I personally enjoy games for characters & stories. I don't need to "fight the game" for a sense of accomplishment. Not sure why that's "worse" than playing games that are hard to master. I played hard games in the past. I don't feel a sense of accomplishment. I feel like a wasted an hour learning an entirely useless skill.
It's fine to like a certain kind of game. There are plenty of games that are hard and if you want to play them - good for you! But it feels kind of weird to say that the quality of a game is relative to how frustrating it is to play. Games are a form of entertainment after all.
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 had to read your comment a few times because while you seem to be arguing that Easy can dilute a game's experience and ruin it for a player, your analogy appears to make the exact opposite point.
You describe a frustrating experience in which you had to work very hard to experience the content, and as a result you didn't care much for it, and posit another experience in which the content is far more accessible and the experience is shared with a wide audience, and assume you'd enjoy this better. I'm with you that far.
And then - if I'm reading correctly - you suggest that the frustrating experience is Easy Mode, and the accessible one is Hard Mode? This is where you lose me.
If I'm trying to play a game I've heard good things about, my experience can certainly be soured by a high level of frustration. And I'd probably like a game more if I can share the experience with other people who like it. To me, these are both arguments in favor of Easy Mode.
Wrong on both counts: A game should have a difficulty curve that guides the player through the course of the game, but presents them with enjoyable challenges that they must escalate their skill to as they progress.
It's no good having a game that's too easy, because then it is boring. Conversely, if the game is too hard with no way to provide the player feedback necessary for them to improve their capacity, then there is no purpose in playing.
When Jeff is talking about games that are easy or games that are hard that are still satisfying, he's referring to the fact that both types of games provide adequate feedback to the player. The easy games that are good will still quickly defeat the player if he does not interact in an appropriate and effective manner even though the player still knows exactly how to engage in those interactions. A hard game that is good is fair about its difficulty and the skill challenges provide the player a way to attune their play to the required interaction with coherent and consistent feedback.
When faced with a challenge, you want to figure out as much as you reasonably can, and then learn what you were missing.
Struggling at the same problem for several sessons, or god forbid years, sounds like misery to me. I'd rather use that time productively learning, rather than struggling for the sake of it, because I refuse to learn from others.
I disagree with the notion that because life is hard video games should be easy. I think lots of people vent frustrations through video games, and get a sense of accomplishment when they do hard things. It's one hard thing in life you can get really good at. And it doesn't mean the game has to attack you. The game Fez comes to mind. Nothing in the game can harm you, but there are tough puzzles.
I guess the thing is it's not fun either. I like games like Half-life 2, on easy mode. It's fun and a challenge, but doesn't become annoying such that I can't enjoy the story.
The best games are simple to play, hard to master.
Not sure how I feel about this statement. Such games are certainly excellent examples of what a game is. Chess is a classic example. But I derive quite a lot of enjoyment from more complicated games that are also hard to master.
Your statements could be totally reasonable. Difficulty in a game can be good or bad, it all depends on why and how it's difficult. If that tough level is hard because it's well designed as an interesting challenge and you can get past it with practice and thought and it remains interesting while you do that, it's good design. If that tough level is hard because it's unpredictable and requires excessive luck to get past and forces you to go through lots of tedious replays when you fail, it's bad design.
I have no idea which category this falls into, just pointing out that your examples can be legitimate.
1. Old games had to be hard because if they weren't, they would be too short. People would finish them straight away and exclaim "wait... that's it?".
2. The point of playing games isn't always to "win" or "lose". Sometimes the point is just to have an experience. To roleplay, to see a story unfold, etc.. Then a ruthless difficulty can get in the way of that experience. Or it might not - but the point is that difficulty and achievement aren't always the biggest points. At least not to me.
3. A lot of hard games are hard in a lame or lazy way. Or just in a "fake" way[1]. Games should be hard in a way that forces you to be more cunning, agile, faster and smarter. Not just blindly double the HP of all enemies, or make progress depend on an obscure secret which can not be guessed from the game, forcing you to buy some gaming magazine in order to progress further in the game.
IMO Not everyone has the skills, patience, time, or will to battle artificially hard games but should still be allowed to participate and enjoy the games. The ability for anyone to enjoy them is what makes computer games really great.
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I really enjoyed both Horizon games (Zero dawn and forbidden west) mainly due to their "story mode" difficulty.
The game heavily depends on being able to finely aim using a controller, which I really really suck at and I honestly no longer have the time or patience to master the skill, or grind/cheese my way to better gear that makes up for my lack of skill.
I started the first game on normal diff, and finished it on story mode most cause I enjoyed the story and various encounters.
When the game was out on PC I replayed it on very hard and even tried ultra (was an epic fail) as my overall skills with a keyboard and mouse are much better and enjoy the experience more.
I'm now going through the second game still switching between normal and easy mode whenever I can't be bothered with a 30 minute long fight (remember, I still suck) that I can't be bothered replaying.
I really appreciated that the developers allowed me to play their game in a pace and time that I was able to.
Indeed. I think this has a lot to do with 'fluff'. More modern games have a lot of fluff to make the difficulty increase less abrupt and, of course, because we demand it.
There are a few games, even relatively new ones, that don't have much 'fluff'. They're often considered very difficult, but because they're so lean and well-designed, they don't generally feel unfair.
These games remind me of what I used to play growing up, and they often offer much more satisfaction in a shorter time-span.
A good, new-ish example of this is Ninja Gaiden for the Xbox, which at times feels overwhelmingly difficult, and yet after playing for a while you notice improvement. It rarely feels truly unfair, and I find it more enjoyable than 'fluffier' games.
Other examples would be games like Ikaruga, F-Zero.
Game companies made difficult games historically. Some subset of gamers were unable or uninterested in completing them. Consequently, subsequent game companies made easier games that catered to those players.
The bone of contention I have is that the easier games pretend to be difficult games. See: COD's relentless "be a badass in cinematics" style. Which if you think about it, makes sense, as all players want to imagine they're surmounting a challenge.
But the real toxicity is that players themselves aren't clear on whether they're playing a difficult or easy game, because the latter game is lying about and obscuring its nature.
I think the article is oversimplifying the issue, but it's still an important and relevant view that a lot of gamers don't want to believe. Most people don't play games for the challenge, we play it for the fun. Overcoming obstacles is one way, of several, to achieve this.
Ninja Gaiden is fine. It's a good game. It's hard, but it's not hard just for hardness' sake, it's not a jackass about it (usually). Ninja Gaiden was the best example I've seen of a game that makes the player rise to the challenge and become better at the game. There are a lot of games I've seen that are simply cheap and frustrating, losing sight of the 'fun & games' aspect of gaming just to raise the difficulty bar. These games shoot themselves in the foot by severely restricting their appeal. For example, the Medal of Honor series never interested me because too often, it uses the 'challenge' of making the player memorize with millimeter-precision a route through the level, with no way to find the path without getting shot in the face a statistically significant number of times.
However, the issue isn't really about how hard or easy the game is. The issue is appealing to different audiences. How do you appeal to the hardcore and casual audiences at the same time? One way is by offering difficulty levels (another is auto-adjusting the difficulty, like Max Payne), although some absurd fraction of people just choose "medium" and be done with it. Another way is having a more continuous range of success available, with different difficulties. This is why achievement systems are such a good idea. They let the user cherry-pick how much challenge they want to deal with, as well as when and which types.
This is not to say that hardcore tough-as-nail games shouldn't exist. They have a right to exist. However, they should be made with the awareness that they're niche products, and that the majority of the game-buying public (now that the majority of the public buys games) is looking for some entertainment and not a lifestyle.
There's also a lot that can be done to make difficult games more palatable, and even appealing. As as said above, Ninja Gaiden does a good job of making the player better at the game. Giving the appearance of progress is important, even if the player is nominally failing, they'll feel better if they're getting closer to succeeding. The most important quality is simply the appearance of fairness, which varies wildly and is totally subjective. Quite simply, if the player blames the game for being hard he'll quit, but if he thinks do better and beat it he'll most likely continue.
A lot of the “brutally hard” games were just bad with crude RNG that created unavoidable or not predictable behaviors though. Most games that are regarded as good were pretty more reasonable.
Modern games want to give you progress at every step, but the reward for high skill tends to be much higher and there are more extreme difficulties.
Games aren't necessarily improved by smoothing out the frustrations. Part of the point is to be challenged, and to have sections which are difficult, and produce anxiety. The joy comes from finding out how to overcome those sections.
Additionally, because everyone will have different trouble spots, a game which has smoothed out the frustrations for the greatest number of people is really a game which doesn't provide much challenge. The worst culprits here would be the games of the mid-2000s, with their heavy cinematics, and extremely low difficulty. Conversely, these games fare worse over time than something like classic Doom: the gameplay was never there in the first place, and the graphics only wowed people 1.5 decades ago.
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.
It depends on the person(like I was different in the past), but today I don't get satisfied by what developers think is challenging. For example in Skyrim I make my own challenges - for example the lockpincking mini game after you played the game a few times is just a waste of my time so I mod it out, I gave up on Neverwinter Nights 2 because of the combat grind, I loved the story but I was not into the min-maxing of characters and fighting same spiders over and over again in a cave and I could not find a "killall" cheat at that time.
I played a lot of Minecraft(though I stopped 2 years ago) , exploring and mining in that game while listening to a audio book is so relaxing, it does not feel as a grind and if you want to build or decorate you pop into creative and do it.
But some frustrating stuff are quests that lock you out from the main story, like in GTA4 was a quest where you had to be super fast on a bike and I was terrible at it, so you have to repeat same shit over and over again or give up (later in GTA V , they let you skip sections if you fail 3 times)
I strongly feel the opposite. The difficulty is what makes you spend time with the game, and truly appreciate each bit of progress you make. Without the suffering, you can't truly appreciate what you find around the next corner.
It's fine to like a certain kind of game. There are plenty of games that are hard and if you want to play them - good for you! But it feels kind of weird to say that the quality of a game is relative to how frustrating it is to play. Games are a form of entertainment after all.
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