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Video Games and Difficulty
Topic Started: Jan 14 2010, 05:05 AM (168 Views)
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There is a light that never goes out...

How exactly do you judge a Video Game, and its level of difficulty? Are there different kinds of "difficulty"? If so, is there any kind that are "better" than others?


I ask this, because I've gotten to the point in Video Games, where I judge a games difficulty based on how hard it is to play it, as in, the mechanics behind it. This is largely due to Starcraft, and just how mechanically talented you have to be to play the game at a decent level, where you have to have at least 100 actions per minute in a game to be able to compete at even the lowest levels. SSBM is another example of this.

With this mindset, I can go into other games, like for example, League of Legends, and say the game is incredibly easy. I can play LoL with one hand! To me, this makes the game a walk in the park. I don't have to "try" really hard, and get exausted after a game. The difficulty in LoL is not in mechanics, therefore, but in reaction and teamwork.

And then we might have something like Persona 3, where you have random jackass enemies that just happen to cast one of those Insta-death spells on the main character, and it just so happens to actually work, and that causes you to Game Over, and have to restart from your last save, erasing sometimes hours of gameplay. Is that really difficulty, though, or is that bullshit? I'm gonna have to say that is complete horseshit.
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-HJ-
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I've failed to come up with something witty, so I hope you will enjoy this filler text instead.

Instant-death traps and stuff like that sucks. A lot. But complicated mechanics sometimes just means gay, not difficult. Like, if a platform game had complicated mechanics just to jump and do a spin attack or something, that game could get lost. Some games need simple controls.

I think Demon's Souls has the perfect kind of difficulty, everyone should play it.
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Admin
There is a light that never goes out...

Well, the individual actions themselves don't have to be complex. Often times the difficulty comes from the speed required to perform those induvisual actions. Like, for Starcraft for example, the action of clicking on a building, and then hitting a key to build a unit isn't hard, by itself. Or giving a move order to a unit isn't hard, by itself. But when you are required to do virtually everything at the same time, that is when the difficulty via mechanics starts to come in.

I agree that if you make simple actions themselves complex, for the sake of being complex, that is gay.
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I've failed to come up with something witty, so I hope you will enjoy this filler text instead.

Oh, okay, that sounds fine then. Not really my kinda game, but it's not unfair or anything.

I just hate artificial difficulty in general, though. Like Prinny (for the PSP) and it's godforsaken jumping mechanics. Or RPGs where you have to grind so you can take on a boss, instead of the boss relying on a clever use of barrier magic and... well, all that shitty magic I never use because RPGs never demand anything from me other than being level +10 and knowing which command makes my dudes attack. :kermit:
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Kalamadorel
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Your friendly neighbourhood spiderman.

I generally see difficulty as how difficult it is to succeed at a certain game, you see a lot of different stuff used to provide difficulty. The first is the pure numbers method (WoW uses this as do a lot of other MMOs) all it is is a pure number scaling to prove more difficult the enemies will hit you harder and you will hit them for less, I don't agree with this very much as normally enemies do not actually get harder they just get more difficult to kill the game is just the same as it always was it would just take longer. Another type is actually changing the AI (This tends to be more prevalent in shooters, Halo uses this with the skull system), this will make the enemies more accurate, more tactical and use more teamwork etc. I'm fond of this type of difficulty as it tends to make the player need to think more to succeed. You're going to get punishment for failing (Demon's Souls) this means that whenever you fail you lose something extremely important this will then on act as a deterrent from dying. This also prevalent in games that feature a trial and error game-style e.g. IWBTG, Prinny. I don't believe in Artificial Difficulty because generally it will come down to either being a bad game-play mechanic or something that actually does make it more difficult.

Overall, I find difficulty very hard to define generally it's an objective thing but I just tried to lay out some of the more basic approaches to it. Keep posting in here though it would be interesting to see what you guys come up with.
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I've failed to come up with something witty, so I hope you will enjoy this filler text instead.

When I say artificial difficulty, I mean something that doesn't rely on skill at all, but more on memorization and countless trial and error, like IWBTG. Prinny isn't so much trial and error as it's horrible jumping mechanics that breaks the platforming aspect.

Demon's Souls does punish you for failing, but in that game's case, the reason you fail is actually because you aren't skilled enough, which makes it okay.
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Crysta
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wat

Anything that relies on pure luck to ascend isn't clever but lazy. But thankfully I can't name anything right off the bat that pisses me off that much.
~ Crysta, Zombie Queen
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GODonPCP
 
I always give frying pans to female survivors in Dead Rising. It's really the only thing I'm confident they know how to use.
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There is a light that never goes out...

Crysta
Jan 14 2010, 05:48 PM
Anything that relies on pure luck to ascend isn't clever but lazy. But thankfully I can't name anything right off the bat that pisses me off that much.
Minesweeper. The game isn't difficult on Expert. The game is bullshit on Expert.
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Crysta
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wat

Sentenal
Jan 14 2010, 06:25 PM
Crysta
Jan 14 2010, 05:48 PM
Anything that relies on pure luck to ascend isn't clever but lazy. But thankfully I can't name anything right off the bat that pisses me off that much.
Minesweeper. The game isn't difficult on Expert. The game is bullshit on Expert.
rofl oh yeah.

Still haven't beaten it, eh? :psypoke:
~ Crysta, Zombie Queen
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GODonPCP
 
I always give frying pans to female survivors in Dead Rising. It's really the only thing I'm confident they know how to use.
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Admin
There is a light that never goes out...

Crysta
Jan 14 2010, 06:27 PM
Sentenal
Jan 14 2010, 06:25 PM
Crysta
Jan 14 2010, 05:48 PM
Anything that relies on pure luck to ascend isn't clever but lazy. But thankfully I can't name anything right off the bat that pisses me off that much.
Minesweeper. The game isn't difficult on Expert. The game is bullshit on Expert.
rofl oh yeah.

Still haven't beaten it, eh? :psypoke:
I've beaten Expert twice in my life. But that doesn't make the game any less terrible.
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Light Yagami
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As dog as a Fetch

Hmm...it's a good question, really, and I don't really know how to give a straight forward answer to it.

Like, if I'm playing a game like Dragon Age where certain enemies have the ability to knock you down, and then knock you down again right when you get the fuck back up, then I'd call bullshit on that. The game has hard parts but I don't think that would make me say it's a "Hard" game.
I usually set "Normal" as my standard because to me, of course "Hard" would be hard...but if a game is on "normal" and I have a hard time rationing ammo, getting past m obs of enemies, or even get past a number of chapters on one try, then yeah I'd call it "Hard" since I can assume that on "Hard mode" it'd be a lot harder, or even impossible without some sort of help.

Some games, to me, can BECOME hard when you play online just because sometimes your team mates do not heave headsets and you can hardly ever predict what they are going to do or use what on who or do what when or where. Left 4 Dead and L4D2 are a cake walk doing solo, even on Advanced. Expert is...well hard since it's fucking "Expert" mode", but when you play Advanced or Expert online then yeah it can be hard because if you and a teammate have a pipe bomb and you both used it at the same time then you both lost a pipe bomb. Now if you walk like 100 more steps and a tank comes out of nowhere but for some fucking reason a horde just happens to be like"hey sounds like a party, lets go see what's goin' on" and join in the fuckfest then yeah, that makes the situation difficult. I'd call that run through "hard" if someone were to ask me. (On normal I usually end up carrying the team to the finale anyway)

I think games can become hard, yeah. I don't think it's really fair to set "hard mode" as the standard for one to judge a games difficulty because it should be hard to the average player, as the game mode name implies. When we say "HHM isn't that hard" I think it's because most of us have played through it at least a dozen times and know who comes out where and we have experience and a good number of resources telling us which units would make getting "S rank" that much easier. So yeah, I would say it depends on the player or certain online scenarios. I'm sure a game that is hard to me is a cake walk to someone else so it's hard for me to give a solid opinion on game difficulty as a whole. :-/
Edited by Light Yagami, Jan 15 2010, 04:52 AM.
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