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

[Something Amyss]

Tutorials don't make a game easier, and most QTEs in my experience are after some event, which hardly makes them worse.

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.

But even then, actually making those difficulties a reality is the trick.

Which sort of brings me to one of my biggest pet peeves: Cranking up the difficulty often means nothing more than increasing damage dealt by enemies and the amount of damage they take. It doesn't make games harder, it just makes them more tedious.

I'm not some über let gamer, and I'm fine with the piss easy option. But on the occasions I find a game to not be challenging, cranking up the difficult should probably do more than make it take twice as many hits to kill bad guys.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

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 you 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.

obviously fighting games would be the exception to that, they frustrate the hell out of just about anyone. I was referring more to shooters/platformers/adventure type games with my post, but i do see your point and seth really was a pain in the ass no matter what difficulty you were on.

 

[FoolKiller]

I agree, never ending tutorials, hints, direction arrows, (driving)aids, maps, frequent save points, regenerating health, etc make the game too easy and ruin it.

In general you may be right about some of these, but that just depends on the game.

Never-ending Tutorials
Well with the lack of instruction manuals and the demands of increased immersion, the tutorial needs to be there. If you think about it, Portal had constant tutorials and still was quite challenging.

Direction Arrows/Driving Aids
I agree with this. Although only to a degree. In GTA, they serve a useful purpose. They eliminate the tedium of pausing to look at the map repeatedly to figure out where you're going. I am not a fan of the path actually being shown to you though. That is a bit too much help, although some of the higher end cars actually had GPS telling you where to turn just like in real life.

Maps
I flat-out disagree with this. Maps are extremely useful. How could you ever go anywhere or do anything in an open game world without having some sort of map? It would just be frustrating and boring wandering around the area without having an sort of map to look at for reference.

Frequent Save Points
Unfortunately, this is more of a result of gaming growing up with the kids who gamed from the 80's. I am not against checkpoints being spread out in a reasonable manner but I also have less spare time to game than I did as a child. I can't afford to go 1 or 2 hours between save points as I don't necessarily have that sort of time to invest in large chunks.

Regenerating Health/Shields
Okay. This was just another sloppy solution to the med kit fiasco. Unfortunately, it's here to stay. I also hate this but it allows for some poor/lazy programming during the creation of the game. If you can regen health, enemies can be bullet sponges and they can force you to play every game with the Gears of War cover mechanic if they want you to.

I think that no single one of these is to blame for a so-called too easy game. I just think that their uses need to be well thought out. I find that many game designers don't understand (or don't have the time to emphasize) the difference between difficulty and challenge.

Unfortunately, most games with shooting fall victim to this misconception. Gears of War and Call of Duty are the most obvious targets of this criticism but I've found the same problem in games like Mass Effect. I may find the higher difficulty harder, but not in a rewarding or challenging way. Enemies just require more shots to kill, and you require less. Not particularly hard, just time consuming. The perfect example of this is the final boss of God of War: Chains of Olympus. I beat the boss without taking any damage (because the boss basically take a quarter of your health with each hit on higher difficulties) but it took me over 30 minutes. Not challenging... just boring as all fuck.

The main issue is that while we keep mentioning all these problems, I have rarely seen any one come up with useful solutions. And any solutions that seem to be good, seem difficult to execute which would leave the game makers from using them.

 

[Eclectic Dreck]

It is relatively simple: something has crossed into the realm of too hard if there is no reasonable chance that a player can win during their first encounter with the obstacle. In other words, something is too hard when it simply becomes unfair.

For example: a trap with no warning signs that can instantly kill the player. A scenario that can only be overcome by luck (Call of Duty on veteran - survival largely depends upon this) is another example. Or, an encounter that suddenly changes the rules of what is or is not effective with no reasonable way of divining this information save by trial and error (Dark Souls for example).

 

[Canadamus Prime]

I really don't know, it's difficult to pinpoint exactly. I don't think there's a magic formula for it. One game with a specific set of mechanics could achieve the perfect balance of fun and challenge, but another game could use the exact same mechanics and turn out to be nothing but dullness a slog.

 

[RubyT]

That depends entirely on the player.

There are people who like to think for days over a puzzle in an adventure, there are people who will try more than a hundred times to defeat a boss, there are people who get pumped up when they die countless times in the first 3 minutes (like Ninja Gaiden).

Others, like me, consider it excessive to die more than 4-5 times anywhere.

And some people will accept steep difficulty in one game and complain about it in another.

 

[Kahunaburger]

Never-ending Tutorials
Well with the lack of instruction manuals and the demands of increased immersion, the tutorial needs to be there. If you think about it, Portal had constant tutorials and still was quite challenging.

I think there are few things less immersive than an extended tutorial. Portal is somewhat of an exception, since in the context of that game's story the testing rooms are explicitly introducing you to additional layers of complexity. (And, incidentally, it almost always teaches you by letting you experiment with the mechanics.)
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[Bad Jim]

Tutorials don't make a game easier, and most QTEs in my experience are after some event, which hardly makes them worse.

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.

But even then, actually making those difficulties a reality is the trick.

Which sort of brings me to one of my biggest pet peeves: Cranking up the difficulty often means nothing more than increasing damage dealt by enemies and the amount of damage they take. It doesn't make games harder, it just makes them more tedious.

I'm not some über let gamer, and I'm fine with the piss easy option. But on the occasions I find a game to not be challenging, cranking up the difficult should probably do more than make it take twice as many hits to kill bad guys.

If they make the enemies tougher, your guns weaker, their attacks stronger, and your armor thinner, then they've made it harder to defeat them. You have to make far better, far more skillful moves and decisions during the fight or else you'll get raped. You actually have to think on your feet, use tactics, use cover, all that jazz, you can't just walk in and deflect enemy fire with your testicles like you can on easy.

Not necessarily true. With a lot of games, a player can figure out how to deal damage without taking any hits.
This cyberdemon can be dodged easily. Giving it more hitpoints and letting it kill the player in one hit will change little, because any half decent player can avoid all damage and patiently wear it down. The only challenge will be killing it before you fall asleep or your bladder explodes.

 

[lord.jeff]

It's not so much a matter of how hard/easy a game is but what it rewards and challenges you with, for example a game that requires leap of fates and memorization to beat it, that's a fake difficulty, also a game that has you fight enemy after enemy is gonna to hard but if those enemies get broken up into waves, rooms or sometimes just having level ups happen during the fight give a sense of accomplishment that makes the fight seem less monotonousness, making it seem easier.

I think the best challenge comes from a game that piles skill on throughout the game, letting you master one then giving you a completely new skill to work with while still executing old skills, so by the end of the game your doing ten things at once and looking like a complete bad ass.

 

[theSteamSupported]

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 (for, 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 expectations 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.

I have to pretty much agree with you on this matter, Axyun. Difficulty is a relative thing, and is thus not that easy to design.

To me, a perfect gaming experience is one that never kills the player's avatar, while still maintaining a strong presence of danger throughout the entire campaign. Axyun is onto something, by proposing that the difficulty should be automatically adjusted to the player's skill.

 

[Something Amyss]

If they make the enemies tougher, your guns weaker, their attacks stronger, and your armor thinner, then they've made it harder to defeat them. You have to make far better, far more skillful moves and decisions during the fight or else you'll get raped. You actually have to think on your feet, use tactics, use cover, all that jazz, you can't just walk in and deflect enemy fire with your testicles like you can on easy.

Except I don't have to make better or different decisions.

Take Hard mode on Kingdoms of Amalur. I haven't had to change strategies at all. I don't even need to block 90% of the time. There's no difference in tact and I'm yet to get "raped."

Same's true with most games I play, and I'm not like, über awesome, like I said before. If I don't have to play any smarter on hardcore, then clearly your statement is full of crap. Even if I were "above average," I'm still nowhere near a great player. And I'm not thinking on my feet or using tactics any more or less than before.

So, now that we've addressed and debunked this utterly specious line of reasoning, what else ya got?

 

[Something Amyss]

I think there are few things less immersive than an extended tutorial.

Of course, we're not talking immersion but difficulty. Even so, if your "immersion" is broken because of extended tutorials, the problem's probably with you and not the tutorials.

I know, "immersion" is still the meaningless buzzword to toss around, but if you're really being yanked out of the game because someone is instructing you, then I'm surprised you haven't thrown down your controller in disgust because you can't jump by pressing "A" in real life.

 

[The Wykydtron]

Depends on what type of difficult you mean. Proper skill based stuff like Bayonetta on the harder modes can be pretty awesome fun if you're good (read: godlike) at the game.

Then there's Dark Souls which freqently moves between skill based fights and super cheap one hit kill bullshit. Snipers in Anor Londo. Fuck. You. And it gets to the point where you just memorise the area to such an extent you could sleepwalk through it. That gets so tedious so fast it hurts.

Then there's the online stuff. Fighters and League of Legends come to mind. Where half the difficulty is learning the metagame and/or characters. Like on Skullgirls I still have no clue how to beat Cellebela's jumping heavy punch with Filia. That shit completely invalidates her air dash, y'know her primary means of getting around? /ragequit

And the LoL community is one of the worst around i've got to say...Good luck finding one game without someone going "Report X for flimsy as fuck reason!" I have to wonder if the report system does fuck all though. They probably just dump it all into a virtual internet sewer and be done with it.

Oh speaking of LoL has anyone else had bullshit waiting times to log on today? 20 minutes of waiting I shit you not.

 

[Kahunaburger]

I think there are few things less immersive than an extended tutorial.

Of course, we're not talking immersion but difficulty. Even so, if your "immersion" is broken because of extended tutorials, the problem's probably with you and not the tutorials.

I know, "immersion" is still the meaningless buzzword to toss around, but if you're really being yanked out of the game because someone is instructing you, then I'm surprised you haven't thrown down your controller in disgust because you can't jump by pressing "A" in real life.

If you'll read the post I was responding to, you will notice that the commenter in question was stating that "Well with the lack of instruction manuals and the demands of increased immersion, the tutorial needs to be there."

If, for the purposes of this discussion, we define the slippery term "immersion" as "engagement with the game," an extended segment at the beginning of the game that is heavily linear, scripted, and focused on teaching the player something he/she could have figured out in a minute or two by looking at the manual/keybind and experimenting with the controls does not do wonders for engagement with the game. Instead of engaging with the game as a whole, the player is engaging with its mechanics one at a time in a sequence that is frequently unskippable due to a misguided attempt to make it part of the story.

Think about it this way: if you're playing Tetris, would you rather spend thirty minutes learning about the proper use of T-blocks, etc., or would you rather glance over the controls and figure out how to use T-blocks on your own?

 

[FoolKiller]

Never-ending Tutorials
Well with the lack of instruction manuals and the demands of increased immersion, the tutorial needs to be there. If you think about it, Portal had constant tutorials and still was quite challenging.

I think there are few things less immersive than an extended tutorial. Portal is somewhat of an exception, since in the context of that game's story the testing rooms are explicitly introducing you to additional layers of complexity. (And, incidentally, it almost always teaches you by letting you experiment with the mechanics.)

Well I have two questions, not that I disagree, but like I said that this thread unfortunately has a lot of problems and not many solutions available.
1. What does "extended" tutorial mean?
2. How would a tutorial be non-invasive or more immersive?

 

[Kungfu_Teddybear]

The medium difficulty setting.

Ok I'll be serious. the medium difficulty setting

I think a great example of balance between a challenge or too easy would be to play Demon's Souls and/or Dark Souls.

 

[Kahunaburger]

this thread unfortunately has a lot of problems and not many solutions available.

Haha true.

1. What does "extended" tutorial mean?

I think the prototypical example of a bad tutorial is the one at the beginning of Oblivion. You play through an unskippable linear scripted segment that throws text at you at every turn explaining every aspect of the game (many of which can be discovered almost immediately through player experimentation.) It's particularly obnoxious in that game because you'll be playing through that segment multiple times if you create multiple characters.

2. How would a tutorial be non-invasive or more immersive?

I think my favorite thing designers do with this stuff is making the tutorial optional. That way it's there if you want to be taught the controls, but not there if you want to figure out how everything works by yourself.

My second favorite is what they did in Portal, or in Mega Man X:


where part of the increasing difficulty of the game comes from the introduction of game mechanics one at a time in an environment that encourages the player to experiment with those mechanics. It doesn't always lend itself well to replays, but it's probably IMO the best way to incorporate teaching the player the mechanics into the main game.