Quite often there will be games I love, but life gets in the way. Then when you try to go back, especially at higher levels, it's very difficult to get in the pacing/difficulty level so you just don't pick it back up. Even though it's a great game and you enjoy it.
I love hard games, but there's a very fine line between hard and frustrating and pulling it off is difficult. For one, if I'm playing well and don't make many mistakes (how many depends on how far in I am - if I'm almost at the end, zero mistakes may be tolerable or even a good thing), then I expect to advance. For example, if I play really well and then lose because of an unforeseeable event, that's not "hard" - that's just frustrating. It's also closely tied in with fairness. If a game is only hard because the AI cheats (perfect aim, always knows where you are, always outnumbers you, infinite resources, whatever) then that is probably not going to be fun. It can be, depending on the game (eg infinite amounts of enemies are a fun challenge in one game but frustratingly unfair in another), but again, this is difficult to pull off. Repetitive stuff is rarely fun, no matter how hard or easy it is.
What makes hard games fun is the sense of accomplishment when you finally outwit or outplay the game. A constant sense of impending failure is a good thing. Failure is also not a bad thing, as long as you can learn from it and do ever so slightly better next time. Constant failure is not a good thing as it quickly leads to frustration. Anything out of your control is also a bad thing and leads to frustration (example: if I died because I made a mistake, that's fine. If I died because I didn't do exactly what the designer wanted and there's no other way to do it, that's probably not fine, unless it was obvious what I should do). Some games also expect you to die a lot, but dying isn't particularly painful, so its not all that frustrating (ie in VVVVV).
Finally, gamers often (maybe even "usually") make terrible designers, so unless you have proven yourself, designing a fiendishly hard game is going to be a pretty big gamble.
I’ve tried this with a few games, most notably perhaps Persona 3.
The problem is that I’m rarely playing just for the story and I end up feeling like I’m constantly managing the difficulty level. I want the game to lead me on a journey, with the right amount of challenge predetermined for me.
Off the top of my head, Bioshock: at lower difficulties, I found it easy to run through the game guns blazing; at higher difficulties you need to use your skills and the environment to your advantage. When 3 head shots are unviable or a drag, have you tried setting the enemies up the bomb?
Another example is Dungeon Defenders, where strategies differ dramatically (as in almost 100%) in the later stages of the game -- which in this case just means same levels, stronger enemies. Baldur's Gate (2, particularly) also was much deeper when it was difficult, forcing you to think more tactically to win fights. The list goes on and on.
Going back to the beginning isn't necessarily a frustrating experience though. It depends on other factors such as how far back you go and how frequently it happens. I personally don't find Crash frustrating or particularly hard.
If you don't play platformers (I do), then perhaps it would be frustrating for you. But.. yes, games have become more accessible than they were in the 90's when Crash was created.
Some old games only had 50 or 100 levels and were intended for repeat play. So the developers made some games super hard so that people could get many hours of play out of them.
Yeah. As a kid who spent a lot of time playing games but just wasn't very good at them, I'd pore manuals to look at levels that I knew I'd never reach, and not for lack of trying. I was amazed the first time I played a single player game on the PC (forgot what) and was actually able to see the end! Unless you're into speedrunning, playing the same levels over and over just isn't fun. It's frustrating
I'm jealous. Every time I try a game, I totally suck at it. Even the easy difficulty is not easy enough anymore. Nowadays, I only enjoy puzzle games if anything at all.
I've found all the games to have high replay value for the same reason. It doesn't really matter how hard the game is because there are plenty of challenges beyond just passing the level.
More rare, is finding folks that can honestly admit to having beaten it. I picked up the "game and watch" recently, and I can't remember crap about how to make progress in that game. It is really really hard to remember where to go next.
Granted, the first game is bad at that, too. Especially on the second play through. Really difficult to have the same map be different in that way. Still have fun playing it, years later. :D
I honestly had a lot of trouble getting through games like Sonic 2. If you were to play Sonic 2 end-to-end its probably 3-4 hours. But the reality is getting through it all was challenging. It wasn't 40 hours of puzzles, nono.
This is not to say that that is the right way to make a game, but it was to say that playing it was a challenge for young me. Today the only games I find challenging is PvP games, but often times I don't want the other parts of the challenge like the actual people part. This is why some games like Demon's Souls (the first time I ever saw a castle in the distance that I could literally walk up to and smash through, was an awe moment) still stick in my mind.
I wonder if part of the problem is the attitude that games are there to be "beaten". That the aim is to beat it, and then you're done.
If games were seen as something to be played and explored rather than beaten, perhaps people would approach them differently and get a lot more out of them, even if they'd already completed a playthrough.
For a game to be fun, it needs to give the player a sense that they are progressing ... getting a higher score, advancing to a higher level, seeing the next bit of the map, whatever. To play a game and score more than last time is success, even if your character ultimately fails by "dying". That reward is why we keep playing; if a game didn't give you the impression that you were getting further you'd feel like you're failing and soon give up. If you turned the score counter off in Tetris no one would play it for very long.
I’m the same. I love the look of it all but I can barely manage to make progress in something like Hollow Knight never mind Souls games.
With work and family and ageing I don’t have the time, patience or reflexes for this type of game unfortunately.
I really enjoyed Jedi Fallen Order, which is ostensibly a Souls type game. I managed most of the game on regular difficulty before one boss bested me and I was able to drop to easy difficulty.
I get that the desolation and feeling of hopelessness against insurmountable odds (and finally overcoming) is part of the gameplay loop. I just can’t do it.
It depends. For example, you couldn't play the game all the way through in easy mode in Doom. You had to play it in a harder difficulty to get to the third area. This was motivation for me to replay the game at harder difficulties.
They're both hard for the same reason (to me anyway).
The pain point in both classic games and fromsoft games for me is the amount of time it takes to try something again. The feedback loop is often so long that I get annoyed with how long it takes to even ATTEMPT the part that tripped me up again.
Say I'm struggling with a particular screen in megaman, and say that screen is maybe the 10th screen in a level. I get to that screen, I die, I start back on screen 1. I now have to go through all 10 screens again just to try the part I'm stuck on. And then after a few tries I progress to screen 11 and I die. I'm back on screen one again and the cycle continues.
Yes, this results in me getting really good at every part before then, and it can look visually impressive once I know the whole map because I have the whole thing memorized at some point, but that takes a lot of time and I just don't play games like I used to. I have the same issues with fromsoft games, but it's actually better for me with classic games, because they usually have the kindness to put a checkpoint right before the level boss. But dark souls rarely puts a bonfire within spitting distance of a boss.
I didn't mind when I was younger, which is why I can 1cc Castlevania and Sonic 3, but it's just not something I'm willing to put the time into these days. And that's fine, I don't think they should make the games easier or anything, it just means I'm probably not going to play them.
Edit: This is also why I don't really play competitive multiplayer games anymore. I may have the time to put in to get good enough to have fun, but I'm not willing to commit it to getting good.
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