It is! It’s a mirror, you get it after you complete Act I. It’s almost kind of cheesy, you can just run to it and re-invest points in a skill you need, then dash back and put things back how you want them, honestly. But it’s handy as hell.
Well, you seem to think it’s the mark of a poorly designed game, and @jsnell seems to think it’s okay because some games that don’t have it work well without it (which I disagree with, because the very games she cited (Zelda notwithstanding) I myself could only beat when co-oping with friends (and not at all in the case of Bloodbourne).
Note - I think games like Bloodbourne should probably NOT have difficulty settings, some of the game’s appeal is the badge of honor for completing them and their various sub-challenges. But I sure would have liked an “old man” mode.
Souls games have an easy mode: you summon help.
It is very probable that I’m not especially interested in games as can be designed in the virtual space right now except as platonic ideals of what I think I liked as a kid/young teen. Probably my outright favorite digital gaming experience in the last five years was Gone Home. A good chunk of this is because I don’t especially like challenge I can’t just ignore or remove at will. My threshold for “interesting challenge” becoming “obnoxious and unpleasant frustration” is exceedingly low, in part because my actual videogaming time is extremely low, but also because I don’t particularly enjoy being challenged or made to try hard. Especially not in my leisure-time activities. Most of the last few years of my life have been about carving away challenge and difficulty in as much of my life as possible, and it’s much better for it.
Tabletop RPGs certainly can have challenges I do enjoy, but they tend to be social or world-scale challenges that aren’t just overcome by sufficient applications of tactical skill. When the tabletop games I play do descend into “roll dice at the thing correctly until it dies or else tonight’s session will never end,” my enjoyment essentially drops to zero. . . and the sessions I run reflect that ethos very clearly. I, nonetheless, remain a very popular GM in my local area :)
As a younger man, this was less definitive, but the more I think on it, the more I can see the beginnings of it. I would bribe friends to come to my house and beat my games for me while I watched or played Player 2 to their lead. I’ve never beat a Mario or Sonic game on my own, full stop. They’re too hard. I did manage to complete a handful of videogame campaigns as a kid, usually with liberal applications of cheatcodes (e.g. Starcraft and Warcraft 3). I never much enjoyed “serious” multiplayer gaming because it was just a bunch of people trying really hard to win that I was hopeless against, barring the promise of endless hours of grinding my IRL skills up to be able to challenge them, which completely did not interest me. It’s no surprise that the multiplayer games I’ve played and loved most (e.g. Mario Party and Super Smash Bros have a hefty appreciation for high randomization and chaos to diminish the impact of skill [though of course a community of dedicated Smashers have found ways around that to make even that title competitive[).
So yes, from time to time, I’ll flirt with a genre that I used to play more of, and remember that in some ways, the “challenge” of figuring out how to beat it could feel interesting. . . optimizing build orders in Starcraft, optimizing gear load-outs in Diablo, optimizing everything in Pathfinder. But I very quickly discover that the interest there is hollow for me, and that what I really want is to. . .
Yep. That is my ideal gameplay experience. I want to experience as much of the content as possible in the single play through I might manage to carve out time for. I want to win fully. I want the best stuff. I want the whole story and the happy ending. And I don’t at all want to be required to git gud at any point at all, because if I am, in all likelihood, my $60 is wasted and I ain’t seeing the ending.
And at the end of the day, since what I play is largely single-player, and it’s my money, I very much expect to be able to do the above. Otherwise the title isn’t really worth my money.
As my increasingly dim view of the new Star Control title, whose primary content gating mechanism seems to be exactly the sort of resource grinding that Brad promised wasn’t the point of the game, entirely showcases. Ugh. Can we not with that oldschool hardcore nonsense in the middle of a fun adventure game? I just wanna hear the funny aliens talk, or else I’d rather go watch a Let’s Play.
Agree with basically everything Armando said. With the caveat that this statement, is very, most excellently true. As well, I wanted to merely add that repeatedly just trying to sufficiently apply tactical skill is…boring.
Neat discussion!
Tom is crazy, but he does has have at least 80% of a point here. Games exist inside a magic circle, a pocket-realm where fantasy and illusion can thrive. By allowing players to mod the game at a whim, the game makes it easy to break that magic circle. When a game does not indicate how it is expected to be played, then the game draws the border of the magic circle in faint and wavery lines. It becomes more difficult to generate and maintain the magic of the circle.
As people have written, if the magic simply isn’t happening for you and a game is too difficult/easy/whatever, then you do want the ability to redraw the lines so that the game is not a waste for you. But that should generally be a major operation, a red button that is set under a special glass panel and requires 3 keys to turn at the same time. There should be barriers in place to stop the player from redrawing the lines too casually. These barriers can be things like only allowing mods at certain points (the start of the game, or certain check points), or by telling the player “You will lose out on an achievement if you redraw the lines this way!!” One way or another, it is always possible to mod a game (they are just computer programs), the only question is how difficult the designers make it to mod the game.
So, preferring a clear definition of terms we are talking about “PC/Video games where one person is interacting against an AI” here, right?
Because that crazy man tried to apply this to Pen and Paper RPGs, Boardgames, and Multiplayer games earlier. Both directly or by implication.
Just sayin’…
I’d say that it applies to all of the above, and even more to social games than to single player games. E.g. in a tabletop RPG, the game isn’t so much in the character sheets as it is in the shared fantasy in the brains of the people playing.
It’s why GM’s like me and Armando are famed for our iron determination and rock hard will. We have to maintain the magic circle against the assaults of real life, cell phones, arriving pizza, etc. etc.
Edit: sorry, I was not commenting at all on the “enjoyable frustration” discussion. I have no opinions there.
I agree that anywhere a game lets the player set parameters, that is a place where the designers have disclaimed control. I just think that by and large that’s a good thing that makes it far more likely I’ll enjoy the resulting experience.
And in a tabletop RPG the players should absolutely be talking about what they want from the game with the GM. Probably they won’t get as nitty gritty as making minor tweaks to the numbers involved, because the GM can directly and on the fly make adjustments for them in a way a PC game can’t. But there’s nothing inherently wrong with saying “I don’t like the way X works, can we house rule it to work like Y?”
90% agreed, though I’m semi-okay with a short game with a heavy emphasis on story rewarding replay. Something like 80 Days.
Lots of good thoughts here that I want to come back to, but this one can be done easily:
By that same token, the game type that I think I hate most is the “small bits of fascinating story/worldbuilding gated behind extreme rogue-like difficulty.” I’m particularly thinking of Fallen London and Sunless Sea, but also, tbh, Dark Souls. That seems like a cool world. . . that I will ONLY ever get to experience via Let’s Plays :(
Hey now. Fallen London has zero difficulty. Just a hellish grind that’s mandatorily stretched over months. :P
Been there done that. Don’t forget “mood music” and the arrival of the morning sun.
I was more sure of Sunless Sea but I wanted two examples to make it seem like I had a point!
I’d add that I think of difficulty adjustments etc more in terms of accessibility than creative vision. Sure, not every book is for every reader, etc. But I don’t see people railing against books being printed in large type or Braille, or produced as audiobooks. And games have far more potential barriers to entry that aren’t about the content but the delivery mechanisms.
Sure, a pure game qua game, one that’s entirely about the mechanics, you probably need a more fixed design. But for my part, those games interest me little to not at all.
I don’t believe it’s relief disguised as satisfaction, and this is why Monster Hunter (and dark souls style games in general) are amazingly complexly designed and not nearly as simple as they appear.
The monsters are very frustrating the first time because it seems erratic and impossible. The satisfaction that the game manages to give me is not relief that I was able to beat it, but I found myself understanding that unique encounter’s mechanics in such a way that to beat it skillfully. I did not feel like I beat the encounter due to sheer luck but instead I feel like I beat it because I understood what it was throwing at me and was able to react to it accordingly, and that’s what gave me the satisfaction.
That doesn’t mean it didn’t start out as frustrating though, and without going through that process it wouldn’t have been nearly as satisfying. It was only satisfying because the encounter was hard enough that it forced me to learn it and force me to have to learn it’s tells and patterns, and force me to figure out a strategy to beating it.
I thought anyone would know about the first two - I haven’t played the Trails series, so I’ll avoid misrepresenting it - but I admit that was a reach. Chrono Trigger and FF6 are SNES-era JRPGs that aren’t hard at all, but that never stopped them from being praised as amazing classics since their release. I don’t play that many hours, but I read a lot about games and I’m going to disagree with @Scotch_Lufkin a bit: some JRPGs are super easy (like the ones I mentioned, the Dragon Quest series,…), but I doubt anyone would call the SMT or Etrian Odissey series easy - it varies a lot too.
This type of RPGs in particular is unbalance-able: there’s too many options, which means both too many terrible and too many broken combinations - as well as the possibility to go from one extreme to the other as you level.
I’ve read threads equivalent to Tom’s complaint elsewhere, so I’m not unsympathetic. There’s fundamentally different desires from gamers, even for the same person at different times, and that’s after taking into account that one man’s bump is another’s Himalayas. For my part, it’s not really about blazing through a game (might as well watch a let’s play), it’s about experiencing what the medium has to offer while respecting the amount of time I have for it and the frustration I already carry from real life. Repeating/grinding the same thing over and over until I pass (more than a few times) doesn’t feel like success either, just brute force (or a wall/series of walls that makes me delete the game). I might want to go back to improve, however. At the same time, it’s clear that a lot of people game for exactly that moment of release and I wouldn’t want to take that away from them either.
I thought achievements were a good way to reward those who care about “developer balance”, and they’re certainly a lot better than gatekeeping. The stupidest one is rewarding you for already being good at the game and penalizing you for being bad, that’s just substantially and repeatedly narrowing the conditions where the game feels right.
They’re kind of a funny solution, though: as someone with a few thousand hours in PDX games and 0 achievements, it’s pretty funny how so many people care about ironman while at the same time savescumming is normal and accepted. But hey, no one is complaining about difficulty levels (well, outside HOI4, because the bonuses are on the wrong things).
BTW, the one game that supposedly does dynamic balancing right is Rimworld, and that game isn’t even out yet - sitting several years in EA to get it right is not going be applicable to every game, certainly not to an expensive huge RPG.
That’s the quickest way for me not to want to read anything about that developer ever again. I might get to some that are already on my Steam account, but even that is a big maybe.
I had a bad experience with the Witcher 2 recently. The normal difficulty was way too hard for me and the easy difficulty was way too easy. Therefore, I had to play most fights on easy difficulty and not be challenged at all. It was either that or not complete the game.
See being challenged and being frustrated aren’t the same thing. Maybe it’s because we’re talking about games that it just seems they overlap each other so easily, but I submit it’s not the same thing at all.
Most parents want their children to be challenged in school. They want them to find their limits and push them a bit or something like that. We try to push children towards appropriately high standards, but why is that appropriate word important, because it means it’s high but it’s achievable. This means they could fail at it, repeatedly, several times even but when they succeed they feel they’ve accomplished something.
So why don’t we hand kids over to teachers, coaches, and any other learning experience and typically say, hey, can you frustrate the hell out of my kid and see if he has fun and learns something?
I mean, if the game does it right, you can have fun… and lose. It’s the challenge that should keep you going back, the belief in being able to overcome whatever it is. It’s not the feeling of frustration. If there is enough frustration going on, student, gamers, whomever, is at risk of completing disengaging. That’s bad. What’s the completion rate of some those games?
I mean we’ve talked about this before… QT3 is not a good representation of an average gamer. And when I say that I don’t mean because even half of us would go running into a Fortnite tournament and not get our asses handed to us. There’s a heavy strategy, hard slant here. I am guessing what frustrates us disengaged the general gaming population some time before that. It’s not a good thing.
If someone told they enjoyed game night but man were they frustrated for a couple of hours there, they’re coming close to telling me that for two hours, they didn’t have fun and almost disengaged. That’s not good. I am going to want to know what game that was and see if we can tweak either the experience of the game or the game itself to make it work better the next time or that might not be a game that’s going to come out when they’re there. This has literally happened. The game did not come out, no one has asked for it since. They didn’t like it, clearly.
Now if they said hey that was a real challenge, we failed twice, but wow on the third time they just knew if we tried a different tactic and it worked, or hey we came so close can’t wait to try a fourth… that’s different. That’s a challenge being attempted with a belief and want and we can achieve it.
I will say i find Divinity Original Sin and its sequel both extremely frustrating, and not in a good way.
What it seems to be asking me to do are things i’m not interested in doing, i suppose.
It’s sort of like when i was a kid and for a Christmas treasure hunt i designed a fake language and then made a bunch of clay tablets and thought it would be a ball of fun if we sat down and then listed every symbol and then ran the probability of each symbol being a letter and went to work translating it. No, actually, nobody wants to do that.
Original Sin wants to me to do something, but i’m not sure what that something is, in order to advance. It’s frustrating not because i don’t know the strategy but clearly because it has in mind a specific thing (or small range of things) i should be doing, and i can’t go forward unless i figure out, essentially by blind trial and error, what that thing is.
It’s like sitting down to dinner and your host sets down before you a steak fork, a skewer, a butter knife, a vegetable peeler and rock hammer, and fully expects you to use each and every implement set out before you’ve finished the meal. Can’t i just use a knife and fork? you ask. But how, they retort, will you get into the coconut? What if don’t want coconut? Can i skip the coconut? SKIP THE COCONUT?! Then why did you even come to my house to eat! Away with you! Come back tomorrow after you’ve learned how to hammer.
Original Sin has a bunch of vegetable peelers that by god, you will use before you can get any farther. Whether you want to eat your vegetables is not the point to the game.
Nobody actually wants to play a complicated LARP game of Star Trek TOS where there is a parallel Earth where the Germans won World War One either, with the scripts and props and whatnot. I worked for Days on the Cardboard Phasers and whatnot…control panels…
I still find that weird. THEY are strange, not me!