Difficulty in games

Games
21

Difficulty is a hard thing to debate. Person A says “I thought the later levels of Far Cry were poorly balanced” and Person B says “QQ moar, you just want EZ mode.” It’s hard to quantify, especially considering we couldn’t go a page on medkits without people insulting each other. :)

I finished all the GTA games, and while there were missions I found harder than others, I often found them satisfying, because the games were open enough that you could often concoct a strat to turn things in your favor. “hey, instead of chasing these guys on a motorcycle, I’ll steal a helicopter and cut them off from the air.” You couldn’t solve every mission like that, but at least you felt like you had options a lot of the time.

I also played a lot of the Midnight Club games, which, predictably, felt more restrictive. A lot of racing games come down to pinpoint execution, and it would get frustrating when you feel like you hit 19/20 turns perfectly but lose because some rubberband AI caught up to you at the last second and knocked you off course on the final turn. In that case, it felt like the game was cheating to beat you, and that gets frustrating quickly.

The worst example I can think of was the final boss fight against the devil in Guitar Hero III Expert. I could write pages about what was wrong with the fight, but in short, you didn’t just need to be exceptionally good, you needed the RNG gods to bless you with the right sequence of powerups, which you didn’t get 90% of the time and caused a guaranteed loss. To make it worse, you had to sit through a minute of the song before getting to the battle portion, which was like adding an unneccessary cutscene to an already unbalanced fight.

I guess what it comes down to for me is fairness. I don’t mind a boss with a zillion hitpoints, but when your rank-and-file grunts can take multiple headshots, it feels a little silly. I’d be happier with 20 enemies flooding out of a barracks than bunch of guys spawning in front of me out of thin air. I remember Black Hawk Down had gripping, wide-open sections where you had to cross giant areas with gunfire flying in every direction, but also a lot of “gotcha!” trap deaths that were almost impossible to avoid the first time through. I guess “difficulty” doesn’t really bother me as long as I feel like the designer is playing fair.

22

Isn’t this true because you had a good early game?

23

I always feel this way about the Tiger Woods PGA golf games. You start out as an amateur who can barely hit the ball 250 yards, but before long, you’re shooting 58s and winning tourneys by 20 strokes.

24

Nope, didn’t. There’ve been so many threads before that I’ve gotten accustomed and in my presumption made an ass of myself and jumped the shark. My folly. Apologies.

I think a great part of the difficulty in X-Com was in the human/gamer psyche’s difficulty of accepting X-Com’s way of gameplay. In a sense, it was a war simulation. And in war people die.
Players have an innate tendency to want to win, win optimally and an inability of accepting the incurring of losses. In relevance to X-Com, you wouldn’t want to lose soldiers in battle. Because if they lived they’d advance in abilities (level) to become better and more efficient tools. And probably because you weren’t yet at a point where you’re alike a cold-heart apathetic general (or a de-sensitized apathetic Internet user) who couldn’t think less of the soldiers being virtually other human beings that you could sympathize with or care for their well-being (or that you would root for them instead of the aliens).

But in order to be victorious in the grand-picture of the X-Com war, you needed to be able to sacrifice soldiers in the tactical battle. and realize that when you put a team out to an action area, many are likely to not return home. And that’s a troublesome point to negotiate for most gamers.

Of course, there was the entire Lords psi control thing that made the first game beyond a certain point practically impossible without high-psi soldiers and then it really becomes a matter of insane difficulty.

25

Games that do dynamic difficultly well should be more widely acknowledged – they do exist.

As mentioned, the later Resident Evil games are pretty good at doing this in a fairly subtle manner. The pinnacle in recent memory is Batman Arkham Asylum for not only supporting different modes (Easy/Normal/Hard) that were each well tuned to what they claimed to be, but also for introducing a combat system that rewarded difficult manuevers without penalizing bad players too much. Playing the ‘normal’ mode in that game you could win most fights just with button mashing and pig-headedness, but to get huge combos and really feel like a bad-ass you could learn to play the game better and it just felt so much more rewarding to take on a group of 20+ thugs with style instead of with brute force.

26

I don’t know about that, but Shogun does a far better job of giving me a challenge later on…

27

It’s been alluded to earlier with regard to save points, but an important aspect of Difficulty for me is recoverability: When I make a mistake, is it possible for me to recover without explicitly reloading or restarting, or is the game pretty much lost?

For example:

[ul]
[li]Enemies with one-hit kills vs. enemies that merely take out a chunk of health.[/li][li]Tricky jumps over instant-death chasms vs. jumps over gaps that merely send you to a previous place in the level.[/li][li]The “hard fail” of standard Rock Band games vs. the “soft fail” in Lego Rock Band.[/li][li]Harsh economic penalties for a suboptimal build order vs. …um, less harsh economic penalties for a suboptimal build order.[/li][/ul]
In case it wasn’t obvious, I greatly prefer a recoverable system. It doesn’t shut out those with less-than-perfect skills, but still encourages and teaches better play.

Incidentally, I don’t count rubber band logic in racing games as allowing for “recoverability”. You can recover from mistakes early in a race after the game detects that you screwed up… but a single mistake near the end, even after a perfect run, can be fatal.

28

My big objection to the modern RPG?

The theme park feel.

Here are these supposedly living breathing worlds, full of every sort of mystical and magical NPC. Except that all they really are is little scripts dressed up and pretending to live. Until the human kicks down the door, they’re content to not do anything, ever, from the time the game loads to the time it ends. Kvatch is the perfect example. If you start Oblivion’s main quest, Kvatch will burn. If you don’t, it won’t burn but you can never go inside. It’ll sit there, inert, and wait for you to start the ride. And what’s sad is that Oblivion and FO3 are better about this than most; if you’re wandering around, NPCs that are hostile to one another will fight and kill each other.

Now look at Mount and Blade. In M&B, the lords don’t give a damn whether you exist or not, so long as the game is running. They’ll plunder villages and conquer towns whatever you do because it’s what they do. Halfway through the game, the map will be entirely different from how it looked when you started, even if you just sat in a town and waited for years. And every game, it’ll look different.

And if you choose to start conquering and build an impressive army and a giant kingdom? Odds are the existing kingdoms will all declare war because you’re scaring the crap out of them and disrupting the order of things. And that’s right and good and sensible.

That’s dynamism, and it is awesome. I wish more devs would give it a shot.

29

Hold on, lemme just get this right. Super Meat Boy is difficult?

I mean really think about it. Simply completing Super Meat Boy is incredibly easy. It’s getting an A+, getting the bandages and getting to/completing the Warp Zones that are the difficult bits. Yet they are all player imposed challenges, I’m choosing to try and get through a level as fast as possible to get an A+, the game isn’t making me. It’s one of the (many to be fair) genius design decisions made by SMB’s developers.

30

I see the point of your post, but don’t you think the “incredibly” is a tad hyperbolic ? Simply completing SMB is a challenge in itself if you’re not a 2D platformer ninja.

31

Ok yea, incredibly is definitely hyberbolic :)

But still, the game in itself is not too innately difficult. That I stand by. It’s the challenges it presents to you past simply completing the game which most people find the hard part. It’s a nice concept, or at least I thought so.

32

Another example is NDS’s The World Ends With You. Difficulty is selected before every battle and loots are dropped accordingly. Personally, I think it was fantastic. It provided enough challenge and at the same time keeps the story going.

The difference is that the player changes the difficulty voluntarily.

I think we can conclude that the best way to execute dynamic difficulty is to branch optional contents/mechanics accordingly to the difficulty ladder, instead of making blanket-changes that mess up player’s sense of progression.

33

I think difficulty in games is subjective. For example, I play Starcraft and the Fashion Fantasy Game. I think FFG is much more challenging because it’s more realistic. Yes, I know it’s meant for teenage girls, but I think it’s an interesting game.

34

There’s extra challenges that are even tougher? I found the surgical timing required to jump up Super Meat Boy’s chasms hard to complete, and quit early on. Not really in frustration (I finished both LittleBigPlanets, so I’m sure I could have perservered), but because the difficulty made the game tedious and annoying.

35

36

The other day my wife was watching me play a military sim (Arma 2). She came in and out of the room and watched me over two hours pick a loadiut, equip my squad, load them into a convoy, drive to their base, unload, line them up, give them a little speech, and then head over a hill. I actually paused it and told her “we are finally starting our attack! Want to watch?”. So she sits down and watches as I give out targets and then set everyone to “fire at will” and lead the charge over the hill.

Whereupon I was killed a half a second later by an APC main gun. Oops! And then the game crashed.

Now, was that a difficult game? Two hours of preparation only to be killed in the first second of battle? Sure, but it was oddly fun getting there. Next time, Chernarussians!

37

In the grand and beloved QuarterToThree tradition of necroing ancient goddamn threads rather than starting new ones, I would like to drag the below difficulty in games tangent over here so that I can complain about it in the whiniest, lamest way possible. I’ll even tag folks like @Rock8man, @tomchick, @Skipper, @inactive_user, @Soren_Hoglund, and @Left_Empty in on the madness!

So, in short, my thoughts to add jackshit of value to the discussion before you all go back to piling onto Tom :)

I really hate games that lock content behind difficulty barriers without any other means of acquiring it. I actually don’t mind high score counters/multipliers like Tom mentioned in ReBuild at all; it’s basically just giving you a formula to calculate how skillfully you overwhelmed impossible challenges to maximize the dopamine release you get from Doin Hard Shit. Good on y’all that dig that!

But gotdamn, man, as someone who does and has always sucked fucks at all games, all the time, forever, I really hate when cool content gets locked behind difficulty walls that the dev doesn’t give me options to waltz through. I love the recent trend of adding Babytown Races modes to RPGs so that I can experience the cool story without having to carefully micromanage the two remaining heals left on my party while there are still 18 Displacer Beets hemming us in from both sides, painting the ground red with our blood and their juice.

Like, I think of all the cool cars in racing games. I literally would bribe more talented gamer-friends over to my house with free food and soda to beat the Burnout games’ most challenging races and wreck-mode puzzles for me on PS2 so that I could finally play all the most tricked out cars. Ditto for unlocking all the cool endgame weapons in FFX so that I could actually challenge the super awesome post-endgame content in that game and see all that stuff. I also usually have to beg people to help me beat fighting games’ upper level challenges to unlock all the characters on my save file, cuz otherwise, when you visit to play Smash Bros at my place, you’re only gonna see like half the cast there, man.

Like, I get it. For a lot of people, the enjoyment of games is the challenge. And I don’t begrudge games having challenges in place that really tax those people!

But for me, the enjoyment is seeing all the other cool stuff in the game–the cinematics, the story, the badass weapons and cars and characters. Like, I paid for the disc. Let me have the goodies! And when there’s no way for me to feasibly get at that stuff because I have the hand-eye coordination of a dead cat, I get real sad.

So there, difficulty in games should either be adjustable with no difference in experience for lower levels, or the rewards for higher levels should be purely structured around the “get moar better” experience (e.g., point leaderboards), not extra content/better endings/etc.

38

So first, perhaps those are different games you’re playing, Mr. Penblade.

But to drag my comment over as well:

I think not every game needs a carrot on a stick for each difficulty level. And I appreciate that there are different levels of play, some I may have no inclination to do.

But I agree with you that unlocks and hiding of content around extremely challenging gameplay is a design I wish would go away entirely. I can’t think it through enough to know a good alternative though.

I think perhaps the difficulty sliders in Skyrim/Fallout and the like are a good method. Those “spawn” harder enemies. Those harder enemies drop nicer items, but certainly some that you might not ever need in a normal, low difficulty playthrough.

39

I actually really kinda dig the Diablo style of progressively harder difficulties that drop progressively better loot and provide progressively more XP, allowing your character to essentially “keep up” with the scale all the way through. Sure, sometimes you’ll luck into a wildly out-of-scale ultra-rare drop and feel extra powerful for a few hours, or the game balance may get a tweak too far in one direction and people might get crushed in Inferno difficulty for days on end before they manage to eke out enough XPs to survive more than 3 minutes straight, but the sort of idealized goal of the system they have seems to perfectly scratch the headspace I enjoy in games. . . even if most Diablo clickfests wind up being too fast-paced for me to actually be good at. I just appreciate the way they do it: while the game gets harder, it gives you non-aptitude-based tools to deal with the increasing difficulty, keeping the actual dexterity/strategy-based difficulty fairly level.

It’s part of why I love JRPGs so much (omg these enemies have 10,000,000 HP instead of the 100 I used to fight but oh wait I also do 10,000 damage per attack now rather than 1 so it’ll be fine), and why the endgame weapon quests in FFX pissed me off so much (rather than letting you use the game powers to get this spellbook for Lulu, you need to have instant-perfect reflexes to dodge 100 lightning bolts in a row with the count resetting anytime you get hit).

40

I agree - mastery is a reward unto itself, and a specific facet of what makes play enjoyable. Not everyone is going to be interested in it, and that’s totally fine, but it’s still a perfectly valid thing to design a game around.

It think difficulty settings are important in a game like Mass Effect 2*, which is bifurcated in its appeal - there’s the story/character/world exploration, and the combat. Someone might just there to date hot aliens and play team manager, and not be all that interested in the shooty bits. Or just like shooting stuff, but not be very good at it.

I think carrots for difficulty levels are a good way to nudge those players towards engaging with all parts of the game, but if someone cough @tomchick cough goes from that to “Waahhh! Why would you play on a harder difficulty? Nobody’s going to give you a pat on the head for it!”** all I year is “Why would you engage with a game in a way that makes it more enjoyable for you?”

Play, and mastery of play is an intrinsic reward dagnabbit.

Bah. Kids these days. Totally ruined by achievements.

*Mass Effect 2’s implementation of difficulty is terrible though. The difficulty doesn’t just influence hit points/damage/ai aggression, it also largely removes the offensive/defensive power interplay by drastically changing the amount of enemies that have protection types besides hitpoints! Why would you remove the tactical layer from someone just because they have crap reflexes? That sort of thing should default to opt out, not opt-in.

**Whiny enough of an impression for you? :)