"Good" vs "Bad" Difficulty

[BloatedGuppy]

So I've been playing a spot of Valkyria Chronicles lately, and it's a surprisingly difficult game. Part of it is that the game is just a bit wonky...it functions very atypically from most other turn based tactical games of its type. And part of it is that, well, the game is a bit "puzzley". Enemy forces and map layout are arranged in such a way to force a very specific critical path to success. There are mild ways in which one might deviate, but not if one wants to stay within the game's success parameters. You will do A and then B and then C, and if you try do C before B you'll fail. The game allows you to generously replay the mission as many times as necessary to learn said critical path to success, but in the end I imagine most successful run-throughs will look very similar.

This, IMO, is a bullshit type of difficulty. We'll call it "Forced Failure" difficulty, or "Difficulty by Rote". It's not that it isn't a KIND of challenge, I just don't find it to be a particularly interesting challenge. The Elven Legacy games functioned somewhat similarly, where you faced the dual pressure of overwhelming odds and time gated objectives, and failure to perform optimally meant weaker and weaker starts in subsequent missions. Hard? Very. Satisfying? Not particularly. You'll get there eventually, it's largely a matter of patience.

So I thought about other kinds of bullshit difficulty.

1. The AI cheats. This is typified by Civilization style games, perhaps most notoriously Civilization itself. The AI is bone stupid and barely understands the rules of its own game, but is gifted with enormous bonuses and/or gets to ignore the rules entirely, in a fashion that is immediately transparent to the player. It's hard, but it feels "gamey" hard. The masochism of knowingly playing against stacked decks.

2. One right way to play. It's not so much about strategy or tactics as following the single preordained path the developers created for you. Aside from the aforementioned Valkyria Chronicles, I'm reminded of things like The Last of Us and their sniper level, where the sniper doesn't even exist to shoot until you enter his room from behind, it's just a gun floating in space, shooting you.

3. Rubber banding. The AI will get bonuses at specific times, to give the illusion of narrow competition. Primarily seen in racing games, but exists in strategy as well (Civilization 5's shameful "espionage" comes to mind, where the most secure/powerful nation in the word will leak secrets like a hole-riddled dinghy).

4. Overly random. We're not talking XCOM "I missed on an 80% shot, is impossible" randomness, but "I will triumph or wipe based on this single utterly random event/dice roll that is outside of my ability to mitigate" randomness. Hearthstone's Unstable Portal is a good example of overly random determination of outcome.

5. Bags of HPs. Unique to RPGs, in which "harder" means the enemy is still hopelessly incompetent but now has eleventy billion HP. Not interesting difficulty, often results in numbing tedium.

So what are games that have good, or rewarding difficulty?

I thought about XCOM, most especially the original but to some degree the re-invention, which allow for tactical experimentation, punish sloppy play, but does not enter "end state" with a single botched mission.

I thought about Dark Souls, which suffers from a bit of "gotcha" forced failure but is otherwise an interesting mix of twitch skill and RPG build management.

I thought about a variety of "raiding" MMOs, which require one to replay a fight to learn the "right" way to do it, but unlike in a TBS you still have to execute it, which requires manual dexterity, resource management, and exquisite timing.

Can anyone else think of games that did difficulty "right"? Or other ways in which difficulty is handled poorly, or artificially? I don't view "hard" as a merit in and of itself. It's easy to make "hard". It's HARD to make a game difficult AND rewarding, where players are not punished for creativity or experimentation, and there are multiple roads to success.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

I've always felt Alien: Isolation used a cheating AI system. Now some would argue it technically doesn't as the infamous 'teleporting alien' is explain in like the 2nd to last level. Having said that a) you spend the overwhelming majority of the game watching the Alien walk around one corner, you go the opposite direction and its literally right waiting for you. Now I'm going to spoil this, but since Isolation was released last year, I don't really care.

There is more than one alien. Good. Great! I can work with that, even if Ripley is too thick to come to that realization herself. What I hated was the motion tracker, your primary way of avoiding the Alien(s), seems to be in on the gag and only tracks 1 alien at a time. It isn't until the game tells you there are multiple aliens that the motion tracker decides to work.

So maybe the AI doesn't cheat, exactly, but certainly it has several one-ups on you without ever telling you. And it expects you to be able to work out them, without letting you know a)that you need to, b)how to and c)why.


Another game I thought was absurdly difficult was Dark Souls. Now yes its supposed to be hard, but that always felt like a cop-out to me, like when Tommy Wiseau said The Room was supposed to be bad. I can deal with obtuse, trial/error game-play, or I can do bad controls or obnoxiously hard enemies. I hate the idea of them all being together, because then its never a challenge. Then its a test of patience where any and all progress has a sense of achievement sucked out of it because you pretty much lucked out. You can fight the same guy the same way 100+ times and that one victory has no actual joy. You just feel cheated of your time and angry that your only reward for spending 5+ hours fighting one enemy was...SHOCK! Two more of the same type! Hope you cleared your weekend! Basically if you have to use a Wiki to get out of the prologue training area, the game has done something wrong.



And finally I'm gonna rag on FTL: Faster than Light. This one I'll categorize as One Right Way to Play, and God help I've never figured out what that is. According to Steam I have 17hrs logged in the game, and I've never once beaten the final boss or even unlocked a new ship. Basically every third star system kills me. Usually its a giant mother-fucker with 2-4 plasma torpedoes that just targets any place I have crew and kills them all. I hate that the money to repair your ship, buy weapons, upgrades, crew and everything is all the same. It would have been a-lot easier if we could use scrap to repair the ship, and credits to buy things. I always find myself either at damn near full health with a pea shooter and a paper shield, or practically no health with a laser gun or two. I've never found the balance between health and fire-power.
Very frustrating.

 

[Fappy]

Funny you should mention Dark Souls, because I definitely file it under the "mixed-bag" difficulty. The thing it does remarkably well is make you learn the game. On a second playthrough you will likely perform far better than you had previously (unless you're using a difficult/crap build). I like that a lot. The brutal difficulty forces you to essentially get good to overcome it and I found the learning curve a bit steep, but not so much so that it was discouraging.

The thing it does wrong, in my opinion, is how easily it can rob you of large chunks of time. There a 1,000 cheap ways to die in DS, and none of them would be much of a problem unless you're on your way to collect your fatty soul. I will never understand why people enjoy this kind of punishment. It is incredibly frustrating and does nothing to enhance the gameplay. It doesn't even make the game much harder unless you were unfortunate enough to die with an especially huge bag of souls on you.

All that said, sure the game's hard but I don't get why it has such an over-blow reputation. There are a lot of harder modern games on the market right now that people don't really make a fuss about. I guess people are just used to action gameplay being really easy (unless it's DmC or something).

 

[Silvanus]

I've always felt Alien: Isolation using a cheating AI system. Now some would argue it technically doesn't as the infamous 'teleporting alien' is explain in like the 2nd to last level. Having said that a) you spend the overwhelming majority of the game watching the Alien walk around one corner, you go the opposite direction and its literally right waiting for you. Now I'm going to spoil this, but since Isolation was released last year, I don't really care.

There is more than one alien. Good. Great! I can work with that, even if Ripley is too thick to come to that realization herself. What I hated was the motion tracker, your primary way of avoiding the Alien(s), seems to be in on the gag and only tracks 1 alien at a time. It isn't until the game tells you there are multiple aliens that the motion tracker decides to work.

So maybe the AI doesn't cheat, exactly, but certainly it has several one-ups on you without ever telling you. And it expects you to be able to work out them, without letting you know a)that you need to, b)how to and c)why.

I was under the impression that until Ellen headed down into the Alien nest, she had only been interacting with one Alien-- I thought that it was the meltdown that prompted the (newer) Aliens to scatter and take up residence elsewhere.

I can't speak to teleporting AI. I know the Alien can move at high speeds in the vents, and believed that's how it always got around: I didn't notice any "cheating".

Maybe I missed the significance of the whole Alien nest scene.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

The thing it does wrong, in my opinion, is how easily it can rob you of large chunks of time. There a 1,000 cheap ways to die in DS, and none of them would be much of a problem unless you're on your way to collect your fatty soul. I will never understand why people enjoy this kind of punishment. It is incredibly frustrating and does nothing to enhance the gameplay. It doesn't even make the game much harder unless you were unfortunate enough to die with an especially huge bag of souls on you.

Creates tension. Death without consequences creates a tension-free experience. As Dark Souls lives and dies on atmosphere to a large degree, a loss of tension would be particularly disastrous.

Now, there is a definitely a fine line between "tense" and "frustrating", and how often you go over it in a single play session will likely help determine whether you consider Dark Souls a GOTY contender or a puntable turd.

 

[Fappy]

The thing it does wrong, in my opinion, is how easily it can rob you of large chunks of time. There a 1,000 cheap ways to die in DS, and none of them would be much of a problem unless you're on your way to collect your fatty soul. I will never understand why people enjoy this kind of punishment. It is incredibly frustrating and does nothing to enhance the gameplay. It doesn't even make the game much harder unless you were unfortunate enough to die with an especially huge bag of souls on you.

Creates tension. Death without consequences creates a tension-free experience. As Dark Souls lives and dies on atmosphere to a large degree, a loss of tension would be particularly disastrous.

Now, there is a definitely a fine line between "tense" and "frustrating", and how often you go over it in a single play session will likely help determine whether you consider Dark Souls a GOTY contender or a puntable turd.

I may just be pissy because 90% of my deaths in those situations are cheap pitfalls

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I may just be pissy because 90% of my deaths in those situations are cheap pitfalls

I'm sure you meant to say "pratfalls".

Dark Souls definitely has numerous instances of situations where, unless you pre-prepared going in by reading a guide, you gonna die. That's when it slips into "cheap" difficulty rather than "admirable" difficulty. The Goat dude and his stupid dogs are an example of that. Walk through misty door and they are literally eating your balls off before you have time to even register the scenery.

 

[Fappy]

I may just be pissy because 90% of my deaths in those situations are cheap pitfalls

I'm sure you meant to say "pratfalls".

Dark Souls definitely has numerous instances of situations where, unless you pre-prepared going in by reading a guide, you gonna die. That's when it slips into "cheap" difficulty rather than "admirable" difficulty. The Goat dude and his stupid dogs are an example of that. Walk through misty door and they are literally eating your balls off before you have time to even register the scenery.

I actually never died to that fight surprisingly (and wasn't using a guide the first time). I was playing sword & board and was cautious as fuck... barely survived.

Worst surprise buttsex boss has got to be the Stray Demon. You fall through the ground, go to half health and he smashes you immediately :I

 

[BloatedGuppy]

I actually never died to that fight surprisingly (and wasn't using a guide the first time). I was playing sword & board and was cautious as fuck... barely survived.

Worst surprise buttsex boss has got to be the Stray Demon. You fall through the ground, go to half health and he smashes you immediately :I

Took me 23 tries to kill the Stray Demon. I one shot Four Kings. I one shot Ornstein and Smough. And yet some fucking random leftover demon kills me 22 times.

 

[Fappy]

I actually never died to that fight surprisingly (and wasn't using a guide the first time). I was playing sword & board and was cautious as fuck... barely survived.

Worst surprise buttsex boss has got to be the Stray Demon. You fall through the ground, go to half health and he smashes you immediately :I

Took me 23 tries to kill the Stray Demon. I one shot Four Kings. I one shot Ornstein and Smough. And yet some fucking random leftover demon kills me 22 times.

Did you one-shot those two with or without a guide? Either way that's pretty impressive. I've only managed to one-shot about half the bosses without a guide. I only resort to a guide if I am getting stomped multiple times.

Ornstein and Smough were just plain tough, but my issue with Four Kings was how disorienting it is. I had a really difficult time with depth perception in that fight... whiffed a lot of attacks and got hit by stuff I should have been able to dodge.

 

[BloatedGuppy]

Did you one-shot those two with or without a guide? Either way that's pretty impressive. I've only managed to one-shot about half the bosses without a guide. I only resort to a guide if I am getting stomped multiple times.

O&S was without a guide. Four Kings I knew what to expect.

 

[Silentpony_v1legacy]

SNIP

I was under the impression that until Ellen headed down into the Alien nest, she had only been interacting with one Alien-- I thought that it was the meltdown that prompted the (newer) Aliens to scatter and take up residence elsewhere.

I can't speak to teleporting AI. I know the Alien can move at high speeds in the vents, and believed that's how it always got around: I didn't notice any "cheating".

Maybe I missed the significance of the whole Alien nest scene.

Oh yeah, the Steam forum is filled with people complaining about the 'teleporting' alien.

Basically the game plays by certain conventions. The motion tracker is able to track moving enemies, the Alien has to spawn from the vents in the ceiling, the Alien has to hunt/sniff you down first before he can just kill you, etc...


So when you check the tracker and nothing is there, and boom and Alien comes charging from the hallway, you feel cheated.
When you see the Alien crawl back up into a vent, walk down a hallway, open a door and the Alien is waiting, you feel cheated.
When the Alien crawls down from a vent and makes a beeline towards you(assuming you're already hiding before he spawns) and just kills you, you feel cheated.

I imagine you if play through the game knowing there are multiple Aliens kicking about, you'll have a more honest experience. The game just felt very dishonest with a lot of the mechanics, up to the point where any progress just felt randomly achieved and I can't draw satisfaction from spending 6+ hours rolling a D6 hoping for a 7.

 

[StriderShinryu]

Sadly, there really aren't that many games that I can think of that I would single out as doing difficulty well. I would put the Souls games largely in this camp as I feel that if you take the time to actually learn the game and get good at it, you will succeed more often than not. Or, at the least, when you do die, you'll know why. Even the majority of the so called cheap deaths by traps, etc. can be avoided the first time once you learn what sort of things the game likes to throw at you.

As for examples of bad AI? Sports games and fighting games. Sports games are notorious for a strange form of rubber banding where the team you were destroying for 3/4 of the game suddenly can't miss a shot and plays perfect defense. Your team, of course, suddenly can't make a pass without it being intercepted and can't even score into an unguarded net.

And fighting games.. oh boy. When the AI starts reading your button inputs and reacting instantly with a perfect counter things get real stupid real quick. I'm always reminded of how Super Street Fighter 2 Turbo's AI for Ken worked (and it basically became Akuma's AI in later games). He would walk towards you. If you threw a fireball or other long animating attack, he'd jump before the move even came out and combo your ass. If you let him get within a literal pixel of his throw range, he'd throw you with inhuman awareness of his throw range. If you waited just long enough and tried an attack, he'd use an inhumanly timed invincible dragon punch before your move even started to blow throw anything you tried. That was it, and he didn't just do this once a match. On higher difficulty levels, this is literally all he would do. At least there was some variance in Street Fighter though. In the Mortal Kombat games, this sort of bullshit input reading was all the AI ever did.

 

[Thebazilly]

I would add another category here. "Difficulty by Luck."

FTL's been mentioned a few times, but what that game really comes down to is how lucky you are on drops. To even have a chance of beating it, you have to get good weapons, missiles, spare parts, etc. I don't think I've seen a game that's equal to it in that regard, but I imagine a lot of rogue-likes or procedurally generated games would run into the same issue.

 

[TheYellowCellPhone]

My favorite is the game thinking that more enemies = more difficulty. The game developer says, at the end of the game when you've honed in on your skills and become accustomed to defeating these mediocre enemies, we could incorporate new enemies that use different tactics and have different means of defeating them... But it's easier if we just throw waves of the same mediocre enemies at you so that you drown in the sheer numbers because you can't output enough damage, or you take damage and die due to the monotony of doing the same stupid thing over and over.

A game that I felt was a terrible offender of that was Zeno Clash. There are maybe five different enemies in the game: brawlers, zombie-like things, animals, juggernaut minibosses, and marksmen who also incorporates two of the bosses. The game starts with you fighting one brawler at a time, then it ramps up the difficulty by having you fight more of the same brawlers, but I think it caps at having you go against five without losing. The zombie section will pit I think a maximum of six zombies at you. There's a section in the game where you're on the rails of a rowboat and have to shoot a long line of the same marksmen. Especially the final fight, where it throws two juggernaut enemies at you and intends on you to beat both of them simultaneously, where previously you've fought both juggernauts seperately in one-on-one arenas.

 

[Evonisia]

I think Call of Duty: World at War deserves a medal for its dedication to shit secreted by a bull.

Veteran difficulties (or hard modes) are typical fine. They often reveal an error in the balancing of damage distribution to players, with Gears of War being a woeful but engaging example, but World at War specifically changes the AI to make it so they throw more grenades at you than I think the German or Japanese military even produced in real life. So between praying that your face doesn't dissolve from seventeen thousand bullets on the battlefield, you have to run because you can't stand still for more than five seconds without having a grenade lobbed at you. The increased damage to explosives means that even on the edge of the danger meter you take like half your health's worth of damage per grenade. It's clearly a tactic to try and make the game hard as if it wouldn't have been had they thrown grenades like they did in Normal mode, but it's not hard it's just obtuse. It's a test of the player's patience and it's one I failed on multiple occasions until finally bashing through the wall with my skull and finishing the thing, broken, shaken and practically weeping.

I don't know who thought it was a good idea, but whoever it was deserves to be sent to some kind of Developer Hell for the crimes of Covetousness, Wrath and perhaps Gluttony. Thank Christ it didn't return in Black Ops or Black Ops II.

Weirdly enough, however, the Veteran mode of WaW creates a rare feeling that you really are desperately fighting for every inch of land you can get off the enemy. You go street by street, jungle by jungle, corridor by corridor, it creates a crushing sense of dread and oppression that I don't think I've seen replicated in any other game. So props to you Treyarch you mad bastards, I hope it was worth the Hell sentence.

 

[RJ 17]

I thought about a variety of "raiding" MMOs, which require one to replay a fight to learn the "right" way to do it, but unlike in a TBS you still have to execute it, which requires manual dexterity, resource management, and exquisite timing.

Eh, I'd disagree with you on this one. To me a game that is difficult in a "good" way is one that challenges your actual skill level, not your pattern memorization ability. That is to say any raid-boss in an MMO isn't really a "fight", it's a precisely choreographed song-and-dance that if you take too many missteps during your raid will wipe. In fact, with that notion in mind, I was going to offer up WoW - and MMO's in general - as a game that does difficulty poorly. There's no tactical decision making in a raid boss fight, there's no nuanced approach you can take that will defeat the boss in a way no one thought of before. No, everyone in the raid has a specific place where to stand, a specific mark to crank up the dps, a specific mark to tone down the DPS, and whatever other dance the prescribe "strat" requires. It's almost exactly what you were describing with Valkyria Chronicles: do it this way or the highway.

Then you throw in the concept of "your raid's collective gear just isn't good enough yet to even have a chance at this boss" and the "validity" of an MMO's difficulty drops further.

As for some other games...

Game that did it wrong:
Bioshock Infinite. This goes with the "Bags of HP" complaint in that every enemy in that game is little more than a massive bullet sponge. Then again, the game does give you built-in infinite ammo in the form of Elizabeth pulling it literally right out of her ass. Still, bullet-sponge enemies are not difficult, they're tiresome.

Game(s) that did it right:
The Tenchu series. Here's a pretty simple and straight forward game: use stealth to infiltrate somewhere and kill off a target. The rules are easy to grasp and understand and they don't change just because you're doing awesome. Quite simply if you mess up you have no one to blame but yourself. The controls for actual combat are awkward at best meaning if you get in a fight with someone often times your best option is to just run away or you'll quickly find the one guards you were facing sword-to-sword now has three buddies helping him out. This is intentional, however, as the entire point of the game is to be a STEALTH assassin...as in one that is not seen. You're not supposed to hop over the outer wall of an enemy compound and start charging at people. This thus encourages a more patient and calculated approach to each level. You wait and watch from the shadows, learning the overlapping patrol patterns of the guards, then you start picking them off, one by one. Each guard you pluck off unseen gives you more room to maneuver as you execute the plan of attack that you developed. Every level can be completed in numerous ways, all that matters is the the strength of your own plan and your skill working within the game's clearly defined rules.

Edit:
Oh, another thing I wanted to point out is another type of "Bullshit Difficulty": AI that has "shared vision" or "screen cheats" off of you. That is to say when the AI - purely because it is the AI - knows exactly where you are at all times, even when there's absolutely no way for it to accomplish this within the rules of the game.

As an example, last week in League of Legends, Shaco was one of the free champions available. I had never played him before but I was interested in him. Now I'm not one to just jump out with a new champ and get my face stomped in by actual players. No, I take champs I'm interested in on a little test-drive with a few matches against bots so I can at least learn some basic strats and combos and how the champion works. This was particularly true with Shaco as I've heard that he takes a lot of skill in order to play effectively. There's just one problem: his ultimate is 100% ineffective against bots.

For those that don't know, Shaco's ultimate ability is that he disappears for a half second and when he comes back he has a clone of himself standing next to him. Now against actual players, this creates misdirection...which one is the real one? Better guess right because if you kill the wrong one it explodes for some pretty big damage. Played as effectively as I've seen him played by other players, this can cause some real havoc. The problem is you can't really practice with this ult because the bots always know which one is the real you. They utterly ignore your clone every single time and immediately go straight for you. As such any hope of getting in some test drive practice rounds with Shaco against the bots is entirely fruitless.

 

[RJ 17]

but World at War specifically changes the AI to make it so they throw more grenades at you than I think the German or Japanese military even produced in real life.

And god help you if you merely wound an enemy combatant. That's when they go into "last stand" and literally become a grenade-lobbing turret. No matter where you are, what cover you're behind, you're going to get doinked on the head by a grenade once every three seconds by some jackass you knicked in the leg at the beginning of the firefight and he went down behind some cover. Well he can't shoot at you now, there's cover in the way! Time to bust out the Mary Poppins' Bag-o-Grenades and start chuckin'em! And there he will lay for 10 minutes, just throwing homing grenades at your face despite the fact that there's not a chance in hell that he can see over the cover that he went down behind, until you finally find the barrel he's hiding behind and finish him off.

 

[Dirty Hipsters]

Example of bad difficulty:

Jackal Snipers in Halo. On the higher difficulties they have perfect accuracy and will shoot you in the head instantly if you even peak around cover. They also fight in packs so while you're shooting at one you're almost guaranteed to get shot by another one you never even saw.

Example of good difficulty:

Pretty much everything else in Halo. I've always liked the way that Halo handled difficulty (jackal snipers not withstanding). Halo's enemy AI has always been pretty impressive (at least in the Bungie games), and on higher difficulties the enemies don't just get harder because they get more health and better weapons, they get harder because the AI actually changes. On higher difficulties the enemies are bolder, they react faster, and in general become more organized and more vicious, and that makes the game a lot more fun because you really get a different experience when you increase the difficulty.