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[PATV] Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 6, Ep. 15: When Difficult Is Fun
"Punishing games will never succeed... see you in Anor Londo."
That doesn't make sense. Both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are notorious for having extended, unskippable journeys placed between the player respawn and the boss fights. Running across half the Boletarian Palace every time you face the Tower Knight is the very definition of what is described here as a failure of game design... and yet, both those games were successes.
Something about Super Meat Boy (yes I died over & over in that game too) was how tight the controls where, they are the same in Super Mario Bros 3D land. I never felt like I was plunging down completely out of control (well I did when I had made the mistake & could only watch the plummet) but it looked like I could make that jump, or there was a gap between those two buzzsaws.
@ruzkin I think the main point there is that the Souls games are consistent with their own rules.
The "punishment" of running across the Boletarian Palace is part of the "challenge".
You are informed beforehand that if you die (and you will. A lot) you will be set back quite a bit so as a player you expect and even want that, because that challenge is what the Souls games sell.
Being punished for your failures isn't what they mean by a "punishing game" in this episode, because there is no challenge if there are no consequences for failure.
Instead, as I understand it, what they really mean by "a punishing game" compared to "a challenging game" is a game that punishes you UNFAIRLY, through excessive or completely unexpected means.
The Souls games may be hard as balls to complete but they are never actually unfair.
I think you're drawing a parallel here that doesn't exist. Early console titles were supposed to offer the arcade experience at home - or as close to it as you could get with the poorer hardware that was affordable in the home.
Come the NES and Megadrive,it was getting possible to produce games that aped the arcade experience surprisngly closely, and it started to become obvious that the coin sucking arcade model of difficulty really wasn't suited to a home game experience (this is particuarly notable with early Megadrive titles, which basically sold on offering near-as-dammit arcade games). So with those machines you can see a sea change in difficulty, with games that continue to offer a challenge, but one that is often surmountable.
The alleged rise in production cost thing isn't really a notable factor until the PS2 and the rise of mega-content games like GTA and later the Elder Scrolls, which require a very large staff simply to produce the sheer volume of assets those games require.
The thing that Demon's/Dark Souls does well is that the game is never unfair. Yes, you will die...a lot. But it is always your fault. It is never unfair. Every time you die it is because you screwed up in some way. Fire Emblem, you can play perfect, but lose a character because an event happens you could not possibly forsee. Even in the later part of the games where you know enemies can randomly spawn on the map, guessing where they will spawn is near impossible and because you're just guessing, there is not skill involved. Multiple times I said, well I hope they don't come from the east because...oh well...time to reset...In DS, I have had one death ever that was not my fault and it was so comedic, I didn't even mind. I crit an enemy which left me falling off a ledge to my death after the animation.
Can you make the guys behind "Don't Starve" watch this? There are things I love about the game, but "and now you die because a nigh-invincible monster came through your hard-earned camp in the middle of winter and broke all your stuff, delete save, ha ha" isn't even close to being one of 'em.
I would really love to see and play a tournament-viable fighting game that follows the rules outlined in this video. To date, I can name none that did. It could be a glorious end to the tired and tedious formula of endless, endless frame data memorization.
I was just thinking about something like this. How are you defining difficulty and how do designers create different levels of difficulty? (Along with that how SHOULD they create different levels of difficulty?)
I thought Dark Souls was a terrible example of difficult and a textbook example of punishing.
It had long periods just getting back to where you failed just to try again. It relied on rote memorization and the "alternate paths" felt more like sequence breaks or violations of common sense rather than clever solutions. Oh, and it doesn't exactly play by the same rules. I've never had a Black Knight have his sword get stopped by the stone wall like mine. They often just clip through the wall and hit me anyway. My plan had been to lure it into a small tunnel where it couldn't swing that monster. I was wrong!
Also, you ignored one of the biggest things I think facing "difficult" games: Technical execution. Dark Souls might not have many glitches, but the ones it does have (including lag) add punishment. I remember one of the first times I died. I fell through a floor and croaked. There was no way I was getting my souls back from that. How is that not punishing. There is a direct ratio to how "easy" a game is to how much forgiveness you get when bugs and whatnot rear their ugly head.
If Dark Souls should be praised for anything it's atmosphere and little else, in general it's a mediocre game.
@d.TFFoS You need to play more. I lose 60 secs or more :P
But on iteration time, I don't think the game has to have a necessarily low iteration time to be not punishing. It just needs to not have any downtime where you're not vulnerable.
For example, Super Meatboy/Hexagon are great for low iteration straight back into the action hard games, but Nethack, where you can easily die at any point and only intelligent long term play on the range of hours wins, is also great. But some of the BIT.TRIP series, RUNNER and BEAT, are horrible for this, BEAT because the last boss changes the rules slightly and so I have to play through everything to just prove I'm horrible at PONG, and RUNNER because to perfect the bonus levels you have to go through multiple surplus screens to just start the damn level again. These slight or minute long disruptions annoy me far more than a character loss in Nethack.
That's not to say there isn't room for downtime. In Guitar Hero or RUNNER, you can have fun playing through the easy sections before hitting the challenging bits, but once you start falling into repetition (RUNNER's ODYSSEY) to pad the mastered section out, or more generally once the player faces no challenge at all playing the easier content, then it just becomes tedious and detrimental to the flow of the game. I can play through 60 seconds on the easiest level of Super Hexagon zoned out just to get to the actually challenging Hyper levels (and try for Super Hexagon : 360 secs ), but one wrong move will still crash me into a wall and the music and random level design prevents it becoming monotonous. But having to jump the same jump in ODYSSEY nine times whilst the same beat plays in the background over and over is just brain numbing, because even if you fail the 7th jump, you already succeeded far too many times for it to be a learning experience, and nothing else in the level is keeping your interest anyway.
If nothing is learned, the death is pointless. So easier content should either be interesting for other reasons, or be an easy test of all your varied techniques to keep you fresh.
Super Meatboy also isn't a perfect challenging game. Aside from the "CONTROLLER MASTER RACE" loading screen which annoys me every time, it could really benefit from a toggle run button to improve its usability. I wind up with sprint cramp from holding Shift down perpetually. But this is the only complaint. A few of the levels get a bit long towards the end too, but I can forgive Cotton Alley's last level for being an endurance challenge.
As for difficulty curves, this is very hard to balance in multiplayer games. Fighting games require a high degree of reading your opponent. Natural Selection (1 or 2) requires a large amount of movement skills (bunny-hopping, wall jumping, evading fire, flying) as the aliens to get anything done. These are things that can't be easily taught with dumber bots. Ideally, there'd be a ranking system and the new players get lumped together until they figure all this out, but that requires a large user base that can't be easily segregated by user skill. A ranking system doesn't help if the mid-range players can't break out of their bracket because the elite players beat them into submission.
Overall, I think hard games are great and this video does pretty amazing justice to them.
But I'll go back to playing Path of Exile Onslaught league, losing my character after several hours and enjoying myself anyway. I won't get angry at the lost time, I'll just get angry at the lag spike that trapped my character in the first place
Recent games that are excellent examples of low iteration time and thus, though difficult, not punishing:
Braid (just rewind when you screw up)
Super Hexagon (when you die all it takes is a tap to jump *right* back in, you lose your progress but if that progress is more than 1 minute you're some kind of God)
Gunpoint (When you die it offers you to jump back in a matter of seconds ago, usually there are four options for how far back averaging something like 2 seconds, 8 seconds, 13 seconds, 30 seconds. It's like Braid but quicker to execute if less granular.)
Worse examples:
Trials HD (easy restart but if you finish the level poorly and want to retry there's a delay and then a 3,2,1 at the start of the level)
Im surprised Rayman Origins didn't come up, you have to get the rhythm for each level down through memory (the last level in particular) but when you do it feels amazing. The almost non-exsistant loading times make things alot less frustrating to.
You forgot to mention the cost of failure. See,far too often,failing means sitting through loooong and boring screens where the player's failure is basically rubbed in their face. Where it feels like you're waiting HOURS to get back to what you were doing,in addition to having to wade through the game again. It's one thing to have to reload the level a bit to set everything back up. It's another to have to sit through some elaborate scene with no way to skip it.
Consider Contra. You die,you drop right back into the action where you left off. There's no punishment for failure. No long screen shot of the map. No going back to the start. You died. Now get back to work. The death itself is your punishment,no need to dwell on it.
Now consider Ghosts N Goblins. You die. You have to go through a long scene showing the whole map,you have to wait for the level to load,you have to go back to the start of the level. There's a reason they added things like check points and save games. It's cause of shit like this. And all of it feels like the game is rubbing it in your face that you died.
Another thing to consider is,if you're going to make your game insanely difficult,give the player unlimited continues. Nothing pisses players off like a cheap shot death and then having to go back through the WHOLE GAME and do it again. That was the main flaw of Battletoads. Limited continues,making the players replay the whole level if one player runs out of lives,insanely high difficulty,the ability to hit each other. Any one of these things is annoying. All of them together makes the game damn near unplayable,especially with 2 players.
So,yeah,it's bad enough the player died. Don't go rubbing their faces in it or they're gonna get sick of your shit really fast.
I've heard a lot of back and forth about Dark Souls, whether its merely very difficult or punishing. I have to say it falls just past difficult and into punishing due to a few things. The storyline, which is quite good, is sadly hidden. It requires you to sift through the items and make assumptions about connections between people. Mainly, though, its the lack of context to its difficulty; now let me explain what I mean. Most know that in order to proceed you are likely to die, a great deal in fact, and especially when you are attempting to recover your souls. This can mean you will flat out lose a significant amount of time spent playing. They do not fit any reasoning behind this or even explain this. You are expected to accept that this method of obtaining, losing, and then permanently losing your hard earned currency is to make the game more difficult, while i believe this is the most punishing design i have seen in games for a long time. This combined with areas that are, despite what others may say, designated kill areas regardless of skill ( Bed of Chaos, Capra Demon ) this makes for a trial and error style of game play.
And just to clarify with my previous post, i do not believe the Souls games to be "unfair" as it were in terms of combat or controls. I am in my NG++ game at the moment. However i do consider the souls recovery mechanic in and of itself to be punishing, and i feel it detracts from the game as a whole, not merely by its presence but by the simple fact that it feels like forced difficulty without context. If death merely resulted in the loss of souls, like most JRPG's do i would likely consider the game a diamond in the rough, but as it stands it just looks like cubic zirconia.
XD I was in the middle of doing the sliding spin-slash in Warframe when he mentioned it :P
On that note, I find that combo really easy to do. There are two differences for me than the standard set-up that make it so.
Make crouch toggle, then once you're sliding you can let go of both crouch and sprint, you will keep sliding. I usually continue to hold sprint to keep going once the move is done, but you don't need to.
Secondly, if you have a thumb button on your mouse, use it for melee (I use thumb buttons for melee and grenade in every game that has those for the following reason). You want to move and melee a lot, so it should not be activated using a finger that is also used to move. You cannot melee and shoot or melee and power at the same time, so make it a thumb button if you have one, otherwise middle mouse may do. But really, your mouse should have at least two thumb buttons. You can get cheap-ish mice with them and they're soooo useful in gaming. They're useful enough that mine has 12 thumb buttons, but I recognise that may be overkill :P
*sigh* Brevity is not my strong point, sorry if this seems a little long for what I was trying to say.
Good episode, as always. Thanks for helping me to be able to explain the very real difference between difficult and punishing in future
I think a lot of games have unfortunately substituted challenge for fun, and have been very successful because of it from a certain subset of gamers (i.e., those who like to brag about their 1337 skill). Super Meat Boy and Super Hexagon come to mind. And that's fine -- if there's a market for your super punishing thing, go for it. But it annoys the hell out of me when people assert that these are the only "true" games, that anything else is for casual sissies, that EVERY game should be made this way.
I don't think this video could have been timed any better if you tried, because it applies directly to the game I am now playing to get off my backlog.
That game is Bayonetta.
Holy hell. I'm playing on Normal, and this damn game changes the rules so often I have never cursed at anything so much... not even the most difficult parts of Dark Souls.
Just when I think I'm getting the hang of this thing, they introduce a new enemy that attacks you immediately after the load screen is finished, then proceeds to air combo you to death before you figure out what is happening.
This happens so frequently that the combat resorts to spamming dodge until you trigger Witch Time (bullet time), and lay into the bad guy with your own combo... repeat. The enemies are often too fast to fight outside of bullet time... especially when they start throwing multiples at you. These are enemies that are difficult enough to kill one on one.
Got a big guy to kill with a big axe? Makes sense to go behind him and hit him in the back doesn't it? Nope, not allowed. They will grab you every time and throw you out front because you're not allowed to fight behind them.
At this point I'm just trying to finish the damn game so I can say I didn't spend $20 bucks and never played it.
I don't think that kind of criticism about Fire Emblem applies in Awakening because the game always gives a hint of where enemies will appear, except the final chapter but you already know from the start that enemies will constantly spawn and the floor tiles tell you where they'll appear, Previous FE entries do that sure but not Awakening, in fact one of the reason I think that game is so great is because it corrected that mistake that has been with the series all these years
In warframe, if you play on a modified controller, you can spin dash incredibly easily, but you cant aim as well as you can with a mouse. I think that was an accidental balance between the two play-styles !
@LazyDogJumper here's why I disagree with you about the recovering souls issue-YOU have to make the choice of going back for them. Heck the fact that in Demons and Dark you can recover them after you die is something many games wouldn't even consider let you do. The point is you have to make the choice of wondering is the risk worth it. The game doesn't force you in anyway to go back. Free Will in the Souls Series is one of the many reasons I love this series
@Inkidu Near the edge of where you fell will be your "soul marker" I never had that problem. And the glitch with the Knight has worked both ways for me as well. For me its anything but mediocre
This sort of thing is exactly what made me quit FF13 without ever finishing the game. 99% of the monsters followed their own rules, and were challenging but beatable. I even took out the Juggernaut the first time it was possible to fight (it was an optional battle) simply because I refused to let myself pass it up. It was an extremely challenging fight, but I did it. Fast forward to the boss of the game. Orphan has 6,780,000 hp (which is huge, compared to the rest of the monsters or even bosses), takes half damage from everything and is capable of inflicting instant-ko, which in FF13 was punishing. (If the player-controlled character died, game over. Not so if one of the two other characters died.) This was only his first form. The second had half as much hp, but took zero damage until staggered. It also does ridiculous damage in either form. There was no gradual curve. The challenge of the game went from roughly 7 or 8 to about 12 at the end boss.
In contrast FF13-2 maintained a safe challenge of about 6 throughout.
Dark Souls is really good at making you feel that each death is your fault. That's one sentiment you see repeated in dozens of reviews. Every time you die, you're like "Damn, I knew I shouldn't have X!" And half the time you're laughing at your own foolishness.
@Inkidu. I've used walls against enemies many times in Dark Souls. Only in rare cases did I find it inconsistent, and can't remember what those were. Never for glitches either. Lag was occasionally an issue but I never died because of it. Dark Souls 2 new engine will alleviate the lag.
I would have thought "when easy is fun" would be a harder question to answer. Games without some degree of challenge are generally just not interesting to me.
I'm also a little confused by the use of the term "punishing game" because I don't think a game being punishing is an inherently bad thing. In fact it's an important part of a lot of great games - including ones that were praised in this video. I'm really not sure what they were getting at.
I really like Fire Emblem: Awakening, but I do agree that it took some bizarre steps backwards in basic game design in comparison to its predecessors. The game only sometimes warns you about reinforcements, and when it does you are given no clue as to when or where. For a strategy game, it's really terrible to throw such random elements like that into combat. It's a blessing that they added casual mode, because classic mode is nearly unplayable because of it. It's a shame, because almost everything else they did to progress the series is fantastic.
But of course, Demon's/Dark Souls are among the epitome of hard difficulty done right. The only thing unfair about those games is the camera at times.
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KalnaurI See Rain . . .Centralia, WARegistered Userregular
@weakboson there is a difference in punishment that makes a game hard or makes it pure punishment (aka punishing games). For example, if a game has rules, and it sets out those rules, and you break the rules, quite commonly you are punished with death and a restart screen, instant restart, checkpoint restart, etc. In Super Meat Boy, you know when you miss a jump that you are fucked. You just know. But you also know that it's alright, because you can hop right back in and try not to fuck up next time. If instead there were any of the elements mentioned in the video, such as breaking the inherent rules of the game, then it's probably punishing.
Basically, there are games that are tough but fair: those games are hard games. There are also games that are tough and not fair; they use gotcha tactics, (the Fire Emblem example), break game rules ("This pit had treasure" example), or are simply rote memorization (Battletoads) in place of actual difficulty.
If the game presented you with all the rules up front, and you can totally attribute each of your deaths to "user error", it's a hard game. If the game presented you with rules and then fucked with them and you "for the lulz" and you can usually blame your in-game deaths to the game and it's system, that is a punishing game. Also usually, but not always, punishing games are poorly made games. So, a hard game can have punishment, but not be a punishing game. A punishing game is hard only because of its punishments.
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As a long-time Fire Emblem fan (and one without a 3DS, so no Awakening), I have always felt that the series has been built upon the ideals of "challenging but fair," and "Many ways to solve a problem." Granted, there are certain requirements for a solution to be successful, such as sticking to the same group (not "spreading levels around" but making one super-team), but at all times they give options, even for what looks like a no-win situation.
From what I've heard, the only thing people can really complain about in Awakening is the "reinforcements move as soon as spawned" thing, which wasn't present in any other FE game (except when they spawn on your turn via moving past a spawn line). This is a frustrating mechanic, and game-breaking to the series, but it teaches the player to make a cage around squishy units like healers, instead of just a wall or choke-holding strategy. Granted, I haven't played the game, so I don't know just how frustrating the spawn-deaths are, but I can see that by being informed that they exist you can make a better strategy. This does, however, fall into the memorization category.
Another game which I'm surprised you didn't mention here (though you did mention it in the first or second "games you might not have tried" episode) is Monster Hunter. After having it for so long but never really getting into it (due to the long tutorial, non-existant explanation of skills, and slow grind to get higher equipment), I've been on a binge for the last 2 weeks, getting farther than I ever have before. While there are "grind" elements to it (I still haven't completed some equipment sets due to rarity of drops), the game itself keys into the fact that, aside from weapon sharpness, you don't need anything else to win. You can dodge every single attack in that game, if you're good enough, and the monsters give enough telegraphing to get a sense of where they're going at any given time. There are some frustrating times where they pin you to a wall and you can't escape, or other monsters interrupt you out of nowhere, but the game feels like a real environment, where you are evenly matched with any opponent.
Another thing the game teaches you is that you are only as strong as your skills, and while sometimes there is a better weapon for the job, you can usually defeat any monster with just about any weapon, given it is sharp enough to cut through their hide. I like the fact that you don't "level up" and gain natural skills, but that your equipment is the only measurable sense of strength. It makes you feel powerful when you equip a brand-new axe or armor set, rather than the Diablo route of "well, the numbers are higher, so that should mean I'm better." Not that there's anything wrong with the Diablo route, but it just doesn't have the same sense of power as Monster Hunter.
I don't see your point with Warframe's spin slash. I find it quite easy to do. You sprint, then crouch, then slash. W+shift, control, e. I may have just adjusted quickly but it seems pretty simple to me. What is really annoying in that game though is the balls, those god dam rollers.
I loved Max Payne 3 on the hardest difficulty for this exact reason. It was ballstompingly difficult, but if you could land the headshots, you could still tear through. I hate punishing games, but MP3 always felt fair. You should die from getting shot, that's what happens. But it happens to the enemies too, even the ones with fancy gear.
Hotline Miami and Metro 2033(on ranger easy/hard mode) are also pretty good examples of challenging but difficult. They both provide scenarios where you are incredibly easy to die, but so are your enemies. they both get you back in the action almost immediately with the exception of waiting for enemies to get done talking with metro.
in Hotline, you die in one hit from everything just like your opponents and gives you countless ways to try and beat a level to try every time you failed with a large amount of mechanics to use to do so.
in metro, the ranger modes make both you and your enemies much easier to kill and ammo far more scarce so you have to decide whether you should try to take out enemies silently, use your available ammo to take them out, a mixture of both, or try to sneak past the enemies all together.
just a couple of games that i enjoy that i think could have been put in there.
Why was the Pepsi poison? Coke used to have drugs in it. Why do you think we refer to cocaine as coke? It used to be in Coca-Cola. Coca(ine)... Bad art decision. Shame.
[PATV] Wednesday, June 19, 2013 - Extra Credits Season 6, Ep. 15: When Difficult Is Fun
Posts
That doesn't make sense. Both Demon's Souls and Dark Souls are notorious for having extended, unskippable journeys placed between the player respawn and the boss fights. Running across half the Boletarian Palace every time you face the Tower Knight is the very definition of what is described here as a failure of game design... and yet, both those games were successes.
The "punishment" of running across the Boletarian Palace is part of the "challenge".
You are informed beforehand that if you die (and you will. A lot) you will be set back quite a bit so as a player you expect and even want that, because that challenge is what the Souls games sell.
Being punished for your failures isn't what they mean by a "punishing game" in this episode, because there is no challenge if there are no consequences for failure.
Instead, as I understand it, what they really mean by "a punishing game" compared to "a challenging game" is a game that punishes you UNFAIRLY, through excessive or completely unexpected means.
The Souls games may be hard as balls to complete but they are never actually unfair.
Come the NES and Megadrive,it was getting possible to produce games that aped the arcade experience surprisngly closely, and it started to become obvious that the coin sucking arcade model of difficulty really wasn't suited to a home game experience (this is particuarly notable with early Megadrive titles, which basically sold on offering near-as-dammit arcade games). So with those machines you can see a sea change in difficulty, with games that continue to offer a challenge, but one that is often surmountable.
The alleged rise in production cost thing isn't really a notable factor until the PS2 and the rise of mega-content games like GTA and later the Elder Scrolls, which require a very large staff simply to produce the sheer volume of assets those games require.
It had long periods just getting back to where you failed just to try again. It relied on rote memorization and the "alternate paths" felt more like sequence breaks or violations of common sense rather than clever solutions. Oh, and it doesn't exactly play by the same rules. I've never had a Black Knight have his sword get stopped by the stone wall like mine. They often just clip through the wall and hit me anyway. My plan had been to lure it into a small tunnel where it couldn't swing that monster. I was wrong!
Also, you ignored one of the biggest things I think facing "difficult" games: Technical execution. Dark Souls might not have many glitches, but the ones it does have (including lag) add punishment. I remember one of the first times I died. I fell through a floor and croaked. There was no way I was getting my souls back from that. How is that not punishing. There is a direct ratio to how "easy" a game is to how much forgiveness you get when bugs and whatnot rear their ugly head.
If Dark Souls should be praised for anything it's atmosphere and little else, in general it's a mediocre game.
But on iteration time, I don't think the game has to have a necessarily low iteration time to be not punishing. It just needs to not have any downtime where you're not vulnerable.
For example, Super Meatboy/Hexagon are great for low iteration straight back into the action hard games, but Nethack, where you can easily die at any point and only intelligent long term play on the range of hours wins, is also great. But some of the BIT.TRIP series, RUNNER and BEAT, are horrible for this, BEAT because the last boss changes the rules slightly and so I have to play through everything to just prove I'm horrible at PONG, and RUNNER because to perfect the bonus levels you have to go through multiple surplus screens to just start the damn level again. These slight or minute long disruptions annoy me far more than a character loss in Nethack.
That's not to say there isn't room for downtime. In Guitar Hero or RUNNER, you can have fun playing through the easy sections before hitting the challenging bits, but once you start falling into repetition (RUNNER's ODYSSEY) to pad the mastered section out, or more generally once the player faces no challenge at all playing the easier content, then it just becomes tedious and detrimental to the flow of the game. I can play through 60 seconds on the easiest level of Super Hexagon zoned out just to get to the actually challenging Hyper levels (and try for Super Hexagon : 360 secs
If nothing is learned, the death is pointless. So easier content should either be interesting for other reasons, or be an easy test of all your varied techniques to keep you fresh.
Super Meatboy also isn't a perfect challenging game. Aside from the "CONTROLLER MASTER RACE" loading screen which annoys me every time, it could really benefit from a toggle run button to improve its usability. I wind up with sprint cramp from holding Shift down perpetually. But this is the only complaint. A few of the levels get a bit long towards the end too, but I can forgive Cotton Alley's last level for being an endurance challenge.
As for difficulty curves, this is very hard to balance in multiplayer games. Fighting games require a high degree of reading your opponent. Natural Selection (1 or 2) requires a large amount of movement skills (bunny-hopping, wall jumping, evading fire, flying) as the aliens to get anything done. These are things that can't be easily taught with dumber bots. Ideally, there'd be a ranking system and the new players get lumped together until they figure all this out, but that requires a large user base that can't be easily segregated by user skill. A ranking system doesn't help if the mid-range players can't break out of their bracket because the elite players beat them into submission.
Overall, I think hard games are great and this video does pretty amazing justice to them.
But I'll go back to playing Path of Exile Onslaught league, losing my character after several hours and enjoying myself anyway. I won't get angry at the lost time, I'll just get angry at the lag spike that trapped my character in the first place
Braid (just rewind when you screw up)
Super Hexagon (when you die all it takes is a tap to jump *right* back in, you lose your progress but if that progress is more than 1 minute you're some kind of God)
Gunpoint (When you die it offers you to jump back in a matter of seconds ago, usually there are four options for how far back averaging something like 2 seconds, 8 seconds, 13 seconds, 30 seconds. It's like Braid but quicker to execute if less granular.)
Worse examples:
Trials HD (easy restart but if you finish the level poorly and want to retry there's a delay and then a 3,2,1 at the start of the level)
Consider Contra. You die,you drop right back into the action where you left off. There's no punishment for failure. No long screen shot of the map. No going back to the start. You died. Now get back to work. The death itself is your punishment,no need to dwell on it.
Now consider Ghosts N Goblins. You die. You have to go through a long scene showing the whole map,you have to wait for the level to load,you have to go back to the start of the level. There's a reason they added things like check points and save games. It's cause of shit like this. And all of it feels like the game is rubbing it in your face that you died.
Another thing to consider is,if you're going to make your game insanely difficult,give the player unlimited continues. Nothing pisses players off like a cheap shot death and then having to go back through the WHOLE GAME and do it again. That was the main flaw of Battletoads. Limited continues,making the players replay the whole level if one player runs out of lives,insanely high difficulty,the ability to hit each other. Any one of these things is annoying. All of them together makes the game damn near unplayable,especially with 2 players.
So,yeah,it's bad enough the player died. Don't go rubbing their faces in it or they're gonna get sick of your shit really fast.
On that note, I find that combo really easy to do. There are two differences for me than the standard set-up that make it so.
Make crouch toggle, then once you're sliding you can let go of both crouch and sprint, you will keep sliding. I usually continue to hold sprint to keep going once the move is done, but you don't need to.
Secondly, if you have a thumb button on your mouse, use it for melee (I use thumb buttons for melee and grenade in every game that has those for the following reason). You want to move and melee a lot, so it should not be activated using a finger that is also used to move. You cannot melee and shoot or melee and power at the same time, so make it a thumb button if you have one, otherwise middle mouse may do. But really, your mouse should have at least two thumb buttons. You can get cheap-ish mice with them and they're soooo useful in gaming. They're useful enough that mine has 12 thumb buttons, but I recognise that may be overkill :P
*sigh* Brevity is not my strong point, sorry if this seems a little long for what I was trying to say.
Good episode, as always. Thanks for helping me to be able to explain the very real difference between difficult and punishing in future
That game is Bayonetta.
Holy hell. I'm playing on Normal, and this damn game changes the rules so often I have never cursed at anything so much... not even the most difficult parts of Dark Souls.
Just when I think I'm getting the hang of this thing, they introduce a new enemy that attacks you immediately after the load screen is finished, then proceeds to air combo you to death before you figure out what is happening.
This happens so frequently that the combat resorts to spamming dodge until you trigger Witch Time (bullet time), and lay into the bad guy with your own combo... repeat. The enemies are often too fast to fight outside of bullet time... especially when they start throwing multiples at you. These are enemies that are difficult enough to kill one on one.
Got a big guy to kill with a big axe? Makes sense to go behind him and hit him in the back doesn't it? Nope, not allowed. They will grab you every time and throw you out front because you're not allowed to fight behind them.
At this point I'm just trying to finish the damn game so I can say I didn't spend $20 bucks and never played it.
Talking about permadeath, I hope you make a episode about permadeath, I’m very curious about your opinion on it.
In contrast FF13-2 maintained a safe challenge of about 6 throughout.
FF games just keep getting worse and worse...
I'm also a little confused by the use of the term "punishing game" because I don't think a game being punishing is an inherently bad thing. In fact it's an important part of a lot of great games - including ones that were praised in this video. I'm really not sure what they were getting at.
But of course, Demon's/Dark Souls are among the epitome of hard difficulty done right. The only thing unfair about those games is the camera at times.
Basically, there are games that are tough but fair: those games are hard games. There are also games that are tough and not fair; they use gotcha tactics, (the Fire Emblem example), break game rules ("This pit had treasure" example), or are simply rote memorization (Battletoads) in place of actual difficulty.
If the game presented you with all the rules up front, and you can totally attribute each of your deaths to "user error", it's a hard game. If the game presented you with rules and then fucked with them and you "for the lulz" and you can usually blame your in-game deaths to the game and it's system, that is a punishing game. Also usually, but not always, punishing games are poorly made games. So, a hard game can have punishment, but not be a punishing game. A punishing game is hard only because of its punishments.
From what I've heard, the only thing people can really complain about in Awakening is the "reinforcements move as soon as spawned" thing, which wasn't present in any other FE game (except when they spawn on your turn via moving past a spawn line). This is a frustrating mechanic, and game-breaking to the series, but it teaches the player to make a cage around squishy units like healers, instead of just a wall or choke-holding strategy. Granted, I haven't played the game, so I don't know just how frustrating the spawn-deaths are, but I can see that by being informed that they exist you can make a better strategy. This does, however, fall into the memorization category.
Another game which I'm surprised you didn't mention here (though you did mention it in the first or second "games you might not have tried" episode) is Monster Hunter. After having it for so long but never really getting into it (due to the long tutorial, non-existant explanation of skills, and slow grind to get higher equipment), I've been on a binge for the last 2 weeks, getting farther than I ever have before. While there are "grind" elements to it (I still haven't completed some equipment sets due to rarity of drops), the game itself keys into the fact that, aside from weapon sharpness, you don't need anything else to win. You can dodge every single attack in that game, if you're good enough, and the monsters give enough telegraphing to get a sense of where they're going at any given time. There are some frustrating times where they pin you to a wall and you can't escape, or other monsters interrupt you out of nowhere, but the game feels like a real environment, where you are evenly matched with any opponent.
Another thing the game teaches you is that you are only as strong as your skills, and while sometimes there is a better weapon for the job, you can usually defeat any monster with just about any weapon, given it is sharp enough to cut through their hide. I like the fact that you don't "level up" and gain natural skills, but that your equipment is the only measurable sense of strength. It makes you feel powerful when you equip a brand-new axe or armor set, rather than the Diablo route of "well, the numbers are higher, so that should mean I'm better." Not that there's anything wrong with the Diablo route, but it just doesn't have the same sense of power as Monster Hunter.
in Hotline, you die in one hit from everything just like your opponents and gives you countless ways to try and beat a level to try every time you failed with a large amount of mechanics to use to do so.
in metro, the ranger modes make both you and your enemies much easier to kill and ammo far more scarce so you have to decide whether you should try to take out enemies silently, use your available ammo to take them out, a mixture of both, or try to sneak past the enemies all together.
just a couple of games that i enjoy that i think could have been put in there.