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Classic gaming, classic game difficulty, and elitism
Fairly connected to my P4G rant, but I thought I'd cover classic gaming and its Fan Dumb too.
I abhor the idea that “real gamers” have to be able to conquer all the table-flippingly hard classics of the 80’s and early 90’s. Fuck this “back in my day” garbage. Just because somebody can’t, say, beat Contra on NES without the Konami code doesn’t mean they’re a sorry excuse for a gamer. Games are for everyone to enjoy, not just for some sort of super secret elite club.
Not everyone plays games to challenge themselves. I mean don’t get me wrong, I like challenge in video games, but I understand that some people just want to play games recreationally and not the same way I do. As we grow up, it becomes harder to have time to practice games, due to work, studies, and for some, getting married and starting a family. Or maybe people have all the time in the world, but only want to play video games as a story they can interact with or to go pew pew on things as stress relief.
If you don’t like easy games, don’t play them. If you don’t like easy modes, DON'T PICK THEM. There will always be hard games to play, whether they came out over 20 years ago (R-Type) or less than 2 years ago (Catherine), and there will always be hard modes for challenging yourself (Very Hard / Maniac in Persona 3 Portable and P4G, Extra Stage songs in DDR, Ultra/God in Mushihime-sama).
Live and let live, everyone. Or should I say, play and let play.
Comments
I think difficulty is generally a good thing, although it depends on how it's handled. A lot of casual games in particular are actually very challenging, much moreso than most AAA titles; it's just that those games are short and don't heavily punish failure. In any game, I feel that agency is reinforced by the prospect of failure, ensuring that overcoming a challenge holds some degree of meaning. If you've ever been playing a AAA game and beat a difficult section only to still feel resentment at the fact that said section was in the game to begin with, I think you know what I'm talking about -- since the emphasis is on accessing more content rather than the general gameplay experience, the punishment for failure is actually locking away a part of the game rather than a setback that provides more opportunity to play.
To me, difficulty isn't about casual or hardcore gaming (and, as mentioned, casual games tend to be more difficult anyway), but about providing a strong risk/reward relationship and deep gameplay. And simple games can certainly be very deep as long as their mechanics are versatile.
For the better part of the last decade, I guess AAA games have been in a strange position where they threw emphasis on progression through a storyline without usually having good storylines to begin with, which has in turn influenced the current generation of challengeless, content-focused games where failure is very deeply punished because it prevents access to said content long past the time a particular section has ceased to be fun. But a "game game" is largely about manipulating the mechanics in the most efficient way possible, meaning that even retreading old ground is an engaging experience.
Welll said, Ray.
^^On the flipside of that, games where the only motivation is a high score à la Tetris are not everyone's cup of tea.
Certainly not, but the massive casual playerbase right now doesn't care about a game story -- they want a simple, fun experience. Game stories appeal largely to "hardcore" gamers, whereas casuals just want to play something with fifteen minutes of spare time. And a spare time game isn't heavily punishing when it comes to failure, so they can be challenging in order to ramp up mechanical engagement at no real cost.
IMO, what games need is accessibility. People can cope with difficulty; otherwise early games would have all failed because difficulty was the only way of creating length. So what drives people away from, say, Dark Souls isn't that it's a difficult game, but that the game just doesn't tell you how to play it.
On the flipside of that, forced tutorials and the like.
I don't think forced tutorials are bad. The problem comes from the fact that most developers don't seem to know how to make tutorials that don't suck.
Forced tutorials aren't so bad if they're cleverly hidden. Think of Pac-man, which shows you everything you need to know as soon as you start it up. I think the best way to do this is just to teach the player the basic controls and then to introduce each major factor of the game in a way that's mutually exclusive from others; one example might be that the first item you find is automatically bound to the "use item" key, like a lantern, and the immediate area afterwards is dark.
Basically, it's the art of both hiding and idiot-proofing a tutorial. A lot of the better games out there do really well at this, although some good games have awful tutorials (lol Witcher lol Dark Souls).
Witcher isn't as bad, since a lot of the stuff it doesn't teach you is easy to figure out. With Dark Souls, meanwhile, I didn't figure out what poise was until well after Anor Londo.
Heaps of games do this. A good example is Legend of Zelda games, which will often give you an item as a reward for defeating a miniboss, then ensure that said item is the key to getting out of the room. Then they'll reinforce it later by making the item the true boss' weakness.
The initial issue is explaining how to use the core mechanics of the game, though, which I suppose contributes to the amount of games that use the same control schemes by genre.
At first I thought this in response to my comment about King's Quest in the vidya thread.
In any case, I think if a game is too easy it's dull, but too much difficulty makes a game impassable.
I just appreciate when developers make difficulty levels that actually mean something. Really, I don't mind it when people make Easy a Splash Mountain style tour through a fun game with a good story and aesthetics that you can get through by mashing buttons. I'd just rather their idea of challenging you with the higher ones was to add more variety and unexpected curveballs instead of just blindly cranking up stats into a tediously long HP grind that one-hit-kills you when you fail to dodge the same attacks that are still easy to dodge.
This kind of thing is why I appreciate emergent difficulty in games that have it, which is essentially a natural way of selecting difficulty throughout the entire game. An example might be to choose the difficulty of a particular task, with one option providing less reward for less risk and the other providing the reverse. This kind of approach allows developers to soften the difficulty of a game without having to balance it two or three times over, thereby saving development time for content and polish.
We're currently in an era of highly social gaming, so I think there's a lot to be said of everyone having the same essential experience with a game. Emergent difficulty can allow for natural, subconscious difficulty selection without the possible divergence in collective experience that comes from difficulty levels. Consider Skyrim, which I consider to be a hugely social game. It doesn't even contain any kind of multiplayer, but sharing those experiences verbally with friends is a huge benefit, and although it works on that level even with difficulty settings, I consider it the exception. Most games are much more limited in content and exploration, so they need more synchronicity to achieve that kind of multiplayer-free social success.
I suppose the simplest solution is to create a challenging game with lots of "outs" -- options that can be taken in order to soften the difficulty, like a sidequest that disables a particularly nasty boss attack or a reward that provides more room for error. Things that, while making the game more appealing and fun to less accomplished or invested players, don't diminish the actual tension of the challenges provided.
What I'm saying here is that Dark Souls should have given you a way to get rid of the Capra Demon's goddamned mutts before you entered the boss arena.
The problem with "outs" is that they'll either be taken anyway by people looking for full completion (maybe they want to do the sidequest just because it's there instead of making the game easier), or they'll still cheapen a fight just by being there.
Like, take Twilight Princess Ganondorf. The sword-bind where you overpower him turns the entire fight into a goddamn joke. The fight is actually pretty fun if you don't use it, but it'll happen unintentionally anyway.
I'd like to see more things like what Baldur's Gate did, where the last boss actually gets harder if you did more expansion side stuff. Like, on Hard mode maybe taking the sidequests causes some of the late bosses to scale harder or get more attack patterns, and doing all of them adds one last phase to the fight.
Badly implemented things are bad.
Punishing the player for playing the game is pretty much bad design 101.
Not always; some designs--such as pretty much any resource management sim--rely on that as part of their premise.
Okay, fair enough.
But Baldur's Gate is not a resource management sim, last I checked.
I did specify on Hard mode. If you set that in the options screen you're pretty much putting on the gimp mask already. Just give fair warning -- a lot of people like having something relevant to use their shiny new doom sword from the bonus boss.
And IIRC Baldur's gate did warn you like 3-4 times between the back of the Sword Coast box, the install screen, the readme, and one other place ingame that doing expansion content would make Sarevok harder. If you were of a mindset to miss all of those, you were probably stuck in the Nashkel mines anyway.
Plus, Vancian Magic systems are totally resource management :P
Oh, okay, missed that. Fair enough then.
Also fair enough.
the stairs are there in the boss room for a reason.
To have a "hard mode" on a boss, I'd rather see rewards provided for a specific kind of victory as incentive. This could be as simple as an experience or currency bonus for defeating the boss with good performance, but I'd rather see more specific, narratively-inspired things. Perhaps a boss drops a particular item if you avoid attacking its most obvious weak point and instead go for a less intuitively accessed one. Not sure, because it would have to be very specific. Either way, I think it's good to both incentivise stronger play and provide an out. Dark Souls provides a good example:
Half way through the game, there's a particularly notorious fight where you have to defeat two opponents at once. Alone, either one would be a moderately challenging mini-boss, but together, they can be exceedingly challenging. Furthermore, the first one to be defeated is absorbed by the second, who becomes more powerful and has their HP reset to its maximum value. So there's two ways to go about it and two different fights, depending on which one you defeat first. The more difficult way of doing it has better rewards, since you get a special ring and a resource that allows you to construct one of the best weapons in the game, but you can also summon an NPC ally or other players to help you.
So we have multiple stages of difficulty here, depending on whether or not you have assistance and which of the two bosses you decide to defeat first. The more difficult choice in terms of the latter consideration is more heavily rewarded, while the choice between having allies or not makes no reward difference. That means there's both an "out" to the boss fight in general, but also an "out" in terms of achieving the advanced rewards. It's a boss battle with two different kinds of emergent difficulty, which is appropriate as it's considered one of the toughest engagements in the game.
On a tangentially related note, it's neat how Dark Souls trains you for battles in which you're outnumbered, beginning with the Gargoyles and then the Capra Demon.
> using the stairs rather than a resin on a thrusting weapon to attack the dogs from behind a shield when they leap at you
> you don't even have to upgrade the weapon, the resin does everything
> fire resin is only 500 goddamn souls, there's no excuse
> and then the capra demon's small time without his mutts
That's not even strategy. Using the stairs to gain ground on the capra demon while you deal with the hounds is tactics.
I find that approach to be unreliable, since the dogs might not follow you predictably or they might stagger their individual attacks and break your poise at the worst moment. Then the Capra Demon can jump attack you up the stairs. So while using the stairs is a decent way of doing it, the unpredictability of the dogs when going up or down vertically makes it pretty dicey. On a plat surface, however, you can always count on the dogs to make predictable assaults.
It's not exactly a geographical or technique-oriented strategy, but using the resin on a thrusting weapon might count as a logistical strategy; it's the application of limited resources while hedging your bets on the most likely enemy behaviour. The resins last just long enough to take out the dogs and perhaps get some hits on the Capra Demon, in which case you reduce the battle to a standard one-on-one against a predictable enemy with a standard set of abilities.
If you go up the stairs and stand on the archway, the dogs can get to you but the Capra Demon almost always falls before reaching you.
And then you can do a plunging attack.
All I know is that the stairway method hasn't worked efficiently or reliably for me in a long time. So I just use resin and get it over with quickly.
Personally I'd rather see the "do things the hard way" be more of a meta achievement or challenge mode match than cooked into the game. The two-boss thing is something that can be justified as having different rewards since you're doing a completely different fight depending on which one you pick (another example would be Yuki and Mai from Touhou, or the Green Room in Dynamite Headdy), but something like killing a boss while ignoring the weak point or something is more along the lines of showoff material.
The whole point of emergent difficulty is to meld things naturally into the game, though, and I kind of dislike achievements, trophies and that kind of thing for that reason. Providing advanced rewards for a more difficult way of accomplishing a task strikes me as both a reasonable form of balance and perhaps an excellent way of reinforcing some parts of a game's narrative. Perhaps a boss is weak to magic, and will disintegrate if a certain amount of magic damage is dealt in comparison to its maximum HP, but if you deal that same damage via mundane means, you can pick up that boss' equipment or some material for game economy advantage.
Of course I prefer when the showoff achievements are folded into the game too. Like Naughty Dog and Insomniac using them to unlock bonus features, thereby rewarding screwing around with more stuff to screw around with. Or optional "exhibition match" style things, like Melee/Brawl event matches, or Solomon and Lovecraft in Shadow Hearts, that throw you into weird mechanics for some kind of side reward.
The problem with making it a part of the main gameplay is that there's usually no nice way to signal to a player who isn't compulsively poking through Gamefaqs that it's even a thing. It's not a huge deal for something like an arcade shmup that gets played repeatedly in its entirety as a short performance run and gives you a shitload of points for doing something awesome, but working the same kind of thing into a sprawling 40+ hour adventure where you only fight the boss once is a whole other can of worms.
I don't consider this a problem, because I think secret content adds quite a bit to a game. Remember, this isn't necessary to complete the game, or even to complete it without facing great difficulty; it's a way to reward particularly observant or thoughtful players. Or guidehounds.