This Obsession With Difficulty is a Little Absurd

[Scow2]

Difficulty settings have been a staple of video gaming for what, two decades now? Can we please just accept that we can have the same game be both easy as pie and balls hard with a simple setting alteration in order to have a suitable challenge level for different people's preferences?

That goes for developers too. Dying over and over in Call of Halo: Battle Warfighter 3 is more of a nuisance than a real challenge because you die really quickly and respawn just as quick, set back about 30 seconds in total. Problem's not that the game is "too easy", it's that it's badly designed.

So I guess what I want to say is that I think anyone who derides a game as "too easy" is just being dumb.

... well that would have saved me a lot of time if I'd thought to put that at the top.

Unfortunately, I've seen FAR too many cases of "If you can't beat X game on Y difficulty, you must be a braindead toddler."

You go play Skyrim with the difficulty all the way up. Then go play Morrowind with the difficulty all the way up. Skyrim's difficulty is just artificial, in that the AI does not change whatsoever, it just hits harder. Now in Morrowind, the AI will be granted new abilities to roll with as well as a bit of a strength boon. Archers will poison their arrows, mages will cast invisibility, warriors will actually surround you. They will also make use of scrolls and potions that are distributed randomly on spawn to mix things up. That's interesting, a giant that clubs you so high you die from fall damage is just frustrating.

What? Here we have another case of people assuming Morrowind has qualities it lacks completely.

Archers don't poison their arrows - That's not even a mechanic supported by the game.
Mages cast invisibility even on the lowest difficulty settings, if they can get it off.
Warriors "Surrounding" you is just a byproduct of them running up to hit you and living long enough that they have to run around each other.

The AI in Morrowind doesn't improve the difficulty - it's the same system used in Oblivion and Skyrim. It MIGHT make them attack faster, as Daggerfall did.

As for that giant - You were dead before you ever left the ground.

It's impossible to have honest discussion of difficulty in video games when people profess this staggering level of ignorance on how the game's mechanics and settings work together (or not work together, as the case may be)

Once I've straightened the Elder Scrolls-specific subject which isn't about difficulty at all,I'll tell you my opinion about average game difficulty these days.

You know what ? I'm glad games are not so hard as they used to be in the Arcade days. And you know why ? Because back then when each game needed its own huge hardware the main costumer of video game companies where bars. That's right developers were getting paid by the bar owners who ordered arcade machines so they can have them on their bars and make money. Video games at that time were designed to be hard for the sole reason of making you spending more coins on the machine,and making the bar owner-arcade machine buyer more rich. By the time home consoles appeared and you didn't had to give money for every single life you loose,there really was no reason for developers to make the games that hard.

The games had to be hard but rewarding as well, to keep people paying.

 

[Burst6]

What's with all the people hating on Skyrim in this thread?

The game has adjustable difficulty levels so it's as hard as you want it to be. As long as you don't try to break the game, there will always be a challenge (except the last encounter which was poorly designed) The game lets you change difficulty on the fly which is great.

Some people mentioned bugs, but a bug occurring has nothing to do with the challenge of a game. Bugs are unintended.

People are also saying that the game is easy on the hardest difficulty and that it's imposable to die. They're wrong.

Now a good example of a game that is too easy is Kingdoms of Amalur. Even while playing on hard and avoiding crafted equipment, wearing whatever dropped gear looked good, it was still barely a challenge. In 100 or so hours, I must have died 4 times, and that was only because I was careless.

The problem with difficulty sliders is that 99% of the time they suck. Skyrim, for example, has a horrible combat system and very floaty controls. It's not designed to be difficult, so when you force difficulty on it it becomes cheap. Until you get alchemy and blacksmithing to 100 and then start making godlike invincible armor and weapons, then it becomes easy again.

I downloaded a mod to make my skyrim more difficult. It's still pretty cheap (skyrim has problems that mods can't fix), but it's 100x better than just maxing the difficulty slider. I find it far more entertaining than the vanilla game, even if i have to keep a finger on the quicksave key.

 

[VanQ]

Wait wait wait wait...you're complaining about artificial difficulty, yet praising the old era of games where the difficulty was incredibly artificial in order to get you to pump more quarters into the machine? Much as I enjoyed it, I dont' think Smash TV or Total Carnage were great examples of crafted difficulty....

Well, arcades are a different story altogether. Bullet hells and Beat'em'ups can't really be given much more difficulty besides "more bullets" and "more power" but there were examples of good games with balanced difficulty settings in the arcades with shooters like Area 51 and Virtua Cop. There was also a Sonic the Hedgehog machine at my local arcade that was good for a challenge and didn't chew through coins once you got good at it.

So yeah, there were good and bad arcade games but to be honest, they were designed specifically to make you pump more money into the machines and were not really the example I wanted to go with in the first place, which is why I used Morrowind as an example. It may not have been the best example but it got my point across, I think.

 

[Buzz Killington_v1legacy]

Difficulty settings have been a staple of video gaming for what, two decades now?

At least three and a half, and probably close to four. I remember my Atari 2600 having difficulty switches on it, and there were settings on some older consoles before that.

 

[Stavros Dimou]

Singleplayer wise I always play on the easiest difficulty level possible in a game, simply because I really am not bothered about the challenge. However, in regards to multiplayer modes my opinion goes in the opposite direction.

To be fair, multiplayer these days in the likes of FPS games has gone down in difficulty and complexity due to the control scheme(s) of the biggest user base, consoles. I'm not bashing consoles here, I'm simply saying that in order to make up for the lack of precision in movement, aiming and available binds the mechanics need to be streamlined to make up for it.
Having said that, the way the likes of COD and Halo handle those issues and make up for them in the game mechanics is very well done.

Anyone who can play FPS games on console is a hero in my book, because I can't stand using the controllers

I will have to disagree on the point you made about multiplayer shooters and the relation of complexity and difficulty with the number of buttons.
You see Quake 3 arena except from the shortcuts for each weapon,used the WASD for movement,a jump button,a crouch button,a zoom button and a fire button. It used quite less buttons than lets say Crysis 2 or Call of Duty.
But to master that game and not suck at it,you had to learn how to wall jump,strafe jump,and rocket jump,and to master these tactics could take months of tries,perhaps even years,or perhaps some people would never master these technics.

If someone joins a FFA match of Quake Live right now without ever having tried it before,he will be dying in a second or fragments of a second without even realizing where he is been hit from or by who. But the game's controls are way simple and simpler than most modern FPSs.


Take a look at this video: This is a demonstration of the skills I mentioned above. I've been playing Quake Live for 3 years daily,and I still can't move as fast and get so high as this guy does.

 

[janjotat]

I love a challenge, but I hate frustration. The game has to show me it was my fault that I lost, if I think it was the game's fault, the devs screwed up. For example in ace combat 5 the missions were hard, but satisfactory until you got to the fortress level. You had to protect 12 tanks during an assault. The problem was I would run out of my 99 missiles because there were too many targets. I stopped playing because I thought the game was just being unfair.

 

[DSK-]

Singleplayer wise I always play on the easiest difficulty level possible in a game, simply because I really am not bothered about the challenge. However, in regards to multiplayer modes my opinion goes in the opposite direction.

To be fair, multiplayer these days in the likes of FPS games has gone down in difficulty and complexity due to the control scheme(s) of the biggest user base, consoles. I'm not bashing consoles here, I'm simply saying that in order to make up for the lack of precision in movement, aiming and available binds the mechanics need to be streamlined to make up for it.
Having said that, the way the likes of COD and Halo handle those issues and make up for them in the game mechanics is very well done.

Anyone who can play FPS games on console is a hero in my book, because I can't stand using the controllers

I will have to disagree on the point you made about multiplayer shooters and the relation of complexity and difficulty with the number of buttons.
You see Quake 3 arena except from the shortcuts for each weapon,used the WASD for movement,a jump button,a crouch button,a zoom button and a fire button. It used quite less buttons than lets say Crysis 2 or Call of Duty.
But to master that game and not suck at it,you had to learn how to wall jump,strafe jump,and rocket jump,and to master these tactics could take months of tries,perhaps even years,or perhaps some people would never master these technics.

If someone joins a FFA match of Quake Live right now without ever having tried it before,he will be dying in a second or fragments of a second without even realizing where he is been hit from or by who. But the game's controls are way simple and simpler than most modern FPSs.


Take a look at this video: This is a demonstration of the skills I mentioned above. I've been playing Quake Live for 3 years daily,and I still can't move as fast and get so high as this guy does.

I didn't necessarily mean buttons alone, but also sensitivity in regards to the mouse, individual weapon binds, aliased binds and so on.

Also, you mention Quake 3, whose overall mechanics and controls haven't changed a great deal since Quake 1, although you do indeed make a good point.

Spoiler

Turn the audio down - your ears will hurt due to the volume of the announcements

Admittedly, I was probably thinking of this game when I was writing my original post, but in that video I can make out: Primary fire, alternate fire, jump, dodge (double tap directional key) dodge jump (double tap directional key and then jump), shock rifle bind, lighting gun bind, rocket launcher bind, translocator bind, forward, left, right, back, weapon throw bind.

You don't need those individual binds, but they certain help you out instead scroll-wheeling and then dying because you were too slow doing so