Poll: Difficulty of Games, too hard?

[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.

 

[GigaHz]

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.

To this day, I STILL cannot beat Sonic the Hedgehog 2 without cheating.

You decide.

This comment doesn't make any sense.

You're telling me, you could beat a game where a Big Daddy can kill you in a few hits on the hardest difficulty but not a game where the majority of time you're holding the right directional button and occasionally jumping.

This boggles the mind.

 

[TrevHead]

Imo the autosave feature is one of the worst aspects of gaming. It allows devs to create unballanced games because they expect gamers to just spam F5 to get past an arkward bit. It also drastically lowers the skill level of gamers who abuse it.

Thank god that the Japanese dont use it as they believe that ballancing and using normal saves is all important to gamedesign

As for me I tend to play games in normal even if they are on the easy side. Ive been burned by too many games that dont scale up in difficulty well to bother with hard mode on my first play though.

If I want a challenging game ill play Ninja Gaiden or arcade games which are difficult in normal mode

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

I have a few comments and question regarding difficulty. Just to give a bit of context I have been playing games wince I was about five year old when I had the original Pokemon Red and Tetris for the Gameboy and Sonic and Tails for the Sega Genesis. At that age I could not get past the Green Hill Zone in Sonic or even finish a simple game of Tetris. I eventually grew out of that phase but my first PC game was MechWarrior 4: Mercenaries, which I only beat that game because there is an invincibility toggle right in the options menu. Eventually I got a PS2 mainly because I fell in love with the Ratchet & Clank series, and despite some difficulties along the way I beat them on my own.

Now a days I play a lot of action games including First and Third Person shooters, along with other action games such as Assassin's Creed, God of War () along with some Real Time Strategy games such as Starcraft 2 and Dawn of War 2. Most of the time, if not all the time I have to set the game to Easy difficulty, and on a lot of games I start on normal and eventually switch to Easy or else I won?t be able to finish the game, one such example was Bulletstorm. Other game where I just got tired of dying so often that I turned the difficulty to easy include Space Marine (and I have not played very much of it), Crysis 2, Resistance 3, all Call of Duty games. I went back and started another play through of Mass Effect 2 on Normal and also find it rather hard. 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.

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.

How on Earth were you unable to finish MW4: Mercs without invincibility? It was one of the easiest games I have ever played. My guess is just that you were awful at making mechs, more than the actual gameplay. All you had to do was rotate your torso in that game and circle-strafe the shit out of your enemies.

I can understand having some trouble with Ratchet & Clank, there was a world or two that I had an issue with in that game, for sure.

Your other examples I'm having a bit of trouble with, however. Starcraft 2? The campaign for that was incredibly easy, I could understand flicking down the difficulty for the last mission or so, but the campaign for that game wasn't particularly hard.

Next you listed DOW2. I would like to know which DOW2, because I can only see anyone having trouble in the vanilla game with the optional super-bosses to pick up your power armour. Playing through Chaos Rising was ridiculously easy if you'd done that, even easier if you picked up The Blessed Cage in the Judgement of Carrion. Retribution, I can see someone having troubles with that since all of your gear is reset, but still, all it took was some basic tactics and some RPG know-how.

Reading through the rest of the list there's only a couple I've played, COD, Armoured Core and Split/Second and the only one I've had trouble with was Armoured Core. I've finished both COD4 and 6 on Veteran, hell, my first play-through of 6 was on Vet. Split/Second I got a little while back, and am still working on it, but I haven't had any real difficulties.

So I guess, the only conclusion I can reach from this is that you're just not very good a games. So as for fixing that, just go back to a game you really enjoyed, but play through it on a harder difficulty to get some practise at this.

 

[DesiPrinceX09]

I never play any game on a difficulty below normal, it just gets too easy. I traditionally play normal on first play through and then try a harder difficulty next run. I don't get why people think that just because you can save and autosave and have checkpoints that makes it too easy; dying and having to repeat something all over again is not challenge, it's just annoying, as is having to start over from the beginning if you get a game over. God of war 3 on hard difficulty is hard as hell, that took me a long time to beat and when i did beat it i felt awesome just as i do with playing something like uncharted 2 on hard or crushing difficulty. I don't see how games are getting dumbed down when many games have hard and very hard difficulty levels for more skilled gamers. The whole game is not being aimed at casual gamers, just the easy/very easy difficulty settings and the "hardcore" crowd has the harder setting. And if games like God of war and Uncharted are still too easy even on their hardest difficulty setting, then I must suck at playing games.

 

[Clive Howlitzer]

I think most games are too easy nowadays of course there are some genres I am simply not good at and thus, have to play on just normal. An example would be Street Fighter IV. I know what it'd take for me to get better to hold my own but I just don't care enough to go through the trouble so I am fine playing my 2 friends who aren't great and the AI.
In regards to most other games, I'd say too easy. This is why I am a big fan of difficulty settings.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

ehh it depends, honestly games are "easier" these days, just slightly, as back in the day the difficulty was "cheap/annoying", not hard.

enemies turning into sponges and dealing 300% more damage is fake difficulty, which is bullshit.

enemies using better weapons and using strategic points way better? that is good difficulty which i can deal with.

plus as long as you are enjoying your games there is no reason to worry about what difficulty you play on, i play on easy/normal on basically everything, but then i'll hop online and go 24-3 *insert shooter name here*, even though most of the people i just played against smashed the campaign on god mode.

tl;dr as long as your having fun, then no big deal no matter what mode your playing on.

 

[s0p0g]

blah

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.

i played as an adept (i don't like mixed classes, and the tech wasn't too appealing to me, so i only played soldier and adept, both ME 1+2), and it wasn't hard at all; heavily armoured targets like gunships were a little annoying because you only have one (i think it's just one) ability to deal any dmg to them, so you always have to wait for the cd to finally go by xD
much "rinse and repeat"

but shielded or hp-only enemies are fairly easy; throw in a couple of bullets every now and then if there are way too many enemies, and you'll just be fine.
with a nice team setup and strict skilling you won't have much of a problem as an adept; on many missions i didn't use my guns at all xD

guess it's a matter of the individual playstyle.