What Makes A Difficult Game Good Or Bad?

[sXeth]

Bad difficulty basically comes in the game throwing "challenges" in ways the player has no potential to address or mitigate.

Mostly this comes in the form of poorly done RNG systems where winning is a toss-up dice roll. You have to roll good loot to possibly win, or hope that the enemy doesn't randomly pick its "Game Over" attack out of its moveset. There are lots of games that use RNG, but the good ones always use tweaks to avoid stupid unwinnable situations. Even in games that don't seem dice-based, this can come up with lazy AI if its given random actions.

Another commonplace one is Interface Screw. This can range from poor design to begin with, including awful camera controls or button layouts. It can also be invoked deliberately by locking the camera in an unfavorable position (some third person action games will have boss fights where stuff is actually spawning offscreen behind you where you can't see it, for instance), weird meta attacks that alter your controls, or more simplistic things like simply hiding enemies in ambush points where you can't possibly aim the camera to ever see them (alongside no indicators of the ambush).

Thirdly, there's inconsistent physics or mechanics. A certain degree of that can be waived off as balancing a dumb AI against a human, but there's definitely games that go overboard. Enemies that never have to reload their guns (or Skyrim's infinite mana enemy mages), the infamous Souls "magic homing arrow that clips through walls", AI's in strategy games who don't even bother to collect resources, enemies that can see through walls or react to your button inputs. A fall being safe in one instance, then lethal in another despite being an identical distance.



As the pausing of Dark Souls goes, I wouldn't consider it relevant to the difficulty, but it does seem an arbitrary and annoying restriction. If I'm playing offline (which the game allows), I don't want to deal with having to restart a 10 (or more) minute boss fight because my phone rang, or my dog needed out, I spilt a drink, etc. It doesn't alter the actual gameplay or mechanics.

 

[Zhukov]

No, that's bullshit. I just showed you that there ARE plenty of signs that mimics use to telegraph their presence.

None of which will be familiar to the player the first time they encounter one.

It's not really the game's fault if the player hasn't learned what the signs mean yet because they haven't had any time to.

Yes, it is the game's fault because it's not a matter of time, it's a matter of opportunity. The player is not given an opportunity to learn the warning signs before they die.

The warning signs are useless anyway because after the first time I just stabbed every chest I saw before opening it.

So the net result is one bullshit death followed by a brief extra step to opening chests in future.

Just out of curiosity, how would you want the mimics to telegraph themselves so that a new player could identify one on the first time?

I wouldn't put them in at all.

However if for some reason it was deemed absolutely necessary for the game to have chest mimics then I would change the model so the "jaws" were slightly open with some blood on the rim. Something that says "this is dangerous" to anyone who stops to look at it, rather than a chain pointing in a different direction that doesn't tell you shit until you've already seen it.

For your first point, yes actually, I do. In a game that punishes players for not thinking clearly or pushing on ahead without thinking, I would in fact think that they should stop to examine an object such as a chest, in an area full of traps. This is especially true if the gamer has knowledge of other RPG's. At the very least, it might be reasonable to expect it to be trapped.

So now you're expecting players to apply specific knowledge from other games? Other games that they may or may not have played?

Yeah, you and I clearly have different notions of what constitutes "reasonable".

The one in Dark Root garden is partially surrounded by very dangerous mushroom men.

This fact is relevant... how exactly?

(And they're not particularly dangerous. I always just poked them to death with a polearm from beyond the range of their incredibly slow attacks.)

I would figure most players would get to Sen's Fortress before the garden, as it requires either 20k souls, or a long work around through the hydra.

I got to the garden long, looooong before I got to Sens. Hell, I got the garden before I got to Blighttown. It's not hard to do, the door is right there. 20K souls isn't hard to get. Don't you get that much for killing the bell-tower gargoyles?

Also I said most, not all, are up against walls or close to them.

But some are not. Some regular chest are not up against a wall.

Therefore a chest not being against a wall is not a sign of danger that you can reasonably expect players to anticipate.

If we are going to continue this charade, could we dial back on the passive aggressive sarcasm? I came here to discuss, not to throw bile.

I am not trying to be passive aggressive.

In fact, I think I'm being quite blunt.

 

[Conner42]

I remember Egoraptor complaining about the "puzzles" in Ocarina of Time as in they weren't really puzzles. It was either find the right item or find a trigger in the room to hit so you can open the door just by looking around. A proper puzzle is when you have all the pieces in front of you and you only have yourself to blame if you can't figure it out. The game shouldn't hide information from you just to make the puzzle seem more challenging.

I think the same rules apply to difficult games. If it was your fault and not the games fault that you died, then the game is probably doing its job well. I think the worst kind of challenge is trial and error, because that's not really challenge it's just memorization and it really fucking sucks when you have checkpoints and you can only get a little further each time. If you find yourself tapping the quick save key after every kill, I think the game is really taking the piss out of you.

 

[Recusant]

Though it's far from a bad place to start, it's not always so simple as "fair difficulty good, unfair difficulty bad", as anyone who can't hear the phrase "Kurasawa two" without wincing can tell you. A particularly difficult game that never pretends to be anything else is usually a great deal better received than one that takes a sudden massive spike in difficulty, even if said difficulty is entirely fair- doubly so if the game itself was not particularly difficult. The Icy Lake, from the Saturn's Mister Bones is a great example. The levels beforehand (and, indeed, the levels after) were wildly varied in both design and gameplay, and pleasantly surreal and trippy. But the experience grinds to a halt as you find yourself facing a singularly demanding rush across the semi-frozen surface of a lake and seeing, time and again, the death cutscene because you mistimed a bounce or misinterpreted an ice-cracking audio cue. There's nothing "unfair" about it, but the spike breaks the pacing and deeply damages the experience.

 

[JCAll]

The mimics in Dark Souls are fine. Now the Mimics in Legend of Grimlock II are bullshit. Get this, some of them...ARE LOCKED! You use one of your rare and valuable lockpicks, confident that no idiot would ever lock a Mimic, and it's a damned Mimic. Who does that? Why? Why would a Mimic ever be locked? And better, some of them are buried. You follow a treasure map halfway around the map, dug underground to find a hidden treasure, open it with a lockpick, and it's still a damned Mimic. That's just the stupidest thing.

 

[Neonsilver]

In bad difficult games enemies are often just sponges, they aren't actually hard, the fights only last so long that you are more likely to make mistakes due to losing focus or because the enemy gets a lucky hit.
Another thing would be enemies that have one hit (or at least close to it) attacks, that are hard if not impossible to avoid.
A last thing is, if you combine at least one of those points with an enemy (usually a boss) being immune against what I would call standard abilities or mechanics. I mean abilities or mechanics that the game teaches you is necessary to succeed.

A game that to some degree does exactly that is borderlands 2. Especially the invincible bosses. They have ridiculous amounts of health, do so much damage that you often have to abuse a mechanic that prevents one hit kills and they are close to immune against debuffs, to be specific the dot damage or the slag effect lasts at most a second.
A regular enemy with a bad difficulty in the game are badass pyre threshers. They only come out of the ground below your character and that always causes a lot of damage. I'm not sure if that attack is survivable because the game doesn't allow one hit deaths, but it's still to much damage for an attack that is pretty much unavoidable.

 

[Gray-Philosophy]

As has been mentioned already, it comes down to how much you're essentially in control of the difficulty. A bad difficulty is...for some reason hard for me to come up with something that hasn't already been said right now. But it's one that you have no control over, things like RNG determining your success, "simulated" difficulty by just boosting enemy health/damage and not making them harder to beat and such.

For good difficulty, I'll jump right along on the band wagon and refer to Dark Souls. The game punishes you so, so, so much when you make a mistake. But, at least 90% of the time it's your own fault when you die. Dark Souls forces the player to stay cautious and methodical in their approach. It has a degree of mechanical complexity that (in theory) would allow a level one player to beat the game, provided he knew all the enemies well enough to succesfully dodge and attack in all the right patterns. (as well as all the time in the world to pull it off)

Spoiler: I'll also pitch in on the mimic discussion @Zhukov (spoilered)

I feel like that first mimic in Sen's Fortress does exactly what it's supposed to do. I fell for it as well, but I couldn't help myself from laughing it off for how stupid it was. I mean, it's a mimic, it's supposed to trick adventureres into thinking it's just an ordinary chest. In this case, it succesfully tricked the player. After you had your face eaten the first time, I'm willing to bet you were a lot more cautious of chests from then on.

Dying isn't only a punishment, it's a learning experience. After that first one, you know they exist. And after that first one, you can begin looking for tells to figure out whether or not the next chests you find are safe.

I think it falls in line with what Dark Souls does all the time. Lures you into a false sense of security only to tear it away from you and sodomise you with it afterwards.

Also

Might as place a bonfire that kills you when you try and light it. Because traps.

Yes, why not? :3

 

[BarkBarker]

Moments where death is basically expected for you to learn, as if just because it doesn't take too much time or resources with each death is justification for being an asshole. Good design gives the player a chance to "get it" instead of dropping them in a situation and murdering them if they don't absorb the information like a god.

Defying logic in attacks that gets you hit for not expecting the logic defying instant 30mph from nothing IN THE AIR WITHOUT JET ENGINES. Touch of death style combat I also consider bad, it just doesn't come across as particularly good design when a slip up that could very well come from janky design of the environment or as stated logic defying attacks that ends in death.

 

[Kolby Jack]

I hurried my attack or bit off more than I could chew and had I acted differently, I would have had a chance to be victorious instead of staring at a YOU DIED screen.

FTFY.

I've been a big fan of the Souls Series since Dark Souls 1. The games encourage cheesing. If you run in thinking you're a badass who can dodge and strike effortlessly like Errol Flynn, maybe you can if you're really good but if you AREN'T up to that level of combat, you have plenty of options available to you. Hell, in Dark Souls 3 you can now summon friends of any level to help out in almost any area, making almost the entire game co-op. It's never unfair, it's just a challenge. The only people who cry bullshit are people who need more practice or who stubbornly refuse to try a different approach to a problem.

 

[Fieldy409_v1legacy]

I hurried my attack or bit off more than I could chew and had I acted differently, I would have had a chance to be victorious instead of staring at a YOU DIED screen.

FTFY.

I've been a big fan of the Souls Series since Dark Souls 1. The games encourage cheesing. If you run in thinking you're a badass who can dodge and strike effortlessly like Errol Flynn, maybe you can if you're really good but if you AREN'T up to that level of combat, you have plenty of options available to you. Hell, in Dark Souls 3 you can now summon friends of any level to help out in almost any area, making almost the entire game co-op. It's never unfair, it's just a challenge. The only people who cry bullshit are people who need more practice or who stubbornly refuse to try a different approach to a problem.

I usually like to say that to me, Dark Souls is more of a puzzle game. Once you know how to beat a boss or an enemy and what you need to do, what the answer to the problem is. You are set. You dont need amazing reflexes or anything like that to win, unless its pvp lol.

 

[CaitSeith]

Not really. All of the messages saying "mimicry ahead" and the bloodstain phantoms that die when they open the box should be giving you an idea that this isn't a normal box you're dealing with.

Neither of those things are guaranteed to show up. And of course they won't show up at all if you're playing offline.

There were none around when I ran into my first mimic chest in Sen's Fortress.

So still bullshit. Buuuuulll...shit.

EDIT: I dont think it's any different to dying to a new enemy or boss because you don't know it's moveset well enough yet.

If there were enemies that insta-killed you with an unblockable, undodgable attack that you had no way to see coming then those enemies would be bullshit too.

It isn't insta-kill. You were killed because you were too weak. With enough HP and enough defense you would had survived (the same with bosses attacks).

 

[Sharia]

And why would you ever need pause in a Dark Souls game? It won't net you anything. Or you mean the Skyrim-pause, where you can eat cakes and pies and change a whole bunch of outfits midfight?

Why not add a pause button that just pauses the game? You can't be expected to be able to put your full attention towards any game 100% of the time. There are many distractions that might require your attention for more than just a glance - not that the Soulsborne games care.

I get the case for when you're online as most online games won't let you pause, but there's not a pause button in offline play either so clearly its a design choice for the overrall game.

Because you don't need it. Granted, when you're in a fight, you have to finish it first, but otherwise, you don't really need pause.
And if you afraid of dying because there's no pause... You'd die anyway. Just accept it.

I'm sorry, but if the phone goes, I would like to answer it without concern of either missing it to finish a fight, or loosing my progress in the game.

There's always a need for a pause function.

 

[Jeroenr]

No, that's bullshit. I just showed you that there ARE plenty of signs that mimics use to telegraph their presence.

None of which will be familiar to the player the first time they encounter one.

It's not really the game's fault if the player hasn't learned what the signs mean yet because they haven't had any time to.

Yes, it is the game's fault because it's not a matter of time, it's a matter of opportunity. The player is not given an opportunity to learn the warning signs before they die.

The warning signs are useless anyway because after the first time I just stabbed every chest I saw before opening it.

So the net result is one bullshit death followed by a brief extra step to opening chests in future.

How do you expect the player to learn the intricacies of a foe they've never encountered before?

Do you expect the game to sit the player down in the first 5 hours and just flat out say "Hey watch out for mimics. They prey on adventurers by disguising themselves as storage chests. Here's how to tell the difference."

That's exactly the kind of over-tutorialized babysitting that the Souls game pride themselves on not having.

Exactly the way you probably did.
Fall for it the first time, die, get back to the chest(mimic), examine it, read the comments, and (try to) kill it.
And maybe lookup a thing or two on the internet about them.

But once you know how to deal with them, they are easy to kill.

Assuming you don't die again before you retreaf you dropt souls, It isn't even an expensive lesson either.

 

[Valkrex]

A lot of good points in this thread (got ninja'd on a lot of stuff I'd like to say) and Extra Credits did a pretty good video on this a while ago.