo 2 approach.

However, I would like to throw out there that one of the reasons games seem much easier nowadays is the abundance of checkpoints.

 

[-|-]

I don't know if you're aware of this but, some of us play games to have fun.

I agree. I normally go for normal mode - but occasionally I get to a point where frustration sets and the game isn't fun any more. I then drop down to easy only to find easy to be a cakewalk and unsatisfying. Some level between easy and normal would be good thing sometimes.

 

[Tohron]

*Wall of text*

I think a solution to this problem would be to simply make the highest difficulty level hard enough so that most people couldn't beat it, and then add achievements for doing things like beating the various bosses on that difficulty. It allows for the feeling of accomplishment and bragging rights, while allowing the game to be completed by others at lower difficulties. And then they could maybe throw in an easter egg or two on the max difficulty.

 

[FightThePower]

Am I over-simplifying things by saying that 'difficulty levels solve all problems'? There must be some kind of problem with that I'm missing, seems too obvious an answer...

The way I see it people who aren't good can play on a difficulty that's super easy and that they'll complete without needing to have much experience at all when playing games. And the daredevils amongst us can play on the hardest setting imaginable.

People who want difficult games are people who want Video games (not Simon) which the majority of people playing them are not going to be able to finish. The abillity to finish being determined by talent, and intelligence, rather than simply the investment of time.

To an extent, isn't investment of time one thing that determines talent anyway? I'd say that some of the more ridiculously difficult games (e.g. I wanna be the Guy) are mostly about Trial and Error so experience plays a huge role. Not to mention those of us who are better at games in general probably have spent more time with them.

 

[The Deadpool]

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?

Oddly enough, Demon's Souls was used as an example of things done RIGHT.

I don't remember dying out of bad luck in that game... I'd say they did the difficulty right on point.

 

[timeadept]

-snip-

I read your whole post, there was a lot to it, but the thing that stuck out to me the most was your WoW/EverQuest example(mainly the wow part though). I have nothing against you guys getting your extra shiny armor, where my problem is that in a game like WoW this armor is then REQUIRED to have even a chance at the next challenge. I love a challenge in games, i fought crawmax in borderlands solo and won, no glitches or exploits (played a siren). It took me some time to learn how to fight him and think up tactics capable of taking him down but i managed it and it was awesome. But I didn't need to grind lower difficulty dungeons to do it. I didn't have to run Naxx 10 or 20 times to get the armor i needed to move on to the next raid. For me it's enough to beat these challenges once and move on and i could care less if i get the gear to "prove" that i beat these guys. Hell once i was kicked from a dungeon from having poor gear on my healer, despite the fact that up to that point NOBODY HAD DIED. A side note, it was the aoe healing giving me trouble, we were about to fight a boss with largely single target attacks and i was confident that he'd be easier than the mobs we'd fought up to this point because of it. I was DENIED my challenge because my group didn't feel that i met the arbitrary requirements for killing the boss. Like i said, you can have your shiny toys, i'd just like to fight the boss please.

I suppose it's a side note to the overall article (or maybe exactly the point, just approached from a different angle), but I don't want to have to play and replay content that i've all ready beaten just to move onto the next challenge. And more to your point, again you can have your uber challenge but it should be in the minority of content, the majority of say, the endgame content in WoW should not be accessible to only a minority. In any case, the endgame content in WoW is primarily gear based and not skill based, you need the gear to access it and after that and ONLY after you have the gear does skill begin to make a difference.

 

[ZippyDSMlee]

I do not think its difficult at all, first off know your target audience(which have more and more drool cups by the day) so what was easy is the new normal, also scripted jumping would help ease their pain. Once you see to the needs of the lowest common denominator you can then add options when can make normal and higher levels of difficultly more fun and less frustrating. Like sliders for AI sensitivity, all auto aim off, damage done,damage taken, pickup rate and such, this way even the worse game mechanics can be tweaked to taste.

 

[TheEggplant]

"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.

He's referring to The Shadow and The Flame, not the original PoP. The first game was difficult but ultimately rewarding game because it never felt(to me)cheap. The second however was bone crunchingly destructive to one's sanity. I had to buy the strategy guide just to get past the first dungeon only to be completely murdered in the second because I couldn't get the sword fighting down. That game was NES+10 level hard. I can't conceive of anyone except masochists finding it fun.

 

[Michael O'Hair]

From the article:

I'm playing the game to have fun and be entertained, and if making a mistake means the game is going to refuse to entertain me for a couple of minutes, then the game is no longer doing its job.

People play games for different reasons, and you were playing the wrong game. Many people disparage games for lacking qualities that they would enjoy, and in some cases those dislikes are warranted. But I've found that I haven't been playing bad games, but playing the wrong games; games that aren't tuned to the risk-reward frequency I'm accustomed to.

Everyone plays games to have fun. But not every game is fun for everyone. Some players enjoy the competition of fighting games, others the exhilaration of shooter games, and other people enjoy turn-based strategy games. Different strokes for different folks.

There is a subset of players, who are few in number and probably going extinct as we speak, who enjoy very difficult games. They enjoy overcoming seemingly impossible obstacles. They can't get enough of Demon's Souls (masochists). They aim for the no-miss completions of curtain fire scrolling shooter games (unrealistic idealists). They challenge the best fighting game players in online matches despite the fact that their chances of winning are slim-to-none (gluttons for punishment). They practice and lose and practice more and lose more then occasionally win, but they stubbornly refuse to give up (stubborn slow-learners). There's a lesson to be learned in that, a lesson easily learned from a game but difficult to learn in the real world: do not give up until you win.

Games are not movies; you don't get to see the ending and developer's credits just for being there. Some of the early games of this generation of home consoles awarded trophies and achievements just for pressing the start button or completing the first level. Back in 1986, I couldn't complete World 8 in Super Mario Bros. I'd run out of time in World 8-3 or fall into a pit in World 8-1. It wasn't until 1988 that I had actually completed that game, two years later. But I don't remember playing the game in 1987, in fact, I believe that I had become so frustrated with the game that I refused to play it during that year. After my sabbatical from Super Mario Bros., I managed to complete that game. Perhaps I had not gave up, I would have completed the game sooner.

I missing games of overwhelming difficulty; many of the bullet hell shooters are only released in Japan or occasionally released on X-Box Live in the West, difficult puzzle games aren't in vogue anymore and hard to come by, games where the player has a limited number of lives to complete the game have infinite continues, etc. I recently saw a trailer for the new Pac-Man game to be released: dozens of ghosts being consumed after eating a power pellet, as if the game delivers them to the player on a silver platter.

Games are not movies. Do not expect a reward just for participating. If you expect to be entertained, do not play challenging games. If you expect to be challenged by a game, you will probably despise the game until you find a way to complete it. I think being challenged by a game is more worthwhile than being entertained.

It is late. And I feel old.

 

[maiiau]

It really seems to be a matter of what you came into the game for. I'm not old enough to have been too into the challenge-based games (I was four or five at the time the Sega Genesis was out, I just didn't have the motor skills yet), and got into games later based more on the interactive stories they're telling; if a game isn't going to let me see its story to me it wasn't worth the investment. Of course, this just means I don't buy the super punishing challenge games because they're not my thing. But saying another gamer is doing it wrong is silly--they're just in the hobby for a different reason.

On the other hand, I really adore bullet hell shooters, though I did get into that through Touhou, which has enough characters to keep just about anyone interested in that sort of narrative interested. Maybe it's just certain kinds of challenges for certain people--I've always liked the idea of games that anyone can beat on a certain level, but with a lot of room for mastery above and beyond the storyline. Case in point, Touhou games on normal or Touhou games on insane difficulties.

On a different note, did the article get trimmed in editing or something? It really seems to have just cut off at the end.

 

[Daniel Laeben-Rosen]

I don't know if you're aware of this but, some of us play games to have fun.

I agree. I normally go for normal mode - but occasionally I get to a point where frustration sets and the game isn't fun any more. I then drop down to easy only to find easy to be a cakewalk and unsatisfying. Some level between easy and normal would be good thing sometimes.

Indeed. That's what I like about some games having an Easy and a Very Easy-mode. There Easy will still put of a challenge enough to feel like the game isn't holding your hand. Well, usually. One or two games I've ramped up to the hardest-possible difficulty and still not felt even slightly challenged. Then... I get disappointed.

 

[Dectilon]

I'll agree that PoP was punishing, but wasn't that partly the point? You had to learn the levels, because although you could restart a level as many times as you wanted the hour was still ticking away. I personally don't like that game (much prefer for example Flashback), but I see what they were going for. As for "wasting your time", I'm sad to say you're wasting your time regardless of game. Nothing wrong with that, but it's not like you're accomplishing more playing MW2 over PoP1.

The hack n slash genre contains some of the best examples of difficulty in the business.

"Devil May Cry always did it right."

I'll agree with you there. The fact that the increase in difficulty level makes enemies faster and more varied rather than have oodles of HP. Also there's the fact that if you don't feel up to a certain challenge you still keep your red orbs if you die, so you can power up for your next run.

"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."

First of all I'd like to say I beat most of MM9's levels on my first try, so there's that, but it's not all that different from DMC really. In DMC a certain boss can absolutely destroy you with its attacks before you figure out how to dodge them or damage them(the method isn't always entirely obvious). In the MM games you can challenge yourself by picking any level in any order, or you can pick the easiest first and use that boss' weapon to make some other level much easier. Both series have a vein of exploration and imposing restrictions on yourself to see what you can handle.

And if you're talking about block puzzles and the like, 9 times out of 10 any sort of puzzle in a MM-game can be solved by observing it for a few cycles before jumping into them.

 

[DaveMc]

0.95^30 = 0.21... ?

To elaborate on this: the probability of making one 95% jump is 0.95. Making that *and* the next one is (0.95)(0.95). Doing that thirty times in a row gives you a probability of (0.95)^30, which is about 0.215, or 21.5%. So yes, your simulation was off a bit, but close enough to get the general idea.

On the actual subject: interesting point that difficulty needs not only to be right, but to be *communicated* correctly in advance, if it's going to match its intended audience.

 

[Phishfood]

See, I would say that expert level on l4d is my perfect difficulty. With the right support and a bit of luck, its doable. Its not a cakewalk.

The trouble with NO punishment for death is that there is no feeling of achievement for beating something. if something only has a 5% chance of working, but its ok...I can have 10,000 attempts for free...well. Not fun to me.

It really does depend on the game. I am content that I couldn't finish crysis, I didn't enjoy the entire game enough to care. If however Fallout 3 had been too hard to finish, I would have been pissed. As others have said, having a story that people can't finish is bad. Having a dungeon that only 5% of people can handle is good.

 

[kouriichi]

Alot of producers forget the differance between "challanging" and "a**hole" these days.

I was playing assassin's creed Brotherhood, which i am loving by the way, and to get 100% on a mission, you have to go without taking a single hit. This would be easy, if the 30 minute mission didnt end a cutscene and have you attacked by 3 armed men who you cant counter.

The cutscene litterally ended to me having 3 of the toughest guys in the game charging me. Ofcourse, i get baby tapped and fail the full sync. Because of the way the game is set up, you eather have to restart the whole 30 minute mission of walking some people to some place, or say screw it, and retry for full sync at another time.

Thats where the line from, "Difficult" to "a**hole" is crossed.

 

[LostAlone]

To be honest, I think that developers should spend SO much more time than they do looking at difficulty. Particularly, I'd love to see difficulty levels that aren't just the standard Easy, Medium, Hard settings.

I want to be able to tweak specific aspects of the game to change the difficulty. So have three bars with three settings. Enemy AI, Enemy Toughness, Player Toughness. The presets (all at 1, all at 2, all at 3) correspond to easy medium and hard, but they let me tweak to my current skill level.

That'd mean that if I'm pretty good, so medium isn't much challenge, I can make myself a little weaker, or the bad guys a litter tougher or smarter. Just one click up, to make me work harder for the win. Alternatively if I'm not that great, I don't have to drop all the way down to Easy to get through. Just make the enemies a little easier to kill, and suddenly I'm having a great time.

You can apply that kinda thing to any game really. They all have difficulty levels these day, so there's no reason why you can't make them tweak-able. That way if I'm awesome at combat, but a dreadful platformer, I could still get the greater margin of error I need to progress through the platforming bits without child-friendly nerf combat.

It all comes together to mean that as you get better at a game, you can gradually increase the difficulty, and when playing with others you can find a balance between skill levels, so the stronger player can still enjoy the game without overwhelming the weaker guys with a true 'hard' experience.

Its a great idea, and I hereby patent it. You all saw it.

 

[WhiteFangofWhoa]

Seems like we have a discussion topic like this on the public forums every day, a**hole difficulty versus reasonable difficulty, with many examples of both.

I don't see how Mega Man can be considered unfairly hard. The only obstacles that are sometimes hidden until it's too late are the occasional long spike shafts that show up maybe once per game in Skull Castle. Everything else is right there in front of you, and if you die to it it's your own fault. It's a golden example of reasonable difficulty.

A**hole difficulty tends to occur more from the conservation of checkpoints than any enemy or obstacle. Of course gamers aren't going to be able to figure out how to take down a new enemy the first time they meet if the game is remotely interested in challenging you, but a balanced game will place a save point or check point close by so you can try again shortly after getting your face bashed in the first few times until you know how that enemy/obstacle works and will be ready for them in larger numbers later. To that extent, the lives system is one staple of the old days I don't mind seeing gone forever.

Oh, and Battletoads. Just throwing that out there since no article on difficulty is complete without at least one mention of the pinnacle of unfair difficulty.

 

[Fearzone]

Bad games have one level of difficulty that will appeal to that select group of players along the delta for which that difficultly level is challenging.

Good games, you can play them as hard or as easy as you want.

For example, take an RPG. Playing it "hard" would mean going straight through the game with your level 1 sword. Playing it "easy" would be taking time to grind your levels up a little bit. Skilled players are happy because they went through it faster than most people could. Casual player are happy because, even thought they had to grind some and pay more attention to the right gear, they still finished the game.

Take away grinding from and RPG, and it is stuck at one difficulty level, which either works for you, or it doesn't.

 

[DVS Storm]

I think the best example of making a game difficult by making it unfair are Call of Dutys. They are fricking frutrating on veteran. Another good example is Ninja Gaiden 2. I have Ninja Gaiden( the one that game out on Xbox) and it was awesome. It was damn hard but it was still fair(well the camera was an ass sometimes and some parts were of course unfair). But Ninja Gaiden 2..... I stopped playing it on the volcano level because it got really friking annoying. They were just recycling old bosses and there were two volcano turtles(or wthatever they are called) at the same time. Plus the shiny graphics of that level made my eyes bleed and not ina good way. It had been made easier than the first Ninja Gaiden(you could replenish your health at checkpoints etc.) but they made the game completely unfair imo.