The scenario: You, controller in hands, sitting on the sofa, staring at your television with a mixed expression of frustration and anger. You've hit a point in a game where you can't get any further, you don't want the strategy guide, you don't want to go pull up Gamefaqs. You just want to figure the wretched thing out so you can get on with the game you were enjoying up to this point.
The moment is as simultaneously recognizable and detestable as catching a fleeting glance of an ex at a party. The more you try to figure out how to advance, the less enthusiasm you have. It gets to a point where before you even pick up the controller to try again, you can feel it in your stomach -- a kind of grudge you don't even notice developing until it's in full effect. Before you know it, you don't pick up the game anymore at all.
This frustrating little phenomenon is the Difficulty Arc, a slippery slope where wonderful games can easily lose their footing and fall to their death, never to be played again. That perfect marriage of conflict and reasonable challenge rarely find their balance on the Arc. Only the best games manage to delicately hover there, poised as a hummingbird before a flower fat with pollen.
Hit the jump, where I dissect details and perhaps wave entrails at you.
Let's begin with a little video (because somehow pictorial examples make everything seem a bit more realistic.)
Ah yes, that moment. While it rarely gets that bad, sometimes it happens. Perhaps partially the fault of the gamer in question (that lad seems to have some anger management issues.) Regardless, the issue here to focus on is not the gamer but the game: Envision a well-adjusted young man or woman of about 30, sitting with controller in hand seriously fantasizing taking the disc out of the console and hurling it out the window like a shuriken with murderous intent.
What I'm proposing here is that one of the biggest faults of games today is finding the right spot on the Difficulty Arc -- a space that is neither too hard or too easy. Now, all gamers differ, so they can hardly all be satisfied by the same exact point on the Arc, yes?
BioShock is an excellent example of the use of difficulty settings: I would have become extremely frustrated (enough so to deter me from the story) had the hard diffuculty been the average, but thanks to the normal, I was able to enjoy the story first and go back to the hard setting later.
One of the worst failings of bad placement on the Arc is when frustration makes a gamer quit altogether. This often happens with excellent games, which seems to me to be a sorry shame. My personal memory of this moment is with Chrono Cross for the PS1. You can beat the last boss in a straightforward fashion, or you can beat it in a complex way, which nets you the best ending. The latter challenge was so elaborately ridiculous that I gave up after a few tries. The frustration here was more mental than physical -- The equivalent of attempting to find a single paper in stacks of thousands.
The physical form of Difficulty Arc failure is more a matter of personal skill and adaption to a game. For instance, some gamers hated the
Myst series, citing the puzzles as ridiculously difficult. Others whipped out their graph paper and mapped out elaborate puzzles with relish. Some games have a reputation for being insanely difficult, such as
Ikaruga for the Gamecube. This is hardly a failing on the part of the developers, as the title is intentionally intended to be a tremendous challenge.
Dementium: The Ward presents a more recent form of structural slippage on the Arc. The game allows you to save your progress, but you must begin at the start of the chapter each time you die. Sometimes, this isn't such a big deal. After trekking through the entire level to kill the boss six times only to die when you get there and be whisked back to the start, forced to repeat all the same crap, is just a recipe for frustration. This echoes the NES era, but even most of those titles employed checkpoints, rewarding you for your progress and effort.
Dementium is a fantastic title, but it did test my patience and I have to admit to putting it down a lot due to that.
Of course, some gamers will tell you they've never been frustrated enough to quit playing a game because of difficulty level (they're likely lying or androids posing as human beings.) You're not a gamer until you've thrown a controller at the TV and screamed SHITFUCKJESUSHOLYASSCOCK loud enough for your neighbor to hear you and look at you oddly the next time you pass them in the hallway. It's simply a classic rite of passage for the digitally addicted. I actually hit a friend in the face with a flying NES controller while playing Super Mario 3 once ... still feel a bit guilty about that.
This is not a rally to encourage harder games to take a hike. Rather, it's a picture of a consistent issue in gaming today: The balance of challenge and difficulty is a delicate one, and to ensure a title is truly enjoyable, there must be a flow to the gameplay. By interrupting this flow with unnecessary amounts of frustration, you are taking the gamer out of the gameplay experience -- exactly what you don't want to do.
I hope the next gen of gaming stands up to the challenge of making more game conflicts that are less ridiculous and more reason, offer level difficulty selection more often, and keep in mind how difficulty works with or against the immersive quality of the title. As long as I'm wishing for stuff I'd also like a miniature pony, a mint condition Delorean and the ability to teleport at will, but for now I'll settle for a few controller-hurling titles that are still within the boundaries of reason. I will try not to hit anyone in the face with controllers again, although it's likely best if the cursing and screaming begin to just get out of the way.
Contest:
2:57 PM on 11.16.2007
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Also the old school rubber band AI, to hell with that.
1. I play the game on a harder setting from the outset because I don't consider myself a "novice" or "average" player. I've been gaming for 20 years for chrissakes.
2. I work full time and have a gf so I don't have all night every night to game.
3. Given 1 and 2 if I sit down to play a game and encounter a part that I can't beat in a single gaming session (one night usually) I'll usually head to gameFAQS for help before trying again. A nudge in the right direction usually speeds things along.
I know the pain all to well SHITFUCKJESUSHOLYASSCOCK is right.
all in all, i think we all have anger management issues. some of us just hide it better than others.
At least, once you managed to work to how to play it in the first place.
Mario Galaxy's well on the way to being another one, though.
Excepting that one, church window breaking, purple, megabitch. Fuck that boss.
Ikaruga was on the dreamcast first too, btw.
Then I turned 14 O.o
The problem wasn't getting the better items via the inventions (because you would be able to find out from certain townsfolk what you could make), but I felt frustrated at not knowing why I couldn't progress to certain sections of dungeons. I eventually found that I just needed to go further into the game to get the key to open up those sections. That and levelling up Monica's monsters.
There was a boss on Sol-Feace (Mega CD) that was virtually impossible to defeat. It spat out so many bullets and tentacles that I wondered if I was meant to defeat it (it did die, btw, but after one invinciblity cheat, and one no-cheat attempt).
Ok, so I agree with Bioshock, it did a great job of seperating the casual and the frustrating, but I must disagree with you Super Mario 3 : If that game made you 'accediently' hit your friend in the face with a controller, that tells you something.
It tells me that though you had a hard time with it, alot of us didn't, and it was even quite easy for some. That being said my woman sucks at playing video games, but does have a good time when the difficulty and the learning curve isn't too hard.
So yes, I'd love to see some variety in the ways they can make a game apply to different talents of specific games, but on the other hand I'd hate to have the whole system change because of this.
In the end, maybe an easy, medium, and hard mode is all we really need, right?
Also, I was 8 the time I hit the friend with the controller - guess I should have specified that. SMB3 doesn't give me any trouble now. ^__^
Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts' difficulty was off the charts, and I knew it before my VC download started, but there is no way I will stop playing it - even if level number two is never vanquished.
My stubbornness persists because the music is awesome and I have never beaten one of the more difficult gametapes before. I think that Super Ghouls and Ghosts is a good place to start.
@ Remz:
YES, fighting Alma sucked! Ninja Gaiden was hard for me, but I don't disrespect it - the game is amazing.
In other news, you can buy Prints now for Penny-Arcade comics!
That's literally the first thing I thought of when I saw the PA comic on the front page.
And yes, swinging your controller around, and becoming outright physical in mindless frustration is most definitely an anger issue. At that point its not even about management, rage rolls over you like a train that you never even heard. Ive played games all my life (27) and when I was young I broke a fair number of controllers. That kind of frustration and anger usually stems from another place. Its definitely worth finding out, and fixing, what is wrong (yourself, not the game ;)).
The seventh mission of F-Zero GX's Story Mode is so ridiculous...
However, since GX is the best F-Zero game ever I can forgive it for being a little challenging.
Also, Snakers!
For me, I just had this experiance with Portal. A totally fun game, to be sure. I was playing Advanced, where the turrets are encased in cages and can not be toppled. I couldn't get near the botting to advance. Eventually I watched a speedrun to see what that guy did to get around 'em, so at least knew how to go about trying.
A perfect exclaimation. It will now replace my previous catch-all exclaimation, "Christ on a stick!"
My biggest problem with game difficulty is a lack of time to play. Between work (and the damn commute) and the basic necessities of life, playtime is never enough. I don't want to spend the precious 90 minutes of free time I can find to play constantly doing the same thing over again, and dying. I want to stumble off to bed having made some amount of progress.
Adult Gaming Irony:
As a kid, you have time to play games but no money to buy them.
As an adult, you have money to buy games but no time to play them.
What else? Oh, the final boss in Tekken 3. Freakin' cheap.
Also, BHACKNEY has an excellent point that each of us should consider.
$10 says all the current gaming community really wants is an M-rated version of this:
At the same time they could decide to simply spam a specific move in their arsenal. If they spammed, you would die. Simply put.
I believe it was a boss fight while playing as Rachel. Twin fiends or something. I beat Ninja Gaiden: Black and only played mission mode in Sigma. (Which had a super awesome way of unlocking it without beating the game.)
I just turned thirty and I am feeling old. That 'young' call just made my day. Thanks!
I've broken maybe a controller or two, and many, many keyboards from WoW (mostly because people are dickheads, not because it's hard). Yelling obscenities is more my style.
"GTA:SA flying missions = more obscenities than I care to post... even on dtoid"
I hear that, Renegade
It's hard to pinpoint what an ideal difficulty is. I like a game that pushes me to my skill limits, but doesn't kill me. As I said, I hate death. Dying in a single-player game pisses me off. I don't want to have to spend hours trying to get past something. I want to make one attempt, but it has to be a fun, engaging, epic attempt.
"please let me save! ill sell my soul for for a goddamn save point!" oh and anyone remember those skeleton-fish?...Grrr...the water temple in Majora's Mask almost killed my love for Zelda (it did for 3 months). Various cupboards, bins, Siblings have been on the recieving end of varying degrees of hurt..oh two more: the twin insect boss in jet force gemini (possible game that time forgot?) and non fludd levels of Mario Sunshine...yet more Grr...