Games you thought would be fun, but were very boring instead

To use a very Tom Chick argument, did playing on the hardest difficulty actually reward you in-game versus playing on easier difficulties? Remember, I don’t agree with you on this, but just providing a better balanced and better design isn’t enough. Higher difficulties must provide an extra in-game reward or else they’re not worth playing. A player should instead just play it on easy since they get the same rewards on easy.

This is utter nonsense.

I agree. But over the years Tom has made that argument many times. Sometimes he seems to make it tongue-in-cheek, and other times he seems to be completely serious.

And by sometimes, I think Rock8man means all the time, recently.

Nicely played.

the end game of every 4x strategy game ever created

can we please have someone fix this

Absolutely. I’m going to piss off even more folks by saying even more than that title is this one:

Europa Universalis - It is incredibly dry as a game. While I can slog away and have fun at Hearts of Iron or some of the other Paradox titles, CK and EU both have me looking at the clock by turn 3 or 4, wondering when that wonderful moment of “WOW” will hit, but it never does.

And outside of Paradox, I’ll add another:

Farming Simulator 17 - I gave it 7.5 hours. I tried. It’s boring, clunky, and well … it turns out actually real farming as a game is way more boring than the lighter versions of it in things like Stardew Valley and the like.

Unfortunately, that’s how far too many games work. They subvert their own systems because they don’t understand how to engineer or incentivize pushback. So the player just mows down a hundred bad guys without ever seeing their unique abilities, much less how their own weapons/powers/abilities interact. Mass Effect is a great example.

What’s really sad is that players come to expect this sort of difficulty adjustment and developers don’t even seem to realize they’re compromising their own designs.

Absolutely! There was a score multiplier based on the difficulty level you were playing. Since you’re invariably failing most of the games when you’re playing on impossible, the idea is to do better than you did last time.

Which leads me to a whole other rant: if you’re going to have scores, why would you not save a list of the scores in the game? So lame.

-Tom

By the end game, the possibilities are just so endless, you can’t really design for it as a game designer. But as a player of these games, I learned to try to engineer the type of outcome I wanted.

For example, in Civilization games, what’s my late game desired outcome? Well, usually I was either losing badly when the time came for modern weapons or winning convincingly by the time modern weapons came around.

So to engineer a World War with modern weapons when I got to the modern era, I started doing the following:

  • Start on Earth map, and put myself in Eurasia or Africa.
  • Put one AI opponent in the Americas.
  • Play the game trying to dominate Eurasia/Africa as much as I can through war, economics, peace treaties, etc, but never go to the Americas.
  • By the time the modern age comes around, the Civ that started alone in the Americas will always be a modern age Juggernaut that has to be dealt with.
  • If you want to fight a modern war with this Civ, it will be really tough.
  • If you want to fight a race to Alpha Centauri with this Civ, it will also be tough, because they’ve had a lot of times to themselves to devote to their research tree.

This always ended up with a fabulous end-game scenario in Civ games. Whether it was the Mayans or Aztec or Americans, the Civlization that was allowed to sit in isolation for the first 5500 years of the game will always be formidable by the end-game.

Oh, wait, are we really going to revisit this? Okay, I’m up for it. But first of all, this is what you think I’m saying?

Jeeze, really? That’s your takeaway? You’re not doing a very good job of making my point, so you should probably just let me handle it. I’ll make it short and in boldface and italics:

Incentivizing difficulty is an important element of game design for anyone who appreciates the process beyond “hey, it’s fun to kill/craft/level up stuff!”.

See Soren’s post on Mass Effect, for example. So if you think of Rebuild as a score chase – that’s how any given playthrough is evaluated – there’s an incentive to play on a harder difficulty level instead of just subverting all the gameplay systems, cruising along without any resistance, and eventually concluding, as jpinard did, that it’s “boring” and “nothing happens” when you haven’t even really seen the design.

(Also, you should play Rebuild on “impossible” because that’s literally the difficulty level of realworld zombie apocalypses.)

-Tom

So just to be clear, if jpinard is not playing Rebuild for the score chase, it’s still a good idea for him to play on a higher difficulty level because it better shows off the game’s systems, even if he’s not incentivized by the score chase, right?

You weirdos are way deep off in the weeds. Anyway:

Shogun 2 actually has a pretty good endgame. It’s a bit of a gotcha the first time you hit it if you don’t know what’s about to go down, but when you understand the mechanic it’s quite clever. Rather than just snowballing forever, you snowball…to a point. Then you fortify your borders, solidify your allies, and step off the cliff hoping that what you built is strong enough to survive the oncoming storm. Not unlike Colonization, though the latter isn’t quite as satisfying IMO since you’re dealing with this abstracted off-map thing rather than a set of modifiers that are applied to the existing gameboard.

Well there are degrees to it. As an example, Subnautica adds difficulties onto the gameplay without extra reward for the benefit of further, “survival,” additions to the gameplay, like managing food, water, or oxygen alert notifications. And yet, people gravitated to the harder difficulties, BECAUSE of that better immersion, and for the full experience of gameplay.

Then there are games like Dark Souls where you can ramp up the difficulty of enemies each time, again, without needed player reward.

In both cases, the reward IS the challenge.

What you are arguing is the equivalent to something like Diablo, where each upper difficulty adds harder gameplay, but better reward drops. And what you would find is that not everyone who plays that harder difficulty does so - JUST - for the reward drops. Some just like the challenge.

Diablo is its loot drops, though, in a very real sense. It’s the core of the entire game. Furthermore, “difficulty” in Diablo isn’t “difficulty” in the sense that we’re discussing it here, so much as a new game+ extended mode. Unless you’re talking pushing GRs, which have a whole leaderboard/achievement structure around it so it’s really not about the loot drops (which are optimized well before you hit a character’s theoretical maximum GR).

And I would agree with you it is, but it’s also a complicated game as far as motivation to play the harder modes. I hate that I extended this tangent on a thread about boring games. I can’t think of why any motivation would force me to play a boring game.

Sorry for extending the diversion!

Shogun 2 realm divide only catches you by surprise the first or second time you run into it.

But yeah, the mechanism of changing all the rules seems like a pretty good idea.

There’s usually pushback from the playerbase thought… Take all the whining from the chaos invasions in Total Warhammer.

Diablo 2 and 3. Almost every action-RPG after the original Diablo and Divine Divinity and maybe Sacred, since the genre did devolve into nothing but a looting game - as fun as playing a slot machine.

Every RTS after the original StarCraft, at least as single-player games. Loved the look of Company of Heroes and stuck with it through the campaign, but the genre diminished itself by largely abandoning single player gameplay.

To me, the appeal of Diablo 3 is the very rapid and noticeable power gain from figuring out all the various synergies with abilities, runes, and gear and perfecting your build. Your fireballs go from doing 10k damage to 100 million damage in a couple days of play. That’s really gratifying. But I agree it doesn’t have longterm appeal like a MMO. And that’s fine, I certainly got my money’s worth!

This post is literally the first time I have felt a spark of interest in Diablo 3 since learning it was always-online. I love the feeling of massive numbers escalation, most commonly seen in (in my experience) JRPGs.

At current progression rates, if you know what you’re doing you can go up like fifteen difficulty levels in a week. You go from laboriously taking 3-4s to kill individual monsters on “master” difficulty to clearing entire screens, even off the screen, on high levels of Torment. The power progression in that first week is immensely pleasurable.

Then you hit a soft cap and it slows way down, that’s when I stop playing. And then Blizzard releases a new patch with new items that enable new multiplicative synergies, the cycle begins again, and suddenly your fireballs are hitting for 100 billion damage.

Stusser man you gotta stop typing that shit I’m at work bro can’t get all hot and bothered like this