Of difficulty and frustration
 

Some of the games I've played recently have had difficult sections that are really frustrating. I'll spew obscenities at the game when I fail a mission for the millionth time because I messed up for second. That kills my enjoyment of the game, which I don't think is good.

But what is a good difficulty level? Is there some magic point between "too easy" and "frustrating"? I suppose the answer depends on the type of game. It would be different for Grand Theft Auto and Monkey Island. Also, maybe I'm taking things too seriously and the games wouldn't otherwise be frustrating.

I don't have any specific direction for this. I'm just interested in some general discussion.

When I played Half Life 2 on hard, I was surprised that it was actually realisticly hard and not impossibly hard. :)

Too many games are trying to hard to make the game challenging and forget that it should be fun...

I'd rather play and easy yet long game, than a short but impossible one...

Some games are frustrating because how complex and long they are, I hate it when a game is over 80 hours and even longer if you "sidequest"...

Like you said, it depends on the genre...

In adventure games, I hate it when you have time limits and you can screw up so bad you have to start over...

In plataform games I find frustrating when I'm stuck becasue of a stupid minigame/race/skateboarding thing....

It's frustrating in fighting games when the have cancelling moves, counter cancels, etc, etc... And that are so hard you lose the first fight on Easy even though you are good with other fighters...

In most games I find frustrating that you can beat the game in "x" hours, but to get 100% you need to play "x"X 3 hours...

I think the major one frustration factor for me is the way console games checkpoint and save games. If implemented badly, it can be the most frustrating thing in the world. Example culprits: Jak 2. Platforming section heavy on combat and risky jumps, and where any jump can lead to your death, yet the last checkpoint is about 10 minutes away. Huh???

Another thing that bothers me is the "Press button A as fast as humanly possible". example culprits: Torture sequence in MGS. I almost lost a thumb because of that game.

Other games are just plain difficult, and they are in my opinion, "sadistic" in nautre. I never thought Ninja Gaiden for example was fun, because I couldn't even get past the first boss without being killed 200,000 times and giving up. In such cases, the game should adjust its difficulty to accommodate for people like me, who do not want to be raped by a game.

I hate "Easy" modes that aren't actually easy to play. To me, easy means that an average game (eg. myself) should be able to complete the game without dying millions of times. I'm not saying that harder difficulty options don't have a place, but can they at least be named sensibly. Thief got this right, beginning at "Normal". Far Cry got this hilariously wrong.

Games are a lot easier today, and have been getting easier. Gaiden is hard, and it's meant to be, the game is known for being a challenge, that's the reason why people buy it. A lot of MMORPGs were insanely hard in the 90s, but the newer ones are a lot easier. Some early AI was completely stupid, or completely scripted, and this was compensated by deadly accuracy.

I think learning curve, and randomness(of AI, gameplay, and physics) play a great part in how hard the game is in recent times. A lot of games increase your health, slow the AI down, and make them weaker on easy modes, and this just takes the enjoyment completely out of the game. Farcry isn't hard, it's just got a steep learning curve, and the randomness can make things hard, or easy, depending on your luck.

Adventure games don't have this problem, sometimes they're designed badly (Still Life), so it's hard do something when you know what to do, or they require illogical thought(The Longest Journey) to solve a problem in a strange and probably dangerous way.

I'll agree with you here, though that doesn't undermine my point.

You don't have to play on Easy mode, you know. By all means play on Normal if you're good enough, but don't penalise me for not wanting to be hammering Quick Load every six seconds ;). As for Far Cry, the game is hard. Yes, there's randomness to it, but it is also a difficult game in comparison to the vast majority of other FPS games. I can complete Half-Life 2 or Unreal 2 without problems. I've gotten far in a whole host of other titles. I can reach the fourth or fifth level of Far Cry. Compare and contrast.

I actually found The Longest Journey fairly logical, though I certainly agree with your point.

PREACH!! If any of you have played Indiana Jones And The Emperors Tomb you will notice you can never save on the spot your on. Thats the only feature of the game that can be called bad. It can really pee me off when I need to re-do so much because of one small mistake. :frusty:

But the game is very enjoyable, so it makes up for it. :)

I loved that game until the last level. Then it went from being a fairly easy game to a ridiculously mean game and I gave up :frown:...

Unreal 2 is an appauling game, I'd never buy it, let alone play it. Half-Life 2 is pretty easy, perhaps a little too scripted. Farcry requires stategy, it's not hard, it's fair.
Rubber duck, Clothes line, clamp.

It's not as bad as you make out. Not worth buying I agree, but if you're given it for free (like I was) then it's vaguely enjoyable[/quote] I'll happily agree with you. I don't doubt that you felt that, but that's not the point of my argument. My argument is that a mode called "Easy" should actually be easy. Not fair, but easy. I didn't find Far Cry easy. To be honest, I didn't find it fair either at several moments, though you're perfectly entitled to disagree with me. I died several times during the Tutorial/Prologue/Whatever it was called. I hadn't even reached Level 1. That doesn't make the game "Easy" in my book.

Evidently I am the only person in the world to solve that puzzle in about five minutes without recourse to a walkthrough :crazy:.

This is highly subjective, it completely depends on your personal experience, but at a design point of view I wouldn't say the game is particularly hard.
I didn't use a walkthrough, like the underwater altar, I used a brute force attack on it. Just try everything with everything, because I didn't know which items to use, or what some of those symbols on the altar meant. The game was pretty susceptible to just trying everything to solve a puzzle.

Definitely agree with that. I remember some of the old C64 games. Yikes...

There is nothing wrong with a challenge. I love challenges myself, and I am a decent if not super gamer, having finished tons of games on normal difficulty, but that game was basically impossible. The sad thing is that I really thought it was a good game from the looks of it, but I could not enjoy its awesomeness, because it was so damn hard. Like Lacy suggested, having an easy mode is not going to hurt anyone. For people like yourself and the rest of the hardcore gamers looking for a challenge, they can go for the difficult level, and get the most out of the game. But for people like me or Lacy, we still love these games, but for the experience and not the difficulty. It would be nice to think of us too as potential customers.

What I hate about platformers is climbing up high only to miss a jump and fall all the way back to the bottom. That's my current frustration with Psychonauts.

I have Jak 2, but I haven't played it yet. Now I'm worried about that. Ratchet and Clank did okay with it. Loading a saved game brings you back to the beginning, but the levels aren't large, and once you clear a section you won't have to go through it again. You also have a chance to teleport or take a taxi ride.

Yeah, I hate having to resort to that tactic.

I find that this is difficult for developers, because it's hard to still make the game somewhat of a challenge. Sometimes developers completely fail and putting the difficulty on easy means that the AI becomes completely useless. Then they resort to increasing the health, and lessening the number of opponents, and how hard they hit, but that makes it extremely hard to balance the game then.

FarCry is a great example of a frustrating game - It starts off pretty easy for the first few levels but eventually it gets to the annoying point where you are crawling through the jungle to be as stealthy as possible, and then from out of nowhere you are shot and killed by an enemy bullet:frusty:

This happened to me millions of times - there was one instance where you have to cross a ravine to infiltrate some enemy building and no matter how quiet you are, one of the guards always sees you and manages to fire a few expertly aimed shots in your direction:frown:

And then there is the level where you have to fight off the helicopter attack in the ruins! OMFG! I must have died and reloaded about 10 times before I finally managed to destroy those damned helicopters:frown:

I've found most games these days to be rather easy. I have to say that I prefer starting (and beating) the game on Easy and then working my way up through the difficulty levels. I have to say that the most difficulty I've had with games is when you get to the final level and it's insanely hard on Easy.

My gosh, LoTR: The Third Age has the worst case of this that I've seen. Not to mention that the game is terrible on its own, but this just makes it cruel and unusual/

Ummm... I don't think it was meant to be fun. It's torture, silly.


Any difficulty level is acceptable by me as long as I am capable, with enough effort and not too much boredom, to overcome every challenge. An example of the rare game I consider "too hard" is Metroid Prime 2 on hard mode, where there is a boss with so much randomness that it is impossible to pass no matter how good I am. The eventual difficulty level is not as important as the effectiveness of the difficulty curve- if every skill the player will need is laid out clearly and taught beforehand, then even a relatively bad player can get good enough to finish the game.

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 find that games that take to long to kill a bad guy very frustrating. Diablo for example.

Spoiler:

When I played as the barbarian I had to die over a hundred times just to kill him. There didn't seem to be any other way to fight him without using this method.