Difficulty in games

[Lornsteyn]

I play most of my games on normal too.
Normal = balanced, at least it should.

Same here. I recently finished Persona 5...in Easy mode. I just got tired of the fact that Atlas has no idea how to balance bosses anymore, and I really didn't want to grind another 3 - 5 levels just because their ultimate attack one hit KO my party even when they guarded!

I love all Persona games, but Persona 5 was totally easy on normal even the bosses, I killed the last Boss before he could make his super attack, it was a bit dissapointing.^^
The only hard boss who beat me once was

Spoiler

Akechi

because I was unprepared and low on SP.

 

[bgillisp]

You must have had more levels than I did, as again, the super move was a one hit KO even if I guarded, on normal. And that was with me fighting everything en route too (well, except for a couple really cheap monsters where the EXP reward was not worth the hassle) Wonder though if the difficulty was implemented differently on the PS3 version though, as that is the one I had, and I've heard none of those complaints on the PS4 version.

 

[Lornsteyn]

You must have had more levels than I did, as again, the super move was a one hit KO even if I guarded, on normal. And that was with me fighting everything en route too (well, except for a couple really cheap monsters where the EXP reward was not worth the hassle) Wonder though if the difficulty was implemented differently on the PS3 version though, as that is the one I had, and I've heard none of those complaints on the PS4 version.

If I remember correctly my Level was 85-90 or higher, but I had some powerful personas too.^^

 

[bgillisp]

Yeah, your levels prove my point though. By playing the game and (almost) not grinding, here were my levels:

Spoiler: Slight Persona 5 Spoilers Below

32 at the end of the pyramid
41 at the end of the Big Bang Burger place (whatever it was called)
49 or so at the end of the casino
60 at the end of the ship
74 at the final boss battle, though I did grind one level before trying it.

The only time I ever hit level 80+ in an Atlas Game was ones I stopped to grind for a really long time. I hit 90 in Persona 3 actually, and I took out some forms of that final boss in one hit as I was so overleveled. Plus Armageddon made the last form a total joke.

But, my point still is, by playing the game naturally and not stopping to grind for a long time, normal was too hard for that game due to the ultimate attacks doing one shot KO's to you, even when you guarded. By dropping it to Easy, those attacks did about 55 - 60% of my HP (as Easy is 1/2 the damage of normal from what I could tell in that game, the rest is unchanged), even when I guarded.

Unfortunately, boss design has been a problem on every Atlas game since Persona 4 in my opinion as since then, unless you grind for a VERY long time, most bosses in their games are ridiculously cheap. And I don't have time to grind for 40 - 50 hours anymore*, so Easy it is.

*Exception: I did grind for a long time in Devil Survivor 2 as that game was on my 3ds and grinding was a great way to kill my one hour break between classes that term.

 

[FleshToDust]

Yeah, in most rpg's, grinding is a big part of the experience. I don't know of any games where you don't run into a wall and have to go back and grind a bit especially if you're purposely trying to avoid grinding. rpg's are more of a rollercoaster than a straight line. You go straight for a while and eventually you find something you can't beat so you have to go back and strengthen yourself.

 

[bgillisp]

@FleshToDust : Strengthen, yes. Grind for 40 - 50 hours because every enemy is giving me 1 EXP* (or some really low number) because I'm higher level than every enemy on the map and the devs decided I should get very low EXP for when I'm higher level than them, no. All those levels I mentioned I was higher level than the enemies on the map, so grinding wasn't a realistic option unless I wanted to do it for hours or days (with the exception of the last boss).

See, there's a difference between grind and I'm at the level you obviously intended due to enemies giving almost nothing in EXP but I still can't proceed as you can't design a boss. That's what I'm griping about here. And this is a HUGE problem in AAA games these days. Tales of Zilla 2 had the same problem. One boss I was level 27 and it creamed me, but I was getting almost nothing from the enemies either as I was considered higher level than them. 5 levels (and many boring hours) later I squeaked by that boss.

As it is, I feel that if I can KO all your enemies on the map with one hand tied behind my back, I should be able to beat your boss. If you still want me to grind, then you need to learn to design. That's my $0.02 on it.

*: It won't say you earned that due to a bug in the game (or at least the PS3 version has it), but if you note your EXP before and after the battle it is really way lower than it says you got.

 

[FleshToDust]

You'd assume they could get the balancing worked out since they hire I don't how many testers. Hmm, that's odd that it would be out of wack. Never played persona so I can't comment on the game personally.

 

[bgillisp]

@FleshToDust : Right? Now, maybe there was an optional dungeon to grind in that I never found, but then that falls under GuideDangIt problems in games (a whole new topic).

At least it had an Easy mode for those of us who didn't want to grind all day though. Otherwise I'd probably have never finished it, as I'm not THAT bored.

 

[Lornsteyn]

I grinded because I wanted the good Personas and to not be unprepared, since last bosses have often 3 transformations.^^

 

[sciencewarrior]

I like games that present alternative challenges to the player. You don't need to find every secret in more recent Nintendo platformers, and in some, you can just get a special powerup to zip through the phase if you die too many times, so these games are made accessible to players that would never be able to finish Super Mario Brothers 3 or the original Donkey Kong Country, but if you want to get a perfect completion score, you will have to up your game to a Nintendo Hard level.

On RPGs, you sometimes see optional bosses and sidequests that are much harder than even the final boss, and if you decide to implement one of these, my suggestion is to not tarnish the experience by throwing some gold or a +1 sword at the player as the reward. Beating the extra challenge and seeing tangible changes in the game world should be enough.

 

[AMGLime]

This thread shows a lot of why difficulty isn't really a thing anymore. If a boss is hard because you need to do specific things (aka every Persona Boss) people will instead try and grind and still fail, giving up and dropping to easy anyways. Dark Souls is "difficult" in the sense that it's unforgiving to you if you're inexperienced but repeats a lot of puzzles and animations so you learn it once, the rest of the game becomes quite easy. You can't really compare the more modern games with the old NES games, as they were the part of the pioneering age of video games and balance was kind of non-existant, the battletoad reference earlier is an example of how poorly designed things were back in the day.

Now, that isn't saying any of this is bad either. My girlfriend plays everything she can on Easy, she works 12 hour days, and the last thing she wants to do on her days off is struggle when trying to engage a game, so things like Persona where you can't figure out the pattern so it's hard make sense here, you just wanna make through it. She doesn't even bother with Dark Soul styled games because she only has 3 days a week she can play and do things, so a lot of the stuff she learns gets forgotten while working. That's why, especially in the case of RPGs I've never really cared about difficulty. There's almost always something extra to do that is more difficult, side dungeons, extra bosses, Chaos Mode in Tales, etc, etc. People have varying amounts of time and patience, so games as a whole can't really be designed as difficult now.

 

[bgillisp]

@AMGLime : Actually, if the bosses require you to do very precise things to beat, that's not difficulty, that's Guidedangits. Especially if the game doesn't train you to do those things or doesn't give you a clue. Otherwise how is the player to know to do those precise things without a guide?

I actually call cases of that fake difficulty, as the game wasn't actually being hard, it was requiring me to be psychic. I still say I doubt there is a person out there who can legitimately say they beat Yunalesca in FFX if they went into that battle completely blind (as in, had no clue about the battle or anything that would happen).

 

[AMGLime]

@bgillisp What's so hard to believe with Yunalesca? The entire dungeon was filled with Zombie enemies and you were informed that they're wrecked by Healing spells. Makes sense she's going to wreck you when you're turned into a Zombie...

I don't recall any boss fights in RPGs that didn't use a dungeon or clear messages to foreshadow stuff that's going to happen. Yunalesca had a dungeon swarming with zombies. Persona 5 tells you when to defend, and if you pay attention to story you know which characters are better at certain boss mechanics, like Ann is terrible at the Boss one mechanic, but Morgana is great because he's not known. Things like this aren't classified as Guidedangits, they're hinted at in the game, if you don't pay attention or ignore it, then yeah, you'll suffer. Things like Psycho Mantis from Metal Gear Solid, -that- would be a Guidedangit.

 

[bgillisp]

I will disagree as NEVER in an FF game were you told to let a status ailment stay on you. The entire game trains you to remove status ailments when you get them, and that is the standard for 99.9999% of all games. So if a game wants you to actually leave a status ailment on because it might have a positive benefit, it needs to train you. FFX failed to do that. (If you are unsure what I'm talking about here with positive benefit, I'm referring to how the only way to survive her Death attack which hits all for 100% chance was to have Zombie on. The game NEVER trained you for that. The healing, yes, that I was ready for. It's the whole needing Zombie to survive Death that I say is a guidedangit).

I remember Persona 5 telling when to defend, but I don't remember it telling me or training me to be ready for despair on the Sphinx. In fact, until that battle, I had no idea what that status ailment even did, as no one inflicted it on me to date! But, the Sphinx could despair my entire party, and this was before I had spells to remove despair from the entire party. Plus, leave it for 3 turns, and you're dead? Where did the game train me for that? That is what I'm calling guidedangits. In both cases, the game failed to train me to prepare me properly for those cases.

 

[Aoi Ninami]

I haven't played FFX myself, so I'll talk instead about a fairly similar boss in Curse of Saria.

Dark Transient has an entirely fixed pattern of attacks, which I don't remember exactly, but it's something like: physical, Hellspawn (Zombie to all), Pulse (magical attack), Trauma (chance of various statuses), physical, Dark Rain (instant death to all). Similar gimmick: you have to leave Zombie on, because instant-death attacks don't work on the undead. (It's no surprise to me to learn that FFX has a similar boss; the creator of Curse of Saria has said that it's his favourite FFX, and there are many ways in which Curse of Saria takes clear inspiration from it.)

Now, the creator thought that "instant-death attacks don't work on the undead" was a common-knowledge thing players would understand, just like "healing spells harm the undead". That didn't work out; I didn't have this supposedly "common" knowledge. However, after inevitably getting wiped on my first attempt, I kept trying to see if I could figure out this boss, and I quickly realised that it killed precisely those party members who were not in Zombie status. So I got the wrong message about how it worked -- I didn't figure out "this is simply coded as an instant-death attack, and as a general rule, all undead are immune to those" -- but I did figure out what I needed in order to work out a strategy for the boss.

I should note that every boss in Curse of Saria has a puzzle element; you're not expected to beat them on your first try, but need to figure out how they work and use that knowledge to defeat them. For example, there's one boss that consists of two characters, Craig and Brianna. Brianna can cast Haste and Regen on both, and if you try to fight normally, most of your turns will go to removing those statuses and healing the damage done by hasted Craig, and you just can't inflict enough damage to overcome the Regen. The solution is to wait until she casts Regen on both, then cast Zombie. Figuring this out was a lovely "aha" moment, because the puzzle was perfectly fair: you can scan monsters (and bosses) to see what statuses they are vulnerable to, and an earlier boss had used Zombie + Regen on you, so you know this is a mechanic that exists. There is a small flaw: you can't know before trying it whether Brianna has the ability to remove Zombie. But if you've gotten this far in the game at all, you should have gotten into a mindset of thinking up plausible strategies, and then trying them out.

So no, I don't see it as a "guide dang it", but as a puzzle where the game presents you with a seemingly impossible challenge, and you have to work out how it's possible after all. I really enjoyed solving it (for both the bosses I've described). And solving the puzzles didn't make the bosses trivial; it made them doable, you still had to win the fights, and they were extremely fun and satisfying.

 

[bgillisp]

@Aoi Ninami : You got lucky. What had happened to me was I NEVER had Zombie on when round 3 of Yunalesca came, and the very first thing she does is hit with a Death skill with 100% chance to hit, no chance to dodge. So all that battle taught me was it was cheap, as I could never dodge it, whereas, to this point, Death was at least not a 100% chance to hit, or if it was (like Level 5 Death), you knew why it worked.

What I think puts it in guidedangit realm for me is that battle went against Everything I had learned in 12 years of RPG playing to that point. All games I played to that point status ailments = bad, get rid of them ASAP. There never was a positive benefit, period. So if any game is to go against common knowledge like that, you have to tell the player. We don't give our players poison and then say they should have known that poison also gives you +50% ATK, use that to kill the boss do we? If we did that, we'd be ripped to shreds.


So, I think this discussion shows that you should be very careful if you go against 'common' RPG conventions, as it can be seen as very cheap difficulty. For every person who likes it for being different, about 10 hate it and see it is as cheap and dumb (and I say that based on what I've seen on the forums. There were MANY threads swearing at Yunalesca for being cheap when the game was new that I saw on the online forums). At least that is my experience with it.

 

[kaukusaki]

I always play easy mode to get the feel of the game. Then I play normal mode to get everything lol
I never bothered with hard mode. Nobody got time for that XD

 

[MrZalgo]

The thing is, nowadays playability is sacrificed for eye candy. And actually not challenge. Everything is sacrificed for the eye candy. Good music, originality, innovation,... And much more. Even challenge.
I am an old school gamer. I like challenges. Not like masochistic challenges xD I like it when the game is not too difficult (or "difficult"), but not too easy. While I don't want to be wasting threev weeks in one boss room, I like being challenged and pushed to tactics and innovation.

I think The Order 1886 is the perfect example of that. Stuck with poorly made QTEs, hours of boring cutscenes, a cliche' story, and terrible AI, all for the sake of beautiful graphics.

 

[MrZalgo]

For me, I always love a good challenge. The whole Dark Souls franchise revived my love for gaming and I always tend to play some really challenging games for the fun of it all.

Heck I started Doom 2016 on Nightmare mode right away. I died a lot, but it was really fun.

 

[Windows i7]

Video games should be accessible with lower difficulty settings while at the same time providing harder settings for those who want a challenge. The latest Doom is IMO a perfect example of a game with difficulty settings done right. The lowest difficulty should provide a decent challenge to those inexperienced (or not skilled for any other reason), but not be frustratingly difficult.