Difficulty in games

[Tai_MT]

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).

You called me? Yep, I was that guy. I beat Yunalesca on my first try, legit. I was even "underleveled", considering how much damage she was inflicting on me every single turn. I swapped my team around a lot, blew through the vast majority of my items, spend God knows how many Phoenix Downs... Whittled her down with whatever I could think of. To this day, I don't even know if there's a strategy to beating her other than the Brute Force method I employed. I had far more problems with Seymore on the mountain beforehand. The game outright STOPPED ME from playing it by putting me against Sin... and his 3 turn, one hit kill attack you can't seem to block or avoid. I realized at that point I needed a "Guide" to ever beat him and quit playing FFX. Never found a way to prevent him from getting his Overdrive Murder Skill off. That's your "Fake Difficulty" right there. Yunalesca was difficult, but beatable without a guide at all. I did it. She's a challenge if you have no idea what's coming and have no idea how to easily defeat her. I blew through so so so so many consumables...

BTW, @bgillisp I agree with your assessment of Dark Souls. The game itself didn't seem "challenging" to me, other than fighting the controls. It was easy enough to get my own attack patterns down and some of the initial enemies. But, it was difficult to nail down a "parry" or sometimes a "shield block". The controller was also very finicky about what you were doing and would sometimes catapult you over ledges when you just wanted to dodge roll or something. The final straw for me on the controls was before I even got out of the "Tutorial Dungeon" with the Asylum Boss. When the camera kept actively working against me and swinging the wrong ways so I'd get hit... or suddenly zooming way in because it hit an obstacle... Then, the game was picky about how to fight said guy... I couldn't even land the "land on top of him with a sword to take out half his health" method of the fight because the note on the floor isn't specific enough and everything I tried just resulted in me taking massive damage while not hitting him.

Dark Souls is very much a "fake difficulty" game. I prefer games with more responsive controls. I like that when I push a button, the animation immediately executes. None of this "10 frames of doing nothing before it executes" nonsense for Fake Difficulty. Games like that are basically "The Memory Game!" Where you either have to be psychic, or have to have died at this part X number of times to figure it out. I'm not into games like that. If there's no reasonable expectation of the player accomplishing a task on their first try... Then your game has Fake Difficulty. And, by reasonable, I mean, your chances of completing any given section of game are roughly 50% chance upon first seeing it. The second or third death should teach you everything you need to know so you can pass it. After that, it should be up to your SKILL if you can pass it or not.
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That being said... I like difficult games. Ones that are fair, anyway. Bubble Bobble, Zelda II, Contra, Super Ghouls and Ghosts, etcetera. The difference in these games and a game like Dark Souls is that every single death in those games... teaches you something. Whereas in Dark Souls... most of the deaths come from, "foo-traps". That's not what they're really called, but the forums have children in them. Basically, it's a trap you have no way of knowing exists, no way to dodge or anticipate, and it gets you the first time, every time. It's the developer putting their middle finger up to you. That's why it's a foo-trap. Other places call it a "noob trap". I like the "foo trap" better. I don't like games with these in them.

But, I like a fair challenge. I've beaten all the games I listed above, other than Dark Souls, legitimately. Without a guide. Without Game Genie. Without Emulator. As a kid. Each one, I consider a badge of honor. I was good enough to BEAT those games. Doesn't matter how many times they killed me and I had to restart. Because I eventually WON. I got so good, that I could beat them. I could do something other people couldn't do. I'd seen ending screens nobody at the time had ever seen and many never will without YouTube or cheats/hacks of their own.

For me, it's not just about "the game is difficult". I like, "This game requires you get some skill to beat". I mean actual skill as well. Like hand-eye coordination, strategy, the ability to not take a single hit from enemies, etcetera. Real skill. Skill that teaches you how to adapt and not how to just do the same thing to every same enemy to beat them every time.

For me, it's about "I beat this really hard game and not many can do that". I like the prestige, even if I don't share it or brag about it.[/user][/user]

 

[Sauteed_Onion]

Difficulty in games.

This can stem from a variety of factors. Does it mean the difficulty comes from not being able to see elements of the environment readily? There was a PlayStation game called Silent Hill, that had a lot of darkness in it, and you could use a flash light to help you see. It was also horribly mired by an issue some people called "Tank Controls". This cased a lot of spikes in difficulty because upon a camera switch the controls could confuse you as pushing one way could case your character to move in an unexpected way often into an enemies gaping maw resulting in many reloads and hours of wasted time. There were also other elements we could call "difficulty" depending on your goals within that game. There was a situation where a person you met seemingly turns against you. If you had been diligent in looking around and getting all the items you could get your grubby primitively 32 bit polygonal hands on, then you could get a different outcome entirely in that encounter if you knew to use one of them there handily nabbed items. If your goal was to get all the secrets and such you needed to pay attention to details. The game had some fairly complex puzzle elements that blocked game progress. (Offering options that go around puzzle elements could be an interesting feature that some other games actually do, -Fallout 1 comes to mind as an early example of this-). They were wildly different game styles, but Fallout was designed with the idea of letting someone choose how to handle situations.

Personally I do prefer a little bit of a challenge at least. I don't like cake walk easy games that are just designed to be simple button mash affairs, but I do have an example of a game I really enjoyed that was cake walk easy.

Chrono Cross for the Play Station. There was a story being told in a very detailed and vibrant way. A weird, and extremely plot hole ridden story, but it was charming, and filled with good tunes, and beautiful and imaginative environments. As a token affair, it was given a NEW GAME + mode, which made the game even easier. Much easier. But in a way if your goal was to locate and get all the secret characters and see all the different endings, you had to be fairly meticulous and clever. This could be considered a kind of difficulty. It took some edgy chances and maybe paid dearly for them, but there was for a long long time, a fairly active community hoping for a Chrono Something sequel. I kinda just gave up after I realized even if they did get it, it would be handled by Square Enix, and most probably miss the point entirely.

Games that limit resources are intriguing. It doesn't 'artificially' increase difficulty if you can't walk around with 99 or so potions or Hi-Potions and antidotes. It actually takes away an element that artificially simplifies a game. Games like Resident Evil 2 and 3 are good examples of this idea, but with an emphasis of extremely limiting resources. You had to judge whether you wanted to kill more stuff (carry more ammo and varieties of weapons), or run away from stuff and be prepared to take a nasty wound if things went wrong.. (take a few herbs or a can of first aid spray or two) and possibly have a payoff of having more ammo for dispatching larger creatures later.

In JRPG situations, difficulty has classically stemmed from puzzle solving, as the ones that seem to come to the US shores are usually sloppily balanced in combat situations. A few exceptions stand out in this line of thinking though, mostly super boss encounters. For the SNES a game called Lufia had me stumped for a while over a puzzle revolving around some towers. It's been decades, forgive me please if I'm not more specific. I still remember that because it felt like a scam to me. It sucked. Some games like Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord for the NES and Wizardry V: Heart of the Malestrom were pretty flippin hard. For the NES one, there was a bug in it I didn't know about until fairly recently where it didn't matter what your armor was because the AC system was messed up altogether. That didn't stop us from beating it though. But these games required a lot of intricate puzzle solving, and with enough dinking around they could be figured out. They had permanent death. I played Wizardry VI, and VII years later and read guides to beat them. Even with guides they could be difficult, as the encounters were balanced to be hard. Spell Resistances and enemy hit points seemed to be excruciating in Wizardry VII. Instant death attacks seemed to be of more concern in Wizardry VI, but overall I had a good time with those games. The later wizardry games like VI and VII had limited storage space like the earlier ones, but also had weight and encumbrance systems associated with them. This wasn't too often a serious concern, but it did add another element to the difficulty in a way.

I don't like artificial blocks either. Having to be level 10 to equip a piece of gear bothers me.. for some reason it doesn't seem to bother me as much as it saying you need 10 swords skill to equip this item. I don't know why this is, but it just is. I dislike games that have 'fodder' creatures that are supposedly terrible monsters that are ruthless and terrify villagers, but you commonly encounter them and easily dispatch them at level 1. I like a little peril at the start of my adventure.. at least at the start. I feel it kind of endears my characters to me when I have to fight a little to help establish them. And permanent death does not affect me as badly or nearly traumatically as it would somebody who probably didn't play Wizardry growing up. To me this really isn't difficulty, it's a cherished feature. In a player versus player game, I would not be as interested in this concept. I have played Wizardry Online, and that didn't keep me from playing it.. a lot. I have seen people playing XCOM and of the understanding that Perma death is there too. I wonder what people who played and enjoyed that game have to say about perma death.

Most people that don't want to play a "difficult" game have other goals for their game time. Sometimes people just want to relax and enjoy something visually evocative like, for me I can flip on a game like Chrono Cross, and have fun. It's kind of mindless and easy, but still entertaining. Good music, attractive graphics, and fairly thought evoking story, regardless of having some derpish Americanization, and probably genuine story board failures. But overall I really liked that game, and it was not in the slightest way challenging or hard, barring a few surprise situations like DODO bird in Fossil Valley. I really enjoyed Wizardry: Proving Grounds of the Mad Overlord, (And it was excruciatingly hard in a lot of different ways.) So, I kind of just meandered around and pooped out a lot of random statements in here. Meow. Please, accept my flavorful apologies for this madness of a post. And I hope this has helped you come to more concrete conclusions of difficulty management.

 

[Frogboy]

I grew up in the Atari/C64/NES era so I like a challenge. I typically make my games difficult enough that I can play them and still have fun. They're still usually pretty easy for me; I know everything about them and want other people to have fun too; but it's also one of the biggest criticisms I get. A lot of people don't seem to like that. Virtually all of my gaming experience comes from this older generation of games, though, so I can't imagine doing things differently.

I am glad that games aren't Spy Hunter difficult anymore, though.

 

[FleshToDust]

@Frogboy You should make what you like. There are niches and if people say it's too hard then it's not their niche. There will be people that do like your games though. Dark Souls is a very popular series and it's advertisement was "this game is hard. you are going to die." I like hard games. I don't want to just go through a game and not get stuck. Challenge is good.