Fail states in games. Are you past it?

Yep. I wonder if whomever decided on that level was just in an awful mood one day/week/month.

I’ve heard the story about that awful race so many times from so many people that I’ve avoided playing it for just that reason. Mafia 2 was pretty good though.

Mafia 1 is actually much better than 2 in most ways. Well worth playing if you can put up with the dated graphics nowadays.

I hit that point in the first two Infamous games, but the worst was Driver: San Francisco. I was having a great time until this one mission I just couldn’t pass no matter what I did. It was infuriating. I’ve tried to go back and restart the game since – because I do love it so – but knowing that mission is coming…I just stop playing.

I kinda hated the stupid Chocobo Race in FFX that unlocked one character’s best weapon… Not a game ender, just a tedious, unnecessarily difficult, repetitive quest to unlock a piece of content that everyone was gonna want anyway.

Then again I suck fucks at games and wish more of them had Baby Mode. I CAN’T beat the toughest challenges, but I want all the cool rewards anyway, man. Real life don’t work that way, so at least my escapist hobbies should!

Hey, remember cheat codes? Yeah those were great.

I miss Game Genie, too

What @Guap brought up feels different than difficulty spikes to me. I think if a game is going to introduce a new mechanic or fail state that will only be relevant for a few minutes and then won’t come up again, it’s bad game design to make that fail state anything other than trivial to bypass.

I enjoy difficult games when they’re about mastering skills I’ve continuously learned throughout the game. Throwaway mechanics and fail states aren’t about player expression of mastery. They’re about introducing a new type of drama to the situation. And that drama is usually killed by failure and repeat plays. The best ones work when they make you feel like you barely got by the first time you played it.

When these moments suck, they tend to suck for a series of game design reasons that make sense given their scope. Like they don’t have dedicated UI that gives clear feedback on success and mistakes. Or they don’t have a good way to respond to any sort of failure other than a restart. To build these out to be good systems takes a lot of effort as well as teaching the player (like how the new UI system works) that just don’t make sense for a 10 minute one-off level. Better to just make it trivial.

That makes me think of the final boss from Beyond Good and Evil. For that, they actually reversed the controls - so push left on the joystick and your character runs right. It was such a maddening end to a really great little game.

I have actually never finished Beyond Good and Evil because of that final boss fight. I loved the entire game, right up to the end. I don’t know how many times I tried that fight but I finally gave up in frustration. It remains the only game I’ve ever quit at the very end.

Back in the day, depending on the game, I’d play many games on hard difficulty, but like others have said here, I don’t have quite the stamina or reflexes that I did back then, so I’m generally content to play on normal difficulty these days. I don’t usually go “easy” if that’s an option, but it would probably depend on the game. I imagine if I played a ton of strategy games, I might select an easy difficulty, but RPGs I generally do just fine on normal.

I do appreciate challenging games though, and am glad they exist for those that like a difficult game. Maybe all games should have a chicken hat mode? “Sure, we’ll lower the difficulty for you, but we’re gonna make sure you feel bad about it!” ;)

Oh come on. All the ultimate weapon quests were:

  1. Optional
  2. Extremely repetitive. (Remember avoiding 100 lightning strikes in a row?)
  3. Game unbalancing. They made the end game trivial instead of interesting.

The game was way more fun and interesting on my first run when I didn’t go for any of the optional content.