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

But difficulty doesn’t have to be the point. The designer may have a particular audience and particular goal in mind, but if tweaking two variables would let a different audience than the one they intend access it, why not let them?

If I recall correctly, some of these twitch hyper skilled games are platforms, and aren’t we seeing a number of those fall like dominoes. as in low to little sales. Who does that benefit exactly? I assume games are meant to be purchased and played. Most games are intended for fun. Yes, there are a few out there with other purposes, but most are mechanisms for fun during your free time. If they don’t want people to buy and play their game, why even call it a game; let’s just call them tests, winners get to show off their scores and walk around with their badges. For everything else, provide options so more people can play.

Even if you enjoy a challenge, skills and approaches are not the same. It doesn’t hurt anyone to provide more options.

It doesn’t actually work.

First, the users you think you’re broadening to won’t find the options. 90+% of players of most games don’t open an options menu.

Second, most users don’t actually know what they would find fun. They think they do, but they actually don’t. You’re just giving them rope to hang themselves (and then claim the game sucks).

I remember back in early Diablo 3, Blizzard nerfed the drop rates of noncombat objects - particularly the decorative armor props and so forth. “Why are you trying to force us to play a certain way?” the forums whined. “Why not let us just do what we find fun?” Well, because Blizzard knew what would actually happen is that players would farm non-interactive props for items for hours, get the loot they wanted, get bored and annoyed without really understanding why, and give up the game without having truly played any of it.

Same reason why you should generally fix exploits even in single player games. Finding one and being overpowered for a while is fun at first… then it’s just mindless repetition. Another game left half finished, often regardless of how good every other aspect was.

Ultimately, in any game whose primary value is its mechanics, making these decisions is what you paid the designer for. They should do their job and limit the mods to the minimum possible - ideally just a general difficulty setting - although perhaps it would be better to present difficulty as “what aspect are you most interested in when you play this game?” type question instead.

Here’s the thing: sure, fundamentally the designers need to be making most of the decisions. But just as a player doesn’t know everything about what makes a game fun for them, neither does the designer. Nor does the designer necessarily understand what everyone interested in their games is actually there for. There is a median ground between the two. What exactly that is is going to depend, especially since making the game flexible enough to accomodate different types of player is never completely free in terms of developer attention and cash investment. But I see no reason not to at least look into it and accomodate to the extent that is reasonable for the return on investment.

I managed to get about halfway through with no casualties, but then there was a mission I couldn’t get past without losing some soldiers. I put it down there and never got back to it, and probably have reinstalled over that old Linux disk several times, so its lost forever.

It depends on the design goal of a game, as well as it’s target market.

Challenge is fun for a segment of the market and it is a valid design goal. You could argue that you can make a game “fun” for everybody, but the design and economic challenges of that are insurmountable but for the biggest productions.

Some people enjoy building in their games more than everything, but it’s silly to argue every game has to have base building like Fallout 4 so that “everyone is having fun”.

If broadly adjustable difficulty goes against the core design principle of a game, including it would damage the appeal of the game for the core market. Games like shmups, rogue likes… games where some of the fun/design goal is comparing your performance against the game difficulty (challenge) or other players (competition)… can’t, in general, really have too broad settings or you will be damaging your core dynamics.

For this same reason stuff like save anywhere is also a design decision. I understand the QoL/real life interruptions arguments that defend that every game should have save anywhere, but it can hurt the dynamics of play for the core audience of several games, so it’s ok to decide you won’t have that. Yes, you lose audience (like you do if you design a difficult game) but you also avoid pushing away your core audience. Allowing an option of play (savescumming by save anywhere, difficulty tweaking…) is telling to your players, as a designer, that using them is ok, when they could really break the experience you are going for.

I’m up for games for everybody, just not every game for everybody. Because trying to make a game for everybody without a huge design team risks making a very bland game indeed. People who don’t like difficult games should not play them and not complaint, like people who don’t like games without challenge should not play Telltale style games and not complain either.

Which is a long way to say I mostly agree with @Tom. Except for Pathfinder. I think my perceived Pathfinder’s design goal (to express the most broad conversion of Pathfinder TT rules possible into a CRPG to give a huge possibility space for players) is actually enhanced by the crazy configuration options.

You can finish Super Hexagon?

There’s a big difference between advocating that games add entire new mechanics or systems to accomodate an audience that isn’t the intended one (like base-building, or the ability to talk to the monsters), and advocating that they offer the ability to change a few parameters so that one can experience the other properties of a game without necessarily contending with something that is specifically a roadblock. And I categorically disagree that anything is harmed by offering the latter.

My point of view is that game mechanics and their tuning (from how high Mario jumps to the specific layout of a level) are part of a game content. Along with visuals and sounds, mechanics and their tuning carry expression.

Arguing that every game should have a difficulty selection because some players do not like hard games is akin to asking that every game should have a non-violence toggle to accomodate players who dislike violence. Nothing is harmed either by offering a no-gore and no-blood option in Wolfstein or Doom, and it’s more trivial to implement than a whole new difficulty level (properly tuned, that is), yet claiming that one should always be included is problematic from several standpoints.

It’s a decision to be made game per game by the design team, and taking into account finantial factors (hard games sell less indeed while violent games do not). Most commonly you’ll see accomodating for everybody, difficulty wise, but we should respect instances where developers do not. I think saying that every game should offer difficulty options comes close to trying to force your favored style of expression in every work so you can enjoy it. It’s gamer entitlement (although an unusual form of it).

It’s ok to dislike difficult games, like it’s ok to dislike violent games. But going further is too much, imho. Let each game be what it is, and if it’s not for you, well, there’s not a lack of games nowadays to try.

Nobody is saying that a game absolutely should have every accommodation anyone might benefit from, full stop, across the board. Like I said a few posts ago, even trivial tweaks do take some amount of testing, development, etc. And so depending on resources and the amount of people served by the option, it’s entirely possible it wouldn’t be worthwhile to implement. What I cannot get behind is the idea that anything is harmed by offering these options where feasible. Sure, maybe difficulty is part of what the designer’s pure vision is expressed in, and someone playing at that difficulty with those exact mechanics is the only one who will receive the perfect intended experience. But that doesn’t mean that’s what everyone needs to get out of it, or that it’s better to have none of it than some of it.

As a designer, I should be able to decide I want players to have a precise experience and not others (and players are of course free to reject it). Nothing is harmed is offering a profanity free version of a book or a movie, after all people can still read the original, yet we don’t see those very often. Nothing is harmed by offering a simplified language version either, and that tracks better with difficulty (in general higher difficulty requiring higher genre literacy -that is, practise with games with similar mechanics so the difficulty can be overcome-).

Moreover, given the current media landscape, how people talk of your game influences how other people perceive it. Offering the possibility of a diminished experience increases the chances an influencer will play the game that way and influence the perception of potential audience, making the experience be perceived as bland.

I would say the, for example, had Dark Souls shipped with an optional lower difficulty setting that offered no setback (lower loot or somesuch) the discourse about the game and the overall experience people got form it would have been very different.

It happened to me recently with Bad North. I found the Normal difficulty very punishing, so I switched to Easy. But the game is meant to be difficult, and playing it on easy made for a shallow, uninteresting experience after the first 20 minutes. I finished that playthrough and I disliked the game a lot, even though I think I would have liked it somewhat had it not offered me the chance to lower the difficulty and cop-out. The designers offered me a way to find their game boring, and I took it.

Which is to say, if difficulty is part of the core vision of a game, offering options does harm the game, at least potentially. This only affects games for which challenge is part of the core vision, which is a very small subset anyway.

I don’t agree.

Well it’s a good thing I didn’t argue that!

There are still genres here. Difficulty is only a component. At no point did I say make every game for everyone. I don’t expect every game to be “accessible.” I’m talking about someone already interested in the genre, in the game and offering difficulty settings not changing the game entirely.

Again, that’s not what I am saying.

I think you’re completely misunderstanding what we’re talking about here. I mean I am old enough to have played games when there were no saves and you won a game by getting to the end of it before you had to walk away, and sure maybe there were bragging rights for some of that, but a lot of that was done due to the limitations of the time. The fact you couldn’t save and couldn’t walk away and there was only one way to play was not a shining example of what to do. It’s just what we had. And again, some games are designed for the twitch thing, so fine, do the twitch thing.

It seems like we have a dozen of those released every day on Steam. But for a game like Pathfinder; it’s an RPG. I am not asking someone to design an RPG that appeals to someone who would prefer an FPS. The developers gave tweaks which can make the game more enjoyable for some people. It doesn’t have to change anything for anyone else. What is wrong with that?

And again, games have a really high no one ever finishes them issue. I would think the developers would actually want people to play their game AND to have fun with their game AND finish it.

That is not my quote. Your reply must be “off” a bit.

On Super Hexagon, there was definitely an explicit goal to survive for 60 seconds in each of the levels.

I know I am being a bit simplistic after all of these very interesting messages but Tom has a good point … took me a while to figure it out. Why do we as a player modify our own game? It is like loading mods up and saying “this is the game we want” when its NOT the game they planned?

I always feel like I am cheating midway through a modded game of anything and roll back to a vanilla. Are difficulty setting that include 27 million variables just another version of the :getting a game we want" instead of “getting the game they intended.”

I dunno. Long week. Seems like a good point though.

You get the intended game by picking an initial difficulty and playing the game. It’s not tough to comprehend.

If you want to put on your tinted sunglasses when you look at a Pollack painting (or exit the game and tweak difficulty) then your experience is on you.

Actually Mono that is a good point and that is exactly what I do. I find the middle difficulty and go. I am not even sure why I commented except for some reason --Fallout 4 survival mode comes to mind… it was a created difficulty that I agree was much more fun than the original.

Horses for courses, as the brits say. Or for the dexterity challenged. I won’t go as far as Nesrie on this, I’ll just pick up a memory editor when/if I ever want to clear a few games off my backlog.

It seems as if the folks who don’t want the ability to tweak the game difficulty would be ‘happy’ if you picked the setting, normal, hard, etc, and it locked you in with no ability to change it. Or even if there was no setting at all.

I rarely deviate from ‘normal’ these days, however I’ve certainly found games where I wanted to experience the narrative and didn’t enjoy the gameplay challenge.

I just find it incredulous that if the option is there for a player to tweak the game more to their liking, it gets knocked by players who don’t want to be able to adjust, because they simply can’t stop themselves from ruining their own experience.

I’m reiterating others, but I don’t know why any of the options discussed here need to be the correct answer for all of gaming. Personally, I’m really variable on basically every topic discussed in here from game to game.

I don’t want a game like Devil May Cry to have the option to switch difficulties on the fly because playing through multiple times, getting mastery of the systems, is the reason I’m playing them. Having the option does undermine my feeling of accomplishment in part because I’d probably use it to get through a hard fight that I would otherwise learn to master and feel better about.

I’m perfectly happy to have never beaten Shiren the Wanderer (or many other roguelikes) because it keeps them mysterious and I’ll come back to explore them later. If I could tweak them, I probably would have at this point, ruined their weird mystery, and killed my desire to keep playing them.

I also expect Pillars of Eternity to allow me to change my difficulty on the fly because I absolutely do not expect the developers to know that I accidentally made a build that makes fighting high-AC enemies impossible (for example). Most games I play fall into this camp of not really being about the challenge, but having a bit of resistance be enjoyable anyways, and I expect to be able to turn it off when it inevitably is no longer enjoyable.

Finally, I have a big bucket of games I just can’t play because they are too hard. I’ve stopped playing FPS games for this reason. After failing at a scenario in the new Wolfenstein game at the lowest difficulty multiple times, I realized I just don’t have the expected FPS skills to keep up any more. It’s disappointing, but ultimately I’m okay with it because some people are going to feel that way about Devil May Cry and I still want my challenging experience there (a genre I’m moderately good at).