How hard is too Hard?

[philios82]

Do these situations sound familiar?

You wake up on a table in an underground bunker, before you've had so much as a coffee and a fag you're sent to talk to a scary looking Eastern European bloke. He then gives you a pistol with all the stopping power of a BB gun and sends you off to kill a large group of scarier looking bandits.

You are released from jail with only the clothes you stand up in, a rusty knife that you nicked on the way out and a note telling you to find some bloke named Caius. You spend the next few hours being killed by things that look like pterodactyls every time you get lost.

You are a counter terrorist agent and it's your first day on the job. You're armed with only a pistol and a cattle prod. Your brother shows up and breaks the news that your first assignment is to get past hordes of terrorists who've invaded the Statue of Liberty. He also asks if you'd be so kind as to not kill any of the terrorists. He does give you a sniper rifle but, since you appear to have Parkinson's disease, it's not much use.

Obviously these are the opening stages of Stalker, Morrowind and Deus Ex respectively. The three games are linked because: a) They start off sadistically hard and b) I gave up on each one of them before returning months later, determined to get my moneys worth, and found them to be some of the most rewarding games I've ever played. So here are my questions;

Are games more addictive if you have to work hard at the beginning? When does a game become so hard that it stops being fun?

 

[danimal1384]

I'd say the difficulty jump from Heroic to Legendary in any of the Halo games is Too Hard. Enemies in Legendary have ESP, and can sense when they are being targeted by a zoom-able weapon like a sniper or battle rifle, especially in Halo 3. They can also do a blind-fire and get all head shots. That is such Bull.

 

[knumpify]

I really like the controller-shatteringly difficult games, In fact, I'm looking for some good ones.
I've never found games too hard, I've never just given up on a game, but some have taken me longer than most
doom 3 on nightmare was a pain in the ass, but a fun one.
I've finished morrowind, ninja gaiden, just about anything anyone thinks is too hard. any suggestions?

 

[Geoffrey42]

I think there's a need to differentiate between intentional, and unintentional difficulty. Not to mention well done, versus poorly done difficulty. I Wanna Be The Guy is ridiculously difficult, on purpose, and thus despite its unforgiving difficulty, can be quite fun. Other games are hard because they are inherently broken, and while some people enjoy beating broken games (see people playing past the "last" level in Pac-man) that's where a lot of people would draw the line. What I mean by well versus poorly done would be along the lines of allowing the AI access to information that is not in line with the universe (non-superman-thugs that see through 4 foot thick, concrete walls, mayhaps?). This is often referred to as "cheating", but oftentimes, good AI is accused of cheating by less experienced players (in much the same way that very good online players are sometimes accused of "hax"). Knowing the difference requires a certain level of comprehension of the game and the universe.

I always imagine things as graphs, and then try to describe the graphs to get my point across, and it always goes horribly, but here I go again: Let's say intent is the X axis (from completely unintentional on the left, to intentional on the right), and execution is the Y axis (from the worst implementation on the bottom, to the best on the top). (Assume that the entire plane X,Y consists of Hard games. We could make the space 3 dimensional, with Z being a scale of how difficult the game actually is, but what I'm saying should be true for any value of Z) Anything in the (+X,+Y) quadrant will probably be good, even with very, very high values of X, so long as the value of Y is similarly high. Things in the (+X,-Y) and (-X,+Y) quadrants are going to be of varying quality, and not likely to be as tolerable. Things in the (-X,-Y) quadrant are going to be the worst, with the odd outlier which is "so bad it's good."

So really, to the question of "How Hard is too Hard?" To me, given my framework, so long as X and Y are sufficiently positive values, there is no limit to a value of Z which can still be enjoyable. The question becomes, then: Is there a value of Z where it is no longer possible to do it well, to make it rewarding? An inherent limit to the system? I don't know. I don't think anyone's hit it yet.

 

[Jumplion]

Usualy when a game's to hard for me, i put it away for a week or so, come back, and play it again. I usualy beat the hard part i couldn't get across before. Weird. And i usualy start on the lower levels of difficulty, beat the game, then move up on to the next difficulty.

So really, it all depends if the player is willing to put in that extra effort to beat that nigh-impossible level. Why do you think we have achievment whores?

 

[thebobmaster_v1legacy]

I really like the controller-shatteringly difficult games, In fact, I'm looking for some good ones.
I've never found games too hard, I've never just given up on a game, but some have taken me longer than most
doom 3 on nightmare was a pain in the ass, but a fun one.
I've finished morrowind, ninja gaiden, just about anything anyone thinks is too hard. any suggestions?

Go back to the classics. Bionic Commando, Contra without the Konami Code...

 

[Spakkenkhrist]

I love it when games are stingy with ammo and good weapons, the desperation of being pinned down by an overwhelming force knowing you have to make your last few rounds count are usually some of the most memorable moments of games.

 

[ComradeJim270]

I personally don't mind games that are very, very hard, so long as they are consistent. I'm more annoyed by games that are too damn easy (sorry, but Bioshock is much worse in my book than in a lot of people's), or games that have a controller-throwing, keyboard-slamming, profanity-inducing difficulty curve. Killzone: Liberation makes me scream at my PSP every time I play it and get to a boss, because the bosses are leaps and bounds beyond everything else in terms of difficulty. Mechassault 2 had a smooth, gradually increasing level of difficulty until the last battle, at which point I actually threw my controller at my TV. The one genuine escort mission in Far Cry Instincts actually sent me scrambling for cheat codes, because it was probably the single most unforgiving part of any game I can remember playing.

If these parts were consistent with the rest of the game, I would not mind them nearly as much.

The only game I can think of that struck me as 'too hard' was Abe's Oddysey, but that's because I suck at both platformers and side-scrollers... so... a side-scrolling platformer? No thanks.

 

[propertyofcobra]

I don't understand the question.
Hard is never too hard unless it's hard for the wrong reasons.

Right type of Hard: Challenging, intentionally so.
Wrong type of Hard: The computer is cheating and/or the game is glitchy.

Fuck, I think the Devil May Cry games could use taking up a notch in difficulty. But I also found FarCry to be stunningly, annoyingly hard because the computer is a cheating bastard who knows exactly where you are and can snipe you with a goddamned Minimi!

 

[L.B. Jeffries]

I always liked the games that adapted their difficulty to the player. 'Max Payne' would adjust the difficulty of aiming and damage ratio of bad guys depending on how good of a player you were. It seems like a good game shouldn't need difficulty selections, just "play the game" mode and maybe a "Make my Day" mode.

As for a game that starts off too hard...I always thought playing 'Viewtiful Joe' was like being smacked into a brick wall over and over again.

 

[fix-the-spade]

I don't understand the question.
Hard is never too hard unless it's hard for the wrong reasons.

Right type of Hard: Challenging, intentionally so.
Wrong type of Hard: The computer is cheating and/or the game is glitchy.

Fuck, I think the Devil May Cry games could use taking up a notch in difficulty. But I also found FarCry to be stunningly, annoyingly hard because the computer is a cheating bastard who knows exactly where you are and can snipe you with a goddamned Minimi!

You forgot abot the monkeys and their half-mile long melee attack.
Or the Psychic dudes with the rocket launchers (small glimmer on the horizon, "wait a second, its that Carver git, I'll just point my rpg over there and...")

As long as a game is fair, I don't think they can ever be too hard (see System Shock 2, Metroid Prime).

If a game is hard because its full of Glitches, or the enemies can do/see/hear things you can't, or if the enemies are so good the only way to survive is to play until you know every enemy's position by memory (Halo2-Legendary), that's wrong.
These things can make a game too hard, there's nothing worse than entering a section with the knowledge that you can't win first time, no matter how good you are.

 

[philios82]

@propertyofcobra
I mean that when a game is hard you get a sense of achievment, like in Stalker when you manage to take down a guy with a machine gun. First you feel like a badass for winning a mismatched fight, second the game gets easier because you've got a better gun. However in the original Splinter Cell I gave up on the first level because the guy in the house always spotted me. That game wasn't bugged and I don't know if it cheated but for me it was much too hard to be enjoyable. Maybe I suck but that game ended up in the bin. However Double Agent is a piece of piss compared to that and got pretty boring because of it.

Ps. How do I qoute peoples posts? Never mind just saw the big qoute button.

 

[RoThgar]

I think that alot of games these days have the difficulty level too low. Stalker had it about right, you start out rubbish, but as you progress; the game gets easier to deal with enemies.

Crysis on the other hand was a massive disappointment.

I was really psyched up about the game, looking forward to it for a long time. Got it. Then spent the subsequent couple of days playing it in between lectures and doing work for uni. I should mention I was playing it on Delta (read Hardest) level (hoping that it would mean it was stretched out a bit more), it took me 3 days to do the entire game. I was like. What the hell... I didnt really find the game challenging at all, I cant imagine how bored I would have been if i played it on normal mode.

I think that developers are scared of making a game too hard, which is a shame. because having a challenging game makes you feel really good when you beat it. but all they do is make it easy for you so they can concentrate on the story. Bioshock is another example of this. Dying in that game didnt really have a penalty, which is rubbish, because that meant there was literally no way you could lose the game. sucky.

 

[Andy Chalk]

There are so many different definitions of "hard" that it's hard to say what "too hard" even means. I didn't find STALKER, Morrowind or Deus Ex particularly difficult, even at the very beginning, but I found (as an example) the final boss fight in Neverwinter Nights 2 (among others) so stupidly difficult that I cheated past it after only a few minutes of playing.

But that's not necessarily a result of difficulty so much as it is just a reaction to contrived, gimmicky, and pointless gameplay. Tinq nailed it when he pointed out that difficulty is much easier to digest if there's something compelling about it; boss battles like NWN2, on the other hand, are just tedious affairs made up entirely of empty gameplay. They're like the combat equivalent of mazes in RPGs; they add length to the game and provide a challenge of sorts, but are they really fun by anyone's definition?

There's also the matter of players who have inflated expectations in the early stages of a game, particularly RPGs and other genres in which player growth is a central feature. As a beginning player you can't expect to just go wherever you like and beat the hell out of anything you see, but some people don't seem to grasp that point. Just like real life, some aspects of some games are meant to be insurmountably difficult until certain plateaus of character development are reached.

It's not a big issue as long as games include difficulty sliders that can be adjusted on the fly; masochists can have their fun while the rest of us can play the "real game" at whatever difficulty we want, crank it down to get past the bullshit, and then put it back on to be on our way.

 

[mitsoxfan]

Beating Halo on Legenday = Hard

Beating Ghosts and Goblins without a Game Genie = Too Hard

 

[Eagle Est1986]

No such thing as too hard! Didn't think Deus Ex was particularly hard either, except when I got stuck nearer then end with no ammo and little health.
Actually, Halo 2 Legendary might have been too hard, sometimes I wonder if there's actually enough ammo to kill everything....

 

[Ironhide007]

MOD airborne on hard= death

A game is to hard when you replay the same section about a hundred time and cant get passed it or it takes acouple of hours ie cod 4 no fighting in the war room and mile high on vet admittly mile high is possible but the idea in war room of hiv three hallways all shooting at you is jut gay

 

[Eagle Est1986]

I guess it's nice to know that the challenge is still there though. People have completed CoD4 on Veteran so it's not impossible. I'd rather have the option to fail on the hardest difficulty than so find the game too easy. *cough* Halo 3 *cough*

 

[knumpify]

Go back to the classics. Bionic Commando, Contra without the Konami Code...

done it, done it, and did battletoads, and did ghosts n goblins,