What is the balance between a challange or too easy/too hard ?

[Jodah]

If I play near perfectly but make one bad move will I die? If yes the game is too hard. I should be punished for that bad move but not insta-killed.

Can I beat the game without knowing how the reload/restart feature even works? If yes the game is too easy.

Pandas have been crying long enough, so i figured i had to post. I think that a important consideration one should take in game balancing, is target demographic. This is why Dark Souls difficulty is justified, but would not be in say, angry birds.

First welcome (first post) and stay out of the basement! (That's where the body of Yahtzee's triple cunted hooker is)

Second, I just pictured missing the structure in Angry Birds and having the Minotaur boss suddenly come to kill everything.

 

[danon]

That game needs to exist, i will call it Dark Birds.

 

[the abyss gazes also]

I think pulling off game difficulty is like playing violin. When done well, it is perfect and beautiful, but there is a small margin of error. And when you mess-up it can be really awful.

Giving people a sliding scale is great. I'm all about choices, but I find games that ask you if you would like to skip this part, ala the bulldozer chase from L. A. Noire, just a little patronizing.

 

[malestrithe]

A good game is equal parts frustration and boredom. If it is too easy, people will get bored and walk away. If it is too hard, people will stop playing out of protest.

Finding that correct balance is the tricky part.

 

[Yopaz]

That's a good question. I'm not 100% sure myself.

Personally though, I think that a game should have a decent difficulty curve. Start off at a reasonably easy stage in order to learn the game's basics. And then work your way up from there. Also try not to use difficulty spikes. I've played quite a few games in which it was pretty mellow in terms of difficulty throughout, only for the game to suddenly kick you in the balls.

Overall though, I usually don't try to play games for challenge (games like Demon's Souls and Dark Souls being an exception) I try to play them to have fun and escape from the real world.

That and general fairness, I think. At no point should you fail because of anything but your own shortcomings and mistakes. Dark souls is examplar in this, because while it's extremely difficult, it's rarely "the game's fault".

Psha. I wanna be the guy did it before Dark Souls and it was a 2d platformer.

Is that what its called? Think thats what it was called.

I Wanna Be The Guy is brilliant and one of the hardest games I've ever played. I was really proud when I managed to complete it... Especially after getting all the treasures.

 

[Bad Jim]

I think frequent save points and regenerating health are a mistake. They divide the game into small sections, and adding any real challenge risks creating brick walls for some players.

In constrast, the lives/medikits/run-out-and-you-start-from-the-beginning system of days gone by meant the overall game was a challenge, even when no particular bit was difficult to get through. Anyone could get through with practise, but you wouldn't get through on your first attempt.

Of course, the arcade roots of many of those games meant that a lot of them were just too damn hard. But easier games, like Sonic for instance, required some skill without being nearly impossible anywhere.

Another advantage was that extra lives could be liberally distributed around the levels and give players a meaningful reward for exploration. Modern games have less options for hidden rewards. You can only have so many secret weapons and gadgets. Ammo tends to either be superfluous or something vital that shouldn't be hidden. But health/lives insure against our mistakes, always worth picking up but never crucial.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

A slider that lets you choose between Baby's First Adventure and "Holy shit this makes Dark Souls look like Baby's First Adventure", with many settings in between. Lets people like me who don't enjoy challenge have their piss easy game that provides only enough challenge to not make you think the cheats are on, while masochists that want the game to try to fuck them over at every other step can get their hard-as-fuck challenge. We all win.

agreed. although i think some developers should develop the games for the hard people and THEN add in sliders to make it less difficult for us folk, it seems like they design the games opposite of that alot, and all they do is add in shit tons of buffs to the baddies to make the battle last 3 times longer, not actually make it harder.

(not every case, just saying in alot of cases where i see people bitching that it's too easy.)

as long as a game has good save point locations, and doesn't just throw a boss out there when my pants are down (a.k.a. going to the store to buy new weapons or get more ammo or something.) then i'll probably enjoy it.

 

[Axyun]

The best games are those that are easy to learn and hard to master. Games that add several layers of complexity and allow you to dig in as deep as is enjoyable for you. Each layer should be a viable means of "winning" the game, but deeper layers promise more rewards at higher risks and requirements for strategy and execution.

Though not a perfect example as an entire game, Civilizations 5 flirts with the idea with city output. By default, the game manages the tiles worked by your cities' citizens. This is layer 1. You can choose to leave it alone or tell your cities what kinds of tiles to prefer (foor, production, gold, science, etc.), making this layer 2. The third layer is completely managing every tile manually. Each layer requires more knowledge of the game in order to appreciate and use as a function of reaching a goal. But the new player or the player that doesn't want to be encumbered by that level of micromanagement can ignore it.

If it were up to me, I would make Civ 5 not have a difficulty setting. Instead, the AI gets more intelligent and difficult as you dig into the layers. The AI would start at easy by default. As soon as you start setting city tile preferences, the AI would jump to Normal. Once you start micromanaging your tiles, the AI should jump to Hard. The layers increase your work load and also set new expections of you.

As a side note, I do not mind games in which death is frequent if death is part of the game's mechanics (Dark Souls, Legacy of Kain). However, games like Ninja Gaiden 2 where death is more often a function of bad design and horrible camera placement feel cheap when you die and unrewarding when you win.

 

[RJ 17]

I think it depends on what the game is trying to do/what genre it is.

Dark Souls, for instance, ADVERTISES that you're going to die...a lot....and then die a lot more. They accomplish this by making most enemies able to blow your head off simply by farting in your general direction. I think this is falsely difficult, in that the game isn't challenging, it's specifically designed to be demoralizingly brutal. This same theory applies to games like Ninja Gaiden (except for NG 3 which I've heard has been beaten down with the nerf bat).

A game like Portal, however, is delightfully challenging. The concept is simple: get from point A to point B...you just gotta find the right path to get there. Some of the rooms are absolute stumpers. You'll look at the situation you're given and for the life of you you just can't figure it out, but at the same time: you've got all the time in the world to figure it out. There's no rush, no monster is going to run up and kill you if you don't progress fast enough. However as I mentioned, the basis of a good challenge depends on what the game is trying to do/what genre it is. Portal is trying to get you to think outside the box in an almost literal fashion. You have to wrap your head around all the possibilities you can pull of with portals. Surely we've all been thinking too hard about a puzzle we just couldn't figure out before realizing there's a mechanic about portals that you had forgotten and when you plug it into the situation you're able to progress. But Portal is purely a puzzle game, as such what makes its challenge good is far different from what makes an RPG challenge good or a shooter challenge good.

What makes an RPG challenge good is having tough enemies that aren't just ridiculously tough (as in Dark Souls). Take Mass Effect 3, for example. I personally think they perfected combat in ME3. ME 1 was pretty simple in both design and execution, ME 2 was essentially playing long-range whack-a-mole (just take cover and wait for the enemies to pop out from their cover before picking them off). The enemies in ME 3, however, are cunning and aggressiive, capable of pulling of effective flanking attacks and more or less they're always pushing the line, forcing you to push right back. I think this is why the Mutliplayer is so successful despite essentially being Gear of War Horde Mode with ME characters/powers. It requires good teamwork to survive on Gold and makes it just that much more exciting when your squad is working hard and surviving against the odds.

 

[Squidbulb]

As long as there is the possibility of death without the game being too frustrating, it's fine. Also, spamming enemies does not count as difficulty, neither does challenge due to poor controls, camera angles or just poor design. Then there's the boss battles which would be easy but they have so much health that you're bound to slip up eventually out of pure boredom.

 

[Wayneguard]

I lean towards easy. I so so so wanted to be able to play super ghost n goblins on snes but that game is just TOO MOTHERFUCKING HARD. I can't play it. However, Dark Souls is made of complete awesome. So I can't really say I guess.

 

[Kahunaburger]

+1 to the various points made about fake difficulty.

HP sponges are not hard, enemy waves are not hard, grinding is not hard, and ducking back into cover every half second is not hard. They're just tedious.

 

[WoW Killer]

Learning curve. Some games I find drop you in at the deep end a little bit too much, while others have plentiful easy content with which to hone your skills but then no proper challenge to test you even at the end. And the curve needs to be smooth. Sudden jumps in difficulty can mean the tactics you've been using all the way up until that point become irrelevant; effectively the game let you do it wrong and get away with it, so you think that's the right way. The best sort of difficulty is where when you fail you immediately point the finger at something specific you could have done differently.

Also, tutorials can be a very good thing when they're done right. A lack of a good tutorial is usually more harmful.

 

[Vegosiux]

I Wanna Be The Guy is brilliant and one of the hardest games I've ever played. I was really proud when I managed to complete it... Especially after getting all the treasures.

Hard, yes, but not a challenge if you ask me...

The same way as a double shift at work isn't exactly a challenge, I can do the stuff in my sleep, it's not difficult, but it's still damn hard work.

+1 to the various points made about fake difficulty.

HP sponges are not hard, enemy waves are not hard, grinding is not hard, and ducking back into cover every half second is not hard. They're just tedious.

Actually, I'd say it is 'hard', but not 'difficult' or 'challenging'. And yes, tedious, of course.

So yeah, there are two kinds of "hard", the kind where you win after you bang your head at it enough times and the stars align, and the kind where you actually have to think on your feet and be flexible in your approach.

 

[Bad Jim]

I think some developers should develop the games for the hard people and THEN add in sliders to make it less difficult for us folk, it seems like they design the games opposite of that alot, and all they do is add in shit tons of buffs to the baddies to make the battle last 3 times longer, not actually make it harder

Unfortunately this risks the opposite problem, that giving you more health and extra damage doesn't always help much. An example of this would be Seth from Street Fighter 4. The spammy nature and high priority of his attacks means you cannot rely on attrition to win. You have to learn to fight him which is hard on any difficulty.

I think it's better to have some parts that are far too easy than to have some parts which are far too hard.

Really I think the solution is to make the game for the casuals but actually playtest the higher difficulties. Hire a pro-gamer or two and ask for their opinions. Figure out what each part of the game needs to make it harder and do that, not just lazy damage scaling.

 

[llew]

i will say devil may cry 3 had a godly balance and will end my post there...

 

[Nooners]

I Wanna Be The Guy is brilliant and one of the hardest games I've ever played. I was really proud when I managed to complete it

You actually managed to BEAT that thing?! I...I am not worthy to stay in your presence, master...