Topic: Game Difficulty discussion

Further to the difficulty discussion in an article the other day, I would like to carry that discussion on here due to an incident today which will massively effect my enjoyment of the game Celeste.

You see I am not the greatest ever gamer by a long stretch but I am persistent. Over the last 2 nights I have been plucking away at Celeste and the 30 Strawberry trophy popped and I was like yes! Then I wonderd how many people got to this point and checked the trophy count.

(I am in the hotel and the manager is clearing up. I have just watched the other climber go out of the vent to escape)

Bear in mind some of the sections so far have been imo quite hard. To my surprise over 7% have got the platinum. That seemed really odd to me. These games which are this difficult usually have a much lower percentage. I'm talking neo bosses in Rogue Legacy hard here and that has less than 1% coverage across all players.

Could it be the quality of the game? Avid Indie gamers dedicating their lives? Only platforming gods have bought the game?

No. In fact there's an assist mode unlocked from the start - which offers cheats such as Invincibility, slowing the game speed down, infinite air boost etc. The problem I have now is there is no motivation in making life difficult (I played the same section 40plus times earlier to grab a strawberry) when I can collect all the strawberries on super easy mode without getting good and jump around without a care in the World.

This is the problem with Easy modes in games. The game is designed perfectly with fairly regular checkpoints you can jump back to anyway I don't understand why this is even in the game?

Tbh games are getting FAR too easy nowadays to the point that whenever I play a PS2 or retro game that I used to be super good at, I now struggle immensely with them. It's been a gradual thing, but honestly games are now damn near as easy as those old Sesame Street EC rated games...

I said this over on the article comments, but I don’t mind difficulty too much if it rewards learning the game and is balanced appropriately, but I don’t care for “cheap” game tactics. I’ll often quit if I think the game is just using random occurrences out of my control to punish me.

@TowaHerschel7 I think this is true to some extent but also my tolerance for padding or general time wasting in games is much lower now. That, along with the internet making it so easy to do, means I can have a low threshold for looking up guides online to get me through bits.

Thing is some games have easy modes and some games don't have easy modes. It is what it is and maybe good things or not depending on the perspective.
Point though, there's no need to make a fuss about it and have a campaign trying to influence studios like From S or others. It's a made up outrage campaign from the press.

As for Celeste it comes down to self control. Who are you playing the game for - yourself or people who might (but probably won’t) inspect your trophy list in the future? But if you just want to play it on easy, go for it too. At the end of the day you’ll get less joy from it than you would at the harder difficulty, unless it’s really so hard that you just don’t want to play it

@kyleforrester87 Is there a substantial story to Celeste? I seem to remember hearing it has a pretty profound and strong narrative. If a game is built around a good story or a meaningful message, it makes sense to provide a way for as many people to get that message as possible. Sometimes the difficulty is part of the message and is symbolic of the narrative. But sometimes it is just a means to enjoy the game while it gives you a great story.
NieR Automata is an example of a game that has such a cool and moving narrative that I think as many people as are interested should experience it. And they thankfully built in a large variety of difficulties to tailor
the experience, which doesn’t really detract from the core story.

@Th3solution well, the story is about the main character battling her inner demons and rising above an apparently impossible challenge so I’d say yes it does make sense for the game to be difficult. And to be honest, Noisy is talking about collecting the strawberries, which are optional extras that you don’t need to pick up to see the ending. To be honest I gave up going out of my way to collect them fairly early on as the game does get really pretty tricky in the later levels.

@themcnoisy You need to remember that games are now a way of telling a story and sometimes that is all you want.
Also as @Frigate says, Life Is Hard, so why would I want to make something I chose to play more difficult? Sometimes you want a feeling of accomplishment after a long day, whether it is completing a great treasure hunt in Uncharted, or thrashing a top league side in Fifa. It makes you feel good.
But each to their own. If players find this joy in playing everything on hard, then hats off to them but it is not for me. i have trophy hunted in the past and the worst ones are the difficulty ones. It sometimes ruins the game, especially if making the game difficult is just a case of giving the enemies more health and ammo.

I'm a big fan of easy modes. I often play games on easy, particularly if I've already played them before. Example, if I were to play Mass Effect now - REMASTER IT PLEASE EA - I would play it on easy because I just want to play it at a leisurely pace and enjoy the story. I don't care about the challenge. I played the second one on the hardest difficulty en route to the platinum but it wasn't fun. I got no enjoyment out of it. I just did it because I wanted the platinum.

I tend to play games the first time on normal. Sometimes I'll increase the difficulty in a subsequent playthrough, but more often than not I'll lower it.

@kyleforrester87 You know, I've always collected trophies for my own satisfaction. It's nice to have a permanent mark somewhere that you went above and beyond for a game.

Although I got hung up on them to the point where I abandoned the affair entirely, because hell if I'm not going to be able to enjoy a good game cuz it's lacking meaningless digital tokens.

To address the topic, though, I have the same issue with games that makes easy difficulty simple to access. I don't mind if there's an easy mode locked away in a menu somewhere that I can't get to, or if I have to make that choice at the start of a game, but as a gamer, my instinct is to use all the tools at my disposal to conquer a challenge, and an ever-present easy mode just feels like too much of a temptation to bother with. The PS4/Switch port of FF7 is particular bad about this: why bother struggling against the weapons when you can click two buttons any time and enter god mode? Now, it's fine to say it's for your own satisfaction, but at some point I'm just made to feel like I'm imposing silly restrictions on myself, which spoils my sense of engagement with the game. If I'm just 'making my own fun' like that, as with the people who beat Dark Souls games with DK Bongos, then it completely recontextualizes the entire time I spend with the game.

Nintendo games are particularly bad about this. I was struggling with a Star Fox Zero level the other night, and, after dying multiple times, Nintendo puts an item directly in the path of the Arwing that makes it invincible. I flew around it, of course, but what an obnoxious temptation! And to make me fly around the thing, no less! I don't want that help, Nintendo. I want to conquer the game by my own devices.

But I have also quit games that feel unfair and randomly difficult (I actually did this recently: got tired of spending weeks in a row dying at the last stage of a particular game; which actually isn't that big of a deal, because, reading about the requirements for fully completing the story with all the relevant characters, it was never going to happen anyway). Life is too short to spend it futilely struggling with something that just isn't fun.

I'll pretty much never play games on easy difficulty, though. If I'm forced to do that, then I'm more likely to just quit the game, because I don't see the sense in experiencing something with handicaps. That's fine for other people, but it'd just destroy the experience for me. The one arguable exception to this is Mega Man 2, because, IMO, the easy mode in that game (although it's called "normal" difficulty in the U.S. version) gives it a better sense of flow.

@Ralizah This is my take on it. Exactly correct to point out Nintendos mechanics.

With Celeste its hard, at points very difficult. But its not unfair like old NES games with enemies spawning underneath a jump and stuff. The instant restart akin to Trials HD means a death is only a momentary problem until you work out the room or section and you only have a few buttons to manage.

I think what irks me is that the fun is in completing the small challenges the game shows you. Without the challenge there is no game.

Games especially rpgs are really easy now. I miss the days of digital devil saga, and nocturne. WOW those were rough.

Are you saying you're not looking up my progress in Nioh on the daily?

Whilst I missed the core of this discussion, I was aware of it and had some thoughts.

Then yesterday, I played the Descent DLC from Dragon Age: Inquisition and spent most of the time absolutely furious with its hideous, unfair difficulty spike. At multiple points, it forced me to play the game in a totally different way, for no obvious reason, and genuinely made me hate it and BioWare for creating it. I was a heartbeat from a rage-quit when I finally beat the final boss, safe in the knowledge that I'll never, ever play it again (no matter how many times I'll likely replay the core game).

And it's made me re-evaluate some of my thoughts on game difficulty, particularly given the timing of me walking into it, blissfully unaware of what faced me, whilst thinking about this discussion.

So much loathing.

The title of that Forbes article might as well have been "I can't be bothered to learn how to play Sekiro". They then quickly moved the goalposts to claiming the game is unfair to people with disabilities and its lack of accessibility options might stop them from being able to play it. Well as harsh as it may sound, if you physically can't play the game then that's just unfortunate. That's why it's called a disability.

If I can't play VR games because they make me dizzy, am I gonna write an article asking that Sony make a regular version of Astro Bot? No, I'll play something else or do something else.

If you really want to follow the story of Sekiro, watch one of the millions of let's plays of it.

It's a ridiculous argument and the more it gets brought up, the more I get annoyed by it.

Accessibility in gaming IS brilliant and it's great that our industry seems to be getting more and more adaptive and welcoming to people from all sorts of backgrounds but not every game has to be for everyone.

@RogerRoger Ya know, in retrospect, I think part of why I never quite finished Dragon Age Inquisition (and forgive me if I’ve said this before as I know we’ve had some discussions about it in the past) was that I ran into a difficulty spike with trying to defeat one of the High Dragons. I was cruising along fine in the combat department and had spent loads of time outfitting my party and leveling and I really felt I was at a level where I should be able to beat the Dragon (I can’t remember which one it was) and the thing just decimated my whole party. And despite regrouping and trying different tactics, different parties, different equipment, and even leveling up a bit - I kept getting hammered and not even close to defeating it. It was pretty frustrating. The silly thing is that those are completely optional bosses, but in my mind it took the air out of the experience. Pretty frustrating. Especially when you’ve got a 100 hour game going and you feel leveled up and spent countless hours crafting good equipment and still can’t scratch the thing. Honestly, I should have just skipped it and continued so I could complete the story, but it was my own folly. Your comment just now made me remember that experience because I had forgot. Because yeah, DAI is not a particularly hard game; it’s very much a story driven experience. So to have large difficulty spikes just throws the experience into a tailspin.
It’s a bit different when I would run up against a tough boss in Bloodborne. It may wipe me out in 30 seconds the first go, but since the game is more of a 40-50 hour experience, you don’t seem to mind a little extra time to level up and keep retrying for a few hours. And defeating the boss typically involves perfecting a certain gameplay technique or approach rather than just having a super-duper leveled up sword and armor and a perfectly balanced party that happens to have the magical skill set that can affect the weakness of the enemy. I don’t know it’s just different.

I've stated this before but since there is a nice (friendly) thread, I'll add my two cents here.

I can see no reason why games don't have accessibility options that can affect difficulty in a way that makes sense to that game. I don't agree with the not all games are for everyone routine. The majority of games have difficulty options and no one seems to moan.

I can completely see @themcnoisy 's point regarding trophies, I think game rewards should reward the game being played a certain way, I see them as being made to make people play in different ways, however I don't think that is the same as accessbility.

Gaming is one of the few artforms where physical ability affects whether one can experience it or not. It is not just about disability, though that is a big part of it. I don't have the reaction times of many gamers who are good at Sekiro. Therefore, I am going to struggle at Sekiro more than others and I am a pretty experienced gamer. In 10 years when I am closing in on fifty, will I be able to play a game like Sekiro that I really like? Possibly not but I like the overall gameplay, the world, the sound, the sense of achievement. Now I can't play it.

I don't think that it is possible to say that accessibilty is great but only in certain games. It is only people that aren't excluded who don't care for it. That's like saying a wheelchair ramp is great but people shouldn't be upset if they can't get in a building because not all buildings are for everyone. You can make that argument for old buildings but in this day and age, if you design a new building there is no excuse for it.

Do I think that games should be designed around accessbility? No. I think Sekiro at its normal difficulty is the developers intention and is the default. That's fine. Could there be accessbility options in that game though? Yes. Would it make any difference to the game for players that want to play it on normal? None at all.

The game should be made as intended and then accessibility added in a way that makes sense. Giving infinte health in Sekiro would break the game, but you could tweak the amount of health drops or health bars or even the telegraphing of attacks etc.

I have no problem with accessibility options affecting ingame rewards or trophies etc (so if you play with settings you don't get trophies - I mean that exists on most games anyway). If you find the game impossible at normal, you will probably find it difficult at easy.

In God of War, I played the entire game at normal difficulty but I could not at all beat the last optional boss on normal and I dropped the difficulty to easy and still found it really fudging tough. On youtube I saw someone doing it on high difficulty without taking a hit. Does that mean I should not feel a sense of accomplishment because I can't do it as well as someone else?

I just don't get peoples objections to be honest. If a game has the option to play as intended by the dev and the ability to open that up to more players with options, why does anyone have a problem with it?

@Kidfried haha I have seen you playing it actually. I just assumed you couldn’t afford Sekiro 😂

@kyleforrester87 So true it hurts!