Jimquisition: A Different Kind of Difficulty

[dbenoy]

Every time I died in Bioshock and woke up in a vita chamber, I reloaded my game. Later on they added a patch to turn off the vita chambers and I thought 'Huh? I was already doing that.' but users sometimes confuse 'having an option' vs. 'being forced to take that option', and complained that they were forced to never lose.

So, the developers had to roll their eyes and add a optional game-over screen.

When you get right down to it, these games aren't taking anything away from you when they give you the option to just coast without challenge. They're just adding something in, and giving you the choice.

In my opinion, there's no way to make a game better by taking something away, and there's no way to make it worse by adding something in, so long as you have the freedom to ignore it if you choose. (Hm.. I wonder if that applies to tacked on multiplayer as well?)

 

[Realitycrash]

And congratulations Jim, you have COMPLETELY missed the point of the people who complain about games being too easy today.

Of course Kirby's Epic Yarn is easy, Kirby games have ALWAYS been easy, and it goes beyond saying that the point of Epic Yarn isn't the same as the point of fucking Ninja Gaiden.

The people who complain about games getting too easy mean that ALL games have gotten too easy and that the "hardest" difficulty settings for games where the point is still getting to the end of a level without dying have become fucking jokes.

So this entire episode was basically a gigantic straw-man argument.

Bravo i say.

Did you even watch this? His whole argument was "not dying alot =/= not hard." Most games boil down to getting from point A to point B alive but that is the absolute bare bones of the game. Even in ultra-hard settings, that part is easy because the programmers want the feebs who don't want to put any actual effort into the game to feel they accomplished something by seeing that end credit roll and tell their friends to get it. If they made just "finishing" the game hard, people wouldn't buy it since their ADD addled brains wouldn't have the tolerance to do so.

Now, the real challenge of games is getting from Point A to Point B but also doing it with a degree of perfection or completionism. Sure, "finishing" most games is easy. But "Completing" a game is much harder.

But hey, if you wanna shell out $50-60 just to rush to the end in less than 10 hours and see that credit roll, no one is gonna deny you that. Not everyone actually strives to be good at the game, just getting to the end is satisfaction enough. In fact, you're the publishers and retailers favorite kind of person. You hurry out, buy the game new, think it sucks/finish it, then trade it in for about half of what its worth so they can sell it again at a mark up.

Well that sure is a nice straw-man argument you have there, and an Ad Hominem too! You take after Jim quite nicely.

A lot of games, as far as i'm concerned most games actually, don't lend them selves very well at all to the kind of completionism describe by Jim in the video, and that exactly why i talked about difficulty settings, they should put some actual effort into making the different difficulty settings you know, DIFFERENT!

And i'll have you know that i haven't once in my entire life traded in a game at a Gamestop or any store like it.

And i'm also quite the completionist myself, to a near Autistic degree sometimes, but i'd like the games that don't have tons of side-quests and stuff to actually present a challenge too.

But that's wrong, and here's why.

In the examples he gave, the "optional" difficulty is absolutely integral to the game. Jim didn't "make a challenge for himself" by going for gold medals, gold metal are a goal very clearly given by the game.

If the game can't provide some kind of challenge "optional" or not, that is actually integral to the game, then the game is probably pretty lousy.

I'm pretty sure that nothing in Kirby says that "these medals is what you should go for!", but something like "save the princess/save your friends/save whatever!" (Sorry, haven't played Kirby since NES, so I don't know what his deal is. Some evil Wizard, right?)

If I may make a parallel to Cut the Rope (yes, I'm bringing puzzle-Iphone games into this), the challenge comes with collecting all the stars of the level, but that just gives you extra score. The object is still to just beat the level and get to the next.

Halo has this too. In fact, to just GET the final difficulty (Mythic), you got run around and collect skulls in secret places, etc.
Okey, I don't think a shooter should be about fetch-quests, but still, it's an option.

Except that the Medals in Kirby's epic yarn are gained by collecting (and holding onto) gems, and these gems are the currency that are used for the games side-quest flat decoration thing, you are explicitly encouraged to get gems, and by proxy to get medal, as i said, the medals are integral to the game.

As is getting stars in Cut the Rope, do you actually think that ANYONE that plays Cut the Rope doesn't want to go for all the stars? That's like saying that killing enemies in Duke Nukem 3D or Half Life is "optional" because you can just speed run to the end.

Actually, my ex-girlfriend never went for all the stars. She just said "fuck it" if a level bothered her.
And as for Duke Nukem..Speed-runs can be an optional challenge, you know. I used to play Halo 2 with the challenge of "never get hit". It was hard as hell, but kinda fun.
My only problem with these challenges is that they only work if you grind a game you like, or have no other games to play. Nowdays, when I make money and can play whatever I goddamn please, I wouldn't be arsed to put any extra challenges into a game, because I would just move on to another. The only real reason I did such with Halo 2 was because I owned like..Ten games, or so. Most of them being utter crap.

 

[SwindleUK]

And congratulations Jim, you have COMPLETELY missed the point of the people who complain about games being too easy today.

Of course Kirby's Epic Yarn is easy, Kirby games have ALWAYS been easy, and it goes beyond saying that the point of Epic Yarn isn't the same as the point of fucking Ninja Gaiden.

The people who complain about games getting too easy mean that ALL games have gotten too easy and that the "hardest" difficulty settings for games where the point is still getting to the end of a level without dying have become fucking jokes.

So this entire episode was basically a gigantic straw-man argument.

Bravo i say.

My problem with that is it appears that hardcore gamers suffer from sadomasicism. They can only enjoy a game if it spanks them hard enough.

And what do they want devs to do? Make a game almost imposible to beat?

OT: Bravo I say, Jim. But you're not black.

The idea is you beat something others couldn't so you can brag a little.

but to say kirby is new in its choose your difficulty is bull, you could always play games for highscores, lego star wars has the exact same death equals less gems or whatever mechanic.

Jim is fucking incorrect on this issue. Difficulty doesn't come from death however challenge from slow as movement avoiding hits is not the same as dodging attacks and quickly disposing of enemies to earn a platinum medal on bayonetta.

kirby might have had some tension but it wasn't hard.

 

[DuelLadyS]

I love 'optional difficulty', and this really sums up why... my primary goal when I play a game is to actually play the game. Nothing will make me shelve a game faster than being forced to repeat a segment over and over again becuase I can't get it quite right and die(and I'm not the greatest gamer, so it comes up.) Forced repetition is NOT fun. At all. It just results in an angry gamer and possibly a broken controller.

I love games that lock their core challenge in perfection runs becuase I'm not forced to replay a stage repeatedly to see the whole game- if I get stuck, I can choose to take a lower score and move on, possibly returning later to get that mastery in. I find I do better at these kind of games, becuase I don't get as frustrated with the perfection challenge... knowing it's optional makes a huge difference. The game is not 'blocked' for me becuase my weak platform-jumping skills keep me from completing a nessecary sequence (I'm looking right at you, my old copy of God of War... maybe someday I'll get a friend to do the 'hard part' so I can actually see your story unfold.)

 

[Dana22]

Lets put Achievements everywhere, result will be the same. Oh wait, we already do.

 

[vivster]

pretty much every modern game has challenges beyond simple play through
even if it is only in the form of trophies that give you higher goals than it would be necessary in the game
it's a better way to challenge the gamer because it's optional and everyone who just wants a simple play through can have that too
and that's the thing, today's "hardcore gamers" have gotten lazy
they have to get the difficulty forced upon them or else they wouldn't do it

yay modern games

 

[dbenoy]

I love 'optional difficulty', and this really sums up why... my primary goal when I play a game is to actually play the game. Nothing will make me shelve a game faster than being forced to repeat a segment over and over again becuase I can't get it quite right and die(and I'm not the greatest gamer, so it comes up.) Forced repetition is NOT fun. At all. It just results in an angry gamer and possibly a broken controller.

Strong agreement here.

It's okay for a game to give you a psychological punishment for failure, but it doesn't have to be to force you to spend minutes to hours doing some task you don't want to do. We get enough of that in real life.

In fact, the psychological punishment can be extremely subtle. Just a little 'click-twang' sound in Guitar Hero when you miss a note is enough to encourage you to push yourself as hard as you can to get a perfect game.

Or, more commonly, just having a list with empty slots for every item you missed throughout the game is enough to encourage you to go back and find them, and it didn't have to force you to replay anything.

 

[Jennacide]

Dammit Jim. You made me hate you so much on Destructoid, but with this you keep proving we think alike. I fully agree though, as some of my favorite challenges in games were never the ones outright put in front of me. Sure, games like IWBTG and Super Meat Boy are "hardcore difficult," but that doesn't always mean it's a fun difficult. They are to some people, but they became sadomasochistic in thier difficulty.

 

[BloodSquirrel]

There are two problems with this view of difficulty:

1- Gold medals and the like aren't powerful enough motivators for some people. Not everyone can be made to care about getting 100% instead of 98%.

Witness the number of people who didn?t care- at all- if they ?died? in Fable 2 or 3. Giving the characters scars didn?t work. Some people just resorted to spamming aoe spells over and over and not caring if they got killed doing it.

2- It's very difficult to balance a game around widely divergent difficulty levels. Taking a game system that was designed at a very low level of difficult and trying to force a higher level of difficulty in it is more likely to result in something that is just frustrating rather than challenging. In particular, doing this tends to reveal the weak spots in the system which were more easily ignored before because they could just be blundered over.

A good example is Metroid Prime 3 on high difficulty- the game is still obnoxiously easy (I beat most of the bosses on the first try, and I never needed a third), but becomes downright tedious because of how much health the enemies have, and how long you have to play the "duck in and back out from behind cover" game to kill them. None of the prerequisites for good challenge (like enemy AI or depth of offensive options) were designed into the system, and giving the enemies more health wasn?t going to change that.

 

[mjc0961]

I agree completely. Any time I hear someone complain that Kirby's Epic Yarn was too easy, I instantly know that they did not go for gold medals and certainly did not do all the mini-games. That game was damn challenging at times if you actually took the time to sit down and play it all the way through instead of just beating the final boss and acting like you're a badass hardcore dude for getting to 50-60% completion.

And personally, I'd rather have that than have a "hard" option that doesn't change anything in the game beyond making the enemies tanks or giving them infinite grenades to throw at you. That's not harder, that's just more tedious. Enemies should get smarter on hard mode, not bulkier.

 

[BloodSquirrel]

delete

 

[Ekit]

Jimquisition is getting better and better. In my book Jimquisition is now easily in the top four best Escapist shows.

 

[Mister Linton]

Anyone who bemoans how easy games are today should never ever ever ever save their game. As soon as they screw up three times they have to start at the beginning. Boom. Every game made nowadays is now just as hard as the "good old days".

 

[Redd the Sock]

I don't know. I don't think the lowest rung should be set that low.

Optional challenges have always been a part of video games, but there's something offputting about a "show up and try" level challenge being the main goal. Have we sunk that far that we cater to people that need to be garunteed the "you win" screen? Okay, the main perputrators of this are Kirby Epic Yarn and the Lego movie games, and other kid / family fare, but still, I fear that direction (see Final Fantasy 13's instant battle restart).

I'll admit, I miss the time when beating a game was an acheivement rather than something done so quickly everyone will be spoling the ending online within two days. Castlevania, Ninja Gaiden, Battletoads, these were all still fun even though we never got the payoff. It might be more tolerable if the rewards were known to be better for doing the extra challenges. Take Mario 64 for example: get all 120 stars and what do you get? You see Yoshi for a few seconds and get a ton of lives to no longer need. Lame. Fianl Fantasy 7's optional bosses, win and get things you probably already got to beat the optional bosses. At least Kingdom Hearts gives us bonus ending movies. Some give nothing but bragging rights and weird looks from guys like Yahtzee that wonder why we bothered.

 

[TStormer]

Fucking hell this guy is really really fucking funny every so often.

He's getting better and he is going to be a serious big player in a year or two.

 

[winter2]

Jimbo for God Emperor!

 

[Lord_Gremlin]

Most of misunderstandings here stem from the fact that many people confuse challenge and difficulty with cheapness. And think about this: optional challenge been done many times, but not cheapness - it's not fun, and therefore cheapness is never optional. Have you ever seen optional broken escort mission? Truly optional? Never.

 

[Lord_Gremlin]

Double post.

 

[Mid-Boss]

What I love is people who claim to hate Jim but watch his videos every week. Do they do it just so that they can come onto the boards and complain every week?

 

[The Great JT]

Thank you, Escapist, for continuing to bless the interwebs with more of Jim Sterling.