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[Alex]

This is the correct reaction because there are these things, as other posters have noted, called "check points". Or difficulty modes. He seems to be decrying problems that have solutions. And he has no real excuse for not going to Gamefaqs, but requiring the typical person to find a walkthrough site they probably haven't heard of is a tad unreasonable.

But the article does have a point and you seem to be arguing against it SO

Isn't this usually how retail outlets make their bux off strategy guides, let alone how pulp guides seem to survive in the days of GameFAQs?

None of these follow. At all.

People are paying for a product to be entertained. If they are pissed off about a game, then it has failed for them. It is not a reflection of societal decay or any such psycho-bullshit.

Strangely enough, the populace at large are not masochists and do not play a section over and over because the game has thrown down some metaphorical gauntlet. They stop playing. Because they are not having fun. The horror.

Videogames are becoming more popular, and therefore are (and from a business standpoint should) become easier. The days of increasing playtime with difficulty walls are over (beyond those few throwbacks, anyway).

But at what point does it become necessary for EVERY game to be instantly accessible for everyone?

In some cases, it would be like me picking up a piano then getting pissed because I can't play anything.  Does fault lie with the piano because it's too complex and difficult for me to play or with me alone because I'm not willing to buckle down and learn?  It seems unfair to jump into anything then rage because I'm not rewarded or satisfied immediately.

The "Gameshark fallacy" is a textbook slippery slope fallacy. There is no reason to do it more than once. And I'm not seeing the problem with playing like that. If it's an option, anyway. I imagine most people would want some complexity out of their games.

But it relies entirely on the person in question to not abuse their omnipotence.  I wouldn't begrudge anyone to play Contra 3 on Hard just because I do.  I would just give them a for not just flat out saying 'Damn, I'm just going to shark the whole game because it's helluva tough!'.  I didn't really have any reason to care beyond the fact that someone was not straight with me over something so little.

I think part of the problem is that people just aren't satisfied with the difficulty selection concept.  For dudes who don't care about the vidya, why should they be feeling any shame if they're playing on Very Easy instead of Normal?  Probably because most dudes and dudettes don't like being flat out told that they suck.

Because it's fun, is a decent game, and has replay value? Or is a game judged on how time consuming it is?

I can't imagine the casual player takes much stock in replay value, but this is really just a huge assumption on my part.  I can't really picture these folks feeling the compulsive need to replay the game and would instead return it to retrieve their bucks or trade it in for Retail Outlet Funbucks.

I'd have brought up to idea of dudes renting games and turning on the auto-pilot, but well...that seemed like kind of a dumb idea.

This post is your fault.

It's cool, brah.  I asked for it.

[Brentai]

RE4's system sounds great to me but in practice it just ended up ensuring that I would get stuck on the part where a billion zombies trap you in that house.

[Frocto]

pussy

[Brentai]

I'm going to add a difficulty level to my next game called "Bullshit" in which the player just randomly explodes.

I have a feeling certain people will like that.

[Defenestration]

Man I went to gamefaqs, clicked on Arkham Asylum right there in the "MOST POPULAR GAMES DIS MONTH" list, ctrl+f'd and found a half-a-page long blurb that amounts to "dodge his attacks, hit quick-time events, don't over-extend." It's preposterous that this dude is writing an article on the internet and bitching about the availability of information.

I'm going to go ahead and point out that if you fail a couple of times at a boss in Arkham Asylum that the text during the "Retry/Quit" screen after death tells you want to do, so it's even MORE preposterous.

[Catloaf]

I'm going to add a difficulty level to my next game called "Bullshit" in which the player just randomly explodes.

I have a feeling certain people will like that.

Still easier than Touhou on it's highest setting.

EDIT:  Wait... but all Arkham asylum's bosses are the same besides ivy!

[Transportation]

Isn't this usually how retail outlets make their bux off strategy guides, let alone how pulp guides seem to survive in the days of GameFAQs?

I suppose? I was more referring to the hints that he seemed to think were vague or seemed hard to do for him. The point is sound in general, but apparently Batman is well-designed and the author is an idiot.

But at what point does it become necessary for EVERY game to be instantly accessible for everyone?

In some cases, it would be like me picking up a piano then getting pissed because I can't play anything.  Does fault lie with the piano because it's too complex and difficult for me to play or with me alone because I'm not willing to buckle down and learn?  It seems unfair to jump into anything then rage because I'm not rewarded or satisfied immediately.

Not really, no. It's not like there's a moral imperative. For example, Megaman 9 was targeted at the people who wanted such hard gameplay in the first place. I would still say Tetris was a better game. But that comparison could be said of most games.

Anyway, a key flaw in this analogy is a misconception. Videogames are toys, not instruments or tools. The learning process is supposed to be fun, unlike a piano which is constrained by physics and has a decidedly unfun (for most people) learning curve in order to make something nice. Another example would be programming.
---
The concept of delayed satisfaction is a practical, real life lesson where, yes, putting putting up with all that frustration and anger can get you something nice.

I do not see why a good game should not try to minimize this at costs. Anger and frustration are not fun. I suppose there is the standard stress->success->endorphins argument, but the keyword there is success. Anyway, specifics are irrelevant to my argument.

I suppose in the end we're talking about learning curves. A proper learning curve means the game is "easy" when you don't spend time at the gameover screen contemplating what the hell you're doing wrong. A "difficult" learning curve means the game just drops a bunch of concepts/patterns/reflexes on you at once and expects a trial and error process. The latter probably turns off people, as they have to play the same content over and over.

But it relies entirely on the person in question to not abuse their omnipotence.  I wouldn't begrudge anyone to play Contra 3 on Hard just because I do.  I would just give them a for not just flat out saying 'Damn, I'm just going to shark the whole game because it's helluva tough!'.  I didn't really have any reason to care beyond the fact that someone was not straight with me over something so little.

I think part of the problem is that people just aren't satisfied with the difficulty selection concept.  For dudes who don't care about the vidya, why should they be feeling any shame if they're playing on Very Easy instead of Normal?  Probably because most dudes and dudettes don't like being flat out told that they suck.

Because normal is how the game is "meant" to be played and easy is usually gimped or half-assed, design-wise (often intentionally). Or to be more blunt, the entire concept of beating a game's challenges is pure ego stroking. A game's job is to maximize this. Unless it's trying to be "artsy"/bad.

I can't imagine the casual player takes much stock in replay value, but this is really just a huge assumption on my part.  I can't really picture these folks feeling the compulsive need to replay the game and would instead return it to retrieve their bucks or trade it in for Retail Outlet Funbucks.

I'd have brought up to idea of dudes renting games and turning on the auto-pilot, but well...that seemed like kind of a dumb idea.

That's contradicted empirically by the entire casual game market.

This post is your fault.

It's cool, brah.  I asked for it.

Oh that's what you say now.

[Doom]

Transportation, the thing is that we are mad because a lot of people are mistaking the natural learning curve for the thing that hardcore gamers are smug about.

I'm not smug about beating Devil May Cry 1 on normal. If I want to experience the entire retail game, I have to beat it on normal or I can accept a watered down easy.

Now, you can beat the game on easy and eventually decide to go poke at normal. Maybe it'll click. Maybe you've grown better for your normal experience. Maybe you are more mature and your brain works better.

But the thing is, you can't really get around beating the game on normal. They sat down and decided "This is the standard experience." You can argue all you want that the game is not good because of it, but it is not some sort of MEMBERS ONLY CLUB. It's the bare minimum. Like passing your Driver's Test. If you cannot defeat Phantom on Normal, do you really think the experience will get any better when Gryphon or Nightmare flatten your ass in an even trickier fashion?

That is what bugs me about these articles! There is a fine line between hard game and bad game. Imagine how Spelunky will probably be reviewed as soon as it reaches X-Box 360's Live Market. Hell..

Here's a taste.

An experienced Spelunky player can point out to you several things here:

1) The player did not realize that he is playing a game that is supposed to be difficult to win. He ran in, gave it a few whacks in the starter area, and got stymied by the easiest of obstacles.
2) He got some facts wrong because he thinks the game owes it to him.
3) CLEARLY, IT IS THE GAME'S FAULT.

This is what bugs me! It is the most asinine reviewing angle I have ever seen and it pisses me off.

Now there are arguments you can make. Maybe Spelunky could have some in-game hints, like background details or a pre-determined event where you kick a pebble and it sets off an arrow trap below you. Maybe the tutorial cave could be bigger.

But it is an inherent part of the game's design. It is not avoidable. You learn to deal with skeletons and arrow traps or you do not go any further. It is a separate argument as to whether or not the developer should care if more people will avoid his game because it's too hard. He wants you to develop a protocol for dealing with the enemies.

There is a point where a game is too hard or poorly made.

There is also a point where you must walk before you run.

You cannot pick up a Fighting Game and be the best player with a run through of story mode.

You cannot beat NetHack on your first life.

You cannot expect a medium where you have infinite continues and retries available to feel sorry that you're a lazy ass.

Ideally, you should have games with parallel goals. I like the way World of Warcraft does that: if you want to just hit 80, you can do it in the stupidest, clowniest manner possible as slow as you'd like and you get this huge game. If you want to go do raids, you shape up or you don't. I'm not saying that to be smug or saying that because I hate casuals. It's a simple set of facts you can prove. When you're fighting 10 raptors one at a time, you can do whatever the fuck you want as long as they die and you live. When you have to down Patchwerk as a member of a team, every member does 2000+ DPS or the monster kills you first.

As another example where I think it was done wrong, in the first God of War you go to Hades and Hades is a lump of shit. The programmers admit as much. It was rushed, it's a boring, stupid, frustrating area and even if you turn down the difficulty, it makes the monsters easier to kill but doesn't affect all of the terrible stupid spike puzzles. The game is not hard because you should be a stud(Hades is near the end of the game), it's hard because it's poorly done. But there's a difference. God of War 2 is pretty hard, but not because of stupid spike puzzles. And you can adjust the difficulty. And you should pick up God of War 2 knowing that you can't dumb your way through it no matter how much you want to because the standard experience is set to a quality of challenge that makes it popular.

Can we agree that it's OK to look down on casuals like this article for not wanting to even walk the very most basic elements of competence? You can't beat Bane in Arkham Asylum and you can't be arsed to seek readily available help in incredibly efficient time spent and ease of access? And the game itself will toss you hints if you're that bad? Arkham Asylum doesn't need to be nicer to you, you're just bad at the game. Now if you can't beat Bane because he randomly bugs out his invincibility frames and you only get 1/3 as many chances to hit him as you really need, then that is the game's fault. But we're really past the point where bugs that big make it through.

[Smiler]

There are games that are made to be difficult. When a game presents itself as such, it is acceptable. When a game suddenly hits a wall in terms of difficulty due to new elements, it's retarded.

Fuck you Patapon. Fuck you and your rain miracle. Fuck you and your cart protecting. I may suck at the game, but fuuuuuuuck.

[Royal☭]

See, some games are meant for real players.  It's when the M&S come in and want to leech off us real players who are willing to put the work in to beat a game that really gets me!  When I play a game it's to beat it and work hard and finish it and I deserve the rich endings and special items I get.  These other M&S who paid money just want me to beat it and then tell them how to do it after I did the work already!  GOD!

[Alex]

Not really, no. It's not like there's a moral imperative. For example, Megaman 9 was targeted at the people who wanted such hard gameplay in the first place. I would still say Tetris was a better game. But that comparison could be said of most games.

Anyway, a key flaw in this analogy is a misconception. Videogames are toys, not instruments or tools. The learning process is supposed to be fun, unlike a piano which is constrained by physics and has a decidedly unfun (for most people) learning curve in order to make something nice. Another example would be programming.
---
The concept of delayed satisfaction is a practical, real life lesson where, yes, putting putting up with all that frustration and anger can get you something nice.

I do not see why a good game should not try to minimize this at costs. Anger and frustration are not fun. I suppose there is the standard stress->success->endorphins argument, but the keyword there is success. Anyway, specifics are irrelevant to my argument.

I suppose in the end we're talking about learning curves. A proper learning curve means the game is "easy" when you don't spend time at the gameover screen contemplating what the hell you're doing wrong. A "difficult" learning curve means the game just drops a bunch of concepts/patterns/reflexes on you at once and expects a trial and error process. The latter probably turns off people, as they have to play the same content over and over.

I can agree with this as the steep learning curve is why I torment myself with play Virtua Fighter, which I know isn't really for the casual player.  Though is it really fair to lower that curve dramatically when someone unexperienced takes interest in it?

I mean, I readily acknowledge that a game should be fun in general, but no one is going to be perfect and amazing at something in a day or two.  It feels like the argument on the subject of 'Games are too hard and too much work' just amounts to the less experienced feeling entitled to a rich experience and where they are the master straight out of the gate because they're deeming the activity to be worth their time.

Because normal is how the game is "meant" to be played and easy is usually gimped or half-assed, design-wise (often intentionally). Or to be more blunt, the entire concept of beating a game's challenges is pure ego stroking. A game's job is to maximize this. Unless it's trying to be "artsy"/bad.

See, that was what I was trying to get it.  The only people who are going to feel that 'Normal' is the way the game was meant to be played are the sort of folks where that sort of thing matters.

Typically, anything under Normal generally entails 'Player has more health/strength/defense while enemies have less and have reduced numbers' with the occasional 'game automatically does kool kombos and sweet moves for you' and that seems like a pretty fair way to lay it out.  I can't honestly come up with any other sort of alternative to this situation.

That's contradicted empirically by the entire casual game market.

I was speaking in terms of single player games, sorry.  I think we both know why multiplayer/competitive games are hugely replayable!

Oh that's what you say now.

And I'm saying it again! 

Although I could've just deleted all of this and Doom's post since I largely agree with that?  Although not so much on the part about raiding in WoW (since I'm sitting at an im passe where I was interested in the lore, but really didn't enjoy raiding and preferred sticking to groups of 5 or less while playing).

[Smiler]

I think we can all agree that the author of that article is going to vote Bayonetta for game of the year when it comes out.

[Doom]

See, some games are meant for real players.  It's when the M&S come in and want to leech off us real players who are willing to put the work in to beat a game that really gets me!  When I play a game it's to beat it and work hard and finish it and I deserve the rich endings and special items I get.  These other M&S who paid money just want me to beat it and then tell them how to do it after I did the work already!  GOD!

More like if I want to beat Super Mario Brothers, at some point I have to successfully jump over pits, stomp goombas, and grab an axe at the end of a bridge.

If you take offense with these expectations, maybe you should grab a box of crayons or something.

[Royal☭]

You seem to be mistaking game mechanics for game play, Doom.

You might as well say that in order to beat Ninja Gaiden all you have to do is win.

[Brentai]

Infocom games used to have a cute little label for difficulty on them: Beginner, Casual, Intermediate, Challenging, and Insane, or something along those lines.  They'd actually organize their catalog that way, which is a little extreme for general cases, but is a good indicator of what I'm getting at.

I'm not saying we need another ESRB to determine the difficulty of games, but it would be nice if, say, Ninja Gaiden or some other game designed specifically to fuck you hard had some sort of skull-and-crossbones or something on it instead of relying on word of mouth to let everyone know that, hey, this game is not for 90% of you.  It would help out developers as well, since having a baseline of examples for what is considered "moderate balance" or "challenging but not total bullcrap" would let them hit their intended marks with more accuracy.

[Alex]

But Brentai, no one reads the labels on the box as it is.

[Defenestration]

You seem to be mistaking game mechanics for game play, Doom.

You might as well say that in order to beat Ninja Gaiden all you have to do is win.

I think Doom was giving an example of how people should expect to master the mechanics of a game to a certain degree. I mean, it's not as obvious as you think. Pug groups in wow are a fine example of people expecting reward when they do not bother to master a concept as "Fire hurts, don't stand in it"... or any other concept, for that matter.

[JDigital]

It needs to be done with some grace, though.  Everyone hates the rubberband AI in Mario Kart 64, even though it's designed to keep good players challenged.  I believe Resident Evil 4 had a system where supplies were given based on how well you were doing, so you would always have just enough to get by.  I think this is a lot more subtle and better for the game experience since the enemies themselves would stay the same, so the game never felt like it was getting easier or harder.

You have this in D&D as well. One school of thought is that the DM should fudge rolls to avoid killing player characters outright. That way, you can maintain an apparent level of danger, and that's entertaining. However, if the players know they're being protected, the illusion of danger disappears and they'll become bored.

Geothermal said once that it's important for gameplay to be skill-based. If you win, it should be that you did it, not the game. Players enjoy feeling that their actions have meaning, and that their inputs are significant deciders of the outcome.

[Shinra]

I think we, as a society, have lost sight of something in the last ten years, not just in gaming, but in life in general. We are in an age right now where instant reward is the norm. We work for virtually nothing. And apparently, judging by the comments of some of you in this thread, and the original article that started this discussion, this applies to some of you.

I challenge everyone in this thread to go back and play a classic that we all love - Bubble Bobble. Go ahead. Limit yourself to 0 continues and the base amount of lives. Tell me how far you get.

"But Shinra!" you proclaim. "I LOVED bubble bobble! How come this is so hard? Why did I love something this cruel?"

Because greater challenges lead to greater senses of accomplishment.

When you take challenge out of the game, you take accomplishment out of the game. The game stops being satisfying. The harder you work, the greater the reward. That's how challenging games work. They don't need to be changed or made more accessible. I suppose someone like the article writer, who gets by on a relatively fun job and likely has plenty of time to burn through games can afford to have their sense of accomplishment traded off for more short term happiness, but I get to beat maybe one game a month. If I'm going to ration myself off to one game a month, I want that game to be something challenging that gives me a nice, lingering feeling of accomplishment. And if people who are 'too casual' to enjoy that challenge don't like how hard their games are, maybe they should try games more suitable to their desired playstyle? Popcap makes plenty of amazing, pick up and play, easy and approachable, little challenge involved, instant reward style games. There's no shame in enjoying them.

[Mongrel]

We've had the Undo feature for decades, it's called a save function

 

That was pretty much my reaction.

Anyway, I could give a fuck about some perceived problem with the difficulty of games. Relative difficulty of individual games is easy enough to tweak and we are a long long way from the nightmare difficulties of the late 80's.

In my mind the real issue is that we're still stuck in the broad genres defined by a few seminal games in the early 90's (or in the case of RPGs, the early 70's). What'd be nice would be to see some evolution in gameplay beyond the superficial.