multiplayer substitution for difficulty?

BlitzKrieg

I havnt done a game theory discussion since my initial dual narrative one a few months back.

So today lets talk about game difficulty, how difficulty should a game be and when is it too difficult or too easy. Also its change over the years as gaming has advanced.

One thing everybody seems to say is that games just seem to get easier and easier every year.


An obvious conclusion to that is with the limitations over the years, games needed high difficulty to keep players playing, sort of to milk the value from the game piece by piece and as does limitations have been culled back the difficulty has been toned down.

Multiplayer is clearly one of those culled limitations that has led to an easier game. Why make single player difficult when someone else can make multiplayer difficult for you. Problem is of course people would rarely factor in multiplayer when rating a games difficulty. But a single player game as a whole can feel like a tutorial for the ass whooping you are about to recieve online.

Something else to consider maybe is also the more extensive bug testing and standard of games, some of those 8 bit monstrosities that people complain about are sometimes difficult because of poor hit detection or other similar minor bugs which at the time, young gamers would not have known about and assumed it was part of the game.

Obviously not every title. But today it is an issue that is spotted and not fubbed away as a possible feature but seen for what it really is...a bug. an annoying painful bug.


So Game Difficulty

discuss?

Rev Hellfire

Perhaps another reason for the lowering of difficultly in new games is the wider audience. The days of games been aimed at the hardcore gamer audience are long gone, its no longer a niche passtime.

The lowering of difficultly I suspect is to make the games more accessible to the greater public, people don't want to play games they feel they can't beat. And the majority are casual players which is reflected in their skill level, the games are simply now tailored to accommodate this.

Welcome to the mainstream boys

rizzla

Another reason why games were much more difficult back in the day was because they were arcade ports, mainly designed so they would keep getting you to pump in the coinage.

I heard Demon Soul's is a very tough game but not cheap. Were as when I went through Star Wars The Force Unleashed on the hardest difficulty setting all that was done was to give the enemies more life, stronger attacks and you couldn't break their combos but they could break yours and they could also hit you while you were down.

As for multiplayer being difficult it's all relative to the community involved and the careful balancing act of the classes involved. It's all about balance in multiplayer not difficulty.

BlitzKrieg

As for multiplayer being difficulty it's all relative to the community involved and the careful balancing act of the classes involved. It's all about balance in multiplayer not difficulty.

I didnt mean multiplayer is designed to be difficult, its just it is naturally going to be alot harder to beat most human players then an AI.

jonny72

Many big budget games are designed to be more of an experience than a game in the typical sense.

I think Doom was the turning point, it was progressively harder, but people were enjoying the feel and experience of it more than the challenge involved - after that half-life came out and really paved the way

L31mr0d

I think the difficulty of a game is relative to the individual though. Games haven't gotten easier, we have just become more used to them and we know the rules now.

Lets take a simple example. Sonic, I can clear all the original games in a few hours without dropping a life and I don't even need to try. When I was a kid those games gave me weeks of entertainment as I would die, lose my continues and then have to start from the beginning again.

Now, relatively speaking, Sonic could be seen as a hard game. Imagine if games forced you to begin right from the start again if you lost all of your lives, nowadays it's unheard of. But, comparatively, it isn't a difficult game, once you know the rules and follow them. The same is true of all games, once you learn the rules, the game becomes proportionally easier (don't crouch behind red barrels... etc)

The issue in regards to MP and competing against humans is that there are no rules. Take Demon Souls for example, there is one boss that, if you are connected to online, will usually get controlled by another person who is playing the game at the same time as you. Now, in comparison to the other bosses he is quite weak, but, as a human, he has no pattern, you can't watch him, learn his weakness and exploit it. The human character knows about the boss, knows his weaknesses and protects against it.

Another example of not following the rules, in the arena that you fight him in it is littered with chairs, which, while fighting, you use to put between you and the boss to block his approach. Upon fighting a human character, he proceeded to pre-emptively destroy all the chairs before I entered the room to remove this option. In the context of the story it made no sense for this character to be going around destroying his own chairs, but in the context of the in game competition it did. A human is not bound to any characteristics and is infinitely more complex to predict than an AI character.

tl:dr version: It doesn't matter how difficult the game may initially seem, because, as it is bound by a set number of rules eventually it will become predictable and seem inconsequentially easy in comparison to a human player.

sarumite

Back in the day, I used to get two games a year. One at christmas and one for my Birthday. As such, I needed about at least 6 month offline life out of the game, perhaps even longer.

Today its much different, AAA games are far more common so the life of a game does not need to be that long. If you reach a difficult bit you may decide to simply take the disc out and pop in a different game, whereas before there may not have been a different game to play. This is also true of other media, not just gaming....people constantly complain about the dumbing down on society in general and maybe making games easier is just another example of that.

I also think games today focus a lot more on the narrative than before. Therefore the emphasis is on the experience rather than the functional aspects or difficulty of a game. A game such as Uncharted 2 is less about getting from A to B like a Mario or sonic game and more about the journey. When I think of games in the past that had a narrative (Zelda, Link awakening springs to mind) they were no as hard as games without narrative (Mega man for example)

quarryman

I completed Assasin's Creed the other night. It was piss easy. But i'm pretty quite glad it was. At no point did i get frustrated and i was able to enjoy the brilliant mechanics of the game, jumping across rooftops etc.

However I completed Halo 3 on Legendary Solo a few months back and despite being extremely difficult and taking a number of weeks i enjoyed it immensely. I never felt the game cheated me, i just needed to get better.

Depend on the game, depends on the person.

Vegeta

L31mr0d wrote: »

tl:dr version: It doesn't matter how difficult the game may initially seem, because, as it is bound by a set number of rules eventually it will become predictable and seem inconsequentially easy in comparison to a human player.

I don't think that is a universal truth.

Some games will always require above average hand eye co-ordination and timing to make them easy.

L31mr0d

Vegeta wrote: »

Some games will always require above average hand eye co-ordination and timing to make them easy.

Well, that is my point really. Just because an adaptation to the rules of the game is above average does not mean that the rules can't be learnt and followed.

Yes it is not objectively true, nothing is tbh. Playing a 3 year old in Counter Strike is going to be easier than playing the AI in a Japanese bullet curtain shmup.

My point is that, for the majority, regardless of how difficult the game is, if replace the in game ruleset with the random nature of another human the game can become infinitely more complex.

All games are bound by a limited set of rules that, given enough time, can be learned. No matter how much you play against other humans you will never be able to account for every variable. The best pro MP gamers in any genre tend to exhibit an ability to read humans as well as the game itself.

Diago, one of, it not the best Street Fighter players has confirmed this, that a large part of his game is finding the human weakness in his opponents strategy then exploiting it.

Vegeta

Sorry I kind of blanked out the "in comparison to a human player" bit of the last line of your post.

Yeah I agree completely with that

What I thought you were saying was that any game no matter how difficult would become easy when you knew the rules (Mega Man 9 anyone). Which is a completely different thing altogether, never mind me. I'm a little slow today

Jazzy

better and bigger enemies are whats need in singleplayer games. you can wrench yourself through bioshock without any problems. i remember i only found out what the flamethrower looked like on the last boss because it was the only time i "needed it" and i just wanted to see what it looked like. but yeah, you can wrench the last boss to death..... the last boss

checkpoints also make things really easy, and hiding to recover health... the f**k is that about? sitting in a corner for 30 seconds (if even) and you'll be back in ship shape. there is never a real sense of worry when you play games anymore, its all just an eventuality. you will eventually get through if you keep trying with minimal effort and by "keep trying" i mean about 3-4 times. poison ivy in batman is a good example of a late boss being absolutely p1ss easy... even if you do die you start right f**king there again. no challenge, atmosphere or sense of dread. no real depth.

and then with multiplayer its all about call of duty and halo... which have auto-aim on the consoles and seem like mutli-ball fun football matches in which the 'craziestest' things just might happen and half the game becomes random luck instead of skill defined differentiation. so yes, games are stupidly easy nowadays and games like ninja gaiden become a phenomenon because its a case of "its actually hard". go back and play kid icarus on the nes then whine about difficulty.. or gutsmans stage in megaman 1, cheap c**t of a level

pablomakaveli

I definitely think games have gotten easier but with the improvement in stroylines and narratives i think it's better that way. I want to see what happens next and if it's too hard i don't get that oppurtunity.

I often find i'll play through a new game on an easier setting so i can see out the story. Then when replaying the game i'll up the difficulty to enjoy more of a challenge. As i already know what happens next on the stroyline i won't be so frutrated if i get to a really difficult point in the game.

I think variable difficulty in games is a must as it lets the player decide how much of a challenge they want.

noodler

I think it is true although I would blame the increased frequency of savepoints as much as actual difficulty.

There is a bunch of games I wish I had played on a harder difficulty recently:

Metal Gear Solid 4, Bioshock (which I am still playing), Uncharted 1.

Some don't even have such settings which I like tbh, most RPGs for example such as Fallout 3 or Jeanne D'arc. Valkyria Chronicles didn't have a hard mode until the DLC came along and was challenging enough on normal.

Strangely, of the three 'easy' games I listed above, only one of them had a multiplayer and of all the criticisms I would lay at MGS4 one of them would not be that the single-player suffered because of the multiplayer.

All in all I should play more games in hard from the bat but you have so many games to play these days that sometimes you can be pissed off being stuck at on particular boss etc for hours when you could be starting a brand new game.

EDIT: Did Kingdom Hearts 2 have a 'hard' mode? If so I wish I had played that game in Hard.