Poll: Difficulty of Games, too hard?

[nukethetuna]

They're easier nowadays. A result of the increased audience, most likely. I usually play most new games on the hardest difficulty.

Anyways, the issue is with the larger audience, not everyone has the time to devote to a game that kills you and kicks you back half an hour. The bit-by-bit autosave approach that most games take nowadays is made for people with less time, but more money.

It's not like I can't find a challenge, or make my own challenge, in basically any game if I'm feeling particularly pampered, though. So I don't really mind.

 

[ultrachicken]

My guess is that you have difficulty learning from mistakes. You haven't exactly given a ton of information for us to go on, but generally in these situations, the player is constantly trying the same tactics repeatedly in the hopes that something different will happen.

My advice is this: remember when you didn't predict that boss's sword swing? Don't do that again.

Anyways, I think that most games these days are extremely easy, as I am usually able to complete the games I own on one of the higher difficulty settings without breaking a sweat. Even Dark Souls has become a cake walk now that I have the Drake Sword and some pyromancy.

 

[Ace2401]

snip

DAT DISCORDING BERRY PUNCH. Holy crap that's an awesome avatar.

OT: Games have been getting easier and easier over time with few exceptions. Difficulty sliders do offset that a little though.

 

[Lhianon]

-snip-

i think modern games are not hard enough, but i played all kinds of different games for the last 17 - 18 years, so this is more a personal thing.
instead of asking if difficulty is important, you should ask yourself what you want from a game, is it a good story, a good art direction, cool in-game mechanics or challenge for the sake of challenge.
there is no inherent value in beating a game on a higher difficulty other than the ability to brag about it to other persons, but if you are a person like myself who trys to beat a game at a high difficulty setting just to get better at gaming in general you will find a certain lack of challenge in most newer games.
also, there are certain skills that translate from game to game, having twitch reflexes helps with mikro, having a good makro lets you develop a mindset that helps identifieing and managing "resources" in other games, may it be cooldowns, ammo, healthpacks, mana or magic shrooms.

sry for typos, it is 9:55 in the morning here ^^

 

[MarlonBlazed]

Have I missed something along my gaming life because I have been playing games for as long and as often as they have. Have I made myself a worse player by just playing on easy?

Don't ever let anyone tell you your less of a player because you only play on easy, there only boosting there own ego... Now let me boost mine.

First let me start by saying I was born with an Atari controller in my hand so we know where I'm at. O.K. now I'm going to shock the world by saying playing on easy has made it incredibly easy for me to beat anyone who has trained on hard. Of course this doesn't apply to all games since not all games require you to have a learning curve but its not uncommon for me to completely hand my rivals ass to them signed and autographed.

Simple logic really, give an already good gamer a low ark and the'll be more in tune with the game faster. Playing on hard honestly doesn't make you any better it just makes your progress slower, and pointless.... Really pointless, the reward for playing most games on hard is just unlocking a harder difficulty. Not to say there's anything wrong with wanting a challenge, thats not the point. The point is your not the worst gamer in the world because you play on easy only, that's not where your problem lies.

Anyways you stated that your not a very good gamer to begin with so keep playing on easy forever if you want and when it comes down to player vs player you might just have an advantage.... Uh unless has already played beforehand and is already good at gaming period...

Variables!!! I don't know this is just some things I experienced in my 23 years alive.

I don't play SP games on easy also I don't care if anyone here thinks they can beat me I'm not going to challenge you and we'll never know.

P.S. - I just remembered something that might help a lot, you need to deeply immerse yourself into the game, easy or hard you have to be your character and ignore the fact that nothing matters. Bad story bad gameplay bad whatever just ignore it and immerse yourself regardless. From A-Z I can almost guarantee your skill will go up as your brain syncs up with the games.

Again variables.

 

[The_Blue_Rider]

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.

Actually with the Mass Effect example i think thats one case where simply adding extra armour/barriers does genuinely increase the challenge, you need to plan out what powers you will give your Shepard, and pick team mates that will be beneficial for that specific mission, not to mention trying to get yourself and your squad into ideal positions on the battlefield. By changing a few statistics it does make the game genuinely more challenging, you need to plan carefully.

 

[NastoK]

Most of them are easy on normal difficulty, and for 2nd+ playthroughs even hard can be done without any great frustration. Heck, I play all RPGs on the hardest difficulty on first playthroughs, and you don't see me complaining. Then again, I might like the challange. Hrm.

Today's games are as hard as you want them to be, which isn't bad, I guess, as long as the player is having fun.

 

[Yugeky20]

Many games are both easy and hard these days (that is due to difficultly settings) but, Dark souls and Demon souls have totally raped my meaning of the word "Hard".

 

[Da Orky Man]

Most games are plenty hard enough. i'm still trying to get through Reach on Legendary. But there are a few, looking in the direction of Splinter Cell: Conviction, that are just laughably easy. I blitzed through the single-player on normal in a day, then the same on realistic. Just too easy.

 

[Knusper]

I think that games are too easy - I no longer turn the difficulty down when I'm stuck, but turn it up when I feel I'm being cheated.

 

[Amos the famous]

I'm playing through Rage at the moment and i had to put the game on it's hardest difficulty just for a challenge!

 

[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.

Actually with the Mass Effect example i think thats one case where simply adding extra armour/barriers does genuinely increase the challenge, you need to plan out what powers you will give your Shepard, and pick team mates that will be beneficial for that specific mission, not to mention trying to get yourself and your squad into ideal positions on the battlefield. By changing a few statistics it does make the game genuinely more challenging, you need to plan carefully.

The problem with Mass Effect 2's difficulty was that you couldn't even use your special abilities against an enemy with armor/barriers/shields. By the time the enemy's defenses are down it is just easier to simply keep firing a couple more bullets to finish the job. It was more challenging, but in a way that made being anything other Soldiers or Sentinels almost useless.*

* Take note that I am not saying it is impossible to play as other classes on Insanity, I'm just saying they are harder to play as. *

 

[Ubermetalhed]

If you want to sell more you need to cater for the casual market.

Oh hello new Hitman game...wait a second...oh god...what...what have they done to you?!?!

Seriously though games need to stop holding my hand. I don't want flashy indicators telling me what to interact with, where to go, what to look at. Leave me to figure things out myself.

Or do what Deus Ex HR did and give me the option to turn that stuff off.

It's mainly western developers who make things easy. It's why all the best and most challenging and thus more rewarding games tend to come from Japan. And why I now hate some of the franchises that I loved when I was younger.

 

[StBishop]

I normally play all games on Hard or the difficulties above.

For some perspective I found Dragon Age: Origins easy on Hard Mode I didn't even know people thought it was at all difficult until I saw it in some threads.

Bulletstorm.

I'd have played it on Normal, it wasn't a very good game, don't feel bad.

Space Marine (and I have not played very much of it),

It's legitimately hard. The controls are clunky. I'm sure you could get use to it but it wasn't easy to play. I played the demo on Hard medium and easy because it's not the sort of game I play for a challenge, I had most fun on easy, I felt like a Space Marine should feel in my mind.

Crysis 2, Resistance 3,

Dunno never played them.

all Call of Duty games.

Yeah I play MW1 on Hardened (Hard I think) rather than Veteran (Hardest).

I went back and started another play through of Mass Effect 2 on Normal and also find it rather hard.

This is probably more character design than skill technically.
I'm not finished 1, so I dunno what 2 is like. But I gather it's action-y-er. Try playing the first one?

There are some games I haven?t been able to finish even on easy including Crysis, the Killzone series and Company of Heroes, not to mention Armored Core games. I also gave up on a lot of Racing games single player campaigns, which include Motorstorm, Blur, and Split/Second.

Easy fix. Don't use completion as a measure of success. I've beaten less than 10% of my games. I'm pretty good at most games and I find normal mode trivial, but I often get stuck or bored when I'm not having fun. Sometimes there's a boss I can't figure out.

If you feel like you're doing it right don't worry.

My question is why? Most of my friends play these game on normal, hard, or even harder. Have I missed something along my gaming life because I have been playing games for as long and as often as they have. Have I made myself a worse player by just playing on easy? Is because I play a great variety of genres and not focus on one and get better at it? Or is it the fault of the games and developers? What do i need to do to get better? What are your opinions of game difficulty now a days? Also, I will not be picking up Dark Souls.

Oh and on the "have I missed something?" nah, some people are better at things than you. It's like sport, some kids were always better at sport. Some kids were fast but sucked at ball skills. Some kids are good at maths, but can't read aloud. Some kids are good at doing things consistently but it takes a long time to learn, others learn quickly but are inconsistent.

I don't think it has anything to do with Jack-of-all-master-of-none because I know a dude who is mad at MMO raiding, Area games (DotA, HoN, LoL etc), FPS's, Platformers, Puzzle Games etc.

He's just good at it all, I know other guys who play a stack of genres but just suck at a couple.

I am pretty bad at FPS's. Especially on mouse and keyboard. In fact anything other than RTS or Arena games are literally unplayable on PC for me. I am just bad.

But I can hold my own in Halo on 360, I'm better than most of my mates at games about character optimising etc. I'm better than my mates at Dynasty Warriors games, and Racers, but I fucking suck at Soul Caliber. I'm good at Tekken, but I'm the fucking worst at Kart Games.

It's just the way things are man.

If you want to get better, then yeah; start playing on harder modes.

But to be honest you don't need to et better. The difficulties are there for a reason.

 

[Panorama]

It's not the overall difficulty I'm indifferent about, it's the help you get. There's a X, take this conveniently placed Y and all that sort of shenanigans.
Also cars slowing down when you're last in racing game WTF.

The slowing down cars when your in last has been going on for ages, like underground 1 ages (2003) i think. But i don't think it is a bad thing, i enjoy a challenge sometimes, will finish a game on say medium, if i enjoyed it i will go back on say hard, or if i didn't enjoy it enough to play again i got the whole experience out of it i don't mind.

 

[Athinira]

Snip

Your Poll is missing an option: "Difficult games are good, punishing games are bad."

The difficulty problem with most games these days isn't that they're too hard. It's that they're too PUNISHING, which is basically equivalent to a hard game that punishes you intensely every time you succumb to it's difficulty, and more often than not makes the difficulty so that even good players die all the time.

Take the Modern Warfare games.
Impossible to complete? Absolutely not, I've done both the first and second game on all difficulties.

Impossible to complete without dying at least once? Pretty much, because the gameplay is created so you at any given time can get blindsided by an enemy/grenade/whatever and have to start that section of the map over and over again, all because that the game doesn't give you a proper way to respond. One map that particularly stuck out to me in the Single Player campaign was the airplane graveyard map, where two forces are clashing and you have to make your way through it. I challenge anyone to complete that map on anything but easiest difficulty 3 times in a row without dying, because it's close to impossible. That's an example of PUNISHING difficulty. It's not that it's hard. It's that it's Trial and Error at its worst.

Games that either give you limited control over the outcome of a battle (makes it luck/trial-error/heavy-preperation-know-all-about-the-game-or-die reliant) or punishes you severely when you die (for example by spreading savepoints out too far, like Demon's Soul) is examples of bad difficulty design.

Games that are just HARD, but still allows a skilled player to get through it without dying once or more than a few times (even if it's insanely hard to do so) is examples of good balancing. My favorite example here is Ninja-gaiden. While this game had the "punish"-problem of spreading savepoints out just a bit too far, it was still a great game that took incredible skill, and fast reflexes combined with pattern-recognition would generally allow you to see it through to the end without doing too badly.

Of course we also have games that are too easy sadly.

 

[The_Blue_Rider]

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.

Actually with the Mass Effect example i think thats one case where simply adding extra armour/barriers does genuinely increase the challenge, you need to plan out what powers you will give your Shepard, and pick team mates that will be beneficial for that specific mission, not to mention trying to get yourself and your squad into ideal positions on the battlefield. By changing a few statistics it does make the game genuinely more challenging, you need to plan carefully.

The problem with Mass Effect 2's difficulty was that you couldn't even use your special abilities against an enemy with armor/barriers/shields. By the time the enemy's defenses are down it is just easier to simply keep firing a couple more bullets to finish the job. It was more challenging, but in a way that made being anything other Soldiers or Sentinels almost useless.*

* Take note that I am not saying it is impossible to play as other classes on Insanity, I'm just saying they are harder to play as. *

You do have a point there, the first time I played through Mass Effect, I did think it annoying that some of my powers wouldnt work unless the enemy was unshielded, however most powers do actually work on shielded enemies, Incinerate works great on Armour and Shields, Overload works on shields and synthetics, warp works on everything except shields. Off the top of my head, pull, throw, shockwave and dominate are the only ones i can think of that only work on unshielded enemies. And those still work because they all have their place, pull makes it easier to get at that enemy hiding behind cover, throw is great for finishing off enemies that have their back to a large drop and it wrecks charging enemies, Shockwave is for crowd control, and dominate gives you a cute little follower

Every power has its place
Except concussive shot, that was a kind of shitty power

 

[Ruwrak]

I don't want to be held by the hand, I want to be challenged instead of given the victory from the word 'go'.

So hurray for Dark Souls and Ninja Gaiden.

 

[dickywebster]

It does depend, some games are too easy, some too hard, some just annoying.

Take for example infamous 2, its not that hard, even on hard mode, with the exception of what i consider a broken enemy (the first ice guys mini boss) and the fact most people have one hit kill rocket launchers by the end of the game.
There is a difference between a game been hard and a game just been annoying, ones fun and challanging, the others just annoying.

Personally i find games have either fallen into the easy or annoying groups, i cant remember the last game that was challanging but also fun and felt rewarding for doing it, rather than just making the game harder by eitherb een unfair or just downright irritating.
Ok yes the older games did this as well a lot, but surely something has been learnt from the last few decades of gaming?

 

[walrusaurus]

i think if you even found ME2 on normal setting rather hard, you're just not a shooter-person

I wouldn't use that as a meterstick. How difficult ME2 was on normal depended enormously on which class you picked. The first time i played through the game i was disappointed by how easy it was. Even on hardcore, it wasn't very difficult for me, it just took ages to kill anything. Then i made a new charecter to do the renegade options and picked a class other than the Sentinel, and dear god was it harder. I died more playing through on veteran as a Vanguard than i did on hardcore as a Sentinel. I don't even want to think about trying to do hardcore as an engineer or an adept.