Less Checkpoints or Harder Difficulty?

[Codenet]

I recently got into a discussion with one of my friends whist playing Saints Row 2 on the Xbox 360 (not co-op, just sharing the one controller) about the lack of checkpoints in some of the missions and how this affected the difficulty.

Although the game itself is rather easy, the number of times you get killed but some kind of miscellaneous or random occurrence is quite large, and this in turn changes what should be a 15-20 minute mission, into a 30-40 minute mission, which creates a kind of 'fake difficultly' and can cause a lot of frustration in the player.

I really enjoyed Saints Row 2, but i think the game would have benefited if it raised the difficultly level and added a few more checkpoints. This leads me into the question I put before you;

'Would you rather play a harder game with a reasonable amount of checkpoints, or a easier game with less checkpoints?'

 

[Hashime]

Harder difficulty for sure. Less checkpoints means repetition, harder difficulty means you are going to die a lot, but it is more satisfying to complete then tedium.

 

[ajofflight]

I would like an easier game with fewer checkpoints. Yeah, it's just... a little less frustrating that way.

 

[Layz92]

Easily the harder difficulty with more checkpoints.

 

[viranimus]

harder difficulty and less checkpoints.

Its rare for me to find a challenge in this day and age.

 

[SL33TBL1ND]

Difficulty for sure. Re-doing the same thing over and over again isn't fun.

 

[Wertbag]

I personally prefer the PC way of quick saves. Save when and where you like, leave it up to the player to decide. I've had some games where the check points were too far apart, something would come up and I had to leave but the game wouldn't let you save so I either had to leave the console running for a day or two, or quit and lose half an hour of gameplay.

 

[hazabaza1]

Less checkpoints often causes monotony. Give us harder stuff, not repeating stuff.

 

[thedeathscythe]

I don't have any examples off the top of my head, but I've played hard games with very frequent check points, and eventually you just sort of run the ball up the field. What I mean by that is, you play for a minute, make it past the first tank, then you die, start from just in front of the tank, run past the second tank, and then die once again. You spawn in between the two tanks and you run even further; you're killing things but your main goal is making distance, rather than kills. I think Call of Duty does this...(yes, I abuse it like that...), mainly the ones made by Treyarch. I find the Treyarch ones to have NPC's with an ungodly amount of health, while InfinityWard's seem to die normally.

 

[Fishyash]

I personally don't mind lack of checkpoints. It makes mistakes and dying more punishing, which makes it harder in my book. It also means you have to strive for perfection, making sure you are able to do all the other parts without getting lucky.

Personally if you want a challenging game, it doesn't have to be acctually hard if there were fewer checkpoints, and probably limited lives (ok tbh I do think it makes it harder but I didn't really like it that much).

Autosave is a big part of this usually. Most games don't give out checkpoints but just autosave every time you do something or finish one encounter. On ME2 if I died I would just go back again to the beginning of the encounter I died on (note to self, next time when playing ME2, try out playing without autosave).

Although it does depend on the game, quite a lot. More open games especially should let you save the game wherever you want. You can make your own checkpoints then.

I admit that one thing that I didn't like about new super mario bros. wii was that it gave me far too many lives. I was running around with no hat on for about half of the game, and I never got game over, once... 2 player was a different story though, my friend was getting game over quite a few times... I guess you have to share those 1-ups with up to 4 people anyways.

 

[Scars Unseen]

More difficulty and more checkpoints encourages experimentation (see Portal). Less difficulty and less checkpoints encourages level memorization. More difficulty and less checkpoints encourages insanity (see Super Ghouls & Ghosts).I'll take more checkpoints, please.