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

Games
81

It’s a design principle, not a marketing tagline. And I hate to tell you guys this, but it applies to every single game you play. Every game – video or otherwise – is about using systems to overcome challenges. Remove the challenge and you’re just telling stories or watching clockwork gears turn. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Exactly. One of the solutions is dynamic difficulty, as Nesrie notes. Also level scaling. But imagine if the DM (I still can’t bring myself to call him a gamemaster; too generic!) let the players decide how many hit points an owlbear has, how much damage a short sword should do, and what’s the casting time of a magic missile. It’s his job to engineer the experience for his players, not the other way around.

You might not be wrong, but it’s a really successful license. They were leaving money on the table not adapting it.

Right? It’s best when it’s hidden. I was perfectly happy playing Bioshock when I didn’t know it did this sort of thing. Once I did know, it kind of killed it for me. Fortunately, guess what one of the options was. Harder difficulty without scaling. And an achievement – which I never got – as incentive.

Which Bethesda games level scale again? Because I keep meaning to remember not to play them. Skyrim? Surely not Fallout 4?

Those aren’t games, they’re JRPGs!

I kid! But I don’t know JRPGs nearly as well as their Western counterparts. I’d be interesting in knowing what sorts of solutions, if any, they apply. Isn’t one of the difficulty settings whether or not you can skip the overlong cutscenes? Gotcha!

I booted up Valkyria Chronicles 4 last night. The first thing I had to do was decide if I wanted easy or normal. Et tu, VC4?

Ah, the old “you’re playing it wrong” counterargument! Hard pass. Go peddle that malarky in a thread about saving anywhere.

Yes. A game that expects me to duck into an options screen to tune the someone else’s gameplay!

Which brings me back to my point earlier about entertainment that isn’t created for a specific audience. Every game doesn’t need to be for everybody any more than every movie or book or musical needs to be for everybody.

But, yes, it is hard to do.

Thank you. As I said, I’m easy.

Well, the sticking point there is “designed to be balanced for everyone”. And note that I have no problem with difficulty options! I have a problem with difficulty options dumped into my lap, almost always before I’ve even started playing, and hovering over the experience constantly. That’s the developers expecting me to do their job.

-Tom

82

Except challenge and frustration, that’s not the same thing; it’s not even close to the same thing. You used the word frustration. If you said enjoyable challenges, we would not be having this conversation. The idea that you cant have a challenge without frustration is simply not… true.

83

You think it would be better to go the other way, not have the ability to scale back on difficulty? That doesn’t even make sense. How do you account for different level’s of skill among the player base? How do you account for people with a head for numbers and strategy vs. people that just want to be part of a cool story? I can’t tell if this is just you being snarky or if you are really being closed minded about this topic?

84

Better than the boring old “Get to level 20 as a Fighter”, “Get to level 20 as a Pastamancer”, “Learn every Wizzzzaird spell.” etc, I would prefer actually curated challenges for achievements.

“Finish the game on Normal as a Fighter with no Ranged combat skills”, “Pick 100 locks in a row without failing”, “Visit all 5 mountain peaks and 3 ocean depths within 1 day.”, “Challenge and beat Fonkin Hoddypeak to death with a beer stein on Classic difficulty.”

85

JRPG’s tend to be super, super easy with little challenge involved. “Story” difficulty, largely. Often they even get extra challenge modes (like the recent Dragon Quest XI) when they see a Western release. However, that being said, many of them offer post-credits content which tends to be crazy, crazy hard and require intense dedication to complete.

86

It’s worked pretty well for a lot of games. Dark Souls/Bloodborne. Breath of the Wild. Basically every roguelike out there. Basically every puzzle game.

87

I don’t disagree with it working with some games, I do however believe it’s worse when a game does NOT offer a difficulty option at all to one that does. In the case of a game that doesn’t feel like it needs one, great! I mean, until you are the person that never gets to complete it and ends up selling it of course. In other words, I would honestly have liked the option to play an easier mode in Bloodbourne. Maybe I’d have been able to enjoy the second half of it then.

And you can’t compare a tight, focused game like Dark Souls to a massive, open ended party based RPG that has so many possible ways to build your characters it’s almost impossible to detail on paper, like Pathfinder. The Dark Souls development team has a massive bonus there in terms of designing their game’s difficulty. In Pathfinder, one player could have a super highly tuned party that rofl’stomps all over the game while another player with barely an understanding of the game’s mechanics and rules struggles on Easy.

88

Every time I look at this thread it is like I am playing a JRPG

dot dot dot

Capture2

89

This is 100% correct. As well, there are different types of RPG styles that offer different types of challenges. For example are you playing a heroic, cinematic fantasy RPG or a Gritty “realistic” RPG. Challenges are emphasized in different aspects of the game, based on the style. Kobalds may not be where the challenge lies in a game. Tom, your example is very “one size fits all”. As well it posits a binary world, “man against ai”. Pen and Paper RPGs, for example, are aimed at a a multi-PC party, not one player on a machine. Board Wargames are about Multi-Player competition within a system. So I’d lighten up on my “truisms”, crazy man.

90

I think the lines between challenging and frustrating are very blurry, and frustration can turn into enjoyment. The first time I encounter in monster hunter I get really frustrated because they feel cheap as hell. By the 3rd time I’ve fainted though the frustration starts waning as I seem to have instinctively picked up on what’s going on and take the monster down. Yes there is frustration, but that frustration led to a huge amount of satisfaction and didn’t last long enough to linger bad thoughts. Well except for the brick wall I just hit.

I 100% felt frustration going up against some of these enemies (my wife can contest, she had to yell at me from the other room to calm down a few times lol). That doesn’t mean it wasn’t fun after the frustration waned.

91

It’s exactly the same in other genres. There were people who made it to the endgame of Monster Hunter: World in a third of the time I did, since they understood the systems and the weapon combos whereas I didn’t. Most people will never make it past the first island of Stephen’s Sausage Roll, the puzzles are hard enough that they’re just not solvable by brute force. I have friends who put enough hours into ADOM that they can pretty much win it on demand.

Is the difference purely in that RPGs of this type have no room for failure, or even partial failure? Is the expectation that you’re going to play through the game exactly once, and it’s going to be a perfect run?

92

And here’s the irony of the whole situation. I did it to myself again!

I’m at a point in Divinity Original Sin 2 where I’m running around trying all the different fights I can find until I get to one I can win, which sometimes takes multiple tries. And I’ve realized what the problem is. I’ve wasted too much character advancement on an unoptimized build, sapping resources from a from a finite supply (the enemies on the Fort Joy island). I can’t unspend those points or reverse that character development. There are no respawning enemies for me to rekill. So I’ve squandered a quarter of my interaction with the combat system because one of the four characters is mostly useless after chucking in a couple of spells. He slinks around and mostly gets himself killed if he does anything besides literally lying down to play dead. And if I replace him, it will be with a lower level undergeared character who also won’t be competitive in the tough fights I’m attempting. Which are the only fights left.

So have I killed Divinity Original Sin 2 for myself a second time? Perhaps. Do I regret the choice? Not at all. Do I wish I could go into a dropdown menu and turn down the difficulty? Nope.

I specifically wanted that not to be an option. I specifically wanted to take the developers at their word when they warned me at the outset that I would be committing to this difficulty level, and that it would be hard, and that I would have to git gud.

And I did this because I know the combat system in Divinity Original Sin 2 is good enough the bear up under this kind of harsh tuning. I don’t mind failing and retrying battles, because they’re dynamic enough to be more than just hoping for better rolls or trying to hit the orange weak spot on the boss. After a battle, I see where I could have done better. I know there are other things I could have tried. I have identified different approaches I could take, different starting conditions, different types of gear, different opening moves, different skills and spells. I am playing the game Larian designed, and not a game where if I want, I can just call up the options screen to get past a battle.

(I am worried that maybe I’ve shunted myself into a dead end by spending too much xp on Thane, that some of the difficulty of tactician mode is the longer term consequences of character builds. My concern is whether there’s any way around that other than backing up to an earlier save and building him differently or, better yet, taking on someone else to compliment my party better. I don’t mind having to figure that out.)

That’s the kind of game I wanted to play. That’s the kind of game they warned me I was going to play. There’s an achievement waiting for me at the end of the game if I ever get there. I’m in no hurry.

If other people want to play the “hey, you tune our game for us” mode, they can. That’s the default mode. Instead of learning Larian’s combat system and playing it like a challenging strategy game, they can just breeze through the battles with a minimum of fuss. At which point, I don’t think they’re left with very much. I’m not convinced there’s much gameplay outside Original Sin 2 other than the battles. But that’s a whole other kettle of fish…

So, yeah, I might have killed Original Sin 2 again, but it’s what I wanted. To have to master a challenging and difficult combat system that I know can be done because it was built for it. And Larian gave me the option, incentivized it, and let me commit to it. Thanks, Larian, for doing your job!

-Tom

93

My only two options are “snarky” and “close minded”? Sheesh, you drive a hard bargain.

-Tom

94

I don’t actually agree with the way you are trying to define challenge from frustration, but even if I did frustration turning into enjoyment does not enjoyable frustration make. You would actually have to enjoy the frustration, while it’s happening, in order to use it that term.

Now whether or not a challenge becomes a frustration can actually vary from player to player or as @Navaronegun, it’s not a one size fits all. So what is a challenge to me and what is frustration to you is probably very different, especially with that game, but that does not mean you are actually enjoying the frustration.

95

https://www.wholesaleclearance.co.uk/blog/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/Cinderella.png

96

You’re hitting the words too hard and missing the intent. It’s an interesting phrase because it’s a paradox. It gets at the idea that games without any resistance aren’t games*.

-Tom

* Yeah, yeah, walking simulators and visual novels, I know.

97

The irony here is it sounds like you are very close to unlocking the ability to respec at will for free. But since you can’t just lower the difficulty for this one fight, you risk never experiencing the rest of this amazing experience.

To each his own, everyone has the right to experience their game however they want to - which is precisely why I argue allowing the player to select and tweak their gameplay experience (mid-game), be it in Dark Souls or Pathfinder or any example in between, is almost always (with some exceptions) going to be a strictly better experience to games that do not allow this. Because everyone is different. From the amount of free time they have to their ability to fundamentally understand game mechanics, it’s just silly to assume any developer could possibly account for all of that and craft a perfect experience for everyone. So, let’s allow players to change things up rather than getting bored or frustrated (especially since that just leads to Steam refunds these days - which isn’t good for anyone, in the long run). That’s my stance.

What I’m saying is, that expectation differs for everyone.

98

I believe I understand what @Nesrie is saying. Is @KallDrexx getting a sense of satisfaction when he finally defeats a tough Monster at last, after three or four attempts? Or is it actually just relief disguised as satisfaction? I think a lot of times people mix the two emotions up in the moment, and then think back fondly on something that was really not very fun at the time.

99

No. No! I am not missing the intent, I am explaining why that the term does not work for me and a number of other people.

If I have a challenge. It does not become frustration because I didn’t overcome it the first, second or even fifth time. It becomes frustration when you wind up in a place where you think you are not going to be able to overcome come it or achieve it or you see no progress… I don’t typically get frustrated with a game like Monster Hunter because I can see progress, because i can see myself getting better or go out and get better gear, or I see where I made a mistake and can actually you know try to avoid that in the future. There are things I can do, and I know it.

Some of the RPGs, especially the old ones, you get put in a situation where there is no way to win… You get this weirdo illusion that hey you have this control, make your party as you wanted, feel challenged, and then you wind up with something that seems cheap, like you had all these ways to win, more than one way to win and then they stick in say a magic puzzle in a game where you didn’t have to focus on magic just beef up and pound stuff and then bam, puzzle that only magic can solve… stuff like that.

Frustration is different from a challenge where you can try again and again but actually have hope of overcoming. Frustration is not enjoyable. Frustration is a bad outcome.

100

Ah, is that in the game? Asking for a friend.

As far I can tell, no one here disagrees.

-Tom