DIGITISER
  • MAIN PAGE
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Game Reviews
  • FAQ

HOW HARD CAN IT BE? - by Mr Biffo

26/2/2016

18 Comments

 
Picture
I'm not sure I ever finished a game on my ZX Spectrum. Playing those games now, as I do from time to time, it's pretty clear why.

​Many of them may be charming, they might be great for their time, but they're not particularly playable. 

Even classics like Knight Lore and Underwurlde are an exercise in endurance: just how much death and battling with the controls can a person stomach?

​The hardware - playing on a little rubber keyboard - wasn't really suited to gaming, ironically.

​It's little wonder that games were considered anti-social for so long: they were barely accessible, and you needed to have a particularly psychotic degree of patience in order to stick with them through the repeated deaths.

These days, games have learned the lessons of the past, they've built and improved on what went before, and for the most part they're broadly accessible. If anything... they're a bit too accessible.

Picture
MODES AND ROCKERS
​It was something that dawned on me last night while playing Far Cry Primal.

I'm a long way into it; I'm through most of the story (such as it is), I've toppled the forts labelled as "very hard", I've got enough animals to build my own zoo, and now all I'm doing is just ticking off the remaining secrets on the map.

I realised as I rescued my umpteenth Wenja hostage... that none of this had been a challenge.

In all, I'd probably died no more than half a dozen times - one of those times at the claws of a badger, for pity's sake.

Had I been wearing a heart monitor, I doubt my pulse would've even registered most of the time.

The nature of the game's open world means that the structure just sort of meanders - it doesn't increase in intensity. It's like reading a book or watching a film out of order: you won't necessarily get the big climax at the climax. It could come halfway through - as I think it did for me. Matron.

Now... I know that the day one patch added an expert difficulty mode, but I slightly resent difficulty modes. You don't go and see a film and get given the option to see a version without the long words, or one where you can pay for seats that jab you in the thighs with needles every few minutes. 

​I have this slightly pietistic need to play the game as balanced as the creators think it needs to be. Difficulty modes, to me, simply feel like a way of covering all bases, and don't change the game on the whole - typically, just how much damage you can sustain.

Picture
IT'S NOT DEFAULT
I get why games are, on the whole, easier by default than they used to be: games are better, they're more playable, and they're a major industry now.

They're designed to be as accessible to as broad an audience as possible.

And I'm torn about it. I was put off from playing either of the Dark Souls games because I'd heard horrific things about their difficulty levels.

Feeling I was missing out, I gave Bloodborne a go - and just couldn't cope with it. Not only could I not proceed like I wanted to, but I couldn't handle my boredom at playing through the same moments again and again.

I never reached that moment of Nirvana that players claim they reach in Hidetaka Miyazaki's games, where it all falls into place. I just found it a struggle, from start to the point where I decided that life is too short. It was like playing on the Spectrum all over again.

Thing is, there are similarities in Far Cry - and most of those Ubi-style games - in that there's a ton of repetition. However, it's rarely due to difficulty. You're not repeating the same moments over and over... just the same sorts of moments. And yet, it has become my biggest niggle with Primal, that sense of the challenge not coming from the difficulty, but just getting everything done. It's overwhelming.

And because of the do-it-in-any-order nature of the gameplay, I was able to beef up my character very quickly, and very early on I began to cut through missions and enemies like a hot finger through butter. The exact same thing happened in Far Cry 4. See also Assassin's Creed Syndicate, and Call of Duty Advanced Warfare, and Rise of the Tomb Raider.

So... I dunno. For me, it's about finding that sweet spot between being challenged, and not becoming frustrated, without having to ramp up a difficulty setting to Expert. 

Picture
THE KEY TO EVERYTHING
Perhaps the key to all this is variety.

I feel that Nintendo gets it right: typically its games are not off-puttingly difficult, but you are constantly being introduced to new ideas. Every level will have something about it that's unique.

I think that's one of the reasons why Half-Life 2 has endured as a classic. Valve applied the same to its Portal games. The player was constantly challenged, not through the difficulty of enemies, but by ideas. Learning new skills. Learning the rules of a new area. Finding new ways to play. See also Rockstar's games.

It often feels as if modern developers main focus is creating a map, and then just randomly dumping as much stuff as possible on it. That might allow for plenty of emergent, sandbox, gameplay - indeed, I've had some great fun in Primal - but I sometimes miss the challenge that can only come from figuring out what the developer expects me to do. Solving the Rubik's Cube the way it's meant to be solved, because the minds behind it have really thought about every last nuance, rather than smashing the thing apart with a hammer.

FROM THE ARCHIVE:
REVIEW: BLOODBORNE (PS4)
NOT MY GAMES OF THE YEAR LIST - BY MR BIFFO

VIDEO GAMES: A REFLECTION OF TERROR BY - MR BIFFO
18 Comments
RG
26/2/2016 11:55:40 am

On a similar note, I get frustrated by the RPG leveling up systems in games that can make things easy too early if you do too much side-questy stuff and level up quickly, or too difficult if you upgrade the wrong way. The Batman Arkham games are a good example of this - there are some very specific skills and abilities that are almost essential in certain parts of the game but if you've spent all your upgrades on other things you're gonna have a tough time.

I'd rather that action games just gave me new toys and abilities to play with as the game progresses and not give me the stress of choosing. Not to mention ruining immersion with RPG numbers and levels.

Reply
Minlgefingler
26/2/2016 11:57:07 am

One of the most unwlecome developments in modern gaming for me has been the overwhelming amount of on screen prompts to press a button in order to perform the correct action. I don't need to see "press space to jump" every time I approach a knee high wall, nor do I want hints (often repeated every few seconds) on how to proceed when a game decides that a puzzle is a mite to difficult for my wizened brain. Combine these with objective markers either on screen or on a mini map and I often feel infuriatingly patronised by modern games which seem to assume that I'm a dullard. I probably am but please allow me to repeatedly discover and forget that fact for myself. Fair enough if these things are included for new players but I should have the option to turn them off and that isn't always provided.Games being accessible is great, having a developer tap me on the shoulder and whisper into my ear when I'm playing, less so.
As for Dark Souls, I have a suspicion that we lose the patience to play games of this sort as we age, I know I certainly have. I had no problem repeating huge sections of games on my CPC 464 because I'd died, these days I can't be arsed to try the same thing more than a few times. I still feel slightly ashamed of myself if I play a game on easy difficuly though.

Reply
Stoo
26/2/2016 12:37:43 pm

I have to admit I'm not looking to be highly challenged in games these days. Games are for unwinding, and downtime. If I'm putting time and effort into learning and improving myself, it should be for something useful in real life.

Reply
LPMerriweather link
26/2/2016 12:54:47 pm

That sounds to me more like a problem with the balancing in Far Cry Primal. If you can go anywhere in an open world, then it's hard to instigate a suitable difficult system.

Fallout 3 seemed to get this right, however. There were some parts of the map where progress was a struggle, or you'd pretty much die straightaway. I had to make a mental note to explore those bits later on when my character was suitably beefed up - and heading back later on was extremely rewarding.

But if you can go anywhere straight away and do any mission, and I can see why it could just become very boring.

Reply
Friday
26/2/2016 01:22:37 pm

I agree with much of the sentiment here.

Games with poorly balanced difficulty (and no ability to change the difficulty level without restarting the entire game) resulted in me playing things on Easy mode for years, which was invariable too easy to be fun (turning every game into a theme park).

I did this as I'd grudgingly realised it meant I avoided insane difficultly spikes and crappy mechanics that might otherwise appear at random intervals which would cause give up attempting to progress that title in favour of playing something that didn't make me long for invasive dental surgery.

Examples of harder difficulty woes include being forced to repeat sections until you learned how the level had been designed in tedious detail (Doom 3), friendly AI that kept walking into walls and getting itself killed, causing the level to reset (OG Gears of War) and randomly getting stuck on the map (in the otherwise enjoyable most recent Wolfenstein title). Aliens: Colonial Marines was also a total disaster in this regard thanks to a complete lack of anything resembling AI, but I went into that one forewarned (and gave up in boredom after being tired of that crap).

Games have gotten much better at not falling into this pitfall - and at a allowing you to change difficultly level mid game if you run into problems.

However, I still stuffer from emotional trauma of all those unfinished games and so tend to play unfamiler titles on an easier level until they have not proven themselves to be total bastards, then replay them on a harder level so they are intersting and challenging.

This is ultimately much less rewarding than just being able to play them and enjoy them and find them challenging but fun. Wolfenstein was spoiled on the first play through as my lack of trust caused me to select an easier, ultimatley not challenging level - thankfully it has an alternate mode which provided some solice for replay at a harder leve, through slightly branching narrative.

Sticking with FPS titles, the Ghost Recon / GRAW series worked well to deliver an experience that felt well curated, unfortunately like many titles it ended up rather too on the rails as the production values increased. In conrast CoD titles are explicitly on the rails nonsense designed to feel like you are constantly under pressure but actually tediously predictable (execept when they are widly unpredictable because something that wasn't designed to happen occured, and then the game essentially breaks).

For me, the most tragic example of difficultly balacing gone awry has been in the otherwise fabulous Elder Scrolls series (which remains fabulous despite each game being as horrendously buggy as the last).

In attempt to resolve the issue of "once you'd level up enough, nothing was challenging" (which I thought was sort of THE POINT of levelling up in RPGs; I don't think people though was actually a PROBLEM) the gameplay changed between Morrowind and Oblivion to a mode where, as you level, so does everything else. This continues the point where at higher levels in Oblivion and Skyrim even homeless bandits and vagabons are equipped like Elder Gods adorned with legendary armour and weapons of enough power to takeover an entire hamlet.

Not content with that, in Skyrim they felt that, as they were gving us things actual dragons to fight they should fuck this up further somehow to balance out the good stuff by making something else worse and so they introduced randomly unkillable characters that can only ever be winded, even when they are frail old men you have hit them with an axe enough times to turn a mammoth into a sweetroll sized chunks, purely because they have a special bit that says they are unkillable. It's that same logic that keeps Tyrion Lannister alive, but it's set on every Joffrey Baratheon.

Anyway.

I am a huge fan of sandbox games; but in general the lack of feeling of progression is a big problem for me too, and a reason why I haven't completed half of the last 3 or 4 Far Cry titles I've bought (and am now bored of, as I've come to recognise the feeling of futility they engender).

There is no decent excuse for the sloppy approach either - just like there is no decent excuse for why turning your back on an area and walking 100 yards south shouldn't result in an area you just quite literally butchered and burned to the ground instantly resetting when you go back to pick up something you just left behind.

The produciton quality in these titles - from textures, models, animations and audio to level design - is extremely high and there are some great minute to minute mechanics, so why is the approach to the feeling of narrative progression so sloppy?

Reply
Kelvin Green link
26/2/2016 01:35:33 pm

"In attempt to resolve the issue of "once you'd level up enough, nothing was challenging" (which I thought was sort of THE POINT of levelling up in RPGs; I don't think people though was actually a PROBLEM) "

Oh gosh yes. It's not even as if grinding is an "easy mode"; almost everyone hates it because it's tedious and that's the built in deterrent. If someone wants to spend hours building themselves up then let them; don't slap them in the face by throwing a level 87 peasant at them.

It's weird game design too; if you're going to render levelling ineffective, then why bother having it at all?

I'm a big fan of putting the work in early so I can swagger through the game crushing all my enemies, so I'm against this sort of balancing. Away with it!

Reply
Euphemia
26/2/2016 01:31:25 pm

I loves me the Souls games and it's the challenge that keeps me engaged at learning something new and well, which their system demands. It's that replay value that you don't get in most major releases (Uncharted, Assassins Creed etc.) although they do sacrifice story for gameplay, but let's face it - was it the story that keeps you engaged beyond the first 12-15 hours of any game, or was it the game itself?

Never had a Eureka moment, but the competitive play when it comes together can be thrilling in a way I've not encountered in other online games.

The Souls games are the equivalent of long-term investment over short term gains. The first few days are the probationary period that weeds out the unwilling or the incapable.

Reply
Euphemia
26/2/2016 01:33:59 pm

Although Bloodborne did feel more like a series of hard dick-punches, that fucker was pretty consistently brutal in a way the Souls games were not.

Reply
PeskyFletch
26/2/2016 05:20:09 pm

There is defintely a place for easy games, certainly of the wish fufillment /power fantasy kind. I have fond memories of playing the goldeneye level you start being interrogated. I'd activate the enemy moves in slow motion cheat, dual wield handguns and live out all my John Woo fantasies years before Max Payne came along

Reply
Dirty Barry
26/2/2016 06:44:45 pm

Sometimes I think people look back on the difficulty of older games with rose tinted glasses. You were nine, you had a lot of time on your hands. Your mum had forked out £49.99 on Megaman 2, so it was necessary to have teeth grinding levels of frustrating difficulty and take months of attempts over completing it. Running out of continues and being forced to start again was a cheap trick to maximize the life of an 8 bit cartridge.

These days I quite like games without fiddly bits. Being a working adult, I now have a backlog of unplayed games that would make the child me jump for joy. The last thing I need is to get stuck on one of them, in something resembling the swimming level in nes turtles.

I always dreamed of open world games where you could go anywhere and do anything. Now they're here, we miss the challenge and difficulty of the old days. Nostalgia is a funny thing.

Reply
Ben
26/2/2016 07:07:01 pm

I got about 3/4 through this, (I think the general theme of which is repetition is boring and making repetition arbitrarily harder is even more boring), and thought "I hope he mentions Nintendo" and lo and behold. I love the way that, for instance, the Mario games introduce you to new concepts constantly in ways that keep the experience fresh throughout, layering their mechanics over time and throwing new challenges at the player with gay, throwaway abandon, causing them to reinterpret and reappraise their understanding of the mechanics and their interaction with the gameworld. I love the way they start so gently and playfully but become intensely challenging in their scenarios by the end, ramping up with the players experience but in deeply imaginative, fair and rewarding ways. I think Nintendo respects the players time more than most, and in doing so doesn't (usually at least) use cheap design choices to prolong the experience or heighten challenge in the lazy, arbitrary ways that are so often employed.

I used to love the challenge of hard games when I had all the time in the world to grind my way through them and before I fully appreciated that beating whatever on ultra was utterly meaningless, but now, older, wiser, busier, miserabler, I just don't see the point or fun in it. Having said that, I have younger friends whose absolute all time favourite game is Dark Souls. Young people are idiots.

Reply
Greg
26/2/2016 08:09:45 pm

I find myself having gone the other direction as I've gotten older, where I actively seek out the hardest games out there, especially platformers like Super Meatboy and Geometry Dash, and yes, Dark Souls. The post is right though, there is a definite magic that adds to a game when challenge and progression are well balanced.

Reply
2hondas
26/2/2016 09:19:58 pm

I think you've summed my opinions up nicely.

The difficulty is very relative to the type of game that I'm playing, portal is the perfect example. It might be really really difficult at times, but I don't mind spending ages on a level working it out if it means that I'm not constantly repeating the same actions over and over. Games like half life and fallout, I try to play at a difficulty that means that I only die once in a blue moon, I enjoy playing games for the story and for the feeling of making progress, not because I want to feel smug and brag about how high a difficulty level I completed a game at.

Maybe your preference on difficulty depends on your ego?

Reply
Damon link
27/2/2016 04:33:21 am

Portal is a puzzle game that hinges on trial and error so it's different from, say, an adventure game where you just get more tougher monsters thrown at you.

I usually start on normal and then adjust from there. If it's too easy that's not fun, but if it's too hard that's no fun either.

Reply
Barrie Ellis link
26/2/2016 09:37:03 pm

Audiences are broad now, and there's no such thing as too easy for some players (think of some of the people using custom accessible controllers maybe using just one or two buttons). Variable difficulty levels across a very broad range opens up experiences that would otherwise be impossible. Love what FIFA16 offers (tweaks for all settings). Apart from that EA don't think this should be allowed online somewhat confusingly. Don't like adaptive difficulty alone. That feels a bit patronising.

Reply
Chris
27/2/2016 12:47:31 am

I hate difficulty settings too. It's mostly because I don't know which one to select. I mean, I want to be challenged, but I don't want the game top be impossible. I usually select "Normal". But maybe the developer thinks I'm better at games than I am? Or thinks I'm a "casual gamer"? And then sometimes there are further options to tweak every aspect of the difficulty. I just want to play as the developer intended!

But... If it's too hard I might start saving and reloading if it's a "perma-death", and that feels like cheating. The dead should stay dead, right? Even if I know they only died because I mis-clicked, so I should load back to before that point and fix it, then everybody lives and progression is easier.

In the old days, games had to be hard. I mean, if you knew Airwolf on the Spectrum only had five screens (due to technical constraints), you wouldn't pay hard-earned cash for it, would you? But if you played it and found screen 1 was almost impossible, screen 2 was clearly designed for or by a masochist and screen three you only saw for about five seconds when your sister reached it before promptly dying, in the pre-Internet and you'd be none the wiser and playing through the three screens you could get to would be hours of entertainment.

These days there is no technical reason why a game shouldn't have a decent learning curve, making it steadily harder and presenting a challenge to all players - without asking "how hard do you think this game should be?".

Xenoblade got it right. It's an open world map, with new characters and skills being added regularly as the story progresses. Parts of the map are blocked off - either by usual RPG clichés like broken bridges which are miraculously fixed just as the story requires you to use them, or (brilliantly) by incredibly high leveled enemies. You can go after the high level enemies whenever you like; the rewards are great. You will probably die trying. However, at the point the story (or a side quest) requires you to go that way, you will discover that you've leveled up just enough in the interim!

It's a very well put together game and one of the few I've completed without (a) giving up because it was too hard or (b) getting bored because it was too easy or repetitive. And that's a 100 hour game, I usually get nowhere near that.

Reply
Damon link
27/2/2016 04:29:40 am

I don't mind them so much... partly because of how insignificant it is. I usually play on normal then adjust from there. Really it depends on the game - for a puzzle game it can change a lot more but this article seems to really not be about them. If I want to chill I'll put it on easy. If I want more of a challenge I can have that.

That said "what is even different!?" is not a question that the player should need to ask when adjusting difficulty.

Also the first Mario Galaxy game is too easy. If you get all the stars on the first three observatories you can finish the game only playing mandatory stage and should have enough stars to finish the game. On one hand it means if the later parts are too tough you can come back to easier stages but on the other if you're like me and just say "whatever I'm here I hate walking" you'll wonder why they included stages you can bypass entirely.

I have a friend who will only play games with cheats because she likes the story but for some reason takes death in video games far too emotionally seriously. She will not play a game if she can die or lose in it. They're single player games so, I mean, if she's having fun that's what counts but I can't understand enjoying something with no challenge to it. Go watch tv or read a book if that's what you want.

Reply
Ad Backpage link
24/3/2022 06:03:08 pm

I appreciate it sir. Such a great post. I follow all of your post and notice that your site grow fast day by day. Anyway, best of luck

Reply



Leave a Reply.

    This section will not be visible in live published website. Below are your current settings:


    Current Number Of Columns are = 2

    Expand Posts Area =

    Gap/Space Between Posts = 12px

    Blog Post Style = card

    Use of custom card colors instead of default colors = 1

    Blog Post Card Background Color = current color

    Blog Post Card Shadow Color = current color

    Blog Post Card Border Color = current color

    Publish the website and visit your blog page to see the results

    Picture
    Support Me on Ko-fi
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    Picture
    RSS Feed Widget
    Picture

    Picture
    Tweets by @mrbiffo
    Picture
    Follow us on The Facebook

    Picture

    Archives

    December 2022
    May 2022
    September 2021
    August 2021
    July 2021
    November 2020
    September 2020
    July 2020
    March 2020
    February 2020
    January 2020
    December 2019
    November 2019
    October 2019
    September 2019
    August 2019
    July 2019
    June 2019
    May 2019
    April 2019
    March 2019
    February 2019
    January 2019
    December 2018
    November 2018
    October 2018
    September 2018
    August 2018
    July 2018
    June 2018
    May 2018
    April 2018
    March 2018
    February 2018
    January 2018
    December 2017
    November 2017
    October 2017
    September 2017
    August 2017
    July 2017
    June 2017
    May 2017
    April 2017
    March 2017
    February 2017
    January 2017
    December 2016
    November 2016
    October 2016
    September 2016
    August 2016
    July 2016
    June 2016
    May 2016
    April 2016
    March 2016
    February 2016
    January 2016
    December 2015
    November 2015
    October 2015
    September 2015
    August 2015
    July 2015
    June 2015
    May 2015
    April 2015
    March 2015
    February 2015
    January 2015
    December 2014
    November 2014


    RSS Feed

Powered by Create your own unique website with customizable templates.
  • MAIN PAGE
  • Features
  • Videos
  • Game Reviews
  • FAQ