[I had no idea that a Cblog on the subject of difficulty was written, or that it would get promoted. Now you get to read two articles on the same subject.]
Difficulty in videogames is a subject that crops up often. Retro fans lament how games are getting easier and easier. Reviewers are often called out for "sucking" at a game if they mention any unforgiving elements or perceive an unfair challenge. It's difficult to tell where skill level ends and the game "being cheap" begins. Difficulty is, in and of itself, a difficult subject to tackle. It's also been weighing on my mind for a while.
There are difficult games that I enjoy playing, and difficult games that I do not enjoy playing. Sometimes it is because of the difficulty itself, or sometimes it's in spite of it. As I look back on the various games I've played and how their challenge levels enter into the enjoyment, I've been able to collect examples of what I call "good" difficulty and "bad" difficulty, and I've also been able to consider what it is about certain hard games that are so unappealing to me.
Read on as we examine what a game needs to do in order to adhere to the tradition of good difficulty, and how bad difficulty can ruin the experience.
One of my favorite games of all time is Metal Arms: Glitch in the System. The obscure third-person shooter stars a little yellow droid named Glitch who must save his enslaved friends from the evil Milbots. It was incredibly fun, but it one of the most challenging games of the last generation. The thing was seriously tough, with near-invincible enemies being thrown at you regularly, punishing boss battles and relentless robot-on-robot violence. It was a very hard game, yet I loved it.
Another taxing game of the last generation was Dragon Quest VIII: Journey of the Cursed King. This was an old-school RPG through and through. You know you're dealing with a hardcore roleplayer when you're on the last boss and your character's HP isn't even out of double digits yet. DQ VIII was tough because it constantly limited you. Experience was handed out in small doses, and benefits for leveling were not astronomical. Still, I loved the almighty bloody Hell out of that game.
WWII stealth game Velvet Assassin was, by all accounts, a bloody awful game. One of the big problems I had with it was that it was quite difficult, due to the weakness of main character Violet and the extreme limitation imposed on her ability to sneak around. I was turned off by the difficulty for sure, yet it was not more challenging than Metal Arms. Not by a long shot. So, why was the difficulty a problem in Velvet Assassin, and not in Metal Arms?
I am also currently playing Black Sigil: Blade of the Exiled on DS for review. This is another game with a challenge level that I absolutely cannot stand. The encounter rate for random battles is horrendous, with fights occurring literally every two seconds in some areas. The game also has considerably incremental stat boosting with each level, and limits characters in very much the same was as Dragon Quest VIII did. However, it is not as challenging as DQ VIII, yet I am consistently turned off by how hard the game attempts to be.
With these examples, the simple fact is that a difficult game needs to be able to justify its existence by being excellent. If you're going to do a hard game, you need to be able to validate it, as far as I'm concerned. I sometimes feel that developers think it's "enough" just to make a game hard and people will flock to it with their arms wide open. In some cases this is true. However, if your game is mediocre to start with and you've ramped the difficulty up, I can only use one word to describe that title:
Arrogant.
It takes a degree of pure arrogance, I feel, for a game to make you work hard for something that is not worth it. This is the problem with both Velvet Assassin and Black Sigil -- they have nothing worth fighting for. Velvet Assassin's story is barely there, and when it is there, the poorly acted scenes where nothing at all really happens serve only as a slap in the face to whatever poor gamer worked so hard to get there. These games forget the idea of "risk and reward," where what you invest into a game should be reaped back.
Comparing Velvet Assassin to Metal Arms, it's easy to see why difficulty was only a problem in the former. The bland and boring story of Velvet Assassin is put to shame by the constantly humorous, tongue-in-cheek and sometimes subversive humor of Metal Arms. Despite being balls-hard and often frustrating, the humiliation and pain was always worth it, because the game delivered not only amazingly violent gameplay, but a story and dialog that was truly worth the effort to reach. Why the Hell should anyone put themselves through Velvet Assassin's challenge? What were they getting out of it? Nothing. Absolutely nothing.
Black Sigil wants so much to be Chrono Trigger (an insult in itself) but it could not hope to be such a fine RPG. Its story is not as interesting, and the gameplay is pointless and convoluted, trying to take Chrono Trigger's battle system and adding needless movement commands. The game demands so much, yet gives nothing to the player in return. Once again, you contrast this with DQ VIII, and you can see why I don't mind the difficulty of one game but can't stand it in the other. DQ VIII's attempts at humor, unlike Black Sigil's, do not fall flat on their face. The story is presented with charm, the characters are genuinely likable and the player feels like they are constantly getting something for all their hard work.
The lesson here is that if you're making a hard game, you better make it good or you're just slapping people in the fact. A bad game is bad, but a bad game that is a bitch to play through is ten times worse. This is why reviews will bitch about the difficulty in one game and yet praise a title that's much tougher. It's all about how you do it, and some games do it badly.
There is one form of difficulty that kind of disgusts me, and I call it "hard for the sake of hard." This is often found in Japanese action games. The genre is a particular favorite of mine, but the way in which some Japanese developers try and force difficulty down your throat, seemingly just to inflate the metaphorical penis of the person who designed it, is rather obnoxious, and sometimes really turns me off. These games exemplify the issue of a developer thinking that all he needs to do is throw a fuck-ton if enemies at you, beef up their attributes, and he has a Triple-A videogame on his hands.
However, playing the Devil May Cry and Ninja Gaiden games, I sometimes see what I perceive to be a hint of desperation there. A developer drowning the player in "challenge" as if to try and prove something to himself and the hardcore gamer. A game marketed on how hard it is has no appeal to me, because I know the developer has simply ramped up the difficulty by making it cheap -- merely surrounding the player in opponents and saying "deal with it." It's a style of development that has been popular since the days of the NES, when games like Battle Toads did nothing but force extreme trial-and-error and armies of difficult opponents into the game with no thought towards balance and fairness. At least back then, there wasn't much else to do to make a hard game, but it's odd that some developers still think like it was twenty years ago.
The main point here is that I don't even consider games like this a challenge, because that affords too much dignity to what was actually done. It's not a "challenge" to stack the odds against the player and make them attack enemies mindlessly until everything is dead. Any developer can do that, and ones that show off how "hard" their game is with crowds of enemies that take cheap potshots at the player really have nothing to boast about. Yeah, sure, Ninja Gaiden is "hard," but it doesn't take a genius to work out that if you beef up a load of ninjas and make them gang up on another ninja, the solo guy will probably get raped. There is no style, no finesse and no class to the difficulty of a game like this. They may be very good games (as I said, I like Japanese action games) but a game desperately trying to be hard for the sake of hard.
It reminds me of how Mirror's Edge expected critical praise and accolades simply for being different. Some games seem to be made just to be "hard," with little regard to any clever level or enemy design, and they garner praise from a jaded public who are sick of games that are too easy in the same way "innovative" games garner praise from those bored of the same old shooters. People who are sick to death of one thing will easily accept the other, just because it's different, and I think that's the mentality that a lot of so-called "challenging" games are made with.
There's nothing wrong with difficulty in games, obviously. It's true that way too many games are being dumbed down and over-simplified. There are many games out there, far too easy to be considered interesting. However, it goes both ways, I feel. Once a game crosses a certain challenge threshold, it too becomes as boring as an easy game. This is why I'm rarely a fan of Atlus titles. It's true that some of those games are pretty well crafted, but when you get that hardcore and impregnable, it's as boring as Prince of Persia's "press A to do everything" gameplay. At least to me, personally.
A hard game cannot just be hard to make me care. I am more than happy to play a ridiculously difficult game, if and only if, it's also well designed and with a story or something rewarding enough to make me feel like I'm not wasting my time. Too many games that try to be difficult these days forget that, and I don't have enough time in my day to be frustrated by something that is going to demand so much and offer nothing of value in return. Basically, a game that wants to be hard should deserve to be hard.
Sadly, I think the last games I played that truly deserved to be as hard as they were actually might have been Metal Arms and DQ VIII.
[Further reading: Check out Colette Bennett's Difficulty Arc: How frustration ruins the gameplay experience]
Contest:
3:00 PM on 06.20.2009
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I have never been a fan of games that are hard just to be hard if that makes any sense. I don't mean I don't like a challenge, to me Ninja Gaiden isn't really that hard but what you said probably best sums it up
"Once a game crosses a certain challenge threshold, it too becomes as boring as an easy game"
I don't want to be doing the same bit a hundred times over just because the game is cheap, to me there is no enjoyment from it. No doubt you will get some people saying that you get a sense of achievement from it but I don't and I'm sure we will hear people saying that it's not cheap your just shit but whatever. I would rather just drop it and play something enjoyable + challenging rather than cheap. Just because a game is hard doesn't mean it's good or enjoyable but you will always have people who like games in that mould because it gives them something to crow about.
To a large extent I agree with you on this - as a personal example, Henry Hatsworth could be pretty darn hard at times, but it was so well-tweaked and charming that I saw it through to the end (though I have yet to tackle Gentleman Mode). On the other hand, there was Prinny, where I felt that most of the game's challenge was based on a player's ability to mash buttons quickly, memorize patterns, and put up with wonky jumping controls - and if you read my blog you already know my thoughts on that. Of course, I certainly hope that less challenging titles make it their mission to be high-quality all around as well, but as you say, if I'm going to be challenged I'd like it to be the type of challenge I can enjoy tackling and feel I've got a fair shot at conquering eventually, as opposed to something openly and blindly sadistic.
That said, though, for whatever it's worth I couldn't take the "grinding for grinding's sake" in DQVIII (or any DQ, really) myself, but to each his own, heh heh.
Ninja Gaiden on the other hand is one of those games that's hard for the sake of being hard. They throw tons of enemies at you, and in some cases have rooms were enemies will spawn infinitely until you advance to the next area, something that can humble even the most expert of players. When you crank up the difficulty the games become noticeably cheaper, substituting enemies for higher difficulty enemies in early points of the game that some times make no sense and again throw them at you near infinitely.
The best way I look to describe the difference between a cheaply hard game and a challengingly hard game is this; when a game constantly tests your skill and precision in a game then that is a challenge, but if a game more or less is simply testing your endurance seeing how long you go before you inevitably fuck up (aka, the game turning things into a war of attrition) then its cheap. Another good comparison of challenging versus cheap would be comparing Halo's Legendary difficulty versus COD:W@W's Veteran difficulty.
But there are also rare cases where people simply aren't playing the game right, and are interpreting it as a cheap game (ie: Sterling and inFAMOUS)
both ninja gaiden and devil may cry don't strike me as too difficult, they just have cameras that are difficult to work with , and I often get caught by an a attack I just couldn't see coming
however I prefer that to a game where your invincible or where death carries little penalty. In the older games gamers used to FEAR death because it was just that, DEATH , the end , your kaput and back to level 1 with your ass, now death means you get pushed back 5 feet to try again, and regenerating health doesn't help ( I loved resistance 1 heath and weapons system did they have to haloize it). but I do get where your coming from difficulty for no good reason is just as annoying as a game thats too easy, some kind of balance has to exist .
that being said however I get the feeling devs would rather play it safe than risk alienating the bitch crowd as the bitch crowd would rather return a game to gamestop and find some game were they can feel badass because the enemy can't chuck anything larger than a scone at them and their armed with all the weapons under the sun than actually challenge themselves and develop better skills in the process.
SephirothX: I love DMC games, but I felt that DMC3 in particular was just trying too hard to be hard. I played the game to the end, it's not about me being frustrated, it's about how the game was made. In my opinion, the way they chose to present difficulty (gracelessly throw enemies at you that come in from all directions, not helped by your aforementioned camera) was a bad way of making a game hard.
DMC is probably my favorite Capcom series btw, so don't think I believe the games suck or anything. Just saying that sometimes its idea of difficulty is obnoxious.
I downloaded Mega Man 9 the day it came out, and since then I still have never finished one stage, and trust me I have tried many times also. I just don't have the skills I used to cause now of days BIG games give you some many options and ways to fight or shoot your way out of a issue it's dumb us down. I have downloaded 36 arcade games on my 360 and all of the but one (REz cause I love that game so fucken so much) have never beat. But that's just my side of it.
In regards to DMC3, did you play the original, or Special Edition? The real version had it's "standard medium" as "hard", so it was a tad more challenging than it "should" have been, so I can see where a lot of people wrote that game off. However, I don't think it threw that many enemies at you, or at least as much as Ninja Gaiden did. If you want to talk about 5 metric shit-tons of enemies too many: Prototype is probably the guiltiest game I've ever seen, haha. I remember reading a few reviews and writing off the "it gets too hectic" claims, but now I see exactly what they mean.
As for the topic, I've written a few articles on this myself, because I think it's a really important issue nowadays with the gigantic schism between "casual" and "hardcore" gamers. I'm damn glad that Bayonetta will be shipping with an "Easy Automatic" setting, so a lot of people who suck at games will find some merit in the title, rather than writing it off as "too hard so it sucks". In my opinion, this is the missing link between casuals and hardcores: simply make the game very challenging, and include a super-duper dumbed down version of the game, so the casual player can eventually learn the necessary tricks of the trade to scale up to the hardcore level, if that is desired.
In terms of real difficulty vs. "fake" difficulty, this is an excellent resource that explains it for people who are interested.
Also, "The Computer is a Cheating Bastard" is a pretty funny read.
Speaking of which, I recently wrote an c-blog about the "easy" difficulty.
Also, I don't have a ps3 so I can't compare this to Valkyria Chronicles. This game might be a piece of crap compared to that.
It seems like the better way to phase this dilemma might be might be, "I think games that try to justify their own bizarre gameplay quirks and horrendous design by being cheap and difficult and unforgiving need to be shot in the head, and then shot in the head again." In that regard, I think you are absolutely right; what video game should force masochism onto the player?
But I think the problem isn't with difficulty in it's own right, as you state in the article; there are plenty of hard video games that are good. I love me the Max Payne games, even though I had to "bind the quicksave to the right mouse button", if you will. And I fought my way through the hardest levels of Elite Beat Agents, even when I had to replay the same level 50 times, but I loved it all the same.
So I guess what I'm saying is that....difficulty needs to be considered in the game design process, and it should never be uses as a means of justifying awkward and decrepit mechanics.
.....did I just reiterate the point of the article in comment form?
So.....yes. The answer to the article is yes.
I agree with the rest of the article, though. A game that's hard for the sake of being hard isn't fun; it needs to be hard but fair. Old "hard" NES games were often just complete bullshit and devs need to realize this. I always like to point to Godhand as an example of "fair hard", and really wish devs would follow that example.
For example, as much as I love the recent console Zelda titles (namely Wind Waker and Twilight Princess), I'm starting to feel a bit beleaguered by the continued division of the Heart unit. In past Zelda titles, enemies could take out two to three hearts in one blow; it didn't seem unnecessarily harsh, it just made things interesting. Now we're seeing hearts divided into fourths just to express how little of a threat any of Link's adversaries are to his well-being. I wouldn't be surprised if the next title took it up (or rather down) a notch further.
To prove your point, I am personally so distraught by "nerfed" challenge in games today that I couldn't be bothered to care about the opposite trend outlined in this article.
The games themselves are fun, but I'd rather just have, you know, a set amount of lives per level. Don't freakin' punish me on a NEW level for barely scraping by on the previous one.
Your a saint Jim, don't let anyone tell you otherwise.
HAHAHAHAHA!Right now im laughing in my head at you as i imagine you and your other 12 year old friends playing through Ninja Gaiden for the 12th time and thinking how badass it makes you.
Personally it's my favorite level of difficulty, as you can be completely decimated by a boss one try and completely decimate them the next try thanks to planning and forethought. There has never been a non-optional boss in any Megaten game that was an insurmountable obstacle to me.
While there are some things that are cheap (i.e. instakills), by the time they pop up there are numerous counters to them.
But it depends of the game, Gears 2 i finished the SP in Insane and have a shitload of fun with it, however in Halo 3 SP i can't even finish it in Heroic, but then again, i think that Halo 3 SP is too overrated.
I think that percieved difficulty comes as a result of a lot of other elements of design, and if these things aren't coming together properly, then it's easy to mistake a difficult game for a flat-out bad one. I don't think any game can actually be 'too hard' if the mechanics and difficulty curve are graceful enough.
Difficulty, like most experiences, is a completely subjective thing. What's acceptable or unacceptable to a given person isn't something that can be actively quantified or given form. Some of the games listed in this article, like Ninja Gaiden and Devil May Cry 3, are games that I had a great time with. The difficulty just wasn't something that bothered me in my experiences with the games. For others, however, the difficulty resulted in so much frustration that there's not even a remote chance of completion. While we can easily identify traits that make a game "easy" or "hard", it's important to realize that these designations carry very little weight in terms of the actual experience imparted on the individual player.
Trying to determine what elements result in a frustrating experience rather than a rewarding one in gaming is basically an exercise in futility; in the end, you only succeed in determining those factors for yourself. Though, if that's what you sought to do here, then I'd say you've achieved your goal.
That's the heart of the issue over whether or not a certain level of difficulty can add to or take away from enjoying certain games. As such, Jim has made a sterling and worthwhile point.
What I would add to the game difficulty conversation is outside of the gameplay mechanics and tackling hordes of monsters, and get into the story/level progression aspect of the gameplay.
I have long associated a game's difficulty level, and whether it's worth my time to play a game, with my ability to non-combatively navigate the game world to reach the next objective. That has been my biggest hindrance to enjoying certain games over the years, specifically the Zelda and Metroid games.
Two and a half years ago, Twilight Princess (on GameCube) was the first Zelda game I had ever beaten. I'm 25, and it took me that long to reign in my prejudice against the series and complete one of its marvelous entries. Now I'm a fan, simply because I finally overcame my hangups over (and understood the appeal to) the idea of having to thoroughly explore a Zelda game's environment to get to the next objective. For the longest time, I could not bring myself to get into Ocarina of Time, A Link to The Past, or even The Wind Waker because of how [i]abso-frickin-lutely vague[i] the level/story progression seemed to me in those games. But I own a dozen of the Zelda games, and now I can go back and enjoy them all at my leisure.
As for the Metroid series, I've beaten Metroid Prime and Metroid Prime 3: Corruption. Even though I've owned Super Metroid (on Super Nintendo, ya whippersnappers) about four separate times, I still haven't beaten the thing because I haven't hunkered down and allowed myself to powerball every little nook and cranny in its 2D world. But I HAVE beaten Metroid: Zero Mission. And I absolutely [b]adore[b] Castlevania: Symphony of the Night and the GBA and DS Castlevanias, which of course people have called "Metroidvania" over the years.
It's kinda strange, but wonderful, that I've been able to overcome that hangup with certain games. And I guess that's thanks in part to being able to look up hints on the Internet.
I looked up a hint on the Internet ONCE to get me through Twilight Princess, looked up quite a few hints to beat Skies of Arcadia (Dreamcast), and only looked up hints three times to beat Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne.
Jim, if you want a [b]hard[b] game, play through Nocturne. Although I have heard DQ VIII is no breeze.....
Seriously though, good read. Just not what I expected from a Jimmles weekend post.
"Gears 2 i finished the SP in Insane and have a shitload of fun with it, however in Halo 3 SP i can't even finish it in Heroic, but then again, i think that Halo 3 SP is too overrated."
Overrated because you couldn't manage it? :P
Lol I agree that Halo 3 is overrated but your wording made it sound like because you couldn't manage heroic it wasn't as good as Gears
It's sort of like saying, "now that the interface isn't in your way and is masterable, let's test your mastery." And damned if they don't test it.
I also hate DMC, because of the system of levelling, levels and the hard difficult just for the sake of being hard. As for Metal Arms I've never played it so I cannot judge that.
There are few games I can think of that deserve to be hard (at specific stages not the whole thing), LBP, COD4/5 (even if grenade spam is very cheap on Veteran), MGS2, ,3 and 4 and SF4. As I feel like I've actually accomplished something when I beat parts of these games. They're only a few, there's plenty of older generation games I could list such as Ikaruga and Jet Set Radio, LTTP etc.
The frustrating camera angles that limit how many enemies you can see at a time, cause they come from everywhere and throw everything at you, hinder the use of your most advanced tactics against the toughest enemies. There's sort of a masochistic reward to completeing something so unesisarily hard and the fact that you can overcome it is what's special about NG2 to me.
The thing about the DMC games is, they require you to be a near-perfectionist in the harder difficulties. They give enemies damage and health increases to see if you can use Dante's abilities to the max without breaking focus, they should call it "Don't dick around mode" because as fast paced as the game is, I think the devs went with a mindset that a focused player should go through when the odds are stacked even greater.
However, games like DMC, Ninja Gaiden, and God Hand don't fit into that category. Once you learn the mechanics and the moves, and are able to read your enemies, you can defeat anything the game throws at you.
Metal Arms was F*&^in' brilliant! Whatever happened to Swinging Ape studio?
They were bought and subsequently destroyed by Vivendi, who refused to make anymore Metal Arms games, *or* sell the game's rights back to the original creator. I spoke with the guy who created Metal Arms a few years ago and he told me of his horrible experience trying to get his creation back from a publisher that refused to do anything with it.
Activision currently has the rights to anything Metal Arms-related, but obviously it's an IP they're just going to sit on until the end of the time.
A old school Mega Man game isn't being hard for the sake of being hard. You memorizing the levels in that game is just like knowing what combos to pull off in DMC, Ninja Gaiden, or God Hand. One of Mega Mans mechanics is memorizing the levels and knowing how to navigate them so that you don't take damage instead of causing it.
Jk, anyway pretty good read. I think the art here is making a challenge. Forget about easy vs difficult and make something simply challenging. o wait, that stands on its head. All well.
When I think of a hard game I think of the Commandos games from way back. They took dedication and very precise work to advance even a little bit. It was unforgiving and time intensive... But I found it a challenge so I loved it. I think the issue is that people are very different and a challenge to one person is just arrogant and aggravating trash to another. I suspect this balancing act is where most niches in games come from. It is also where lots of crap games come from.
For my money, Eat Lead was the last game I played where a spiked difficulty in the final hours felt so damn cheap. If it wasn't for the pure will to complete the game I'm sure I would've stopped there in the 11th hour. I think I lost count of the baddies flanking my "cover" while still getting shot from assholes beyond the feeble camera's range...
Another example is the Phoenix Wright series. God help you if there isn't a save constantly updating during a trial because who knows when you'll get hit with a pass/fail question. At which point you get to re-do everything from the beginning of the chapter.
But these two games, I feel, represent the two great crimes of difficulty: unfair numbers like Jim says and disproportionate consequences.
Ninja Gaiden is the complete opposite. The enemies are varied, they attack relentlessly, you have to switch tactics and weapons to defeat certain enemies and no, there aren't as many, but I would rather fight ten worthy opponents with an interesting and varied moveset than a hundred brain dead idiots that can be defeated with mashing one button.
Calling it poorly developed because it's hard for the sake of being hard is like just another way of saying "this game sucks because I suck at this game".
You know what's worse than a game that's hard for the sake of being hard? A game that's long for the sake of being long. Dragon Quest goes on for hours, not because there's hours of content, but because you spend hours grinding through unavoidable random battles.
Learn to play the game and you will find its not very difficult. And please, don't praise Dragon Quest for being a paragon of excellent difficulty where the way to win is to grind mindlessly for hours for incremental stat improvements.
Ninja Gaiden is the complete opposite. It doesn't matter how long you play, unless you get better, you're not going anywhere.
Stop being a pussy and l2play.
And the way you phrase it, NO RPG can ever be difficult because "you can just level up", when this is hardly the case.
On the one hand we have the gamer who gets off on a kind of "memorization" difficulty - which I think could include anything from early platformers (where you had to know each level off by heart in order to save those precious lives) to something like guitar hero (hand-eye coordination is required, but there's also a degree of pattern memorization)...
On the other hand there's "problem solving" difficulty. Adventure games like Zelda or detailed RPGs like Fallout require thorough exploration and research in order to solve the problems of the game's characters.
Each can be viewed as frustratingly diffucult to the opposing gamer. I personally fit into the latter category: I despise putting in the effort to memorize levels etc, and yet seem to have no problem devoting hours upon hours reading dialogue trying to pinpoint where my next quest location is. But to the "memorization gamer" this kind of leg-work can feel unfocussed and boring. I understand this.
Perhaps I'm over-simplifying the issue at hand. I can however admire the dedication of those who play games the kind of games I find frustratingly difficult - but ultimately we all play for games for our own enjoyment. Call me a "crappy gamer" but I'll stick to my adventure/role playing games because that's the kind of game I find rewarding.