Game People Calling: Now You?re Just Being Difficult

[lewiswhitling]

I agree with the OP. I think games should build to a general climax, in all their elements (story, gameplay etc). A gradual ramping up of intensity makes for a constantly fresh and pleasurably challenging experience - but this should not necessarily entail just making the game more "difficult".

However, increasing the difficulty level isn't always a bad thing either, as this often aids in a game acheiving its goal of becoming more climactic. It sets the player on edge, makes them sweat. Obviously if it's over done then this just results in frustration, but when done well can substantially increase the level of intensity, and therefore pleasure, for the player.

 

[elilupe]

Thats what I thought was cool in Fable 2. Even though the enemies got a little harder in the middle point, after that you get the uber weapons to kill them in one or two shots. It gives you the feeling of actually becoming a famous hero.

 

[Rad Party God]

Oblivion had a difficulty slider, even with it's bashed unbalanced leveling system, it gave me the oportunity to scale down or ramp up the difficulty whenever I wanted.

 

[GodKlown]

I remember in old 8-bit games that there were certain enemies you couldn't kill unless you were equipped with a specific weapon. The only challenge lay in finding said weapon and equipping it to battle a specific enemy. All other weapons would do a tiny fraction of the damage of that specific weapon in that specific situation, and you'd spend hours until you figured it all out unless the game was kind enough to give you a clue.

That being said, games such as Crackdown that feature tougher enemies in advancing areas give you a chance to return to an old area if you are soundly getting your ass handed to you. With the rise of the casual gamer, people don't always have eight to sixteen hours to sit in front of a game to master your technique to be able to beat the game. Some people maybe have two hours a day they can devote to playing, with maybe a day or three inbetween sessions of gaming. By the time you get back to the game, you've lost the edge you built on the first day and have to reassert yourself with the controls again, and the game doesn't take that into account.

I also got bored playing both Assassin's Creed games. The motivation to keep playing wasn't really enough, and I know this can be a repeat problem in sandbox-ish games like that which present you with an open world and tell you to just have at it. They provide a broad outline of a premise to get you going, then they hand you a weapon and tell you to get the bad guys. What do you do inbetween those times of chasing down the enemy? Walk around, kill things to provide you with an income to buy more equipment, lather rinse repeat. Blah.

The "realism" setting is a good point. I've seen tactical shooters with this feature, and I agree that it does help immerse you into a more realistic situation. Games like Saints Row where if you get shot up, you can sit in one spot and wait for your health to regenerate isn't realistic at all. I like the feature so I'm not about to crap on it, but I admit it does take away from the realism. But oh well, I'm just playing a game. If I wanted complete realism, I'd get into an actual gun fight with the cops to see if I could wait out a gunshot. Naturally, we know this doesn't work. But some games do tend to ramp up the difficulty rather quickly and without warning, and it is easy to understand how a casual or inexperienced gamer would get frustrated with that. Perhaps the slider bar idea isn't such a bad thing after all. If you want a challenge, ignore the slider. If you are getting killed less than five minutes into a game, then it would be nice to have the option to scale back the enemies to suit your abilities better than for the game to expect you to just become more proficient in a matter of moments. That whole "learning AI" stuff can bite my ass sometimes... I've had a game drastically get more difficult because I pulled off a few lucky shots, and now I'm getting over-run by enemies who think I can manage to pull magic out of my ass like David Copperfield with a rifle. Enough with that already!

 

[BlueHighwind]

The reason that card games and board games do not ramp up difficult in a curve is because those games are typically meant to be a competition. In Monopoly you're not playing against the board, you're playing against your best friend -well former best friend since that jerk just bought all the red properties and built nine hotels on Indiana. Here the challenge is to beat your buddy. In a game the challenge is less of a satisfying one, because there is no other human to beat. The game's need to create their own artificial challenge and feeling of accomplishment. So they get more difficult. Simple really.

 

[BrotherRool]

I actually agree with a lot of your sentiments (shock, horror), especially for Wii games, but I think until you replace it with something less repetitive, boredom is a huge issue. Assassins Creed became almost unplayable towards the end unless you gave it several days break between each couple of hours of gaming. If I'm just doing things the same way every single time I'm going to begin to question why I'm doing this.

But I do agree that making a games difficulty ramp up until the point where it's actually difficult isn't necessarily the right way to go about it.

Solutions include FF's optional sidequests and bosses, always much harder than the final boss (an approach shared by quite a few games)and very careful planning like in KotoR and FFXIII. If (in a RPG) you know exactly what level someone is then you can plan it so it seems more difficult without getting more difficult. In the end the final boss isn't any more difficult than the original but it feels harder because it's doing a lot more damage and you're bringing a huge array of tools to bear on the situation.

Although, in the end, ramping difficulty levels exist for the same reason narrative exists. It's about showing achievement, a sense of accomplishment and a huge climax. If in an action movie the guys at the end of the film are dispatched in the same easy way that the guys at the beginning (unless this is a flatlined-the-polygraph let's do this moment of awesome)then it feels unsatisfying.

I actually think that most developers have changed. The problem is that unless a game has a strong narrative (unlike Mario) there isn't anything you can do to show change. God of War, Uncharted and all of that can have things which look harder, but aren't, because it's designed to be a tale you play with an epic conclusion, without that the gameplay has to do the same thing and that involves increased difficulty.

The simple answer is on-the-fly adjustable difficulty settings a la Uncharted 2 and lots of other games. People who are experienced and need challenge can have. People who want to play on easy can have it and if they start on normal and come to a difficult bit they can just tone it down. Of course that's hard to do on a platformer but for other games there's not much excuse for not including it

 

[Jared]

I do think the way they do difficulty does need to be looked at. It seems the curve is either too small, or far too high. I like to enjoy what I am playing, but when I am near the point of never wanting to play it again then its a problem

 

[Macflash]

He mentions that he wants to be able to decide if the game gets more difficult as you progress or if it should stay the same. This type of difficulty system has already been used in Oblivion. If you leave the slider in its initial place the game starts out easy and then soon becomes much harder. A wolf in the woods soon becomes a terrifying enemy, especially if you invest any of your leveling up points into a non-combat related skill (like alchemy or speech craft). But if you turn down the slider bar, the game doesn't adjust the enemies as much for your level. So now, you're level 25 warrior guy that has single handedly saved the world can take down enemies in a few blows or even just one, where as if you left the slider alone, it would take several minutes of intense fighting, and several health potions to kill even a single enemy.

 

[Hap2]

Heh, Fable II kind of threw a wrench in that formula for creating a game. Epic final boss, hehe....

 

[Miumaru]

From what I see, sports actually DO do the harder later, or rather, as it gets later, they try harder as it counts more for whatever.

Card games have the human opponent factor, and ofcourse people would want to start with novices before moving up to big tournys. The inclining difficulty actually is pretty universal. Since birth its wobble, crawl, walk, run then if you desire, become an athlete which would be the top for that.

 

[Shjade]

The type of game and the type of difficulty that's increasing matters in this kind of discussion.

RPGs need to have beefier enemies with more difficult attack patterns to defend against as you go through the game because in an RPG your character is generally getting stronger. If the enemies weren't advancing in some respect you'd end up with the Fable issue where the latter half of the game turns piss-easy due to everything just falling over dead when you cast your mystical nuke of kill-all. I don't think this kind of difficulty curve is one that gives new players issues.

Shooters are a bit different, not counting shooters with RPG elements which add in the above. In shooters the difficulty is as much a test of reaction speed and accuracy as it is of awareness, understanding game mechanics and the actual strength of your opposition. For a new player I would bet the trouble in keeping up with shooter difficulty curves isn't that the enemies are becoming more resilient and have bigger guns - these contribute, but I don't think they're the killer. The real trouble tends to be how many of them there are, from how many directions they arrive, how many supplies you have to contend with them, how difficult it is to find cover while fighting, and the real kick in the ass: whether or not you have to protect anyone else. Escort missions are the doom of even veteran gamers; I have seen them reduce less experienced players to a frothing mass of tears and hate.

Platformer difficulty is almost entirely comprised of the second element of the shooter curve: reaction speed and accurate inputs. You could have every map of Super Mario Bros. memorized but that won't help you a bit if you can't actually wield the controller as expertly as needed to navigate the obstacles in them. This isn't necessarily a new vs. pro gamer issue either: no one is good at everything to do with a controller. I'm pretty aces in a shooter once I'm familiar with its specific quirks and maps, but I can't bear SMB for the life of me. (SMB3, yes, but the original kicks my ass so hard.) I'm just not a great platform player. Different kind of difficulty.

In short, I agree that difficulty curves are, well, difficult for new players; newer games are easier than older games in many ways for those of us who've actually been playing long enough to compare the two. For players without that experience the control schemes of newer games alone probably makes them harder than the old controller-has-two-buttons brand of games. Hell, it takes at least three buttons just to jump in Bushido Blade. Awkward controls much? I'm not really sure how you'd put difficulty sliders on every kind of difficulty involved in games, though. I mean, how do you make platforming easier? They'd have to make multiple layouts of each level with simpler jumps and obstacles for the more novice players; just having fewer or weaker enemies won't help you get past the pit of instant death.

 

[Zydrate]

I understand the logic but if a game's difficulty stays stagnant, then it gets boring. That's what the difficulty SLIDERS are for. Lowering enemy's health, increasing weapon damage and all that.

I understand the slow upward in general difficult though. It works you up so you can handle various challenges as the game progresses.

Also; Comparing... say, an FPS to, say, a CARD game... Is not a very good comparison for argument.

 

[Baldr]

Games never get harder, the game play doesn't change, the complexity of the game only gets harder. If your a rookie, then your going to play like a rookie and get challenged by pros. If your a pro, then against a rookie it not a real challenging game.

It is like the difference between little league and professional baseball. The rules are still the same, but the game is played differently because it is at two different levels.

 

[Frybird]

"Even on the Wii, beloved of the newcomer, many games ramp up pretty fast. Showing off Super Mario Galaxy 2 to the family last weekend, they were all enraptured by the way it looked and played. The younger ones among us were soon at the controls and doing well. But fast forward even 15 minutes and they were really struggling with some pretty tricky jumps and enemies."

Yeah, i don't really understand that.

While it may be true that a game with a "kiddy like look" like Mario isn't necessarily only for Kids, but why does a game like that has to have punishing difficulty for kids for wich the game seems appropriate.

---

I experienced a sort-of-related example when i bought Trauma Center: New Blood for the Wii. As my mother (the one true real no-exceptions non gamer in our family) enjoyed Wii Sports a lot and since she used to be a nurse i figured she might enjoy playing the game in CoOp Mode with me.

As a completely non Gamer, she had enough trouble figuring out how the controls work at first and essentially needed a lot of general "how video games work" guidance, she eventually got the hang out of it and, indeed, enjoyed the game a lot.

But since it's Trauma Center, wich is known to be punishingly hard, we eventually reached a point where her newfound skills were not enough, even on "Easy" difficulty, and soon after, a point where even i was struggling with the game.
I wouldn't mind a bit of mindless "grinding", but my mother was frustrated almost immediately, and didn't really understood why the game clusterf*cks you with problems and why, even if she did everything right, it would not be enough thanks to an even more punishing time limit (wich really makes not logic sense, reducing my explainations to "games work this way").

You could of course argue with the reputation of Trauma Center in general to be kinda hard, but then again other than it's reputation among GAMERS there is no real reason why the game shouldn't appeal to non gamers, thanks to being non violent, unique, and having that sort of pseudo-wish-fulfilling "be a doctor" premise.


I am all for games offering challenge as you progress through it because, in my opinion, it makes a lot of what games are about.
But if a game has an obvious appeal to Casual- or Non-Gamers, or younger kids, would it hurt the developers so much to add a "very very easy" mode, in order to appeal to EVERYONE who might like the game without turning away "real" gamers who can take a challenge?

 

[rsvp42]

I always thought it was a representation of how stories tend to work. Protagonist sets off, does his thing but things get worse before they get better. To quote a certain Gotham DA, "The night is darkest just before the dawn", the hero's quest is increasingly difficult before the "dawn" of the defeated villain at the end of the story. Games have the means to show this literally, by putting the player in the shoes of the protagonist and showing that it is actually harder to save the world/princess/whatever than it seemed at the start.

This, right here. Difficulty curves aren't some arbitrary, abstract decision by developers to please people who want to call themselves "hardcore" (well, usually they're not or that happens with special difficulty modes). Difficulty is about storytelling. I remember a review of the latest Indiana Jones movie that criticized the film because the characters never seemed to be in real jeopardy. I think the difficulty of a game, at its most perfect, needs to be just a little harder than the player is ready for because we need to feel like we're in jeopardy for the game to stay compelling. Obviously it's impossible to match every player's skill perfectly, but that's why we have the different levels. But as has been said before, the only time difficulty is really a problem is when it spikes or drops too drastically. as long as developers are careful and keep each curve manageable (beginner, easy, medium) or at least feasible for the harder (hard, brutal, insane) we're fine. Games should always have a difficulty curve, with few exceptions like solitaire or maybe some other specifically casual fare (although to be fair, even solitaire has changing difficulty depending on the random placement of cards; some rounds are harder, others are easier).

If you try to change the entire paradigm for the sake of new gamers, you're missing the point. I mean, we all became gamers in the midst of some brutal Mario levels, among many other difficult games. Hell, some of those earlier Mega Man levels were relentless... Why should we underestimate today's young gamers?

 

[The Random One]

I can see your point, and your idea of a slider for the rate at which difficulty grows sounds good. The closest thing to that that I can think of is how in RE4 as you die the game lowers the difficulty, so if the difficulty rises too much the game drops it back down if you fail. Then again, it's not a perfect exit because it only happens when you've already died and it only works so far (IIRC RE4 would only get easier five times, so if you were still getting your ass kicked/head decapitated then you'd be out of luck).

However, the argument you proposed doesn't hold up. Monopoly doesn't get harder? Of course it does, when every other space is owned by some other player and you have to pay rents through your nose to get past. (Some friends of mine who are actually good at it say the best thing that can happen to you in the late game for monopoly is going to jail.) Risk gets more difficult as one player may or may not be almost completing his objective. And sports don't get more difficult on their own, but ordinarialy the teams you'll play against in the playoffs are going to be easier to defeat than the teams you play against on the semifinals. So maybe your complaint is that such a rise in difficulty is not intrinsically related to the nature of the game?

 

[theultimateend]

The assumption of the difficulty curve is that as the player continues to interact with the game, their familiarity with it increases, and so their ability to judge and execute the correct response to the situations the game presents develops and deepens.

The ideal difficulty curve is one that is unnoticed by the player because their understanding and skill with the game develops at the same rate as the complexity and difficulty of the game develops.

To the person I've quoted: I rarely agree with anyone on this website as much as I am agreeing with you right now. There is nothing about that post that isn't spot on .

To the OP: Jesus...Assassin's Creed 1 felt like a job, a punishment for investing in a product, I found myself wondering if there was necessity in playing the game further as it appeared to be a time loop stuck regurgitating the same thing over and over.

Don't get me wrong, many games do that, but AC1 made it so painfully apparent and abused me so heartily with it that I felt like the company was actively out to ruin my afternoon.