Is it Okay for a Game to be Unfair?

[Shoggoth2588]

Being unfair doesn't really make a game better. It just makes the game unfair. If there are ways for the player to play unfairly though as a way to compensate, that helps the situation a bit though not by too much. Zelda 2 is an example that comes to mind; it's unfair how the difficulty ramps up, its unfair how much MP is used up by the spells, it's unfair how there's no way to restore that MP. It's also unfair how you can sit in a corner to beat the final boss of the game...which doesn't make up for the fact that getting a Game Over in every dungeon other than the final one sends you all the way back to the start of the entire game.

 

[Thyunda]

Dark Souls isn't unfair - it sets out some rules and then if you don't abide by those rules, you'll die. Don't rush into rooms. Don't get greedy with your attacks. And be really frickin' cautious all the time. Most of my deaths in that game were from trying to get one extra hit or from not really paying attention to my surroundings. Similarly, The Witcher 3 doesn't punish you arbitrarily. You can dodge or roll under enemy attacks, provided you think about the fight and understand your opponent.

I cannot count the number of times in Mafia II when Vito fucking Scaletta got stuck on the scenery or took cover at the wrong angle and stood there gormlessly while some Sicilians filled him full of holes. That's bad design. That's the game being unfair.

 

[vallorn]

Some unfairness is fine. In fact I'm reminded about the development of the game IWTBGT.

Q: You just make it hard as a substitute for good level design.
As IWBTG gets older, this opinion has fallen out of favor a bit, but I still hear it from time to time. I'm not going to pretend to be a master level designer, but comments like this are ignorent to what 'good level design' actually is. Most people think aesthetically, without thinking about the gameplay elements. Aesthetics are actually a big part of it, but that is only a fraction of the whole story.

I Wanna be the Guy is a game about subversion. It's also a humor driven game. Predicting a players actions perfectly as to maximize surprise and humor/frustration is a way a game can have good level design. The level design is accomplishing it's goal and doing so quite well. The pacing of a game like this is also critical. How much the player is expected to die really influences what the next trap should be and how hard it is to overcome.

Random traps are NOT a real crutch. If used wrong, they are SUICIDE for a game's popularity. It's very hard to have a brutal, mean game while still 'tricking' people to finish it. If a game is popular and brutal it probably has something else going on that makes it work. Instead of lashing against them, look at them closer and try and understand how they work. You might not like them, but you'll probably learn something!

IWBTG is FAMOUSLY unfair sometimes, Delicious Fruit falls up or sideways, it tricks you and violates it's own internal logic just to kill you off, and yet it's beloved because IWBTG is you versus the creator of the game, you against his feindish little traps and tricks, you want to beat it just to show that you can overcome it even when it's unfair and tricking you.

So no, unfair games aren't always bad, broken mechanics can be, but when a game is unfair or violates it's internal logic as a core part of the game, people tend to accept that and make it part of the internal logic.