olds games dificulties vs new games dificulties

[Touchfuzzy]

Replaying 10 minutes of easy stuff to do the hard thing again doesn't make me any more skilled than if I get to try the hard thing again.

Hell, Dragon Quest has always had a system of not removing your progress really when you lose. You just lose half your gold and go to your nearest save point. Yeah, you have to go back through whatever dungeon you were in when you died, but most of the time the dungeons weren't THAT big, and ifyou had beaten 2 bosses and there was 1 left, those two bosses are still beaten, and you get to keep all the experience from doing it.

Having to repeat a bunch of stuff that you have already experienced and which gave you little challenge, does not make a game harder.

 

[Napdevil]

Having to repeat a bunch of stuff that you have already experienced and which gave you little challenge, does not make a game harder.

Have you ever done a ironman or a hardcore run through a game? Even if the game isn't particularly challenging on its own, the threat of losing your progress with a single mistake keeps you on edge and forces you to play defensively. The sheer pressure of keeping your nerves in check will cause most players to "tilt" and die in places that they never even thought about. I can attest to this personally.

It's like playing a Poker game, but being able to undo every bad play you make; that's how checkpoints work in a nutshell. If the game doesn't hold the player accountable for their mistakes, then the fear of losing is simply non-existent.

 

[Seacliff]

Comparing Pokemon Red/Blue/Green/Yellow can seem a bit more difficult than X/Y just because you grind more in Red/Blue/Green/Yellow. But the basic mechanics are still the same. You just need patience to grind in the first gen.

Another thing that should be mentioned is that early games of the 5th generation (PS1, N64) were fairly easy, but probably seemed hard as kids because of the illusion of difficulty known as waiting. Take Ocarina of Time for example, a lot of the enemies is just about guarding then waiting for the enemy to let there guard down (stupidly, if I might add) while attacking them before waiting will cause the enemyto counter. Giant Spiders, Skeletons, Wolfs, Gerudos, Clams, Several bosses, etc. etc. etc. all used this pattern. There is no difficulty in waiting or being patient.

And as Touch also mentioned, FF1 and DQ are not that hard, you just grind a lot. Patience again.

As a final statement for me, I don't think we should going over if games are harder or not. Sure, there were very flawed and cheap game designs in the early days, but that was because not many people knew what made a game 'good'.

Look back at the games that used fair game mechanics, most of them are probably not that hard. I think it's because we thought they were hard when we were younger. The biggest issue being that Kids can be impatient.

 

[Touchfuzzy]

Have you ever done a ironman or a hardcore run through a game? Even if the game isn't particularly challenging on its own, the threat of losing your progress with a single mistake keeps you on edge and forces you to play defensively. The sheer pressure of keeping your nerves in check will cause most players to "tilt" and die in places that they never even thought about. I can attest to this personally.

It's like playing a Poker game, but being able to undo every bad play you make; that's how checkpoints work in a nutshell. If the game doesn't hold the player accountable for their mistakes, then the fear of losing is simply non-existent.

The only games I bother playing on ironman is stuff like XCOM:EU, where a single loss isn't the end of the game. It prevents me from save scumming to save a favorite guy, but it doesn't cause me to have to do THE EXACT SAME THING I JUST DID over again. It helps the difficulty not by making me repeat things, but by making mistakes permanent, and making you have to overcome those mistakes in future situations.

If I die and it makes me have to replay the last hour before that boss fight, its not making the mistake permanent, its making it take longer. Its assigning busy work for dying.

TL;DR: Ironman doesn't have to do with repeating things you've already done.

 

[doncht]

If I die and it makes me have to replay the last hour before that boss fight, its not making the mistake permanent, its making it take longer. Its assigning busy work for dying.

Very well said. I couldn't agree more on this. 

 

[Napdevil]

If I die and it makes me have to replay the last hour before that boss fight, its not making the mistake permanent, its making it take longer. Its assigning busy work for dying.

But the threat of the "busy work", as you say, makes a difference. When a player begins a hardcore run, they're doing it with the understanding that should they fail, they have to begin again from scratch. That threat is what makes it challenging. If your character dies, it stays dead. That's how Wizardry worked, and that's what made it difficult compared to modern RPGs.

I think we're swaying into a discussion on whether checkpoints are a good idea or not. What I'm getting at is merely that checkpoints make things easier because it removes one of the penalties for failure. If you die, nothing of value is lost.

If a game made you replay the last hour before a boss fight (which is very generous compared to permanent death), then you'd take steps to minimize that possibility; it made you tread carefully and plan ahead as much as possible. A modern game that boots you to the start of the boss fight every time doesn't demand as much from the player; you could brute force your way through the encounter if you were so inclined. I would certainly argue that the old way of doing things was harder; whether it was better from a design standpoint is an entirely separate issue.

 

[Touchfuzzy]

You aren't even arguing the same things. Ironman is about permanent consequences for failure. Both Wizardry and the one I mentioned XCOM, do not really END just because you lose some troops/characters. You continue on dealing with your current situation while not having what was lost. Dying doesn't lose progress, it is PART of the progression of the game.

Its not about taking hours out of my life, which is what reduced quality of life features (autosave, save anywhere, etc.) are. And replaying an hour of the game doesn't make you incapable of bruteforcing a boss, it just makes it take LONGER. Any difficulty that can be solved by patience ISN'T ACTUAL DIFFICULTY.

 

[Galenmereth]

Any difficulty that can be solved by patience ISN'T ACTUAL DIFFICULTY.

That depends, however. Increasing personal skill level in any activity requires patience. Thus even 100% skill-based challenges are inherently tied to patience and time spent achieving high enough skill.

 

[Touchfuzzy]

That depends, however. Increasing personal skill level in any activity requires patience. Thus even 100% skill-based challenges are inherently tied to patience and time spent achieving high enough skill.

Patience is required in learning any skill, but it isn't the actual skill. Grinding requires no skill, just patience. Replaying sections of games requires no skill (or no more than was necessary the first time), just patience.

Do we really want games that try our patience? Rather than our strategy, reactions, and/or dexterity?

I'll admit that a game that tests my patience is probably "harder" on me, but that isn't difficulty, its frustration. (though I oddly don't mind grinding. I just HATE redoing parts of games).

 

[Galenmereth]

It's very situational, I find. For example, many people enjoy games where you have to grind a lot, but where planning, exploration and careful scrutiny of areas, items and enemies means you can vastly reduce the amount of grind needed. So that more grind = easy route and less grind = hard route. Different strokes for different folks, and all. I'm not saying grinding is inherently good, however, but it can serve interesting purposes in context. Chaining enemies in FF11 was thoroughly enjoyable, but it tested both your patience tremendously, as well as your minute to minute skill in keeping the rhythm going as a party. It was still an insane grind where you would spend literally a whole day (8+ hours) pulling and slaying the same enemies over and over, but it was actually enjoyable because perseverance through patience and keeping a level of skill up meant better XP than the alternative. I couldn't get into that kind of game today, what with having work and not being a student anymore, but there was something to that, too. It's not for me anymore, but I won't say it's without appeal in context.

 

[Napdevil]

Patience is required in learning any skill, but it isn't the actual skill. Grinding requires no skill, just patience. Replaying sections of games requires no skill (or no more than was necessary the first time), just patience.

I think we're arguing semantics here. Patience itself is a skill. It's not something that's inherently a part of everyone. For some, patience has to be learned. Part of the reason why older games may seem more difficult is because they tend to demand more patience from the player.

You say replaying sections of the game requires no skill. What about the skill involved in avoiding that situation in the first place? Not being prone to errors? Not failing while under pressure? Saying that patience is the only factor involved is, I think, oversimplifying the issue. A game that sets you back for failing promotes a fundamentally different skill set and playstyle than one that allows you to try again immediately, penalty-free.

Again, I must emphasize; I'm not saying one is good and the other is bad. My argument is simply that older games demanded more from the player because features we take for granted today didn't exist. I would not enjoy returning to those days, but I can appreciate them in hindsight.

 

[Galenmereth]

I will go one further than Napdevil and say that in many instances, replaying the same area again after failure is something I still enjoy today. I still play through the NES mega man games for this reason alone: punishing difficulty. Now why do I do that? Because optimizing my route to the challenge I am trying to overcome is tremendously satisfying. The journey to the boss isn't just something to cross off a checklist: it's most of the game. Getting better and better at doing that dips into another thing I enjoy in some games: speed running. And I enjoy that. I actively seek out games that give me that feeling of edging closer and closer to perfecting something truly challenging, as a journey to a goal that isn't set in stone.

I also design my games with this in mind.

 

[Touchfuzzy]

The skill to avoid replaying a section is the same level of skill needed to beat it to begin with whether you got set back an hours or not at all. If the battle takes me 3 times to beat, it would take me three times to beat whether I got to do it back to back or if I had to take an hour between times. Its not like I stop trying to win if I have to go back an hour when I lose.

Well, ok, I do stop trying to win sometimes, but its when I'm forced to replay a section of the game and I just turn the game off.

 

[whitesphere]

I think the difficulty of the game should go hand-in-hand with the type of game.   In an RPG, I think it's completely appropriate for a survival horror game to have really bad consequences for character death (i.e. permadeath for a party member!) since that's the very core of the game.

If I'm talking a story based RPG, it depends on the level of tension I want in the game.  A game like FFIV is challenging, and definitely requires grinding, but as long as you're on the world map, you can save anywhere.  Or you can save at designated save points in long dungeons.  Usually, the save points are somewhere in the middle and close to the big boss for a dungeon, minimizing the extra time required to run through the dungeon, but not taking away from the tense challenge of getting TO those save points.

I think that is a good balance to strike for most story based RPGs.  As a player I am fine with some grinding, and risk, but not fine with "Gee, I have to go ALL the way back through the dungeon" when some dungeons can take a half-hour to go through.  It's fine to kill my party if I'm underleveled, made a serious mistake or am missing important equipment.  That means "Go back and get the right stuff this time" and I feel it's quite fair.  Annoying but fair.

But I think it's just tedious to force the player to go through a large chunk of the dungeon again, because the big boss killed the entire party due to a lucky hit.  

 

[Napdevil]

The skill to avoid replaying a section is the same level of skill needed to beat it to begin with whether you got set back an hours or not at all. If the battle takes me 3 times to beat, it would take me three times to beat whether I got to do it back to back or if I had to take an hour between times. Its not like I stop trying to win if I have to go back an hour when I lose.

I disagree with you. I think performing action A, and performing action A under stress are two different things. Even if you're going through the same motions, you cannot be expected to play your best when the threat of losing something valuable (in this case, time, and maybe your sanity) is hanging over your shoulder.

 

To borrow a Poker term, you go "on tilt": you play too cautiously out of fear of losing, or you play too recklessly to compensate for your losses. You let your emotions dictate your gameplay. Preventing yourself from tilting is a skill. It's especially important when the risks are unusually high. (e.g., losing hours/days of progress)

 

A forgiving checkpoint system removes a big part of that element from the game. Low risk = low pressure. There are no costs associated with failing a fight three times; you could even say the first two doesn't count, it's just practice. Most people would not adopt the same relaxed attitude if there was a price to be paid; no, you're going to damn well make sure that you get it right the first time, because by the time you're on your third attempt, you're going to be "tilting" so hard that you probably won't even make it to the fight.

 

[Touchfuzzy]

If a game can't put pressure on me without the threat of losing hours of progress, it is already doing a bad job.

Order of Ecclesia has save rooms before every boss fight, but I felt pressure in every boss fight.

Also, in the other direction, if you are ridiculously punishing in death, you have to make the fights easier to compensate, because the expectation is that if the player plays well, they won't die. You can't have boss battles that are legitimately hard, because if a boss battle is ACTUALLY hard, you probably won't win the first time. And if you have every boss fight take multiple attempts AND you have to replay an hour of the game it just gets ridiculous.

 

[Galenmereth]

Dark Souls has punishing difficulty, sets you back quite a bit every time you die -- especially if you can't make it back to your corpse without dying again -- and it's one of the best designed games and difficulties in my gaming history of 21+ years.

 

[nio kasgami]

Dark Souls has punishing difficulty, sets you back quite a bit every time you die -- especially if you can't make it back to your corpse without dying again -- and it's one of the best designed games and difficulties in my gaming history of 21+ years.

Exactly Dark souls is hard like hells to play but I love the fact you not need to be a certain level for beat some monster..like the big armor knight they are hard to beat and can kill you in two shoot  but if you  avoid is attack and hit at the good time the armored knight  can be beat!

for what I say the difficulty is balanced in the way you need to be skillfull in the game for have your XP :3! 

this is not like : HAHA I am level 27 so I will kill you b***ch like it was super easy I love the fact monster adapt to your level :3!