Exiting the gameplay, going meta (tweaking the settings in the menu) is a choice you’re free to make, but seems weird to do it if you don’t like being allowed to do it.
I see NO difference between hopping in the menu, adjusting game difficulty, and blaming the devs for allowing you to do that, than pausing the game, alt-tabbing to youtube and watching a detailed strat to overcome your current game problem. Or alt-tabbing to download a hack to cheat. “Hey, the devs didn’t stop me from accessing the Internet and undermining the spirit of the game.”
When you go to the menu and change settings, it’s the equivalent of playing a boardgame w/ default rules, and 1/2 way in deciding you want to apply one of the optional beginner gameplay rules in the manual that allow you to better your odds. Sure, you can sit there and do it. You might enjoy the game even more! But you left the ‘game’, changed the rules, and picked it up again.
There are difficulty settings but rarely you can change them mid game. There are reasons for that, and mostly are “cultural”. War games come from the tradition of classic strategy board games like Chess and Go, where the games need to be “fair”, and be perceived as such.
Both Chess and Go are “balanced” and the space of game strategies is also immense. Let’s say that we have been playing those games for millenia (or millions of years if we adjust for the ability of DeepMind’s AlphaZero to play several hundred games in parallel). So it is quite clear to everyone that if you want an interesting game between two players with unequal skill, you will need to give an unfair advantage to the lesser player. Since this happens as the game is set up, and from then on, the players are also expected to own up to the end result, everyone is happy and nobody claims that Chess or Go are unfair bollocks or that they are “badly designed”.
Let’s go back to war games.
So say that you’re leading a company T-34s through the fields in the Ukraine in August 1943, marvelling at the beautiful rendition of balkas, wheat fields and picturesque villages… but all of a sudden your leading platoon of 3 tanks blows up and the only thing you can see is your comrades jumping aflame from the wreckage.
Was that “fair”? Well, it surely was the fare of many unlucky Soviet tank crews.
Now let’s say that you reload that game, to just the moment you were contemplating the wheat sheafs in the wind. You press the pause button, and open up the Options screen. You go to the difficulty settings and turn off the setting “Fog of War” and turn on “Highlight Enemy Units” and “Easy Ballistics”. You go back to that beautiful simulated environment and you see, on top of a ridge 600 meters away, three huge red arrows pointing downwards. Your leading platoon sees the threat, stops and summarily dispatch the guns and their crews before their commander can finish bellowing “Achtung Panzer!”.
Would that be a horribly designed war game? I do not think so. You totally want people to have a chance at learning the game rather than throwing them into the lions’ den naked but putting a warm lettuce in their hands and telling them “good luck!”.
Now, is it objectively the same to solve the challenge posed by that scenario with side wheels like the ones I mention and without? I don’t think so: there’s certainly a certain degree of skill to go through that and get a good outcome. Rewarding that with achievements that cannot be cheesed out by savescumming or whatever I think is a good thing, to give credit where it is due. In the same way that it is a good thing to both help enjoy your game as they see fit… without compromising your “artistic” objectives!
Sometimes having the ability to tune the difficulty level is great. Like when you already know how the game works, but you want to disable a mechanic you don’t like. Or you want to play a game that is very difficult to you into easiest.
I’m completely agreed with @tomchick, and especially endorse @RothdaTheTruculent’s metaphor of the magic circle and the red button under glass – that’s a great way to put it.
A big part of the reason I play games is to engage with an interesting system and challenge myself to develop some sort of mastery in it. If the expectation is for the player to tune things on the fly, then that system is amorphous and unsatisfying, and the motivation for developing that mastery evaporates. I want designers to lay out challenges within the system, and for me to play to the best of my ability, with the implicit understanding that the developers have tested and certified those challenges to be fair and beatable.
That said, I also endorse games putting a cheat menu in the options where feasible, and letting people toggle on god mode if they get stuck and just want to see the story. Just disable achievements then.
I’m less sanguine about Tom’s suggestion of extra loot or experience for playing on higher difficulties, because rewards that directly increase your character’s power make things easier, which is the opposite of what the difficulty level should be doing. External rewards like achievements are perfect for this sort of balancing.
And also, of course, not every game has have this sort of challenge or enjoyable frustration dynamic – it’s fine for some games to be carried by their story and not really push back against the player mechanically.
Oh man that was horrible. I can’t remember another more unforgiving game with insane difficulty. I didn’t get to play 95% of the game because of the difficulty.
I think there’s plenty of room in games for difficulty systems that reward players with better equipment as an incentive for playing on a higher difficulty, and plenty of games implement exactly this sort of system well - but those are often games that require you to earn access to the higher difficulty in the first place (Diablo) or have a significant enough gap between different difficulty settings that the higher reward feels earned (Earth Defense Force, games-as-services like Puzzle & Dragons that encourage players to clear an endless flow of newer and higher-level content to earn new rewards to be able to clear even harder content).
I don’t think anyone is arguing for that to be expected outside of some very weird cases, just that it’s nice. Especially when it’s a very complex game made by a small team that is never going to balance it all.
You referenced challenges, mastery and some not just understanding but basically trust in the developers to provide that experience in a way that’s feasible. I didn’t see any sort of goal where you went hunting for frustration and was disappointed you didn’t find it. The idea of the challenge being fair and beatable sounds more like you trust that it’s not just a rat race and that you can actually overcome these challenges and achieve something but…
Why do achievements even matter? Whether or not you beat something has nothing to do with what someone else did. This achievement thing doesn’t really make much sense to me nor does the idea of someone getting one in a different way than I did.
Why does it matter to you if I received an achievement playing the game in the same way you did or not?
I’m not quite sure what you’re driving at here, but there have been plenty of games where I got bored and stopped playing due to everything coming too easy and feeling like I was just going through the motions.
I don’t want to lock people out of seeing what happens in the story, or getting to play with the coolest weapons, or finding out what the final level looks like, which have been the typical result in games where someone finds something too hard. I mentioned achievements specifically because they’re non-content with no intrinsic meaning beyond setting a goal and tracking whether it is completed. So if you remove that, then why have them at all? I think their very simplicity and isolation from the game proper makes them ideal, non-intrusive ways to encourage mastery/challenge-related goals without blocking anything important for anyone else.
So to turn around the question, why would you want an achievement that you haven’t completed the requirements for?
I am talking about the opposite end of the spectrum you’re talking about. At what point would you consider it too hard.
I don’t really pay attention to achievements at all. I feel very little reason to advertise what I am doing or what I have done other than telling someone I finished the game. If someone asked me if I finished it on normal or hard or easy or twenty other tweaks, I’d just ask them why they care.
So direct answer to your question. I do not change how I play or what I play based on achievements.
Oh, then yeah, there have been various games that were too hard for me to finish (Ikaruga, Super Hexagon, Nuclear Throne, etc.). If they were to implement a god mode, I wouldn’t care, but wouldn’t use it.
Okay… then I don’t understand your initial objection. Why does the idea of disabling achievements if the player is using a cheat mode bother you?
I don’t care about the social aspect of achievements, and don’t delude myself into thinking anyone cares about mine. For me, they’re just a way for the designer to say “hey, this goal might be a fun challenge; why don’t you give it a shot?”, and to have a little recognition if I manage to pull it off. I don’t change what I play based on achievements, but if I’m already enjoying a game, and the achievements look fun, I’ll try for them.
There’s an argument to be made that in purely skill-based games, such as arcade shmups, there shouldn’t be any expectation that you can just access all the content by cheesing your way through on a lower difficulty (i.e. dumping quarters into the machine). After all, why should you get to fight the ultra-hard secret final boss if you couldn’t naturally clear the first five stages? Many of the Touhou games go even further than this, and cut off after stage five on easy mode instead of letting you play stage six and fight even a normal final boss. Since those games are based purely around twitch skills, not some arbitrary stat system where a fight would be easier if you lowered some numbers on the enemy side, would any of you argue that you should still be able to tweak stuff there to have an easier time?
So you seem to really enjoy challenging games. At what point did you decide it was no-longer a challenge or something you could achieve, dare I say, at what point did you decide it was just frustrating and not fun?
This original discussion came from Pathfinder right. So Pathfinder, based on feedback in that game discussion, has a lot of tweaks, a lot of trial and error, and I am not sure if it has achievements or not. If the developer is going to give you a 100 ways to tweak a game in order to make it work for you, some of which is due to the fact the game is knowingly unbalanced, or as Tom kind of put it, the developer didn’t do the work to make sure it works all the way through (sort of), then using those tweaks isn’t a cheat. It’s by design.
But more to the point, me having an achievement doesn’t change what you get or don’t get in anyway, so why would it matter to you what I get anyway.
On a personal level, I don’t understand a lot of achievements that are not achieved through… natural play. For example, X-Com. I picked up a number of those just by playing, normally. But there were some weird ones like… an all woman’s squad, like something I assume most would never achieve if they weren’t actually trying to achieve that achievement. I get them from games just by normal play. I got a lot from Thea but again the ones I usually get are just based on playing normally not these well if you do this thing in a way you would never naturally play then you get this thing. And then there is this rarity thing which compares me to everyone else’s achievements.
If it were up to me, there would be in-game goals only, no one would ever see what i got and I would never know how many other people got the same thing. As it is now, I sometimes know because these darn games like to tell show them, especially Steam, but if someone got an achievement because they built the perfect wizard in a game like Pathfinder and got some of oddball wow look at this massive damage thing you did or if someone had to tweak it because they did some sort of dwarf wizard and had to tweak the game because it let’s do that but doesn’t really let you do that, then… you got wow that massive damage… it would make no difference to me.
I guess that depends on what you think the goal of a game is. I think the goal of games is to have fun. For some that’s winning. For some that’s scoring. For some that’s reading and enjoying. In my book, if everyone is having fun, we’re doing it right.
I would argue that offering tweaks - be that to difficulty, controls, visuals, or whatever - allows a wider range of players to experience and enjoy the game and that most games and certainly most designers’ bottom lines would benefit from this expansion. And that probably holds true more rather than less the more skill-based the game is, because the potential barrier to entry is higher.
I don’t get anything out of games like those, so it’s not really material to me whether they do or not, but I don’t think it’s helpful to make assumptions about why people are playing that unnecessarily rule out parts of your potential audience.
I picked an incredibly niche genre on purpose, because the “appeal to the lowest common denominator” point seems to be a big part of the argument in favor of offering endless tweaks, and is harder to justify when a game is made with a specific smaller audience, which is more likely to appreciate the design the developer intended, in mind.
For hyper-difficult twitch-based games in particular, arguing that they need the option to tweak everything for every sort of player feels like the old “imagine if you could talk to the monsters” Doom review in terms of missing the point.
