"Good" vs "Bad" Difficulty

[Autumnflame]

Mass Effect 2 on Insanity difficulty.
It was hard yes but no where near an impossibility.

Tactics on easier difficulties had to be adjusted.
Enemies were smarter more accurate and come with additional protection.

You really had to be on the top of your game as a mistake will cost you your life.

I found in areas i had to push harder and be more aggressive as passive play would ensure a surround.

One of the few instances of a hard challenge i liked

 

[Dizchu]

Best difficulty for me is Doom. The monsters are varied and are used to make really interesting scenarios, and if the mapper is at least semi-competent, the game will be fair.

The best mapsets for me in terms of difficulty are Speed of Doom and Resurgence. The design philosophy is basically "overwhelming odds, but there's always a way to get out of sticky situations". If you move around fast enough and are resourceful, you will be able to overcome those levels. It's never unfair.

The worst kind of difficulty is found in games that pretend like you have a second chance but instead you just want to kill yourself to restart. This is common in many games with good difficulty when super-obscure challenges are involved, but if it's necessary for the main game then it is bullshit, sorry. Many stealth games suffer from this. If you're found, you're screwed. If there's no quicksave/quickload, you're even more screwed. Thankfully games like Thief: The Dark Project were designed in a way that actually gave you the opportunity to redeem yourself.

Also, lives systems. They're terrible. They belong in an arcade machine, not a game you actually purchase. While I believe that a game should be allowed to withhold content from you if you're not skilled enough, forcing you to replay sections that you can do without breaking a sweat is just shitty game design. Sorry, I know it's a classic gaming tradition but it's diabolical.

Imagine if you failed a test and as a result was forced to redo high school, no matter how many As you had previously. Yeah.

 

[beastro]

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.

Was a big reason why I quit Civ games after III. Not that the games I've played since then have had good AI "(TW series, ugh), but it was less blatant.

It's also factoring into a bit of souring with me and Paradox games where the devs have pretty much said they hate improving the AI and will no longer both doing it, just give it bonus'. The latest tweak in EUIV being that the AI doesn't suffer from the stacking attrition pentalty where if a province has a supply limit of 50 and 100 factions each have a 40 stack army they won't suffer attrition, but YOU do if if you're 40 stack is in one with an AI army that goes over the limit.

At first I welcomed this until I realized they'd left out the player since it always pissed me off sieging only to have a friendly or neutral army walk by me and knock a few thousand troops off my besiegers.

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.

Sounds to me like this would be an RPG I'd never touch.

For FPS', I'd say it's ok for little junk food games like CoD single player, however annoying, but for a game like The Last of Us it's there's no reason.

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).

CivV has that? Thank God I stopped playing the series 7 years ago.

I have a very specialized way of playing strategy games where I'm aware of my advantages and deliberately handicap myself while focusing on helping weaker AI factions. In Civ I'd always help out weaker powers under attack while in games like CK2 I like to create large empires only engineer their collapse and fragment into successor states and see how they bicker and play out over time.

A rubberband pigeonholes you into always playing one style against the AI and leaves you no free room to go madly paint the map, then lay back and let them get an advantage over you.

As for racing games, it's a big reason why I've never liked them.

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.

Only exception to this would be an MMO raid mob with loot balanced to risk vs reward.

It's inexcusable in a single player game.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

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.

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).

(this relates to these two specifically)


I can't remember if it was age of empires or empire earth (play similar enough), but I got really good at these games when I was younger, and I remember playing a skirmish against the computer on one of the highest difficulties (might have been the highest?), and just for kicks I sent a scout out into their land to identify where they were at and what they were up to...

I was barely gathering enough wood and food to make a few more settlers and MAYBE an barracks in the next few minutes, my scout gets over there and it looks like they've got a 5000 year head start on me with tech 2 ages beyond what I was rolling with, I remember distinctly saying "fuck that bullshit" and quit and never touched that game for years after that.

OT:

It's honestly pretty difficult (har har, punny) to say what is good or bad sometimes, as there are things that I like in games that my friends hate (and vise verse) so I'll just speak off the top of my head here.

It's been a while since I played it, and it is a roguelike game, but rogue legacy always felt like it was difficult but fair; any death was clearly my fault and me just not having the reflexes to time those jump+strafes perfectly. the game is punishing as fuck, but each time you die, you go into the game knowing what your weaknesses are so I don't feel like that's unfair, but some of those bosses are a damn pain in the ass to kill if you aren't a stubborn ************ (which I'm not in particular.).

reference: (all boss fights only pretty much)

 

[barbzilla]

So good and bad difficulty is being discussed, but how does the way the game handles getting the player back into the fray affect our judgment on how it handles difficulty overall?

Take for example Super Meat Boy or Hotline Miami. Now whether you consider these games to be good hard or bad hard [footnote]hurr hurr hurr it's like good touch bad touch[/footnote], while they will happily kill you in a nanosecond they will also let you restart and try again in a nanosecond. Does this affect our judgement; does this excuse otherwise bad difficulty?

I am going to say that to me, respawning and how a game handles you getting your progress back is a very important factor into difficulty. I love Dues Ex (original), and while I wouldn't say the game had "bad" difficulty (though by today's standards I probably would) the save system was fairly brutal (on first playthrough). Since you had no idea of where/when some terrible combination of enemies would pass, there was no possible way for you to mitigate the time loss except to quick save every 5-10 minutes. Meanwhile games like Starbound flop to the other side of the equation by making death so trivial. As for a good example Dark Souls' death system was pretty forgiving and helped to mitigate the otherwise brutal difficulty in new areas (though this is negated for areas without bonfires in decent positions like near Bed of Chaos).

 

[OneCatch]

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.

Spoiler

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.

You can use spoiler tags like so:
{spoiler} {/spoiler}

Makes it extremely easy to avoid spoiling games/films/whatever for people that haven't got around to them yet.

In terms of the game I never experienced that in particular. The Alien can travel extremely quickly in vents, and the motion tracker glitches out constantly with vents (if either you're in them or the target is).
Is it possible that the alien was just figuring out where you were going and cutting you off? I experienced that a few times in the hospital level where it only hunts at ground level - it would seemingly work out that I was moving towards a particular chokepoint and then head there to wait for me. I actually watched it do it a few times, so I don't think there was a teleportation element.

One area where I thought the Alien Isolation did cheat a bit was in the way it followed you around within levels, because it can precisely zero-in on doors opening and closing, no matter where it is on the map. I'd have liked some way of throwing it off for a little bit longer, or perhaps the AI widening the area it searched if you didn't do anything new to alert it for a while.

 

[Ruuvan]

I'm going to throw in another mention for Ninja Gaiden. The game was phenomenal! The fact I couldn't get passed the first boss (the guy with the tonfa in the dojo?) for ages just made me play it even more.

Yes, some of the later enemies had really dick moves, but once you knew how to fight and defend like a true ninja the game was amazing. It pushed you so hard and it felt so good to be able to clear a room of nasties, taking minimal damage and flowing through them like a river. The bosses were insane; if you didn't know exactly how to read their moves - which took a few runs at it - you stood no chance, but again it felt so rewarding to finally beat them and move on.

Sure enough the camera angles caused some problems, but other than that it was solid. There were no truly 'purposely going to kill you' moments like in Dark Souls where, if you didn't know what was around the corner, you were going to die without question. Ninja Gaiden at least gave you a moment to scream "ho shi--" before launching in to a flurry of attacks. Button bashing did not work, you had to know what to do.

I just loved every moment of it.

 

[Evonisia]

Also, lives systems. They're terrible. They belong in an arcade machine, not a game you actually purchase. While I believe that a game should be allowed to withhold content from you if you're not skilled enough, forcing you to replay sections that you can do without breaking a sweat is just shitty game design. Sorry, I know it's a classic gaming tradition but it's diabolical.

Imagine if you failed a test and as a result was forced to redo high school, no matter how many As you had previously. Yeah.

Among many other lesser reasons, this is the major reason I believe Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends to be far superior to the more recent Super Mario 2D games. I can never get frustrated at either game because I know I will start again a relatively short distance back, with no penalty other than realising that I've died 50 times trying to get up this mountain of death and I'll be damned if anybody else realises it while I play it.

 

[Dizchu]

Among many other lesser reasons, this is the major reason I believe Rayman Origins and Rayman Legends to be far superior to the more recent Super Mario 2D games. I can never get frustrated at either game because I know I will start again a relatively short distance back, with no penalty other than realising that I've died 50 times trying to get up this mountain of death and I'll be damned if anybody else realises it while I play it.

The most frustrating thing is having a message asking you if the section is too difficult for you if you die too many times. Apart from that, the latest Rayman games are the pinnacle of 2D platformers. All the challenge and fun of old games without the dated, unnecessary stuff. I wish Mario and Sonic knew how to reinvent themselves the way Rayman did.

I mean you've seen the "Land of the Livid Dead" levels, you know that Rayman hasn't been "dumbed down" for new audiences. It's as challenging as ever. But the challenge isn't artificial, and you know that if you beat those levels it's because of skill and not because of endurance.

 

[Tyrant_Valvatorez]

Good Difficulty: Kingdom Hearts 2 Final Mix. Critical mode is the highest difficulty in KH2 and its a good example of good design and game balance, Sora gains less HP and MP from bonus levels meaning you only have 60 HP endgame and this means the player has to play much more carefully. Instead of this being a bad example of fake difficulty, the game balances it out by giving the player added perks such as starting the game with 50AP and helpful abilities. Critical mode also retains the double damage taken from Proud mode but balances out the smaller player HP by giving Sora a damage buff which I believe is something like 25%, In a nutshell due to proper balancing and good design (e.g the damage ceiling) the game becomes more challenging but very fair as level 1 runs are possible.

I can't think of a good example of bad difficulty going on what I have been playing recently.

 

[Laughing Man]

Worst difficulty... well this isn't aimed at AI it is aimed at multiplayer racing within GTA 5.

Here's a little example I am a level 310 with maximum driving skill and I am driving a full modded Carbonizza (Ferrari 458 drop top), which is one of the fastest straight line sports class cars. Me and lvl 19 driving what can only be a partially modded Elegy RH8 are doing a straight run on The Commute race, we both accelerate to top speed and my car is barely able to pull away.

This is the functional affect of being in first place in this game, you literally loose an entire gear from your cars top end, it hugely kills your cars top speed, to the degree that it renders your level, your car's mods and the so called skill tree almost pointless. It really is bad. Made even worse that if you happened to do a race that involves, well, driving skill rather than top end speed the catch up effect is rendered useless because it ONLY affects the cars top end speed and nothing else.

Best difficulty

Has to be Shadow Of Mordor, the Orcs skills were introduced gradually, the ability to counter and over come them felt logical and if you got killed it was generally because you made a mistake and not because you were forced in to doing some stupid counter that had to be timed perfectly and required a specific button press combo (Batman games I am looking at you.) Better still the Nemesis system was fair, you got beaten by some guy you couldn't just plough back in and go after him because he may have earned some additional skill that would now make him even harder. I don't know any game that could have you engaged in an 30 minute battle with upwards of 100 enemies and not have you thinking I am fucked.

 

[marioandsonic]

I've never been a fan of difficulty by luck. I tend to do poorly when the outcome is determined by the Random Number Gods.

I've beaten the new XCOM, but I admittedly save-scummed, because I wasn't a fan of my sniper missing a killshot with a 95% hit chance, only for that alien to kill one of my units with a 25% hit chance.