Game Difficulty As a Virtue 204
The Wii and various mobile gaming platforms have done wonders for the trend toward casual or "easy" games. But the success of a few recent titles, despite their difficulty, has caused some to wonder whether the pendulum has swung too far; whether a little frustration can be seen as a good thing. Quoting:
"The evidence is subtle but compelling. For one example, look to major consumer website GameSpot's Game of the Year for 2009: Atlus' PS3 RPG Demon's Souls, which received widespread critical acclaim – none of which failed to include a mention of the game's steep challenge. GameSpot called it 'ruthlessly, unforgivingly difficult.' Demon's Souls was a sleeper hit, an anomaly in the era of accessibility. One would think the deck was stacked against a game that demanded such vicious persistence, such precise attention – and yet a surge of praise from critics and developers alike praised the game for reintroducing the experience of meaningful challenge, of a game that demanded something from its players rather than looked for ways to hand them things. It wasn't just Demon's Souls that recently flipped the proverbial bird to the 'gaming for everyone' trend. In many ways, the independent development scene can be viewed on the macro level as a harbinger of trends to come, and over the past year and into 2010, many indies have decided to be brutal to their players."
I returned Return to Zork in one day (Score:5, Insightful)
Emeril Lagasse suffers from the same problem as the article writer. They both think that one ingredient is the key to a winning formula. BAM! Just add some EVOO or in this case turn the difficulty all the way up.
The secret, which isn't a secret at all, is that balanced gameplay is the true Sangreal of gaming. Pitting a newbie against a grizzled Korean veteran in Starcraft isn't going to give anyone a challenge or make them feel like they want to come back to the game again. It's only when the players are evenly matched or only slightly mismatched that gameplay becomes exciting. It is the thrill of being able to beat a game but with enough challenge that victory isn't guaranteed.
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It's not the ONLY road to success. But it's part of the secret blend of herbs and spices.
It's not about cranking the difficulty up until it becomes impossible. Impossible enough even a bot can't succeed anymore [youtube.com]. That's not enjoyable.
It's about finding that sweet spot where it is doable but a challenge. This is, of course, something different for everyone. Hell, there's a good reason why difficulty levels are so popular in games. Let's stay with Guitar Hero since it's been the example in the video. Would it
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It's not the ONLY road to success. But it's part of the secret blend of herbs and spices.
It's not about cranking the difficulty up until it becomes impossible. Impossible enough even a bot can't succeed anymore [youtube.com]. That's not enjoyable.
What do you mean: "even a bot can't succeed anymore"? There are plenty of games where even the smartest AI can't compete with a human: strategy games. And those are games that have always been about challenge. Has Civ ever been fun at the easiest level, waltzing over stone-age AI civilizations? The fun has always been to crush them at Emperor level. The harder it is, the more satisfying the victory.
Of course victory still needs to be possible. Playing a game that can't be won soon loses its appeal.
Players' skill levels differ (Score:2)
Likewise, it's frustrating if a game is so friggin' hard that it simply is not fun anymore either.
But players' skill levels differ. One person's challenge is another person's so hard it's not fun. This is true of DDR [youtube.com] and Tetris [youtube.com] and even platformers [youtube.com].
Why the challenge is important (Score:2)
making something insanely hard "just because" does not make something fun
1 always have some way to move the game forward (have a couple answers to "what do i do next??" at hand at all times) note going to some distant area of the level ripping a random object off the wall and then using it on some random decoration does not count unless the player could have grabbed it the previous time they saw said object
2 killing any opponent should be discoverable (use "houses of magic" or a rock > paper > scissor
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Excuse me, stewardess. I speak Excited Nerdling.
Making a game insanely hard "just because" does not teh fun make.
1. Always have some way to move the game forward. For example, have several answers to "what do i do next??" available to the player at all times.
Please note that enabling a wall decoration as a "grabbable item" only after a player reaches some other point, and has already passed it, is rather irritating. It was not "takeable" when they first encountered it, so it would
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Right. If you take the whining you get on slashdot about games at face value, you'd think half the people here wouldn't know a good game if it cooked them breakfast.
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I cut the bonding plant instead of rooting it and wondered why I couldn't go into the comedy club and had to play the whole thing again hehehe. Quite challenging.
Re:I returned Return to Zork in one day (Score:4, Interesting)
Emeril Lagasse suffers from the same problem as the article writer. They both think that one ingredient is the key to a winning formula. BAM! Just add some EVOO or in this case turn the difficulty all the way up.
The secret, which isn't a secret at all, is that balanced gameplay is the true Sangreal of gaming. Pitting a newbie against a grizzled Korean veteran in Starcraft isn't going to give anyone a challenge or make them feel like they want to come back to the game again. It's only when the players are evenly matched or only slightly mismatched that gameplay becomes exciting. It is the thrill of being able to beat a game but with enough challenge that victory isn't guaranteed.
I totally agree. One of the brilliant things about Supreme Commander is that it matches you against players of equal skill. When I played RTS games before, games were always one of two types: I rolled over the enemy effortlessly, which is boring, or I got crushed like a bug, which is just as boring, and frustrating too. In SC, once it learns your rank, every game is a constant uphill struggle against an opponent you can almost but not quite defeat. It's brutal, but that's what makes it a fun challenge!
Meanwhile, games like Valve's TF2, L4D, and L4D2, which are highly dependent on not just your own player skill, but the skill of your teammates has zero in the way of skill level based match ups. There's nothing worse than a game with some 13 year old idiot in it. There's always that one prepubescent who got the game 10 minutes ago, but thinks he can do whatever the fuck he wants, including run the wrong way, ignore his team, etc...
I like to think of this analogy: imagine how stupid it would be if the world championship game of, say, football, had one team member replaced by a fucktard who just does "whatever he feels like", because, you know, "it's just a game", and there would be absolutely nothing the other players could do about it. Does that sound like a good game to you?
Unfortunately, this is the state of almost all team PC and Console gaming right now. Players with literally 10 years of experience play side-by-side with mouthbreathers who struggle to tie their own shoelaces in the morning, and have difficulty in grasping advanced concepts like "pressing a button fires the weapon". It's common to see 50:1 point ratios on TF2 servers between players, which is just insane, if you stop and think about it.
Many people would argue that this is what clans are for, but clan games are usually very small, are played only on a subset of the maps, and are few and far between. There's just no opportunity to play, say, a 32-player game for 4 or 5 hours straight with clan-level players only.
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It's common to see 50:1 point ratios on TF2 servers between players, which is just insane, if you stop and think about it.
Then where are the people with "1", who actually did just buy a copy an hour ago, supposed to play in order to learn how to play the game? I guess one solution is what Tetris DS implemented: a sort of Elo-style ranking of all players, and random matches are with the closest player to your rank.
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Well, that is one of the things the single-player campaign is supposed to do. It starts with beginner tutorials, and if you can finish it, you should have a basic level of competence. Experienced online players will probably still squash you like a bug, but you won't be totally lost.
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No, I don't think multiplayer should be unlockable. But if you're totally lost in multiplayer and never played the single-player campaign, you've got nobody to blame but yourself. Granted, this doesn't solve the pain of other players having to deal with someone who has no clue and won't learn.
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It's common to see 50:1 point ratios on TF2 servers between players, which is just insane, if you stop and think about it.
Actually, if you think about it, it's quite reasonable. I've had 150:1 ratios compared to others, because I had played 3 full rounds of Payload (150+ points) and the guy with 1 only joined 2-3 minutes ago, is on defense, and has only had the chance to get a single kill because of circumstances beyond his control. I've never seen two TF2 players who played for the same ammount of time yet had a 50x difference in points.
I like to think of this analogy: imagine how stupid it would be if the world championship game of, say, football, had one team member replaced by a fucktard who just does "whatever he feels like", because, you know, "it's just a game", and there would be absolutely nothing the other players could do about it. Does that sound like a good game to you?
This analogy has nothing to do with public servers. Sure, you expect not to get 10-yo n
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this is absolutely true.
part of what made Demons Souls so great was that it was so well balanced. when you died, 99% of the time it was your own fault.
also, you could play through the game knowing that a pile of rocks wasnt going to fall on you or the floor open up when you stepped on it. there were no cheap hits that artificially added 'difficulty' (frustration).
I don't find 'difficulty' useful in itself (Score:4, Interesting)
There are certainly hard games I've enjoyed, but difficulty isn't really a single-axis thing, so I don't find it that useful to talk about in the abstract, and I certainly don't see any benefit to games that are "hard" just for the sake of it. A game might be hard because it has complex puzzles, or because it requires highly honed twitch skills, or because it requires non-obvious inferences, or because it requires acute observation, or any number of other things. Sometimes those are useful, sometimes not.
Plus, it's not even really something to set in opposition to casual games. It's really hard to get the kinds of low times on Minesweeper that aficionados get, and there are pretty hardcore communities based around such things.
I do agree that not every game has to be for a mass market. But surely, if you're given the luxury of designing a game that doesn't have to appeal to everyone, there are more interesting niches?
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A game might be hard because it has complex puzzles, or because it requires highly honed twitch skills, or because it requires non-obvious inferences, or because it requires acute observation, or any number of other things. Sometimes those are useful, sometimes not.
I totally agree with this. I've played PC FPS's for years and I don't consider them hard by any means, but the same game on a console with a gamepad makes them impossible. I wouldn't consider them 'fun' on the console just because the difficulty for me personally is way up there.
On Guitar Hero III and casual vs. hardcore gaming (Score:2)
A game might be hard because [list of reasons] [...] Plus, it's not even really something to set in opposition to casual games.
I think Guitar Hero III is an excellent example of this.
If you play at the easier levels, you can have some casual fun with friends (if you have two controllers or can put up with using a wiimote.)
On the higher difficulty levels, you can get some real finger-twitching challenges, topping out at Through the Fire and Flames. I've tried hard, I've only completed it once on Expert. Raining Blood is pretty tough too.
Plus, if you play in battle mode, you get to exercise your brain---the lefty switch and the amp
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Obviously a rounded game design is essential to a successful and interesting title. But designers for years have become convinced that if the pu
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I agree - I don't understand the marketability of something based on the fact that its "Difficult". ESPECIALLY on such a subjective matter such as that. I have long since been the guy with no difficulty playing video games. Its not that I was always the Best, because I wasn't, but I never had any problems picking up a game and learning its symantics quickly. My friends played Halo 1, 2, and 3 religiously within succession of each other, never spending much time playing online in any other game. I had played
Having fun (Score:5, Insightful)
Some players find difficulty fun, and some players find that frustrating instead. Telling people that they must play on higher difficulties to have fun is like proclaiming that football is more fun than baseball or tennis.
The problem really are those few players who seem to find fun in telling others that they're doing it wrong. People should worry about themselves, not what others are doing.
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Your premise is sound; The point of the game is to have fun. Your logic is flawed.
How does one have fun doing what they find fun, if no one makes a product they find fun because the majority (and that's an assumption) demand ease of access and nearly garuanteed progress.
Quite often the people saying that they dislike the 'easy mode' games or the gimme skill levels are vilified as "telling others that they're doing it wrong", when the reality is those being vilified
People want accomplishment (Score:5, Insightful)
People like to win, of course. But if that win is easy to achive, the achivement feels hollow. Anyone could have done it. People also enjoy the feeling of being "special". And I don't mean in the PC sense. They want to have the feeling they did something not everyone could do.
Get the amulet of yendor! (Score:4, Funny)
That is no hollow achievement, a total waste of perfectly good time, granted. But boom, dead from food poisoning after getting the amulet. Fifteen years later and I'm still bitter.
Storm
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hell, getting the amulet with a search engine is hard enough.
great, now i have to go try again. see you all in a month.
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People like to win, of course. But if that win is easy to achive, the achivement feels hollow. Anyone could have done it.
Seems to me that developers can often hide how easy a win is, making an easy win feel like an accomplishment. Peggle, like many puzzle style games, doesn't require much skill. A lot of it comes down to knowing the ins and the outs of the game, and chance. After you learn how to play it, you'll make a play that happens to come out well by chance. It's easy to feel like you played that well and have an enjoyable sense of achievement, when really you got lucky... although I guess another way of looking at
Well, after all... (Score:2, Informative)
— Pierre Corneille, Le Cid
Winning examples: Supermetroid, Castlevania (Score:2)
That's what difficult levels are for: Feeling that you could achieve what many couldn't.
One of my personal favorites, is "Castlevania: Aria of Sorrow". You have the normal mode, and the hard mode. But my favorite part is battling with Julius. There are numerous youtube videos of fighting with Julius in restricted circumstances: i.e. no armor/weapons, all abilities disabled, no healing potions, etc. Of course, the Boss Rush mode is a must.
Supermetroid also manages to do this, in the form of Speed Runs. The r
King's Bounty (Score:2)
Similar to HOMM, but more of an RPG/adventure. It has difficulty levels ranging from easy to impossible - but many unfamiliar with the genre will find "Normal" to be challenging.
I went with easy and challenged myself to lose as few units as possible. A very enjoyable game.
Right now I'm playing through Torchlight on the hardest difficulty. Good thing there's no death penalty if you respawn in town. ;) I kill enemies in about 4 hits, but they do the same.
Fake Difficulty (Score:5, Interesting)
What I mean is when they use things like... Computers get psychic powers. Or they can 'cheat'. Like bots in a shooter that know where you are at all times. Or bots that have guns that deal double damage. It is a bit hard to define... but generally speaking, any time the game becomes more about w/e coded in cheats the computer gets than about the goals set out in the game then fake difficulty has been taken too far.
AI can game break in the opposite direction as well. For example... max handicap disadvantage in smash bros melee vs a computer. You are no longer having a match. You are playing a game of fucking with the ai so it falls in a pit (yoshi sucks at this). In many cases, especially games that shoot for some degree of realism this sucks balls. In shooter, base infiltration games higher difficulty should not be merely adjusting their hp level. It should be tightening up their AI, their aim, their placements, hell number of troops and their weaponry. Otherwise the game plays like crap. (Nearly all games do it the crap way)
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Even this isn't always true though. Serious Sam FE/SE adjusted difficulty by playing with damage, hitpoints, pickups, and I think even the number of enemies that spawn but at the same time the difficulty is still "real" on most levels below the insanity ones.
Re:Fake Difficulty (Score:4, Interesting)
Starcraft always knew all your units and built counter units.
Starcraft2 they say is supposed to have really keen ai that even needs to learn through fog of war, but we'll see.
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Or it is a memorization game: if i wait 3 seconds before running here they'll have their backs turned. That isn't skill or even luck at that point. You've just died and re spawned a bunch so you know when to go like some kind of psychic. Trial and error != fun.
That's where I think you're wrong. You should be able to observe your opponents and predict what they will do based on that observation. If you die a bunch, then you are obviously having trouble with a part of the game, and need all the help you can get to beat it.
Systems need some tactical depth (Score:4, Interesting)
That's why I love Nethack. The permadeath gives you plenty of difficulty, but the challenge doesn't feel "false" because there's so much tactical depth. Yeah, sure, there are plenty of monsters that are pretty brutal ("go team ant!"), but if that stupid orc has a wand of death, you *get* that wand of death if you manage to kill him without him killing you first and he doesn't have infinite uses of it. And there are usually a dozen ways you could have survived that last death. Contrast this with, say, Angband (or many MUDs, for that matter), where the trend in many variants has been that "we want a harder monster, so let's give it 50% more HP and make it resist *everything*!" But the only way you could have avoided dying was having more heal potions handy or retreating.
I used to be an immortal on a MUD, actually. Nobody knew how to write a mobprog except for random drops, or so it seemed at times, so almost everyone who made hard mobs just set them to aggro and cranked up their HP and armor so that you had to heal via potions for 3 hours while they dropped 1% at a time. I made the first actual mob that used intelligent spell selection to target player racial weaknesses and which used debuffs in a reasonably tactical manner, forced the player to solo it, kept the HP, armor and damage reasonable, gave it a limited number of low HP cohorts that allowed for a flanking bonus, and limited the player's ability to gulp potions so you couldn't just set an autoquaff trigger and watch TV while waiting for it to die.
People had a lot more fun inventing clever tactics to use against it and watching their use of mana for healing vs. damage over a relatively short (~5 minute) fight, vs. other critters where the main challenge was making sure you had enough potions in your bag before attacking and chatting or something while you waited for it to die.
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As a side note wow also hasn't figured it out. Mobs from level 1~80 (excluding bosses) have these strats for each time it can attack:
- If humanoid and hp under 20% flee randomly for 7 s
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a lvl10 human charging a lvl 80 orc in full epic gear is pretty retarded.
It's a problem with the concept of gear, and not skill. Lets face it, intelligence doesnt really factor into a game where a 'level 80' singular entity can walk up to a fortified city and literally walk around as a god as thousands of soldiers are unable to do anything to combat them. I call it the Van Cleef effect. So here is a guy who can manage to organize the near overthrow of an entire kingdom, has armies AND a budding navy at
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A level 10 soldier SHOULD be charging a level 80 orc regardless of his armor. It is just an Orc in armor. The fact that it is completly pointless is just an artifact of the mechanisms which WoW uses to keep your progression (satisfaction) slow.
Unless said level 10 soldier has just witnessed said Orc in armor punch out a dragon.
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"Fake difficulty" annoys the crap out of me in Madden. I'd like the AI difficulty in Madden to be the difference between going up against a Jerry Glanville coached team vs. a Don Shula coached team. Instead I get a team that rolls over and plays dead vs a team that consistently gets huge passing plays even when I make the best call on defense to stop them. It's really annoying and the Madden Karma (like if you go for 4th down and fail, something BAD will happen to your team in the next possession) only m
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Or they can 'cheat'. Like bots in a shooter that know where you are at all times.
That's not necessarily cheating. I once watched a Flash animation about scrubs who accuse skilled first-person shooter players of cheating. If you hear step-step-step, and you know it's not a teammate, run around and shoot. If you hear clank-clank-clank in a vent, and you know it's not a teammate, toss a grenade.
(Nearly all games do it the crap way)
Because the crap way is cheaper to pull off and doesn't sell measurably fewer copies than the hard way.
I have another name for this concept (Score:2)
Difficulty(&sometimes bugs!)gives a game chara (Score:2)
Developers have to strike a balance between what makes you go "f- this game" and "YES! I CAN'T BELIEVE I FINALLY DID IT!".
Another problem they face is the fickleness of the community. For example, the Ninja Gaiden games on the NES would not fly in today's gaming community, except among a small, masochistic market segment.
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It's called Nintendo Hard [tvtropes.org].
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or example, the Ninja Gaiden games on the NES would not fly in today's gaming community, except among a small, masochistic market segment.
I hear that the newer versions of NG (XBox et all) are insanely difficult, just as the original.
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NG2, not so much. It was more frustrating due to bad camera angles, cheap enemy tactics, and broken balance.
Difficulty (Score:4, Interesting)
I consider a game to be a failure if I can play through the whole thing the first time through without dying. Final Fantasy VII was this way - I only died and reloaded when taking on the optional challenges like Wrong Number or Ruby.
A problem I've noted more recently is uneven difficulty levels in a game - they're easy hard at the beginning and then trivial by the end (Dragon Age, Mass Effect 1) or games that appear easy in the first couple levels or your first time through so you kick up the difficulty level to give yourself more of a challenge, and they become ridiculous (Halo 3 Legendary Mode).
Some games also conflate higher difficulty settings with "being higher level", and make the game impossible if you think "Difficult" could possibly be played by an experienced player with a 1st level character. Dark Alliance 2 was this way. Sacred 2 and Diablo 2 were as well, but at least they made you beat the game once before you could turn on Nightmare difficulty. While you could still be underleveled for it, at least you couldn't stumble into it with a 1st level character, like you could in DA2. Even still, I hate game mechanics that have a "you must be this tall to play" mechanic in place, like in Diablo 2.
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I dislike when games notch up only one factor with difficulty.
S.T.A.L.K.E.R.: CoP being a notorious guilty: enemy accuracy. I can still step into anomalies (they hurt more but still one medikit later I'm as good as new, and medikits are as dirt cheap as on "beginner"), I can shoot mutants just the same as before, I have 1 minute instead of 5 to hide from blowout what means I can't cross the whole map and finish the current mission at my leisure, but must run to one of few nearby hideouts within range. Artif
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>>...Some random loser on Slashdot considers one of the most heralded video games of all time to be a 'failure', because he claims that he only 'reloaded' (wtf?) twice.
Says the Anonymous Coward?
FFVII was indeed a shitty game, in very large part because it was so easy (as well as the annoying linearity of the game). As I said, the only two combats I died were to Wrong Nnumber and Ruby Knight, or whatever the giant robot thing was. I didn't even spend much time leveling my party - I think I finished it
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Demon's Souls is a bad example (Score:4, Insightful)
It started off as a cult game that looked really promising in it's original Asian release, then someone in the western gaming community got a hold of it and it became a real bandwagon game, being name-dropped everywhere. With a huge following of people that have probably hardly played it, claiming that they love difficult games, because that's what everyone else is doing. Also see : God Hand. Actually, Demon's Souls owes more than a bit to the Gothic games, for which it plays basically like a linear version of, except with bosses.
Strictly speaking Demon's Souls isn't a hard game, as once you get into the hang of it you'll find that most deaths come from lack of carelessness. You can't simply rush head-long into everything and know that the game won't hurt you for it, like most games. It's just a very punishing one; when you do make a mistake it really does kick you in the nuts. And someone in the design team has confused flawed design with difficulty. No pausing? No ability to save, even to a single constantly overwritten slot, just in case? There is difficult, there is masochistic, and then there is just plain bad game design. I don't regard having to find a safe spot before being able to take a leak or answer the phone to be 'hardcore', just stupid.
Speaking of God Hand, it is a much better example of proper difficulty. In Demon's Souls, if you tip-toe around, you'll go okay most of the time, and most lessons you learn once and you're okay from then on. God Hand kicks your ass early on, and you wonder how it got released in such an unworkable state (also, if you're an IGN reviewer, you'll likely go off and start writing at this point), but if you pay attention to the combat system and start out on an easy level, you'll become comfortable with the combat system, and then eventually you'll start tearing up the place, ready to advance in difficulty, and things that once seemed impossible will now merely present a fun challenge instead of sending you back, tail between your legs. Urban Reign did the same thing. They are great games.
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Oops. I'm not even sure why I wrote 'lack of' in the first place. Lack of carefulness? That doesn't even sound right. Sigh.
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I never wanted constant saving, or multiple slots. Just a simple option for "save and quit" that actually saves the current level, not simply the soul and player level, and boss deaths, and then delete that save upon resuming. How hard is that. The current setup is simply bad design for the sake of trying too hard to be hardcore. Losing current level progress because the real world interrupts the game just isn't good design.
You gotta be kidding. (Score:5, Insightful)
> The Wii and various mobile gaming platforms have done wonders
> for the trend toward casual or "easy" games.
Yeah. Care to cite specific examples? Because this, here, until proved otherwise, sounds like gamer nerd handwringing over their hobby's new mass popularity, no more.
Have you played the new Super Mario game? Care to name some other Mario games that are harder? Take your time, I'll wait. Heck, has there ever been a Mario game where failing one time too many on a single level, no matter how many lives you have, means you can't reach 100% completion unless you trash your save game and start over from scratch?
Hell, have you played the Wii poster child, Mario Kart? How are those mirror cups going? Unlocked the Rainbow Road expert staff ghost yet? Beaten it?
Just because it's easy to get into for newbies does NOT make it unchallenging. Seriously, guys, this is the same line of thinking that gives us people who seem to think that user friendly and powerful GUIs are mutually exclusive. It's a real design challenge to reconcile both, I know. This makes it all the more important to recognize and laud those attempts that succeed.
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Not only that; the submission seems to ignore the wonders that flashagmes, Peggle, Solitaire, etc. have done for the trend toward casual or "easy" games.
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There's a lot of punishing games for the Wii (just like all the other consoles) -- and they don't have to be "hardcore" to be difficult. Go watch a youtube video of "We Cheer 2".
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Yes I've played it. It isn't hard.
As a single player game. It is easy.
Its the first time I sat down and beat a mario game in a couple of days of casual playing.
What is hard is when you add 3 people... some of whom may not know what they're doing. Suddenly it is difficult because people are interfering with jumps, etc
Without doing any life tricks I finished the game with dozens of lives without trouble.
I really don't get how this is supposed to be some kind of benchmark for difficult mario games.
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Never used Super guide.
I completed all the levels. There was one castle/level that was a pain. Super guide came up, but I never activated it.
But one difficult castle doesn't make a hard game. Adding players immediately made it hard as there was no coordination and most people were not that skilled, but vanilla, there was no extreme challenge.
I never said I didn't die, I just didn't find it to be soul crushingly difficult as everyone claims.
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100% completion isn't "beating" the game. Beating the game is rescuing the princess, for me it was that and doing all the levels. Half of the star coins are "secrets" and finding all the secrets has never been on the list of things to do to say you've beat it. They're for replay and challenge.
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Parent is so right. I've been playing Super Mario Galaxy on & off for two years with my daughter and we still haven't beaten it. It's not easy... and I tend to lose interest, at least temporarily, after playing and failing on the same level for the 20th time in a row. Hell, even Bebbled on my Android is a challenge (anyone get past Xmas level 10?). On the other hand I've beaten every FPS I've ever installed on my PC on Normal to Hard difficultys. I suppose I'm a pussy for not playing them at th
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Have you played the new Super Mario game?
No. I'm waiting for time.
Care to name some other Mario games that are harder?
1. Super Mario Bros. 2 (J) [youtube.com] 2. Kaizo Mario World [youtube.com] 3. Super Mario Forever [youtube.com]
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As far as what you are talking about, that really isn't the challenge of the game. Achievements create artificial challenge. The first Mario didn't have achievements yet it was quite challenging. Does this Mario make you start all the way from the beginning if you die too many times? N
Mega Man 9 (Score:2)
Gentlemen, I give exhibit A, Mega Man 9 [wikipedia.org], WiiWare [nintendo.com], a game which I truly think counts as masocore [auntiepixelante.com].
Trust me, the Wily Wars [wikipedia.org] never ended.
Men In Black Playstation... The Horror... (Score:4, Interesting)
When I was a lead tester at Accolade/Infogrames/Atari (same company, two different owners, multiple identity crises), I was responsible for Men In Black (Playstation). Sony had a submission requirement where they wanted a videotaped play through. Normally, it took me eight hours to get through the whole game. The developers made a change for one level just before the final level that made finishing the game impossible. I told them to change it, they told me to screw off.
I spent eight hours playing that damn level before I could advance to the final level and sent Sony two videotapes with 16 hours of video. My request to duplicate the last videotape and send it to the developers was denied. No one cares about the pains that a video game tester must suffer.
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Keep in mind that a video game tester will know every aspect of the game after four months and can play through the entire game rather quickly. The MiB title probably had 20 hours of game time for a "normal" player for the first time. When we had Neverwinter Night in test, we never did test the entire game. A complete play through that included all the side quests took up to 500 hours. Bioware had one programmer who tested the entire game in two weeks.
Overall, the single player mode for most games are g
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Overall, the single player mode for most games are getting too short. Thirty hours of game play for a $30 game was the norm ten years ago. These days you get 20 hours or less for a $60 game.
Well, that's why I buy games only after they've been out for about a year. That way I get 20h of gameplay for $20 instead. I don't see the point why I absolutely have to play a game right when it first ships.
DNAS Error -103 (Score:2, Insightful)
Well, that's why I buy games only after they've been out for about a year. That way I get 20h of gameplay for $20 instead.
True, but in that case, you get only 20 hours. After that point, if you try the multiplayer mode, you'll likely get something like "DNAS Error -103: This software title is not in service" after the publisher pulls the plug on the matchmaking server.
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Why is that a bad thing? Multiplayer isn't everything. For some people, it isn't anything.
Case in point: Dragon Age Origins (Score:2, Informative)
I'd have to agree that in many ways games today are easier than in the past, however I too have noticed a swing back towards difficulty in a few titles. Most recently in Dragon Age Origins. Even played on the easy setting, it can be brutally difficult in some parts, the spikes are enormous. I prefer to play my RPG's in real-time, provided the game has such a mode, and while the easy setting in DAO is supposed to allow real-time battles, it is not strictly true. In many cases it still takes a huge amount of
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In World of Warcraft (Score:2)
latest expansion, Wrath of the Lich King, the endgame has been made substantially easier than before.
But has been added the possibility for players to unlock "hard modes" that present in many cases a much greater difficulty.
You know what?
People complain that the game is too easy (even if they never tried the hard modes).
Or that hard modes are too hard.
Or that hard modes are too easy because top world players (not them, someone else!) were able to beat hard modes in few days.
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People complain that the game is too easy (even if they never tried the hard modes).
The problem with World of Warcraft is that the last expansion truly made the game too easy in several ways.
Outside of dungeons, mobs have simply become ants. Annoying but 100% non-lethal. You almost have to disconnect while fighting multiple mobs to even have a chance of dying. In normal dungeons as well as heroics to some degree, the preferred strategy has become to basically collect as many mobs as the tank (and healer) can handle, have him keep them occupied (which is very simple nowadays) while the rest
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They probably nerfed the outdoor group quest mobs in the older zones to help people on low pop realms where finding a group can be a monumental task for any zone not in Northrend.
"This wouldn't be so bad except if you could only challenge yourself by fighting more difficult mobs. But the experience as well as level system in WoW highly encourages people to fight mobs that are at most the same level as yourself, or preferably one or two levels below if they want to level quickly."
You can fight higher level m
Casual != Easy (Score:2)
Many casual games are an endless highscore hunt that has you struggling until you die, I wouldn't call that easy. Casual gamers develop extreme proficiency at their games like Tetris or Bejeweled. It's the hardcore games that are easy, they are more designed around the spectacle and story now and that's stuff that you can't make the player replay so having him die often and replay scenes over and over again is seen as a bad thing. I don't know about you but to me a game where even a minimally skilled person
Translation please... (Score:2)
Would I be right in thinking this translates as "Me and my friends liked it, but it didn't sell very well"?
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No it means nobody was (over)hyping it, it got good reviews and sold more than was expected for such a game.
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I play easy and hard games (Score:2)
I'm not sure I understand what the big deal is with worrying about some "pendulum". Sometimes I have time; sometimes I don't. (Given hard means it requires more time.) I just like games. It's not an either or proposition.
There is nothing to worry about here. The casual game market was just an expansion to reach a previously ignored segment of players: the very old, the very young, and the very busy. Your hard games aren't going away any time soon and neither will your easy games. Stop fretting over it.
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The problem is that the game industry is to an extent making the same mistake as the film industry: Catering to too wide a demographic with the same product. If you make a 3D romantic comedy in space surrounding a mysterious murder during a high speed car chase and cast everyone as a teenager, you will indeed have squeezed most genres into the film, and it'll probably be watchable for people who like those genres, but it will never surpass watchable. You'll maximize the revenue, but pay a hefty price in qua
New games need to get rid of auto health regen (Score:2)
New games need to get rid of auto health regeneration or at least make it a power up / upgrade that uses power.
I don't that deus ex 3 will have it deus ex 1 had a good system it was a upgrade that used up power. IF you don't want people to back track a lot add more med kits / have no limit on how many you can carry at one time.
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I'm not so sure. Call of Pripyat has health regen (which IS a an upgrade, but dirt cheap). It doesn't get in the way of gameplay and provides value comparable to the price: a Fifteen minutes to get from ~zero to max doesn't change results of battles and encounters.
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New games need to get rid of auto health regeneration or at least make it a power up / upgrade that uses power.
I don't that deus ex 3 will have it deus ex 1 had a good system it was a upgrade that used up power. IF you don't want people to back track a lot add more med kits / have no limit on how many you can carry at one time.
Nonsense, auto-regen and more health kits are both desperate hacks to the real problem: Bullets need to stop hurting so much!
Honestly I'd like to see more games that, you know, actually make bullets lethal and humans much more human. I'd have fun with that.
Challenges are good. (Score:2)
I never get pissed at games, I just can't understand when anyone throws a fit over getting shot or something. I either step away and come back later or push until I succeed.
What's depressing about how I treat gaming, however, is that it's nothing like how I treat life.
Has the author even played Demon's Souls? (Score:2, Insightful)
Or did he just read some reviews about how difficult it was?
The game isn't difficult as so much as it is sadistic. No pausing at all, not even when checking inventory. On screen elements that totally block 80% of your screen during battle—effectively making you a sitting duck until it goes away. Remember, no pausing during all this. WTF?! No real story or purpose, so only the masochists will continue to play through if only to prove to themselves that they can beat it. The lack of plot elements mean y
And that's why God gave us difficulty settings (Score:2)
And yet even within a single difficulty setting some games can have inconsistent difficulty.
I recently finished JK2: Jedi Outcast for the first time - used Jedi Knight difficulty. The early levels were just frustrating, considering the weapons sucked for the most part. The one where you have to protect escaping prisoners was especially annoying, I lost count how many retries I needed there. Fun improved drastically once you got the lightsaber and some force powers (force speed especially), and much more
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Lol...if you like that one, take a look at Syobon Action. There's a hilarious youtube video: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aLrWwmnt2po [youtube.com]
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I got annoyed at the first boss because I didn't manage to get past the third part and every death meant I had to repeat the first and second parts which were pure puzzle parts that are trivial once you know how to beat them. Hard is fine, wasting my time with piss-easy stuff before the parts that actually challenge me is not.
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Or designers making the games to be a struggle in the misconceived idea that people will play it more because of all the retrying and struggle.
Sometimes they are dead right. Nethack, Dwarf Fortress, Mega Man, I Wanna be that Guy etc are all games of this type.
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These were just picked quickly of the top of my head, but I think you are being a bit arbitrary in your judgment of the games.
The only "simple niche" game in the list is IWBTG. Mega Man was defined by its difficulty, this isn't a criticism and does not mean it wasn't a mainstream success.
Nethack is brutally difficult, extremely deep, and with decades of development is at a level of polish commercial publishers can only dream of.
Dwarf Fortress fits because there is no way to beat it. You are supposed to los
Re:I too enjoy a challenge in a game. (Score:5, Funny)
It's a lot of fun though! Really!
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Personally I liked the Lost Levels a lot. But only in the setting of All Stars where you got a couple extra lives and could save. That made for a good challenge and balance. If I had the original 3 lives and start over version, it probably would have gotten smashed to bits.
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... like arcade Gravitar. Where you can get wiped out on the menu screen.