Poll: Difficulty of Games, too hard?

[Koroviev]

If I recall correctly, Mass Effect 2's difficulty doesn't scale very well. Following completion on normal difficulty, I played it on Hardcore and discovered that a small group of even the most basic mechs could take obscene amounts of damage.

I disagree - I found Insanity to be barely any different, apart from my AI companions were even less useful. They would die at the drop of a hat due to awful AI.

That's what I meant. It's not more difficult, just tedious.

 

[efAston]

I think games are getting too easy, because of consoles. Batman Arkham Asylum was all auto-aim, and when I got to the end of Velvet Assassin I didn't know how to use a gun, because I'd been going through all the levels in "wowbuckets you were stealthy as anyone" rating. When you have controllers decent enough to move and aim independently and at the same time, you really don't need big flashing arrows pointing at every object. Detective mode in Arkham Asylum felt like a bloody walkthrough, I felt ripped off that there was no way of playing without it. I've just started playing Assassin's Creed and feels like auto-pilot after Mirror's Edge. I wouldn't drive an automatic and I don't want to play "choose your own cut-scene" games.

If you find the opposite, it's not really a problem though is it? Playing in easy doesn't really change much, just gives you fewer moments of "whoa, that was pretty swish what I just did there", but I'm only really interested in that when a game has a really good combat system anyway. In MoH (2010) I wouldn't have found it any more satisfying shooting at dots from behind cover if it took more attempts, most of my satisfaction from games like that comes from "aha I'm flanking, now this'll stick a gumboot in his oil tank", but anything with circle strafing I'll usually play in hard or wish I had.

 

[NoOne852]

The only games I would say that would be "too difficult" would be Demon's Souls and Dark Souls. Even then, you just have to presevere and not be like me and try to dick around... I don't live long if you didn't catch that. XD But I still enjoy it. In the end, difficulty settings aree there for a reason, however the type of difficulty I do take problem with.
By that I mean artifical difficulty. The kind of difficulty where it only becomes harder by adding some kinda power up to whatever is the conflict. Granted, I would imagine shifting the AI's "intellegence" would be difficult for the programers.

 

[oktalist]

Difficulty settings are a bit of a blunt instrument. A developer can usually only try to design to one "canonical" difficulty setting (normal), and other difficulty settings will just be that one with fewer/stupider enemies (easy) and more/faster enemies (hard), with little consideration given to how playing on those different settings might affect other aspects of the design.

 

[Alrocsmash]

Difficulty settings are a bit of a blunt instrument. A developer can usually only try to design to one "canonical" difficulty setting (normal), and other difficulty settings will just be that one with fewer/stupider enemies (easy) and more/faster enemies (hard), with little consideration given to how playing on those different settings might affect other aspects of the design.

This. He knows whats up.

A prime example, most shooters. Making the difficulty harder only makes the enemies robots who shoot you and ONLY you the minute you try to do anything besides cower under a rock. This is a poor way to make the game harder. Make ammo more scarce, give the guns more recoil, let the enemies coordinate better. Don't give them space wizard reaction time.

I was just replaying MW2 on the hardest setting. It was almost unplayable. In one mission, a machine gunner needed to die. Problem, in that setting he would tear anything you were behind apart with his gun. Even if he has not seen you yet. He would literally trace me ANYwhere I went, auto targeting. That isnt harder, its just gay.

 

[BoTTeNBReKeR]

What's this difficulty you speak of? Most games tend to be soo easy that you might die once or twice in the entire game, even on the hard difficulty. And even then it usually is because you did something stupid like falling of a cliff or getting killed by a grenade or something.

I would really enjoy it if more games would actually be more challenging, especially shooters (and no, making your enemies bullet sponges with aimbot and infinite amount of grenades is not a good way of making a game more challenging)

 

[Racecarlock]

I am disgusted at some of the responses in this thread. Namely, the ones who say he should go on hard or else he's not good. Who cares if he's not good? Kid, what you should be doing is asking yourself "Am I enjoying myself at this level?", and if you're not, reduce the difficulty level. Games aren't meant to be tedious and impossible. Yes, some games could be more challenging, but why does some guy's difficulty choice get to some people on here? To my knowledge, this is not a "I beat every hard game ever on the hardest difficulty with no saves and still found every one too easy" hardcore gamer forum. Oh but what do I know? I've only been gaming since age 5.

 

[Nooh]

What I find annoying with modern day difficulty levels is that you have normal, quite alright, most people can handle it, difference being that veterans can beat it with ease and new players get a challenge, and then you have the harder modes.

Apparently the only thing striking into game developers' heads' when it comes to increasing the difficulty is changing the health. Increasing your enemies health and drastically reducing the player's. Okay, might be a good change to a degree, but it gets kind of annoying when you want a challenge on the hardest difficulty and the challenge turns into running and hiding as soon as an enemy so much as thinks of attacking you.

Are there really no other ways of increasing difficulty than simply changing a few HP numbers up and down? Is it impossible to perhaps add in one, just one, game mechanic that makes the game more challenging on the harder modes? I really enjoy a challenge but I don't find dying after 5 seconds in combat while needing 50 minutes to kill my enemies being fun.

Am I the only one with this mindset?

 

[Magicman10893]

I can usually play most games on normal without difficulty, but simply play on easy just in case. I hate the frustration of dying and failing repeatedly and would rather start on and easier difficulty than start on a harder one and then get frustrated and lower it. For instance, I played Gears of War 3 on Normal all the way through and died roughly 6 times throughout the whole thing.

I hardly ever play games on the highest difficulty because most games treat higher difficulty as "give the bad guys super powers while simultaneously turning you into a crippled shell of a man" mode. Veteran mode in Call of Duty doesn't make the enemies smarter or send more after you, it just gives them double health, double damage, makes them shrug off bullets (as in their accuracy isn't affected by that shotgun shell to the heart) and gives them the ability to see exactly where you are at all times and pick you off from 500 yards away because your foot peeked around a corner.

Mass Effect 2's Insanity mode didn't make the enemies smarter either, it just made you have Call of Duty levels of health and gives the enemies Terminator levels of armor. The only reason I played Call of Duty, Mass Effect or Gears of War on the highest difficulty was because I wanted the achievements (literally the Xbox Live Achievements) from completing it. I love Mass Effect and therefore want to get 100% achievement completion for the whole series, and so far I am succeeding.

 

[Sean Renaud]

Step 1: Play a game from today.

Step 2: Play a game from 10 years ago.

Follow the above steps and you will notice a clear decline in difficulty in the games nowadays.

Not in general you won't. Game difficulty clearly comes and goes so citing specific games won't make my point. I could point to Ninja Gaidan 2 and Devil May Cry 3 and walk away satisfied that nothing you could say would ever get past that.

But even trends as a whole don't seem to support your games are easier now. The thing is you've got ten years more experience than you did then and you were "raised" so to speak when you had ten weapons but half the time you were out of ammo for anything worth using. If there was a table or a waist high fence you couldn't go OVER it you had to go around it because jumping was beyond many many games. Now that you have options and experience you're ripping through. Go back and REPLAY or better yet find something from the PS1 or N64 that you never played and see how hard it really is. Super Contra was impossible as a little kid. Today I can rip through it without difficulty.

 

[Alex Santos]

Crysis 2 has a visor mode that reads like a fucking design document for every single area you enter.

lol that is true.

Also, difficulty settings that go Normal-Hard-Very Hard need to go! Normal should always be the middle setting never the first one, why? Because in all these games doing this the normal setting is really easy and the hard option is obviously what it was balanced for (which is why it should be called normal).

and

Difficulty settings are a bit of a blunt instrument. A developer can usually only try to design to one "canonical" difficulty setting (normal), and other difficulty settings will just be that one with fewer/stupider enemies (easy) and more/faster enemies (hard), with little consideration given to how playing on those different settings might affect other aspects of the design.

I agree. I usually want to play normal because that is usually how the the game was meant to be experienced and most likely most play testing was done on normal, and I feel like this is the same for Normal-Hard-Very Hard game. I like to think that they labeled it that way for a reason.

I played through BioShock (okay maybe this one isn't so recent but it serves the point well) on the hardest difficulty setting they made available to me and I don't think I died more than twice.

I actually played both Bioshock games on easy. And still died.

Games have become more about the experience as a whole rather than the competition with the machine so difficulty is often sacrificed to keep the pace of a story going properly. If you die over and over at something the big and emotional scenes will lose a lot of their connection when they're supposed to be experienced with a 20 minute break between them but you took 3 hours to manage to reach that point. This in turn has made games side with low difficulty for better storytelling.

You have a fantastic point there. And I agree. Most of the time I am in it for the experience and I don't want to die 10+ times due to trial and error for every mission, which is why I turn down the difficulty.

I am disgusted at some of the responses in this thread. Namely, the ones who say he should go on hard or else he's not good. Who cares if he's not good? Kid, what you should be doing is asking yourself "Am I enjoying myself at this level?", and if you're not, reduce the difficulty level. Games aren't meant to be tedious and impossible. Yes, some games could be more challenging, but why does some guy's difficulty choice get to some people on here? To my knowledge, this is not a "I beat every hard game ever on the hardest difficulty with no saves and still found every one too easy" hardcore gamer forum. Oh but what do I know? I've only been gaming since age 5.

Thank you for your supportive comment. However, I may be missing part of the challenge and experience that the developers had in mind when not playing on normal, also playing on normal should also give be better practice so that I don't have to be playing on easy. I am just reflecting on these comments and thinking on personal level. I still completely agree with you and I do still enjoy games on Easy mode and if I am not having fun on Normal I will not be afraid of being a "lesser gamer" and playing on Easy so that I can have fun because that is more important.

Thank you all for your comments!

 

[badgersprite]

No offence, but, how can you say games are too hard when you have the option right there to turn the games to easy whenever you feel like it? You have adjustable settings to cater to the experience and skill of players, so everyone can tailor the experience to one that they personally want. I like playing on high difficulties, but, if I just want to do a speed run for the story or try a different class that I'm not skilled with, I'll probably bump down the difficulty.

Why shouldn't games have a virtually impossible difficulty setting for the people that want it when they can also have a difficulty setting for people who just want to play on easy and don't enjoy the challenge or aren't particularly good at the game?

If you want my commentary on why you find the games so hard, chances are it's because you're using the same tactics you're used to using on easy difficulty and expecting them to work. If you run in with guns blazing on the lowest difficulty setting, enemy attacks will barely graze you. On the highest difficulty setting, a completely different set of tactics is required to make it past the encounters you breezed through on casual, and that takes some degree of practice and experience to learn. It's just normal for other gamers to play games that way because they're accustomed to those difficulty settings, or because they've spent time planning and understanding the game mechanics to maximise their combat effectiveness.

 

[NerfedFalcon]

You think modern games are hard? Play Max Payne for a while. The original. It's three dollars on Steam today. Then try making this point again with the same straight face.

 

[Twilight_guy]

No, your not abnormal. You just lack reflexes most likely. Games have two main core focuses, thinking and reflexes. Some games, like RPGs focus mostly on thinking while others, like rhythm games, focus mostly on reflexes. I know the pain of having slow reflexes and its like its something that you can change when your mind just doesn't work that fast. You can improve by practicing (If you beat easy mode, try normal and see if you have improve enough to ramp up a bit). I personally know someone who is really bad at shooters, so bad that he has to set them all to easy. It's just not his thing and he can't aim that fast. Don't think you're weird. There is a reason games have an easy mode, not everyone can be super good at reflexes.

Also take people's advise here with a grain of salt. Lots of gamers have the notion that "skill" is some magical quality that that everyone wants and is the be all and end all of games. It's not. It's not even well defined concept. Don't try to get better because that's what you're "supposed" to do. If you want to do it for yourself go for it, if your doing it to be "normal" then fuck normal, normal people are overrated.

 

[skywolfblue]

I wish some games were a bit more consistent about it. It might just be asian-ish designed games that this applies to though...

Most of my games are pretty "normal" about their "normal" difficulty. Halo, Gears of War, Mass Effect, Dragon Age, Crysis 2, etc etc etc, are all pretty reasonable to play through the first time on normal without being "pound me in the ass".

However, Vanquish and Bayonetta were absolutely brutal. Their "normal" difficulty is like "extreme hardcore" difficulty in other games.

 

[username sucks]

most games are to easy, even on the highest difficulty. i have beat almost every game i have on the hardest difficulty and i really wish there was a higher one on them. still cant beat super mario bros. though

 

[phats_cocks_strangla]

I like playing on easy/ normal difficulties. Its more fun, isnt that the point of a game? Fun? I want to be able to enjoy the story and kick ass and take some names. I Dont want to be gettin killed every level or be so worked up that i have veins popping out my fuckin head. I like just chillin on a game to relax. If i want some competition or some shit like that I'll play multiplayer.
Also, I love those guys that brag and boast about beating a game on the hardest mode, then get their asses handed to them in multiplayer

 

[dessertmonkeyjk]

When you find yourself running into a new situation due to the fact you get easily bowled over and have to look for a new strategy is rather though provoking. It kind of helps the immersion really if the difficulty pacing is done right. If the enemy started to adapt to your repeated strategy and make you pay for it... by all means I welcome it.

 

[Riddle78]

Difficulty is rather...Nebulous for me. I start at the middle of the road,and employ a strategy that I believe will work. If it works,then it means I was onto something,and I repeat said strategy until it fails,whereupon I'll make modifacations to compensate for the now glaringly obvious shortcomings,or start with an entirely new approach.

If I give up in frustration on the basis if the game being too difficult,then that says 2 things. 1) I'm not flexible enough for the game (and I'm pretty damn flexible;I have a knack for identifying trends as they begin to manifest),and 2) There's something patently wrong with the game's difficulty curve if I find myself unable to evolve adaquately.

 

[m0ng00se]

any game with a scoring system is usually worth playing, provided the scoring system isn't used in a hamfisted manner in order to emphasize the violence by dehumanizing the people you kill (i'll use the context of madworld's point system as an example even though that game was great).

games like ninja gaiden, dmc, bayonetta, vanquish, sin and punishment, etc. you always learn from your deaths in those kinds of games. "every time i do my big slow powerful attack i get smacked from behind, i should probably stop doing that when i'm surrounded" teaches players to stop mashing buttons and employ decision making processes on even the most basic levels of gameplay. anyone who wants to be good at anything would be trying to do this on their own, but when the need to is taken away they might not notice there's even room for improvement.

"oh hey i can block their attacks! i should do that more!" becomes "if i time the blocks more carefully it stuns the enemy!" direct rewards (stunning the enemy so you can style on them) for increasing skill (recognizing attack patterns and employing precise timing) promote skill gain in the player, obviously.

every mechanic of the game is rewarding in its own right but also carries a punishment for improper use, encouraging you to learn how to play games properly. then, when you get to the end of the level it straight up marks you on how cool you were so you don't just cheese through every level with only the goal of survival. the game evolves from "learning to play" to "trying to overcome the challenges of the game while not dying" to "beating everything in style"

the specific skills you acquire while learning these kinds of games may not necessarily transfer, but the approach you took to acquiring those skills (exploring the system, analyzing your tools and their applications) is a valuable lesson in any facet of life and is often the most rewarding part of them. beating them is a point of pride beyond "i'm so l33t" because it's not just about raw twitch reflex. instead of "i can get the most headshots fastest while under pressure," it becomes "i consistently make good decisions from a large pool of options extremely quickly while under pressure, with above average dexterity and it's really cool to look at."


with vanquish, me and my friend tried to gun through it on hard mode right away and we had to constantly rethink our approaches to fights and how to utilize the different mechanics in order to maximize our ability to kill everything without leaving ourselves overly vulnerable and getting killed. At the same time, we had to do enough awesome stuff to keep ourselves from getting bored, and the game never really punishes you for doing something dangerous if you do it well enough. it was pretty much a perfect gameplay experience in that regard. it was consistently fun and every single revelation we made came with such a strong sense of accomplishment i came away from the game convinced i had become a better person as a result of having overcome it.