Tom Chick's crazyman ranting about difficulty levels and game designers not doing their jobs

Oof, that’s a fantastic analogy!

True but we have several examples of books with movie adaptions that primarily pleased the book reader and appealed to a larger audience, so it can be done. It’s not an either or.

Oh, I’m not for a moment claiming that it can’t be done. But it’s tough, and there are a lot of failures. And I think that success requires a lot of insight and focus on this exact problem.

If instead you try to fix it by putting a bunch of tertiary book characters back in to placate one, and add extraneous violence and special effects to placate the other, you end up with, well, Pathfinder Kingmaker.

So you might be the first person that I’ve seen and engaged with that doesn’t like that game. I know it’s a little off-topic, but is the way they handle the mechanics the primary reason at all or is it other things?

Its interesting because from a mainstream commercial game design perspective, “difficulty” is there primarily to ration out a games content. At the game designers whim or for monetization reasons.

I used to be in that camp “the game needs challenge so you get your 100 hours worth of gameplay for your money.”

now I am in the camp of “you paid for this game so if you want to see all the content in a shorter or longer amount of time then that’s your choice.”

I dont know how much this adds to the discussion but in mobile game balancing is often just about monetization. So your games difficulty is tuned based on a lot of data. Not for you to have fun, no no, but to craft certain levels and the content so you JUST lose at specific pinch points when you are hit up for “shame you just lost this level and all the work you put into it, how about buying a booster?”

Its the same principle as machine learning in some ways, just using people instead of neural nets to get the desired outcome.

I dont like it at all and has contributed to my evolving “always let the player avoid challenge if they want” philosophy.

Not sure what you meant to type in that first part – but I have the impression that dissatisfaction is pretty widespread with the game.

But my answer will not be off topic, because it goes back to Tom’s original rant. When I first read his comments, I thought he was way off base. But that was when I was in Chapter 1, which, in my mind is a quite good despite some very aggravating flaws that I believe they can and will fix. The truth of Tom’s comments comes through in the Kingdom section of the game, and it is there that their true colors (the colors identified promptly by Tom) came clear to me. They even tell you in the tutorial, it’s okay, you can not only make this easier, you can turn it off completely. What does this mean, this kind offer on their part to allow you to turn off the kingdom part of Pathfinder KINGMAKER? So… “Buy our game, you can always turn it off?” Very nice.

The first warning sign is that the underlying rules are not laid out. Which at first struck me as bizarre in a game intended for the DnD/Pathfinder crowd. It’s one thing to neglect to explain BAB in chapter 1, but in chapter 2, they neglect to tell you that your town’s economic points do not improve your economy. Shops and piers are fun to build and all, but they do not bring in money. (Just as a wall does not help your defense.) These are only ratings. And a rating only means something if you reach 20 (sort of) and rank up. Which requires advisor time. (More on that in a moment.) And even then, that hardly affects income, anyway. Although income is extremely important (Better go out and take treasure from baddies if by income you mean money coming your way), the truth is that you are playing to raise an economic rating that is mostly divorced from having an ecomomy.

So did no one on their development team point out that this was kind of a bad idea?

The tutorial does tell you that your advisors are extremely important. But they neglect to tell you that you have almost no choice of advisors, and, to the extent you do have choice, “choice” is based on a one sentence little blurb. They touch on truth in referring to the importance of advisors, but you have no control over the most important thing, and that is advisor time. Apparently, the mission critical save-our-barony jobs can only be done by a tiny group of people, and those people can only work on one thing at a time. For some reason, they can still go empty dungeons with you, but they certainly cannot talk to two different troubled groups in the same obscenely long period of time. And you as baron cannot do the job yourself in a pinch, nor ask another local notable to handle it, even at a diminished effectiveness. And there is a strict time limit to accomplishing the tasks, or else your realm is going over the cliff.

Is this really the development team’s idea of the essence of a barony and the problems it entails? No one on the team said, “Hey, I don’t think that time was really the true and only god of noble struggles”?

Actually, I think they did notice this problem, and that is why the rules are laid out so vaguely, and why we are told we can turn this off if we wish. Because it is a desperate, Hail Mary effort to create a game tension where they did not know how to turn a barony simulation into a game. As Tom said, they did not do their job, and they are using difficulty settings as cover for that fact.

It gets worse. Routine actions require series of loading times. It is often ambiguous whether you are supposed to address a problem through a party quest or through an advisor (and solving it through a quest does not free up the advisor, even after the Hotfix). You have two maps of the same area, and they do not match up very well, and you can never see both of them. A map of the surrounding nations and factions would clarify the politics immensely, but no. The date is crucial but often inaccessible. And, a small point, but somehow this encapsulates the game at this point: In your newly acquired territory, you have a choice of some 20+ locations for your town… and zero basis for choosing among them. A charade of an interesting strategic decision, where it does not really exist.

Bottom line is this, I think I know why the developers settled on time as the central resource of a kingdom – I imagine that time was looming heavily over them as they tried vainly to make the kingdom game into a game.

Chapter one was very enjoyable, but I am skeptical that they will ever fix the Kingdom part of the game – or that they have any idea how to do it.

My apologies, I fixed that.

I am under the impression this is pretty well received, with critics and playors. I mean it is a little niche by going back to some older types of play and systems so I would consider like a 70 to be a good score, so to speak.

I was curious about Tom’s rant, about Pathfinder because it sounds like stuff I could deal with. If it’s true they’re dealing with imperfection in Pathfinder by using difficulty sliders or toggles or whatever… okay.

I mostly disagree with him on difficult for other games though. I mean hardcore imperfect RPG systems are one thing… whether or not someone wants an easier go with say 10% or more critters having fewer hit points or maybe less immunity is another.

So the bulk of your concern is in the kingdom building part of the game then?

Absolutely.

Reading between the lines, I think they devoted too much of their total resources toward fine tuning chapter one to please diverse audiences, and then lacked time and ideas for the kingdom portion.

fwiw, I have no problem at all with difficulty settings, nor with fine tuning those difficulty settings for people who want to adjust one aspect of difficulty. Aggressors: Ancient Rome does that extremely well.

And Tom put me off when he talked to the effect that his beef had to do with the fact that someone else could cheese their way to achievements, while he go no reward for playing the game at a legit difficulty. I cannot relate to caring about such a thing.

But I now think he was dead right about this particular game. They are using these settings to allow them to ship something that doesn’t really work, and just put it on the player to make it work. Kind of like shipping a shoddily made car and putting it out there that since the customer can put the parts together any way they like, it’s all okay. The more I looked at and analyzed the Kingdom part of this game, the more outraged I became.

My advice to any potential buyer: Wait til you can find some Let’s Plays that get an hour or so into the Kingdom part, and sound as though they are okay with it. I tried two, and both were making the same wtf comments I made, so this time at least, I am pretty sure it was not just my failure to understand the UI.

(And just to be clear, I am fine with the way the game handles the regular DnD/Pathfinder portion, even beyond chapter 1. Quibbles, sure, but I would recommend that as good quality stuff.)

Welp, there goes any desire I had to play the Pathfinder game. I was interested in it specifically for the kingdom building stuff, but if that’s how they’ve implemented it… Ugh.

-Tom

It’s what drew me too, but even those who enjoy the game right now seem to think a few patches, maybe several, will only improve it. Here’s to hoping because what @FinnegansFather is saying isn’t appealing to me either.

So, a 70 is a good score if a game is “niche”? Isn’t that like saying a D is a good grade if you are a [insert race/nationality]?

(I’m not saying this particular game deserves a higher score.)

No. I am saying a lot of niche games I consider good get a 70. This game would not cater to the larger group as cleanly or tightly as say Divinity. It’s not a poor score nor is it a “D”.

Well of course it’s not a D, it’s a C-. And obviously when you account for the 7/9 scale it really is closer to a F because really any game below 7 will give you literal cancer or something /s

(I do get your point, and agree. Games that are intentionally niche tend to be less broadly appealing, and therefore more prone to lower grades)

Yeah Pathfinder right now is played in spite of the Kingdom stuff.

It’s a weird feedback loop. The kingdom stuff helps with kingdom stuff and not much else. If you ignore it you can totally lose the entire game though.

It’s extremely not compelling. Add in that later in the game it becomes like Tetsuo at the end of Akira and… well yeah.

Tom COULD be right…

I don’t mind having options. Set it as whatever “normal” is and that is how I will play the first run. If I like the game or something annoys me, I like having the opportunity to tinker.

Well I didn’t say I thought he was… it is the Great debate… I just thought … well --he COULD be right.

I’m having an issue with Prison Architect similar to the issues brought up here. I’m just not sure what “default” difficulty mode that game is balanced around. There are so many toggles and settings I can use to set up a game, that I’m not sure if I’m adding or removing an appropriate amount of challenge every time I check or uncheck a box. I just want to play the game in a way where it will provide challenge and win/lose conditions without me having to decide beforehand if I’m going to win or lose or not based on actual features i can choose to turn on or completely ignore.

I try playing what I think might be a default sort of game, but there’s no real challenge, and nothing scary ever seems to happen. As an example, I figure I can choose to Enable Gangs, but I was hoping something like that might happen organically in a regular sandbox game under certain circumstances without me having to strong-arm the Gangs into my prison by checking a box. But no, that feature seems to be off limits unless i specifically toggle them on.

In my current game I have unlocked all buildings, programs, grants, and everything else, but everything is so routine, day after day, because nobody ever gives me any real problems, there’s plenty of money to go around, and I can just set up and assassinate the few problem prisoners I have (with special cells, escape tunnels, and snipers) without any penalties or second thoughts.

I think the game can be a lot of fun, but it seems up to me to decide if I want to turn it into an actual game or merely a toybox full of Legos and Meeples.

I’m not really asking for help with this game, so I didn’t put all of this in the PA thread, I just don’t stop thinking about this thread the whole time I play the game.

I feel part of the game (like Papers, Please and various others) is to determine what actions the player is willing to take in pursuit of the goals the game sets. You have found an answer to this question where it comes to “problem” prisoners that I suspect may differ from many other players. I wonder if the difficulty settings are so nuanced for this very reason.

What do you think about how it’s done in, say, Imperialism? For all the available options, adjusting them changes a visible difficulty rating for the game. (The difficulty then acts as a score multiplier at the end of the game, which I think also fixes Tom’s initial complaint.)

I played White Day over the Halloween period, which is a mediocre survival horror in the vein of Clock Tower, and they completely dropped the ball and peed the bed in managing difficulty levels.

To get “all” endings, you have to get every single ending on every single difficulty mode. Each one counts separately. So that’s 10 ending x 5 difficulty levels = you have to complete the game 50 times. You can technically cheat your way around this by reloading save files AND making a complete backup of your PS4 file on a USB stick, but even the trophy OCD shouldn’t subject themselves to this.

But there’s worse. The only really good part of the game is that there are 20 ghosts hidden in the school. Most of them are really cool and surprisingly better looking than the actual humans of the game. It’s literally the only reason you should play White Day. The problem is that they only appear on Hard and the game does not tell you this. Technically it does tell you, but only in a loading screen tip which means you’ve already started the game and it’s too late… and you might never get the tip anyway. And despite all those endings, the game is not really worth replaying.

What I mean is that there’s an argument to be made about having only one difficulty level versus having multiple. However, you can at least get the basics of creating difficulty levels right.

Which inspired: