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[Silas Vitalia]

I'll agree that I'm not interested in 'trial and error' punishing difficulty either, unless it might be a sort of memorization-puzzle in an adventure game or something.

Dark Souls was ridiculous just for the sake of being ridiculous, super not interested.


It's hard for developers though as there is such a huge margin of skill sets. 

Like you ever watch somebody play IKARUGA online and not even have to shoot anyone and finish the whole game?  That's not me, but for that person the game is probably just fine.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mt6fZBjqE9w

[Lyn Farel]

A friend of mine has a young son (about 11), I had a very interesting conversation with him and his friend a few weeks ago about video games.

It came up that he had gotten a hold of some very old NES games online (the kind I was playing at his age).  I asked him if he thought those old games were more difficult than the ones he plays now, and the resounding answer from both of them was that they were extremely difficult and unforgiving.

I think when you only had enough memory for 9 or 10 levels with most of the same sprites you had no choice but to make it incredibly difficult, or you'd finish the game in 20 minutes.  So you get genre standards like 3 lives, 3 continues and then forced restart.  The japanese games tended to abuse this more than the US ones, and punishing the player and making them run through a grueling amount of grinding gameplay design aesthetic would continue for years with Japanese games.  Think of all the old Resident Evil or very early Final Fantasy games.  Of course ones sense of accomplishment was fantastic when you actually made it through them, like you really achieved something impossible.

That being said it has been super interesting seeing the other side of game design philosophy that more of the USA designers pushed.  Look at the old LucasArts games, where it was literally impossible to die, and there were no 'lose' conditions - you just got to solve puzzles and have a fun adventure with no fear of walking off a cliff (looking at you, Space Quest).

Anyway I guess it's a mixed bag today, but I do like a lot of the variety.  $40 million production games that take 3 or 4 hours to finish and are basically just a series of cut scenes and scripted action (Call of Duty and clones), and then you get grueling punishment like Dark Souls.

On the whole I think most mainstream games are stupidly easy and take little effort and hold your hands the entire way though, though.

I disagree with FF games, except maybe if you speak about the 3 first ones I haven't played... But FF has always been known for its very casual, laid back difficulty. I mean, look at FF4 for instance. It's almost on rails.

I also beg you to try playing Lucasart space sims again, especially the first iterations, and we will talk again how it was "impossible" to die. Impossible to finish you mean 

For some of their other games, probably yes, of course, though.

[Silas Vitalia]

A friend of mine has a young son (about 11), I had a very interesting conversation with him and his friend a few weeks ago about video games.

It came up that he had gotten a hold of some very old NES games online (the kind I was playing at his age).  I asked him if he thought those old games were more difficult than the ones he plays now, and the resounding answer from both of them was that they were extremely difficult and unforgiving.

I think when you only had enough memory for 9 or 10 levels with most of the same sprites you had no choice but to make it incredibly difficult, or you'd finish the game in 20 minutes.  So you get genre standards like 3 lives, 3 continues and then forced restart.  The japanese games tended to abuse this more than the US ones, and punishing the player and making them run through a grueling amount of grinding gameplay design aesthetic would continue for years with Japanese games.  Think of all the old Resident Evil or very early Final Fantasy games.  Of course ones sense of accomplishment was fantastic when you actually made it through them, like you really achieved something impossible.

That being said it has been super interesting seeing the other side of game design philosophy that more of the USA designers pushed.  Look at the old LucasArts games, where it was literally impossible to die, and there were no 'lose' conditions - you just got to solve puzzles and have a fun adventure with no fear of walking off a cliff (looking at you, Space Quest).

Anyway I guess it's a mixed bag today, but I do like a lot of the variety.  $40 million production games that take 3 or 4 hours to finish and are basically just a series of cut scenes and scripted action (Call of Duty and clones), and then you get grueling punishment like Dark Souls.

On the whole I think most mainstream games are stupidly easy and take little effort and hold your hands the entire way though, though.

I disagree with FF games, except maybe if you speak about the 3 first ones I haven't played... But FF has always been known for its very casual, laid back difficulty. I mean, look at FF4 for instance. It's almost on rails.

I also beg you to try playing Lucasart space sims again, especially the first iterations, and we will talk again how it was "impossible" to die. Impossible to finish you mean 

For some of their other games, probably yes, of course, though.

Sorry, I meant specifically the LucasArts 'adventure' games like Monkey Island and Maniac Mansion, they had an expressed 'no dying' rule.   X-Wing, Tie Figher yes dying everywhere.

Funny you should mention that I was exactly talking about the first three FF games.

The first one: No mana, you get extremely limited charges for spells.  If you tell someone to attack a monster and it dies before their turn, wasted attack.  You have to buy all your magic.   Extremely difficult monsters who will kill you with impunity.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1QacOrCLlZg

Basically I think it was the 'dark souls' of 1990.  At least until BattleToads came out.

[Lyn Farel]

Ah I see !

[Kala]

Think of all the old Resident Evil or very early Final Fantasy games. 

Or go back even earlier, Dizzy on the Spectrum.  Aside from having to find out what item does what through a series of basically riddles (or sometimes just knowing enough folk tales) there's a bunch of timing/skills based challenges that will kill you.  I remember magic land had this GOD AWFUL bit near the beginning, where there is a shark fin continually moving on the water.  you need to jump on the shark fin.  but you can't stay on it, you roll off (you are an egg) and drown. so you need to jump and land on it as it's moving again, until you get to the other side.

and it wouldn't be so bad, if once you'd done it, that was it.  but you may need to pick up an item from several screens in one direction, and then go BACK AND FORTH with them, so you might end up jumping that fucking shark several times.  Or lily pads with a similar premise (stay on them too long, they go under the water, you drown).  god dammit. even thinking about that is making me angry (though I loved the game).

and it's really fucking *long* content wise - with no saves.  NO SAVES.

I guess because the arcade ethos originally was much like those seaside machines, where you put money in to control a claw getting a toy bear, or one of the shelves where the money might push some money off.  the point is to rob you of your money so you fail and keep putting money in each time.

Maybe that idea was still in there somewhere in the shift between arcade machines and home gaming.
And isn't now 

On the whole I think most mainstream games are stupidly easy and take little effort and hold your hands the entire way though, though.

Agreed, and I'm not sure how I feel about it.
I suppose I want a specific kind of difficulty.
I don't neccesarily want stupid pointless obstacles, or something that's going to frustrate me, that I have to practice over and over again to get past.
but I do want a sense of accomplishment or discovery or risk or whatever. I want to know the game could KERB STAMP ME and I need to be prepared for that eventuality and be on that edge-of-seat knife-edge.
That's why I love a sense of randomness so much, I guess.  Because it's not putting in things that will frustrate me, but I know the game could throw me a curve ball for a real sense of risk...  Such as a daedra lord at lvl 2 or a very large UFO landing near the beginning of the game...
Knowing the game is going to play fair (or adhere to my expectations) undermines that slightly, somehow.

I usually seriously dislike procedural games and open sandboxes for solo play. I just find them extremely boring and not appealing most of the time. I mean, past 5 min i'm already losing grip on those games...

But to the contrary, I love that for multiplayer ! MMOs, especially, when you are not there for the story but for the story you create with other people, and the sandbox you play in with other people. Without those, I just find it boring...

You've talked before about that (at least, I think it was you) and I think you were saying it was due to your inclination to have to try and find everything that was hidden, all the secrets etc, so you couldn't actually enjoy it?  I can't remember if you said that the world felt empty as well without others, but that's a common complaint too.

I, on the other hand, love them :p well, depending.  and I love linear games too, again, depending. for different reasons.

(though MMOs I feel particularly and especially jaded about as my expectations were so high for the reasons you state and the early promise of games like UO and EVE )

Options are always good, period. I certainly recognize that some people want to play the hardest difficulties to add challenge and such to their experience, but some people do not. I shift between the two constantly, depending on the game I play and what I want out of it. Hearing the internet catch fire then get doused immediately in tearful whines when someone suggested difficulty levels in Dark Souls blew my mind, as apparently this would somehow change the gameplay experience of those who prefer the high difficulty. WHY?! Fuck you! You can still play the game exactly how you want to! Having the option changes nothing except adding a wider range of players to the game.

Intentionally frustrating games are not for me. I have grown way too old and spent way too much time playing games to waste my time on such things anymore. Give me a challenge, fine. Just let me decide whether I want the actual challenge or if I want the progression of the story and so on and let others decide if they prefer the frustration.

Interesting! (...I know I'm using that word too much, I'm becoming a parody of myself  )
I guess if you were able to define enough of your own parameters, you'd be creating your own experience, in a sense.

Actually, IIRC, that's sort of what Jennifer Hepler once suggested.  That if people were just interested in the story they could have the option to skip through the combat if they found a boss fight too difficult or just found it boring or w/e. I think that suggestion was met with outrage

As for me, I don't actually know if I'd want that entirely.  I like being able to define certain parameters - e.g in Civ or something...
But even if games where you can change the difficulty setting mid-game, I tend to just leave it at whatever default setting.  It feels a bit like cheating, somehow.

But I'd worry if I was given the option to adjust too much, I'd take it, but not enjoy it - it would somehow cheapen the experience  (a bit like things like quick travel; I could always choose not to do it, but I don't because it's convenient, yet it feels cheap).

I guess because sometimes what I think I want and what I actually want aren't the same.

I disagree with FF games, except maybe if you speak about the 3 first ones I haven't played... But FF has always been known for its very casual, laid back difficulty. I mean, look at FF4 for instance. It's almost on rails.

Funny you should mention that I was exactly talking about the first three FF games.

Like Lyn, I think I've only really played the later ones (I started at 7, and then backtracked with some earlier retro ones rereleased on the DS) so I'm only qualified to talk about those.

And yeah, they're easy and on rails (though often give you the illusionyou aren't by allowing you to travel a world map freely, until you get to X).

I got Wan to play an FF game because, well, I like them    He wrote six blog posts detailing how much he hated it -.-;

To him (the later) FF games are the antithesis of everything he likes about gaming, or what he thinks gaming should be.  Unskippable cutscenes where you don't do anything.  Dialogue-heavy.  Combat that you can get through just by holding a button down.  Pretty much an interactive movie.

And put like that, in theory, I can see his points. 

But I came from a different position, in that I used to play a lot of jrpgs on my master system, megadrive and PS1. And with many of them, you could probably complete all the actual story content in very little time at all, so they've stuffed in a load of puzzles to stymie your progression and draw it out.  Something like Alundra, for example. But omfg I hate puzzles SO MUCH. Anything with pillars, moving platforms, levers etc needs to just DIAF. (and X is a bit guilty of this too with those FUCKING TEMPLES, but nowadays you can just consult a handy walkthrough ¬.¬ and they aren't every 5 seconds) 

So when FF7 came out and had THREE DISKS THAT WAS BASICALLY ALL STORY CONTENT TO PLAY THROUGH and either no or very few STUPID PUZZLES TO HALT YOUR PROGRESS THROUGH SAID STORY and bosses that if you were really stuck, you could just GRIND A BIT UNTIL YOU BEAT THEM... well.  I felt disproportionately grateful. Because to make the game last as long as it should, they stripped out the irritating puzzles and replaced it with more story.  Like I wanted.

[Lyn Farel]

On difficulty progression curve :



I don't remember who wrote about that theory and graph first (i'm such a bad student forgetting all about his classes), though the idea is there : you give the player a few first and basic tools to make him adapt and understand the game, to start and feel he is actually getting somewhere, and when he starts eventually to believe it's too easy, you increase the difficulty in the next levels, with more tools, more complexity, and challenging enemies that he was not prepared to fight and that might actually ask him to find a way to deal with. The feeling of accomplishment after that is supposed to be multiplied.

It doesn't mean that it works for every game concept in the world, but it's a good general rule that many fail to follow properly. A few of those who do it right are blizzard (in their RTS) for example.

You've talked before about that (at least, I think it was you) and I think you were saying it was due to your inclination to have to try and find everything that was hidden, all the secrets etc, so you couldn't actually enjoy it?  I can't remember if you said that the world felt empty as well without others, but that's a common complaint too.

Mh yes, I might have said that several times somewhere.

But I'd worry if I was given the option to adjust too much, I'd take it, but not enjoy it - it would somehow cheapen the experience  (a bit like things like quick travel; I could always choose not to do it, but I don't because it's convenient, yet it feels cheap).

To me it's even more than that. It creates a feeling of discontinuity, but also makes me feel that I actually failed at it somewhere to eventually fall back to that option. It's quite the opposite feeling to accomplishment.

Dialogue-heavy

Lol, that's the roots of RPGs. Dialogues.

I mean, look at the first RPGs of old, the ones neckbeards of RPGCodex put on altars and venerate all day long. Baldur's Gate, Planescape, etc. Not saying that they all had that syndrome, but it was basically walls of text. Lots and lots of dialogues and NPC interaction. And it was not voiced or cutscened, which means that it was ten times less seamless and implied a lot of reading and time spent doing so. Or TLG again, where every important character was a potential gold mine of dialogues... And by gold mine I mean El Dorado : just one of those could give you half an hour of voiced dialogues that were not even boring or tedious to listen to. It was actually rather soothing.

FF games were more or less similar in that regard, except the story was scripted and kept separate to starting dialogues with random NPCs in the streets.

But I came from a different position, in that I used to play a lot of jrpgs on my master system, megadrive and PS1. And with many of them, you could probably complete all the actual story content in very little time at all, so they've stuffed in a load of puzzles to stymie your progression and draw it out.  Something like Alundra, for example. But omfg I hate puzzles SO MUCH. Anything with pillars, moving platforms, levers etc needs to just DIAF. (and X is a bit guilty of this too with those FUCKING TEMPLES, but nowadays you can just consult a handy walkthrough ¬.¬ and they aren't every 5 seconds) 

So when FF7 came out and had THREE DISKS THAT WAS BASICALLY ALL STORY CONTENT TO PLAY THROUGH and either no or very few STUPID PUZZLES TO HALT YOUR PROGRESS THROUGH SAID STORY and bosses that if you were really stuck, you could just GRIND A BIT UNTIL YOU BEAT THEM... well.  I felt disproportionately grateful. Because to make the game last as long as it should, they stripped out the irritating puzzles and replaced it with more story.  Like I wanted.

I like small puzzles here and there. Not something too difficult actually. Of course I won't expect them in every kind of game. But I like them in adventure games, for example, be it an old point and click or just a Tomb Raider / Uncharted / whatever. I mean, the ones in the last Tomb Raider were nice, though maybe too easy for once. It didn't take a genius to do those.

That's also why I consider The Longuest Journey to be one of the few games I would dare call 'perfect', especially in that regards. It was making you think a bit without making you stuck for days because its main purpose was to tell a story and make you enjoy it even more after having solved little puzzles here and there. Which were very accessible, but not too shabby either.

But to the contrary, if I want difficult enigmas that I will spend days to solve, I expect to see those in Myst-like games, and nowhere else. And in the times of old, yeah, they tended to appear in the weirdest places...

And yes, I never was patient enough for true puzzles. I never really liked puzzles, even as a child.