Sno

Difficulty and balance in Video games.

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This is a topic that i've seen pop up repeatedly in various places over the last few months, and i've been thinking about it a lot.

So, how do you guys feel about difficulty in games? (And to be clear, i'm talking primarily about action games, but i feel this is also very applicable to strategy and RPG games. Also, I'm probably not talking about games people play for story or atmosphere.)

Do you like to feel like you're being pushed, like you're struggling?

I think i might still be formulating my own feelings on this, so let me ramble on for just a little bit, but i think i have some coherent opinions about this.

I've been known to push people to play games on difficulty levels just a little bit higher than they're comfortable with, because i generally feel that you're missing out on a lot of a game's nuance if you're just coasting through a game at a comfortable level of difficulty.

Whenever i get into a conversation about difficulty in games, the example i always go back to is the difference between Halo on normal and heroic. It's not a series that really clicked with me early on, i still think Halo 2 is a really terrible game, but i eventually played through Halo 3 on its Legendary difficulty, and it was there that i kind of realized that the people who were way into that series were playing a completely different game. It's the difference between running around in the open with whatever weapon you feel like using and maybe bashing a dude in the face, to actually struggling and thinking tactically and having to come to grips with the systems in the game.

I mean, and that's what i feel constitutes a properly difficult game, the challenge is making you think in different and interesting ways about the game mechanics presented to you. I think it can be a pretty universal means by which a game can push a player to explore its systems. The kind of thing that is "If you want to win, you're going to have to come at this from a different way."

In Halo's heroic and legendary difficulties, you'll start using cover, you'll start thinking about weapon resistances and ideal ranges, how many rounds of ammo you have to eat through before a melee hit can effectively finish an opponent, and how to use grenades to flush enemies out of cover. You start being more careful about how you use the vehicles, you're trying to keep your distance from dangerous targets, driving with evasion in mind. You have smart, dynamic, dangerous enemies in large, open-ended combat spaces, and you will not make progress without a competent grasp of those games systems. You will take risks, you will experiment, you will die a lot, and you will come to grips with the game and hopefully feel awesome when that understanding is rewarded.

Compare to normal, you can kind of just run around recklessly spraying bullets, and maybe you still die once or twice. Maybe it's hard for you, maybe that's where you're at, but i don't think you would really be seeing the full extent of the game, and i don't know if that would be possible at a more casual level of play like that. (That's a really important question, i don't have an answer for that.)

On more and more games, i've started bumping the difficulty up, and have been having more interesting and more rewarding experiences. I've started feeling that easy modes might be bad for games. Dark Souls was a savagely difficult game that was well balanced and well designed, and while it wasn't something everybody got on board with, the people who took on the challenge and completed it generally love it. Now, If it had an easy mode, what would the experience have been for people who weren't coaxed out of their comfort zone?

The crux of my opinion, i think, is that games kind of need to push players a little past their limits, so that they start thinking about how to better utilize the tools the game has made available. If the game holds up there, at that level of play, i think then it's a properly interesting and balanced game.

I don't think it's always even fun, but for me, at least, it feels more rewarding. There's probably a conversation there about what emotions a game should be eliciting from a player. (Do games have to be fun to be worthwhile?)

I mean, but when it comes down to it, I just get bored when i'm coasting through a game that is showing me all these incredible systems and rules with no reason to ever use any of them. I feel that's the biggest failing for BioShock, and the reason i still love System Shock 2 so much more. (Though, admittedly, the all-mighty wrench was still in full effect there too.)

I saw a quote a few weeks ago, i can't immediately recall where it was, but it was something to the effect of "If you've created a cover-based shooter where nobody needs to use cover, you've made a bad game." I felt it encapsulated the argument for difficult games fairly succinctly.

And for the sake of clarity, i'm not making the argument that difficult games are better by default, that would be silly. It takes deft design and balance for it to work. Personally, I find the higher difficulties on the CoD games kind of intolerable, and while i can't quite pin down exactly why, i think it's maybe like i feel i'm having interesting choices stripped away from me, instead of seeing more choices open up as a result of those gameplay systems being stressed. Or something.

Anyways, somebody yell at me and tell me i'm wrong about all of this, i'd enjoy the conversation.

Edit: I also feel that games need to be better about tutorializing players so that that those higher levels of play are even accessible.

Nowhere in any corner of the Halo series did Bungie ever try to explain any of their complicated, nuanced systems. Things as simple and essential to that design as weapon resistances are never explicitly stated anywhere.

You know, but then you have a game like Dark Souls though, where people relish the inscrutable nature of the design.

I think the difference is that the former assumes for granted that the player will know what's going on, which i think can be self-destructive, while the latter is... I think the experience of coming to grips with that game is kind of the point of that game.

Now i'm totally just rambling, i don't even know what i'm talking about.

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On those rare occasions I actually manage to complete a difficult game, or section of a game, that I've struggled with, it's super-satisfying. However, over the years I've turned into this weak jelly of cowardice and lack of zest, and I quickly become angry and frustrated whenever I encounter so much as a bump in the difficulty curve. I think I've become accustomed to always getting very explicit, tangible rewards for every fucking little thing, and it has ruined me. If I spend twenty minutes fighting nazis or whatever, and suddenly a giant nazi jumps over the wall and kills me, I don't consider those twenty minutes worth anything. Even if I did become better at the game, and even if I would now be able to redo that last part with much greater ease – if I lost all the nazi points I acquired during those twenty minutes, I'll be all «fuck you, game!» and turn it off.

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It's a tricky balance. I can't disagree with anything you've written; the few experiences I've had where I took the harder path were always the more rewarding ones. Thing is, I've conditioned myself for all my life to err on the easy side. I do this because I am generally not as interested in the gameplay mechanics as I am in exploring a world. I used to feel higher difficulties as an impediment to exploring a game. Nowadays, I'm not so sure.

Case in point; Skyrim. I deliberately played that on the highest difficulty level because I wanted to emulate the great time I had in Morrowind just trying to survive the wilderness, in contrast to oblivion where you start out overpowered. My time in Skyrim was great because of that: for the longest time I had to make really careful decisions on which fights I could pick and was running away from a lot of fights. The immersion was so much higher than it would've been had I been able to whack every creature silly. So, a higher difficulty can also improve the exploratory aspect of a game, not just the mastery of systems.

In contrast, there have been a few times I was disappointed taking the easy difficulty, where hard might have been more appropriate. I should've gone with the hard mode in Catherine, and could never get into Shin Megami Tensei: Strange Journey 2 because I was breezing through it.

So I am choosing more and more to take the bigger challenge, because the past teaches me the rewarding experiences are there. My newfound interest in roguelikes are either a symptom or sign of this, or they have pushed the appreciation of brutal difficulty further than before.

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You have to consider the risk vs reward of playing higher difficulties. Sure, hard mode may be more rewarding, but if I hit some seemingly impossible wall, I'm pretty sure I'd personally just stop playing. Not even out of conscious decision to stop, but those walls just sap your enthusiasm.

I tend to play on normal the first time through to see all the content and get a feel for the mechanics, then tell myself that I can do hard on the second playthrough if I still want to.

I never want to.

I don't think I've ever had the impulse to play campaign-based games back-to-back. By the time I would come back to it, I'd probably need to do normal again because I'd forgotten all the mechanics.

I think that's why this recent wave of roguelikes is so great. I can run them on hard mode and get the benefit of tough gameplay and challenges without needing to sink hours and hours into a campaign mode that could turn around at any moment and kick me in the balls.

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[Playing on the hardest difficulty] My time in Skyrim was great because of that: for the longest time I had to make really careful decisions on which fights I could pick and was running away from a lot of fights. The immersion was so much higher

I concur @Rodi.

That analogy @Toblix of easy waves of nazis as supposed elevate the meaning of a big nazi boss in comparison is sadly a prominant stain of how great games become cheap when i'm playing them, extremely quick.

@Laxan, if you knew the campaign-based game you used in your analogy would iterate to unknown potentially exciting through a well-implemented use of dynamic systems would you replay it?

This could help stifle publishers not investing in singleplayer games for fear of the play and trade stigma. or cutting funds to an unimaginative multiplayer mode to appease investors, that will likely see not played after launch.

Dan Pinchbeck of The Chinese Room (Dear esther) was on the Unlimited Hyperbole Podcast explaining one of his greatest gaming memories was in S.T.A.L.K.E.R, he has no ammo and low health and was holding down CTRL and the arrow keys hugging the shadow until a monster that would definitely kill him would leave.

He waitied like 20 minutes if i remember.

You can really tell the tension and relief in his voice during the podcast; i can't imagine that story from a PR team pre-launch would do nothing but put the majority of potential players off.

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I'm quite unhappy with difficulty settings in games. I usually play games on normal. The main reason for this is that it's not always obvious you can change difficulty during the game. I don't want to get stuck in a game because I'm not good enough to pass a meat circus. Most games have a shitty difficulty curve were it is often a walk in the park, and then you hit a wall. After the wall, it's a walk in the park again. I'm really annoyed by that. Increasing the difficulty level only makes that wall higher. This problem is made worse by shitty retry mechanisms in games. Fail? then repeat a tedious part before you can give it a retry.

Also, often difficulty levels are like volume levels where instead of linear they are logarithmic. Considering the dumbness of most difficulty settings (i.e. larger waves of enemies, or enemies with more HP) they should offer a difficulty slider rather than distinctive options. For example:

|--1--|--2--|--3--|--4--|

1: easy (+health regeneration, etc.)

2: normal

3: difficult (+hunger, ...)

4: hardcore (+bleeding, ..)

So you have 4 segments with additional perks. But within each segments you n grades to make enemies tougher/weaker. So

|--1--|--2--|x-3--|--4--|

Would be the easiest "difficult" mode where enemies have equal HP and damage as in the toughest "normal" mode. Except that the perks are active.

@Rodi that never occurred to me :/ I should have done a similar thing. Eitherway, Skyrim was quite often challenging, so that was ok.

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I think that's why this recent wave of roguelikes is so great. I can run them on hard mode and get the benefit of tough gameplay and challenges without needing to sink hours and hours into a campaign mode that could turn around at any moment and kick me in the balls.

I agree with this. Since in a campaign-based game your main sense of achievement and enjoyment is through progression, something that blocks your progression blocks your enjoyment of the game. In a roguelike, progression is cool during the given run you're on but you go into any given run with the understanding that, one way or another, it will be one short section of your broader play of the game. FTL's out of campaign rewards such as new ships and ship layouts feed into this idea nicely; you sometimes gain something tangible even during a "failed" run. Also, since each run is so short, if you have it on a higher difficulty than you're comfortable with you can then turn it down on the next go if the game has that functionality.

This ties in with what Elmuerte mentioned about sticking to normal in case there's no possibility to tune the difficulty at a later stage. Since many games both do not allow you to change difficulty during a campaign and do not allow you to jump to a previously completed moment in a campaign during a new playthrough (with a new difficulty level), if you pick a hard difficulty and the game starts off easy enough to handle (as most do) and then later shows its true difficulty, one can become stuck too far in to want to restart but too far from the end to just want to slog it out.

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Edit: I also feel that games need to be better about tutorializing players so that that those higher levels of play are even accessible.

THIS!

Many games will tell you how to play them, but very few teach you to play them WELL!

I always thought that difficulty settings were obsolete, oddly enough, I recently wondered what would happen if you replaced them with "overpowered" and "underpowered" settings for you and the enemies? In most games, hard mode is having the enemies overpowered and you underpowered, which seems stupid, I always thought having everybody overpowered sounded more exciting.

And I'm glad to see I'm not the only one who thinks "hard" mode is dumb in many ocassions.

Frankly, when I want a challenge, I play a game without difficulty settings, they tend to feel more balanced and tense. I never have to think "This doesn't feel like easy/normal/hard mode" or if the game might be better if I made it harder or easier.

I don't know if this is derailing the thread, but am I the only one to notice the "hardcore retro goggles" effect? It's when people are convinced the games they played in the "good ol' days" were harder and make modern remakes, homages or sequels that tend to be much harder than the original, but everybody claims that it feels like the real deal? You know, like a NES game that has boss shoot a few bullets at you because it's all the NES can handle, but the people remember it as it were a bullet hell game on the hardest setting and remember it having millions of bullets on screen?

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I don't know if this is derailing the thread, but am I the only one to notice the "hardcore retro goggles" effect? It's when people are convinced the games they played in the "good ol' days" were harder and make modern remakes, homages or sequels that tend to be much harder than the original, but everybody claims that it feels like the real deal? You know, like a NES game that has boss shoot a few bullets at you because it's all the NES can handle, but the people remember it as it were a bullet hell game on the hardest setting and remember it having millions of bullets on screen?

I don't know that this is all false perception or whatever. A lot of those earlier games took their cues from their arcade roots where they made their money by killing you so you had to pump more quarters in.

Personally, I'm not really down with higher difficulties because I don't have as much time to game as I used to and I'm not as apt to hurl myself into the same brick wall 30+ times if that's what it takes for me to figure out a way past a particular obstacle. Close checkpointing/not having to replay a lot of stuff/quickly resetting from a death can mitigate that though.

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I think the S.T.A.L.K.E.R. example is interesting. That game is excellent at instilling a sense of tension and fear. The thing is, I never felt rewarded by getting through a tough section, just relieved. Which was an interesting way to experience a game, but quite different from the way difficulty is being discussed here where it's about perfecting player skill and feeling proud of overcoming a challenge. S.T.A.L.K.E.R. was about immersing yourself in an awesomely realized and simulated world. And I do very much enjoy games like that, because I prefer immersion and storytelling over gameplay most of the time. I couldn't finish Meat Boy or Dust Force because I didn't feel like playing just to beat-that-score.

Actually, Bastion is a great example of a game that could get very difficult but allowed you full control over the variables of difficulty and could also be played just for the atmosphere and narrative. In that way it's a game that lends itself not only to replayablity but to a wide player base and I hope other devs take its difficulty system into account. Essentially you could add totems to a shrine that would change particular aspects of the game like having enemies reflect damage or be invulnerable to certain attacks. The reward would be more xp and a more interesting gameplay experience, especially for subsequent playthroughs.

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Yeah, time is one reason I play on easy, since easy means the game is shorter by default since enemies die sooner.

Your last comment just reminded me on how relative difficultly can be. Two people can have the same skills and have the same experience with a game and have the opposite opinion on how difficult it is. One might say the game is damn hard because he died a thousand times, yet the other can say the game is easy because the game let you die a thousand times.

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I agree with elmuerte's post referring to difficulty spikes in games. It hasn't frustrated me to the degree that I've stopped playing games on hard, but it can be quite disappointing when a game feels great except for a few key parts. Dawn of War 2 comes to mind as a game where the basic combat felt awesome but the boss battles were quite annoying due to the buckets of health they had.

I do think there's something to be gained from playing a game on hard though. Starcraft 2 exemplifies this for me. On normal, that game was pretty much a cakewalk for me, but on hard, some missions required quite specific use of the new unit and later levels needed you to formulate good strategies. The achievement system took it one step further requiring you to play even better to achieve the specific goals. I felt like I was being asked to perform better in a very achievable way.

Starcraft also failed in the same way with it's hardest difficulty, Brutal. I didn't play much of it, but read about how it was balanced. First off, the AI plays better than on other difficulties, focusing down key units like medics and SCVs better than on hard and such. This seemed great! However, the game also put you up against units higher up on the tech tree than you'd normally encounter, and increased the HP of the AI's units even more than on hard. The very first mission forced you to deal with a siege tank when all you had were marines, which pretty much required you to mass units because tanks counter marines. It felt like the game might require inelegant solutions because your toolset was so tied to the progression of the game.

In general, simply adjusting the HP and damage of an enemy feels pretty weak especially in games like Starcraft where there are built in mechanics that you could adjust to create a lead. Give the AI more armor/damage upgrades, give them more bases or higher yield minerals or increase their starting units and production capabilites. The upgrade ones kind of sound equivalent to just adjusting hp, but they are different in that they could actually occur in a match of the balanced multiplayer.

On the other hand, adding more simulation stuff into your game seems like a good way to make it harder if possible. Sniper Elite V2 upped the level of the bullet simulation, but a less physics based shooter could increase recoil and make gun magazines perform appropriately.

Anyway, I generally like to play games on a harder difficulty, this usually means if given easy normal hard and expert i'll play on hard, if only given three i'll play on hard or normal, based on my gut.

Kind of an aside, but the weirdest difficulty/mode I've seen was in Winback 2 in which all the enemies are completely invisible, no model at all. I guess they expected you to memorize the placement of every single enemy?

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The easiest way to describe and attribute difficulty in video games is how much room for error you give the player. The more complex your game, the more systems you have to take into account on that rule. The simplest expression of difficulty in this way (room for error) is as follows:

Peggle ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Kaizo Super Mario Bros.

(In case people don't know it: Kaizo Mario is a super-strict, super-precise ROM hack of Super Mario World)

On one end of the spectrum you have as much room for "error" as you want (Peggle is probably a poor example, but screw it). On the other end, there is no room for any error whatsoever. In Kaizo, you have to move at precise momentum, precise jump heights, etc. etc. etc. and failing at any moment just means overall failure, rather than setback. As a more explicit example of this level of difficulty (no room for error) let me present to you some images from Mega Man 5, from the NES.

megabs1.jpg

Now if anyone remembers, vertical scrolling in Mega Man was broken up by hard screen transitions (game pauses, scrolls, then resumes). So here's my game for you guys: Pick the side Mega Man should fall from - left, or right. Got a side chosen? Okay, let's go to what the screen transition looks like.

megabs2.jpg

And as soon as the scroll is done and action kicks back in?

megabs3.jpg

Obviously if you chose the right side, you chose poorly.

The problem with no room for error at all is that it's incredibly frustrating. It can be balanced out with another aspect; foresight. Foresight can come within a second or minutes. But in the demonstration above, foresight is left out of the equation altogether. Such bullshit.

Foresight is a problem too, by the way. Games that are static suffer from a problem where playing on an easy difficulty will grant the player as much foresight as they can remember, even if its in generalities (okay, buncha dudes here) vs. specifics (two guys up top, one on the right behind a crate, etc.). Anyway, that's it for my own personal take on difficulty (and it going too far), lemme get to some things here more relevant to Sno's target point for the thread.

The concept of "pushing players past their limits" is a very sound one. Granted, it's what people have to be seeking. But it has an inherent flaw; person to person, limits in a video game range among a vast expanse and emerge in different ways. Using Halo as an example, one person might be the most pin-point, twitchy gunslinger. But that same person may suck ass at avoiding taking hits. Meanwhile, there's another person out there who is the opposite; very good with their foresight to avoid taking damage, but can't aim for squat. These players face different problems, and choosing between easy, medium, and hard isn't necessarily going to solve their problems without making their strength make the game too easy. The general idea behind ramping up difficulty in games is enhancing all characteristics of the enemies while detracting things that benefit the player as a whole. There's no individual difficulty sliders for ammo availability, enemy health or strength, etc. It's a lot of complexity and implementing such things may take a lot of time or result in very awkward game experiences that aren't necessarily rewarding.

The Halo example had some very good notes when it comes to shaping your playstyle and tactics as the difficulty goes up. A key factor to increasing tactical play is not just to make ammo more scarce, enemies hit harder and take more damage, etc. The player has to retain the emphasized benefits of the tools they're given to overcome things. When those emphasized points take as hard a hit as anything else when you scale the difficulty, it's suddenly not about being tactical at all - no matter what you bring to the table, you're weak. Even if the edge in a tool brought to a situation is small, it has to be retained. It gives the tool value. If you're limited in how many tools you can bring, now you're thinking about frequency of use, odds of replacing or changing tools out, etc.

I'll have more later, probably.

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Hence why I think Bastion's take on difficulty is so interesting. Allowing the player to pick and choose which areas in which he/she wants to be challenged allows the player to create a better catered experience. Now, if you can figure out a player's strength's and weakness via scripting and adjust as needed, that could be even cooler. I suppose L4D does this, having zombie swarm behavior ultimately be a reflection of player behavior.

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Case in point; Skyrim. I deliberately played that on the highest difficulty level because I wanted to emulate the great time I had in Morrowind just trying to survive the wilderness, in contrast to oblivion where you start out overpowered. My time in Skyrim was great because of that: for the longest time I had to make really careful decisions on which fights I could pick and was running away from a lot of fights. The immersion was so much higher than it would've been had I been able to whack every creature silly. So, a higher difficulty can also improve the exploratory aspect of a game, not just the mastery of systems.

I also played Skyrim with the difficulty ramped up a fair bit and had a really great experience with it. It turned out that i was finding combat to be a really thrilling thing, instead of a dull slog. What happened wasn't that the difficulty made the combat better, it's was still kind of shit. Instead, all of the things around the combat came out to the forefront of the game. The tools offered by all the peripheral systems became important and sort of filled in the gaps for the experience. Suddenly the potions and supplies i had been hoarding were starting to dry up after lengthy dungeons, i was even using poisons to get just that little extra edge against tougher enemies. I ended up playing it like the numbers rpg that TES games generally try very hard to pretend they are not. I felt like all the gathering of supplies and character building i had been doing was actually paying off in letting me tackle the significant difficulty i had imposed upon myself, and dungeons actually kind of ended up being some of my favorite experiences with Skyrim.

You have to consider the risk vs reward of playing higher difficulties. Sure, hard mode may be more rewarding, but if I hit some seemingly impossible wall, I'm pretty sure I'd personally just stop playing. Not even out of conscious decision to stop, but those walls just sap your enthusiasm.

I tend to play on normal the first time through to see all the content and get a feel for the mechanics, then tell myself that I can do hard on the second playthrough if I still want to.

I never want to.

I don't think I've ever had the impulse to play campaign-based games back-to-back. By the time I would come back to it, I'd probably need to do normal again because I'd forgotten all the mechanics.

I completely understand this mindset. There's the whole thing about not really knowing what you're getting into, you don't know what balance issues a game has or what level of challenge it was generally built around. Still, maybe you want that challenge, you're trying to understand the game and you're doing your best and you even looked up a strategy guide online, but you're still seven hours in and stopped absolutely dead.

That happens, it sucks.

So yeah, when it comes to a ten hour shooter or something, i am usually prepared to play through it twice if it's a game i enjoy. As such, i'll kind of scope it out on normal first, and then give a shot at the harder difficulties. However, if we're talking about a 70 hour RPG, it just isn't going to happen. I'm not going to play through it twice, and i'm not going to commit to the higher difficulty at the outset.

Being able to adjust the difficulty on the fly is probably a reasonably ideal way to handle things, and given that players are generally inclined to take the path of least resistance, having something in there to encourage them to push the limits a little might be one of the better ways to create a game that can be appropriately challenging for a broad range of players.

Bastion and Kid Icarus: Uprising come to mind as games with largely successfull takes on such mechanics.

Edit: I also feel that games need to be better about tutorializing players so that that those higher levels of play are even accessible.

THIS!

Many games will tell you how to play them, but very few teach you to play them WELL!

Right, hey? I feel if games were better at familiarizing players with their mechanics and tactics/strategies, they'd generally be able to take more risks with difficult, nuanced gameplay. The more i think about it, the more i feel like there should be greater responsibility placed on the developer for bringing a player up to speed on how to play the game at the level it wants to operate on.

Frankly, when I want a challenge, I play a game without difficulty settings, they tend to feel more balanced and tense. I never have to think "This doesn't feel like easy/normal/hard mode" or if the game might be better if I made it harder or easier.

I feel that a developer focusing all their attention around one set of balance rules can still go wrong. I mean, the Assassin's Creed games getting gradually easier with each game. I found Brotherhood to be a distressingly effortless ride.

I don't know if this is derailing the thread, but am I the only one to notice the "hardcore retro goggles" effect? It's when people are convinced the games they played in the "good ol' days" were harder and make modern remakes, homages or sequels that tend to be much harder than the original, but everybody claims that it feels like the real deal? You know, like a NES game that has boss shoot a few bullets at you because it's all the NES can handle, but the people remember it as it were a bullet hell game on the hardest setting and remember it having millions of bullets on screen?

Games were harder.

Arcade games were often explicitly designed to eat your coins, while shorter games on the consoles were made brutally difficult to encourage mastery and replay. (Ideally tricking people into thinking that they were getting more value for their money than they actually were.)

As a result of the mindset behind the difficulty in those games, and the relative immaturity of the medium, they were also much less balanced and refined. I don't think many of those old games hold up as satisfyingly challenging games. (Fuck Battletoads, guys. Seriously, fuck Battletoads.)

...Obviously if you chose the right side, you chose poorly.

The problem with no room for error at all is that it's incredibly frustrating. It can be balanced out with another aspect; foresight. Foresight can come within a second or minutes. But in the demonstration above, foresight is left out of the equation altogether. Such bullshit.

Foresight is a problem too, by the way. Games that are static suffer from a problem where playing on an easy difficulty will grant the player as much foresight as they can remember, even if its in generalities (okay, buncha dudes here) vs. specifics (two guys up top, one on the right behind a crate, etc.). Anyway, that's it for my own personal take on difficulty (and it going too far), lemme get to some things here more relevant to Sno's target point for the thread.

I agree with what you're saying, but i don't think it can apply to everything. There's a certain appeal in that kind of raw trial and error play, and i think it works best when the iterations can be fast, though even that isn't always the case.

The concept of "pushing players past their limits" is a very sound one. Granted, it's what people have to be seeking. But it has an inherent flaw; person to person, limits in a video game range among a vast expanse and emerge in different ways. Using Halo as an example, one person might be the most pin-point, twitchy gunslinger. But that same person may suck ass at avoiding taking hits. Meanwhile, there's another person out there who is the opposite; very good with their foresight to avoid taking damage, but can't aim for squat. These players face different problems, and choosing between easy, medium, and hard isn't necessarily going to solve their problems without making their strength make the game too easy. The general idea behind ramping up difficulty in games is enhancing all characteristics of the enemies while detracting things that benefit the player as a whole. There's no individual difficulty sliders for ammo availability, enemy health or strength, etc. It's a lot of complexity and implementing such things may take a lot of time or result in very awkward game experiences that aren't necessarily rewarding.

Well, Halo actually does let you tweak the difficulty in a dynamic way with "skulls". They generally add to the difficulty though, they're a lot like the adaptable difficulty system implemented in Bastion. I feel that's the key with a difficulty system like that, that the options are adding to the difficulty rather than subtracting from it, so that they don't ever just become a crutch. I thought Bastion was pretty brilliant about how it offered multiplicative rewards for toggling on more and more of the difficulty modifiers. (Technically, Skulls multiply your campaign score in Halo, but nobody gives a shit about score in those games.)

Edit: You know... Ultimately, i don't think i like having tons and tons of options in a difficulty select. There's something nice about a few sets of carefully curated difficulty levels. Putting aside that you could potentially create a sub-optimal play experience for yourself otherwise, being able to say "I beat nightmare difficulty!" also feels a hell of a lot better than having to preface a boast with all the conditions you had set down for yourself. Heh.

The Halo example had some very good notes when it comes to shaping your playstyle and tactics as the difficulty goes up. A key factor to increasing tactical play is not just to make ammo more scarce, enemies hit harder and take more damage, etc. The player has to retain the emphasized benefits of the tools they're given to overcome things. When those emphasized points take as hard a hit as anything else when you scale the difficulty, it's suddenly not about being tactical at all - no matter what you bring to the table, you're weak. Even if the edge in a tool brought to a situation is small, it has to be retained. It gives the tool value. If you're limited in how many tools you can bring, now you're thinking about frequency of use, odds of replacing or changing tools out, etc.

I'll have more later, probably.

I feel that in the absence of difficult challenges pushing back against the player, a player will settle into whatever is easiest or quickest. In a brawler they might just mash the attack button repeatedly instead of learning to time dodges and take advantage of better, more damaging combos. So yeah, as the difficulty increases, the advantages afforded to you by the available tools become more crucial. You start having to actually explore the systems. (At which point, it's up to those systems to be up to the task.)

To go back to the BioShock thing, i think that game is tragically too easy, even on its hardest difficulty. You can look at that game and be impressed by all the amazing things it's doing and all of the tools it provides to the player, but why would you ever using anything other than the wrench? (The answer is "because it's cool" and not because it's valuable in the context of the game balance.)

When every tool is equally applicable to every situation, it's my feeling that essentially no interesting choices are being made. Nothing you do matters, your choices have no impact or worth in the context of that game. (To be clear, i actually do really love BioShock, i just think it's a terribly balanced game.)

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Trial and error gameplay is fine, but the line to walk with it is very narrow. You can either make things way too difficult (wasting time, like losing a half hour to an hour (or more!) when you die) or make it way too easy (Knit Stories had a save point for like every screen that was more than scenery). It's a bit "eye of the beholder"ish.

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Compare to normal, you can kind of just run around recklessly spraying bullets, and maybe you still die once or twice. Maybe it's hard for you, maybe that's where you're at, but i don't think you would really be seeing the full extent of the game, and i don't know if that would be possible at a more casual level of play like that. (That's a really important question, i don't have an answer for that.)

On more and more games, i've started bumping the difficulty up, and have been having more interesting and more rewarding experiences. I've started feeling that easy modes might be bad for games. Dark Souls was a savagely difficult game that was well balanced and well designed, and while it wasn't something everybody got on board with, the people who took on the challenge and completed it generally love it. Now, If it had an easy mode, what would the experience have been for people who weren't coaxed out of their comfort zone?

I don't think that applies in Halo's case because the gulf between normal and heroic is so wide that it suggests that they're intended for 2 entirely different audiences with very little crossover between them. I doubt that the people who enjoy Halo on normal would ever even want to engage with a game on the level that heroic+ would require them to. That's totally OK though, because both audiences get what they want.

Nowhere in any corner of the Halo series did Bungie ever try to explain any of their complicated, nuanced systems. Things as simple and essential to that design as weapon resistances are never explicitly stated anywhere.

Again, different audiences and all that. None of that is required to play though normal, so tutorialising it would only serve to get in the way and maybe even confuse most players. Meanwhile if somebody chooses to play legendary, it's relatively safe to assume that they can figure out that kind of stuff on their own.

I feel that in the absence of difficult challenges pushing back against the player, a player will settle into whatever is easiest or quickest. In a brawler they might just mash the attack button repeatedly instead of learning to time dodges and take advantage of better, more damaging combos. So yeah, as the difficulty increases, the advantages afforded to you by the available tools become more crucial. You start having to actually explore the systems. (At which point, it's up to those systems to be up to the task.)

To go back to the BioShock thing, i think that game is tragically too easy, even on its hardest difficulty. You can look at that game and be impressed by all the amazing things it's doing and all of the tools it provides to the player, but why would you ever using anything other than the wrench? (The answer is "because it's cool" and not because it's valuable in the context of the game balance.)

When every tool is equally applicable to every situation, it's my feeling that essentially no interesting choices are being made. Nothing you do matters, your choices have no impact or worth in the context of that game. (To be clear, i actually do really love BioShock, i just think it's a terribly balanced game.)

Unfortunately it's not as simple as just turning up the difficulty. The reason Halo is so satisfying on higher difficulties is that the designers at Bungie went to great pains to make sure that the most effective tactics at any given time are the ones that make full use of all the game's systems, and encourage intelligent risk taking and other interesting, varied gameplay, while discouraging "safe/boring" tactics like standing in a doorway and sniping all the enemies. Turning up the difficulty then enforces the use of these tactics, and makes for a great time if you can handle it.

Bioshock on the other hand is not quite so carefully designed, and so the most effective tactics are obvious, repetitive, and do not make good use of the game's overlapping systems. If you were to increase the difficulty without seriously changing the rest of the gameplay, you would end up with the same situation, only worse. The most effective strategies are still the boring ones, so by increasing the pressure to use better strategies, it would only encourage you to fall back on the same old lazy ones even more, or worse, enforce them.

It's for this reason that I think very few games can pull off being difficult and fun, and don't usually choose hard mode in games unless I trust the developer to get it right. When they do though, it's like nothing else.

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I don't think that applies in Halo's case because the gulf between normal and heroic is so wide that it suggests that they're intended for 2 entirely different audiences with very little crossover between them. I doubt that the people who enjoy Halo on normal would ever even want to engage with a game on the level that heroic+ would require them to. That's totally OK though, because both audiences get what they want.

If someone has very explicitly chosen to just be there for the spectacle, i wouldn't begrudge them that. I think the tragedy is when a person who would enjoy the latter experience selects the former and ends up disappointed with the apparently inarticulate gameplay they are being shown. Admittedly, it's not a guarantee that Heroic would be a better experience though, for following reasons and ones touched on elsewhere in the thread.

Again, different audiences and all that. None of that is required to play though normal, so tutorialising it would only serve to get in the way and maybe even confuse most players. Meanwhile if somebody chooses to play legendary, it's relatively safe to assume that they can figure out that kind of stuff on their own.

I don't think it's that simple, i've seen a lot of people who have wanted and tried to play through a Halo game on heroic or above, but get caught up just trying to chew through an elite's shields with a battle rifle and end up just getting nowhere. They don't even realize that they're doing something wrong, it just seems unfairly difficult to them. I mean, and everything that is there is still a part of the game on normal, but it's tweaked to the point where you start feeling it, where it starts mattering. The rules are upended on them without any explanation, and even though they want that greater challenge, the game is being opaque about what it's doing.

My belief is that this happens pretty frequently, the training wheels come off and people simply don't know what to do. I mean, a lot of things that seem self-explanatory in hindsight are anything but. I'm not for lengthy tutorials being shoved down a person's throat, that would be awful, I just wish that information would be in there somewhere. It's always shocking to me how much of it isn't. I think it would be about making games more accessible to the people who want more out of their games. The vast majority of people are never going to be willing to spend hours experimenting with the mechanics on their own, or start scouring the internet and to search for explanations of the systems in the game. Instead, they'll beat their head against it and eventually give up.

Unfortunately it's not as simple as just turning up the difficulty.

I didn't mean to imply that they're just cranking up a knob, that would be silly.

Bioshock on the other hand is not quite so carefully designed, and so the most effective tactics are obvious, repetitive, and do not make good use of the game's overlapping systems. If you were to increase the difficulty without seriously changing the design, you would end up with the same situation, only worse. The most effective strategies are still the boring ones, so by increasing the pressure to use better strategies, it would only encourage you to fall back on the same old lazy ones even more, or worse, enforce them.

It's for this reason that I think very few games can pull off being difficult and fun, and don't usually choose hard mode in games unless I trust the developer to get it right. When they do though, it's like nothing else.

I have always felt that a lot of BioShock's issues could be at least helped by toning down the over-abundance of resources. Supplies are uncharacteristically plentiful for that style of game, you never really have to stop and consider what you have on hand.

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A game that neither fails nor quite succeeds in the regard of pushing players to use all the mechanics is Arkham City. On the one hand there is a set of 'tricks' that generally always work (hiding in certain places, using certain weapons or moves). But there are a few times the game upends the tea table and forces you to adjust your tactics. Also, since all the game's moves fall under the same control system, i.e. it's just as easy to use the freeze pellet as it is to drop a bomb, it's a simple matter to spice up your own life to make things interesting.

As for general difficulty level, the game did something really well: when things went my way Batman felt incredibly powerful, but making a few mistakes still meant going down. That's a balancing act Assassin's Creed never quite got right.

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Holy jesus christ! I clicked on this thread cos I was interested in the topic, but boy is this a lot o text!

I read the first post and yeah! I'm really thinking about the same kinda things you are right now. I just played Dark Souls, I ALWAYS go back to Gears of War Horde Mode, I love Devil May Cry and I realised recently that I guess I'm a person who likes hard games!

Your whole first post is more or less what I would say on this topic, harder games can really introduce a way more engaging STYLE OF PLAYING, and that's really fun and interesting. Obfuscating mechanics, like not explaining what X-Factor is in MvC 3 or not explaining how Focus Attacks or EX-moves work in Street Fighter 4 really pisses me off.

Here's something I can add though: I played through Bionic Commando ReArmed and really loved it. It's a really hard game. Once I finished, I started again the next day and checked out the Hard Mode. Ran forward, and the FIRST ENEMY OF LEVEL ONE SHOT DIAGONALLY AT ME AND I DIED.

I stopped dead for a sec and laughed, cos that's never happened before. They only usually shoot straight. That changes the design of every level and enemy, and totally changed how I think about difficulty levels as a designer. Oh and also it means a lot more work.

Similarly, in Devil May Cry 4, enemies have new behavoirs and fresh new attacks. I saw a particular enemy summon a bunch of knives and shoot em at me for the first time recently, and I've played like a hundred hours of that game. It's like there's a variable for how CAPABLE each enemy is that rises as you get further into this Survival Mode.

Anyway: That was cool. Some cool discussion in this thread, you guys are all smart.

I play everything on Normal, and then Hard if I really liked it. I never crank it all the way up to Insane.

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I don't know if this is derailing the thread, but am I the only one to notice the "hardcore retro goggles" effect? It's when people are convinced the games they played in the "good ol' days" were harder and make modern remakes, homages or sequels that tend to be much harder than the original, but everybody claims that it feels like the real deal? You know, like a NES game that has boss shoot a few bullets at you because it's all the NES can handle, but the people remember it as it were a bullet hell game on the hardest setting and remember it having millions of bullets on screen?

Play Shinobi, play Golden Axe, Contra, Streets of Rage, Metal Slug, Gunstar Heroes, Altered Beast, any game I remember liking from the Mega Drive: It's impossible.

I couldn't finish a game up until the PS1, and in most cases I still can't without cheating.

Old games are definately hard as hell, don't worry about that. Sometimes not in FUN WAYS, but they're definately all harder.

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Play Shinobi, play Golden Axe, Contra, Streets of Rage, Metal Slug, Gunstar Heroes, Altered Beast, any game I remember liking from the Mega Drive: It's impossible.

I couldn't finish a game up until the PS1, and in most cases I still can't without cheating.

Old games are definately hard as hell, don't worry about that. Sometimes not in FUN WAYS, but they're definately all harder.

I've beaten all of those games, most of them again recently, the only one that's "impossible" and I had to cheat on was Contra. The only old games that are hard in bad ways are the broken kind that are only good for AVGN (or similar) fodder.

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Alright well you're a crazy person, cos I can't fuckin get past Stage 3 without giving up in anything before 1999.

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, I don't consider those twenty minutes worth anything. Even if I did become better at the game, and even if I would now be able to redo that last part with much greater ease – if I lost all the nazi points I acquired during those twenty minutes, I'll be all «fuck you, game!» and turn it off.

This is generally how I see difficulty modes, time wasters more often than not. If a difficulty mode is not introducing anything new to the game or is just padding it out with frustration, I see no point. Unfortunately that's too often what happens. I often do exactly what Toblix is doing here and watch the clock to break down how much of my life I'm wasting every time I don't achieve something in the game. I have so many games to play and so little time and eagerness to play any games these days that I just get more upset when playing when I can't finish one game and get to the next.

But many times hard difficulty can be fulfilling, especially when it's apparent you are mastering the game along with the difficulty ramp up as opposed to grindy tasks like having to shoot a dude 10x what you did in normal. I always like the hard difficulty on MGS games (not extreme) because the game becomes more tense and every section you get past feels more rewarding because you did it right. When they spoke about this on the recent Idlethumbs podcast where Metal Gear games usually have players doing the same thing to get to the end, I feel like starting with MGS2 I gained more options and could do things more comfortable for me. Hard mode on MGS games encourages me to try out new techniques I probably wouldn't have otherwise. The crazy MGS2 VR Missions has really taken to the extreme of exhausting every way to play that type of stealth game to get to the end of each mission.

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Alright well you're a crazy person, cos I can't fuckin get past Stage 3 without giving up in anything before 1999.

Stage 3 on what? Every game?

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