You feelings on fake difficulty?

[galdon2004]

Either way it's a challenge. Who really cares whether the playable character is inhibited or the AI is better as long as the difficulty goes up and down?

in certain contexts, such as say an action game, that would be true; but in games where it's more 'you vs computer' in the same way you would be pitted against a player, fake difficulty can be extremely jarring. Some examples of this include:

Racing: Rubberband AI. No matter how much a lead you have, if you crash, you get passed by, likewise no matter how fast you go, the AI is always on your tail.

RTS/TBS: AI being immune to the fog of war; having an amount of units that is impossible to attain, or making units without prerequisit buildings

Board games: RNG set up with an unbalance towards giving the computer better dice rolls, cards, or other 'luck' based benefits.

 

[Magicmad5511]

For RTSs I agree that making you weaker to raise difficulty is stupid. You could just try to make the AI more strategic.
In other games though, mostly shooters, I find this method works because it forces you to be more strategic.

 

[weker]

Most games I know do as you say, just mae you take more dmg, however Ninja gaiden 2 not only puts new foes in, but furtheremore makes them use new move sets and such, and act more agressive, such as the large werewolves throwing each others limbs more frequently at you.

 

[Prof. Monkeypox]

The biggest problem I've had with artificial difficulty is in Dead Rising, where the difficulty is the result of shitty controls, unforgiving time limits, cheap-ass enemy attacks, and retarded ally AI. I really wanted to like the game but the fact that my many losses were due, not to my own lack of ability, but because of bad controls or a struggle to escort someone up a one-step ledge caused me to lose all enjoyment.

 

[Dexiro]

Fake difficulty is making the game more difficult by giving the human player handicaps instead of making the game AI play better.

Take a chess video game. Chances are there will be options to play against the computer. The computer will have difficulty settings ranging from beginner to expert. The more difficult the computer, the more advanced plays and tactics it will use.

Then you have games such as Rome: Total War, where increasing the difficulty doesn't make the computer a better strategist. Instead, it turns your army into a bunch of wimps with less morale and fighting ability.

What do you feel about this short cut to make games more difficult?

I'm not sure I'd call that fake difficulty, that's just a lazy way of increasing regular difficulty.

Fake difficulty is generally anything that you'd consider unfair, such as trial and error, anything that requires guesswork, or technical errors such as dodgy hitboxes and cameras. One more thing would be

It's generally a sign that a game is badly made. Lazy difficulty doesn't bother me as much but it can make a game more boring than it could be.

http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty

 

[The Abhorrent]

I haven't seen a link to the TV Tropes article for "Fake Difficulty" [http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/FakeDifficulty] while taking a quick browse through this topic, but that's what I believe the the topic creator is alluding to. Anyhow, that's what I'll be referring to by what I the phrase means.

Generally speaking, it means something is difficulty... but for all the wrong reasons.
TV Tropes lists five key varieties (copied & pasted from the link above):

1.Bad technical aspects make it difficult. Making a difficult jump is a real difficulty. Making a same difficult jump with overly complex controls, bad jumping physics, or an abrupt mid-air change of camera angle - and therefore the orientation of your controls - is fake difficulty.

2.The outcome is not reasonably determined by the player's actions. Unlocking a door by solving a color puzzle is real difficulty. Unlocking it by pressing a button until you get the right number is not.

3.Denial of information critical to progress. A reasonable game may require the player to use information, clues, or logic to proceed. Witholding relevant information such that the player cannot possibly win without a guide, walkthrough or trial and error is fake difficulty. Also includes hidden Unstable Equilibrium (e.g. a later level is much harder if you do badly at an early level, and you're not informed of this ahead of time). In a 2D game with no camera control, hiding important details behind foreground elements or Behind the Black counts as fake difficulty if your character should be able to see them.

4.The outcome of the game is influenced by decisions that were uninformed at the time and cannot be undone. (Unless, and only unless, the game is heavily story-based and unforeseen consequences of actions undertaken with incomplete information are legitimate plot elements.) A game that offers a Joke Character and is clear about the character's weakness has real difficulty. A game that disguises a joke character as a real one has fake difficulty.

5.The game requires the player to use skills or knowledge that are either incorrect or have nothing to do with the genre. A football game that requires you to describe the position that Jerry Rice played for a power-up is real difficulty. A football game that forces you to do multi-variable calculus in order to train your starting lineup is fake difficulty, not to mention just plain silly.

---

In general, fake difficulty isn't something I enjoy in games. Sometimes its unavoidable (for a whole variety of reasons), and a game would be boring to play if it's completely absent of some kind of fake difficulty. Well-implemented fake difficulty can make certain aspects of gameplay fun as well (i.e.: baseline enemy health & damage increasing with upping the difficulty level, in addition to an increase of real difficulty by making the AI better), but quite often this still falls under "unavoidable fake difficulty".

Nevertheless, the main thing with fake difficulty is that its unfair. Real difficulty gives the player a fair chance, fake difficulty does not. Older games were more difficulty, but quite a bit of that difficulty was unfairness; newer games seem easier in comparison, but its mostly because they present a fair challenge.

I enjoy fair challenges, unfair ones are just frustrating.

 

[Jenitals]

Either way it's a challenge. Who really cares whether the playable character is inhibited or the AI is better as long as the difficulty goes up and down?

in certain contexts, such as say an action game, that would be true; but in games where it's more 'you vs computer' in the same way you would be pitted against a player, fake difficulty can be extremely jarring. Some examples of this include:

Racing: Rubberband AI. No matter how much a lead you have, if you crash, you get passed by, likewise no matter how fast you go, the AI is always on your tail.

RTS/TBS: AI being immune to the fog of war; having an amount of units that is impossible to attain, or making units without prerequisit buildings

Board games: RNG set up with an unbalance towards giving the computer better dice rolls, cards, or other 'luck' based benefits.

All true, I still don't see how it takes away from the gameplay though, like I said, challenge is a challenge is a challenge.

 

[Fishdog52]

I personally don't like it. A good example of GOOD AI throttling, in my opinion, is SC2 wings of liberty's campaign. It doesn't make you're units stronger or weaker, same with the AI opponent , but it makes them a better strategist.

Really? 'Cause the problem I was having with brutal was them starting out with extra upgrades. And that insane difficulty computer you can select gathers blue minerals as though they were golden. However, it was much less of a noticeable edge than, say, Civilization difficulties.

Difficulty is based on making the margin of error diminished somehow. This is often done in games where survival is necessary by decreasing the time-to-live in some manner. Either enemy damage, accuracy, or hitpoints increase, or your damage, hitpoints, or resources decrease. This is almost always the norm because it is the most direct correlation. In fact, I can only think of a few games where this situation is not solely the defining feature of harder difficulties.

One of them, SSBB, does upgrade enemy resilience and power noticeably. However, enemies more often select more powerful moves, in addition to having frustratingly fast reaction times. Furthermore, they actually prioritize picking up objects like pokeballs and hearts on stronger difficulties, something which demonstrates that the makers were actually trying to improve AI.

More often, smarter AI seems to be the result of monsters being much more powerful overall. Suppressing fire in Gears of War is much more menacing in the higher difficulties, and baddies take oodles of bullets to kill, allowing more of the baddies to live long enough to effectively flank you.

 

[hazabaza1]

It's bullshit. If I put a game onto hard mode I want it to be hard, I don't want to have enemies spammed at me or the computer just using cheap tactics over and over, I want things that can actually take a bit of thought to overcome.

 

[galdon2004]

Either way it's a challenge. Who really cares whether the playable character is inhibited or the AI is better as long as the difficulty goes up and down?

in certain contexts, such as say an action game, that would be true; but in games where it's more 'you vs computer' in the same way you would be pitted against a player, fake difficulty can be extremely jarring. Some examples of this include:

Racing: Rubberband AI. No matter how much a lead you have, if you crash, you get passed by, likewise no matter how fast you go, the AI is always on your tail.

RTS/TBS: AI being immune to the fog of war; having an amount of units that is impossible to attain, or making units without prerequisit buildings

Board games: RNG set up with an unbalance towards giving the computer better dice rolls, cards, or other 'luck' based benefits.

All true, I still don't see how it takes away from the gameplay though, like I said, challenge is a challenge is a challenge.

going to the turn based strategy for one example; there is a game i played once, i cannot recall the name, in which you basically have to capture towns and ultimately wipe out the enemy.

In order to make the game 'difficult' the AI was first of all immune to fog of war, and always seemed to know exactly where to go on it's turn to find the best artifacts to give it's self an advantage. I mean literally would bee line through the fog of war to reach an artifact rather than weaving around to see the area.

then the enemy also regenerated lost soldiers if they won an encounter with one of your armies. so, if you won, you always had a loss of troups, and if you lost a battle with the enemy having one unit left, it got back it's whole army as though it was a flawless victory.

This literally made many strategies, such as gorilla warfare and softening the enemy to finish them off useless to you, but more powerful for the computer. That was a very damaging fake difficulty because it literally was a strategy game where half the possible strategies are unavailable to the player.

 

[omega 616]

How is it fake? If it making the game harder how is it fake?

It is still making the game harder to play, how does it matter how it makes it harder? How can a game be harder in a fake way?

I don't care how a game makes it harder as long as I have the ability make it harder ... unlike borderlands!