[Phantom]

Originally Posted by Spider Crusoe

But what is a good difficulty level? Is there some magic point between "too easy" and "frustrating"?

Yeah, there is. Finding this sweet spot is actually what game design is all about.

If you make a game easy, people will get bored with it. Games that pose no challenge at all are just not fun to play. Games that are too difficult are just frustrating to play, and people will quit just as fast. The trick to succesful game design is to find the ideal learning curve for your game, and provide ways for players that faster or slower than the average curve to lower/raise the difficulty as they go.

I think this is also one of the reasons why adventure games have lost their popularity. Adventure games most of the time have no way at all to increase/lower the difficulty level on the fly. If one puzzle is too difficult for you, you're just stuck, and your only way to get past it is by downloading a walkthrough. I kinda liked the hint system in some old Sierra games, even though it was often too accessible, and you were tempted to use it too quickly. It allowed lesser skilled adventure gamers to get past a difficult puzzle and see the rest of the game.

Most popular game genres nowadays are very good at changing the difficulty level on the fly. FPS games are a very good example of this. Most of the time you can set the global difficulty level, and you can even change it while you're playing. Most FPS games have some kind of superweapon that you can only use a couple of times. This weapon is also a masked way to temporarily lower the difficulty setting. If one particular fight is just too much for you, you use your uber weapon like the BFG to clear the room and proceed on forward.

[Tanukitsune]

Old games were harder for a reason, IMHO, since you could save the game back then, the games HAD to be short, so they were harder to compensate for their short duration...

A good example is the original Castlevania for NES, I could never beat the game, but since I can save in the GBA version I could at least reach the final boss...

Try playing any modern game without saving and tell me if it's still easier than an old school game...

[Cheerios]

Edit:

Um, wasn't sure about the legality of the link I posted since it had to do with emulation. So I decided to remove it. A friend of mine that works at Capcom said he was going to get it shutdown too, when I showed him... *sigh* >_<

Sorry for wasting your time, folks

[simpson_yellow]

Originally Posted by RLacey

Yeah, I'll go along with that. In my personal view, Far Cry utterly fails to come anywhere near managing this - it goes from fairly easy to ridiculous in seconds. I'm not suggesting that it's a bad game, but I certainly don't expect to ever manage to complete it. Despite playing on "Easy" mode...

I know I've well and truly missed the boat here, but thought I'd chime in to agree with you on this one. Far Cry was a pretty serious challenge on all difficulty settings. I consider myself a pretty experienced gamer but I broke into more than a few sweats on Normal mode, particularly during the last three levels of the game. I lost count of the number of times I quickloaded during

Spoiler:

that part where you're dropped in a trigen-infested jungle with 10 rounds of ammo

I still think I only got through it by chance.

For the most part though, I really enjoyed the challenge.

After finishing, I quickly sampled it on different difficulty settings and have to agree that 'Easy' mode fell a long way short of living up to its name.

[seebaruk]

Far Cry definitely got it wrong, it wasn't too bad once you got the sniper rifle so you could plan your attacks more easily, pick off the enemy snipers etc, but the bits without it made me scare my flatmate with demonic swearing.

Ninja Gaiden has to be the worst though, how anyone can complete that is beyond me. After being skewered by the tough dude on the horse about the 100th time I finally stood up, ejected the disc from my xbox, calmly put it in the box, then put the box on the floor and stamped the living sh*t out of it. Stupid ****ing game. I really lose my temper with these games.