Regardless of genre, there’s always one key property I look for in a single player game (and/or campaign) and that is difficulty. Nothing makes my inner PolarBear turn rabid faster than a single player experience that can be breezed through regardless of what difficulty setting I set the game on. I like a REAL challenge; I like struggling now and then; I like getting my money’s worth.
Rather than delight in the actual challenges presented by games like Resistance 2, Midnight Club: Los Angeles and yes, even Little Big Planet, some gamers are crying that parts of the games are just TOO hard. Cries of “broken”, “cheap”, “unbalanced” and “bugged” abound among gamers who, one can only assume, expect EVERY game to be geared towards their “lowest common denominator,” “someone help me tie my shoes” level of gaming prowess.
Find out what it means to be difficult after the jump!
Now, this is not some new phenomenon; people complaining that a game is TOO hard. There will always be those who, rather than admit they lack the skill or time to defeat a particular game (difficulty setting), would rather label the game as “broken.” The only thing that has changed is my willingness to just grin and bare it. Listening to voice chat, cruising forums and reading fan mail of late in regards to three of my current favorite games has simply pushed me too gosh darn far!
Before I talk about the new games suffering from undue difficulty criticism, lets talk for a brief minute about the ultimate example of “beautifully difficult”; Ninja Gaiden. Easily one of the most difficult action titles in recent memory, Ninja Gaiden (pick a version, they’re all great) is the real deal. It has the graphics, gameplay, sound and depth gamers look for, with a healthy dose of “hard to beat” thrown in for good measure. When you finish any game you usually feel pretty great. When you finish a really challenging game though, you feel like a god. If you’ve ever conquered Ninja Gaiden you know what I’m talking about. Sure beating Prince of Persia (whichever) was fun too, but compared to beating Murai you may as well have gone out and challenged a baby to an arm wrestling match.
Now we come to the current victims of “too-hard-idis.”
Resistance 2 may not have the best single player campaign ever, but it sure as hell does not deserve the undue drubbing some cry babies have hurled its way. Want to complain about the lack of depth the campaign gives to Nathan Hale? Ok, I’m with you. Want to complain that Cappelli is more of a main character in R2 than Hale is? Ok, I can see that too. It’s when gamers start saying that R2 is TOO hard, that it’s JUST a brutal trial-and-error system, that I get pissed off.
Trial-and-error is a bad thing now? I’m sorry, I thought that was the ultimate basis for humanities intellectual growth, my mistake. Yes R2 has a few moments where there is very little chance of surviving your first time through unless your some sort of gaming savant. The first time you run into Chameleons (invisible Predator-ish Chimera) for example. However, once you clue in to the fact that the damn things roar and that their telltale distortion appears prior to them attacking, you should not have much trouble with them from then on. You see what happened? You faced a challenge, failed on the first attempt, but subsequently learned how to overcome the obstacle and are now better prepared for it should it occur again in the future. Learning new things is fun!
The majority of R2’s campaign plays out that way. You hit a snag, struggle to find the solution a few times, and then move on. That’s not broken or unbalanced, that’s called a challenge. If you could just sail through any game without one major hiccup, what would be the point? Would you really feel cool beating a game that ANYONE else, from drooling babies right on up to Wii gamers, could have beaten too? I don’t think so. SuperHuman is no big thang once you have beaten R2 on Hard, just so you know.
Popularity: 1% [?]
| Related Posts:
|
Whew…long article! I was considering getting Midnight Club but now I’m renting it for sure for the weekend at least. I like a good challenge
I’m having fun with Fable 2 but I find it insanely easy. I wanted to die and curse the game but it’s not going to happen.
Well Star Wars Force Unleashes was so difficult on sith lord that the fun of using force powers was subdued.
Totally disagree. How can you get your money’s worth in GTA IV when you can’t get past the darn bank robbery mission? Once you try five times the game is dead. What’s the point? It’s incredibly annoying to try and retry. You know how to get past it: Not get shot. If you can’t do that, then the game is too difficult to be fun.
I think more games should either self adjust like Max Payne (or have an option to do so); or allow you to either customize difficulty (most sports games, The Elder Scrolls games) or let you change the difficulty at any point (Gears of War).
Games that have a difficulty setting like Superhuman, veteran, or legendary should be so difficult normal people will want to quit the games a few times over and break their 360’s. Thats the point of that difficulty. If you want hard play hard. Giving up after 5 tries is pathetic.
Jonathan yeh i did the GTA bank robbery mission first try with no cheats just because a game is hard doesn’t mean you can’t do it
Yeh i was thinking bout getting midnight club and i will definetly rent it now
@Jonathan
The bank robbery mission was easy on GTA IV. The only annoying thing about GTA IV’s missions where that if you failed you had to start at the very begining again which usually meant you had to drive across the city which gets boring fast.
Games these days need to have a wider range of difficulty settings that let PMPB get raped over and over but also let Wii owners have fun on the easier settings.
You want a hard game, try Shinobi and Devil May Cry 3 (not the Special Edition) on the PS2. One of the hardest games I ever played. I’ve been gaming for 23 years so that should tell you something.
Great, Great, Great article. Well said .. and what do you know, already a bunch of sissies responding (I kid because I care!). After going through Star Wars TFU on the hard level, the master level was a piece of cake. The bank robbery in GTA IV was EPIC and I felt like the king of the world when I did it on the 3rd or 4th attempt. Midnight Club LA – whoa – that is difficult … and isn’t that awesome, a game that I can play for a long time before I conquer it. Not like Call of Duty 4 (WAY OVERRATED!!) which was over in 3.5 hours or Army of 2 in 2.5 hours, pathetic.
I have long said that all game devlopers need to make their games with easy, medium and hard as the name for their difficulties – after those 3 levels they can name the harder or easier difficulties watever they want – just please, for the love of God stop with the ‘normal’ or ‘regular’ and whatnot – easy, medium and hard!!
I found that the American Fire Emblem games give me a lot of playing time in trying to outwit the computer. It is a fun and entertaining experience, because you get to specialize your units and tactics in many different ways. Highly recommended.
What I don’t like is games that kick your ass from the beginning, and that gets me out of the game. I like to be challenged after I know what I’m doing and the AI increases rather than me looking at the difficulty curve in the same way I’d look at a giant wall with spikes.
Great article PacMan. One of my pet peeves, as well. Now, being hard for the sake of being hard, that’s a different story. Yet, when something’s hard due to complex, but intriguing gameplay and the player is to much of a lax to try and conquer it. Well, they’ve earned their WaB medal, for whiny ass bitch.
I don’t think I’ve ever called a game “To Hard”. However, I’ve found quite a few annoying but even then its usually after 10 attempts at the same section.
Anyone thats finding a game to be to hard should either lower the difficulty(if you can) or just leave it for awhile and come back. I’ve found that if I’m having a issue just leaving it for awhile and coming back lets me get through, no problem.
Gotta agree… Ive played broken games before, and hard does NOT equal broken. I suppose they can mesh, but VERY rarely (only time I can think of were the light-cycles in Tron 2.0… which was broken due to the AI’s complete disregard for it’s own life).
Also… tiral-and-error? Last time I played a game I can call that to the point it wasnt fun (in that moment) was the infamous hotel level in Dark Corners of the Earth… and I didnt whine… I did it… and despite the scripting, every time I got further, the adrenaline kicked up, knowing I could be dead any second if I dont think quick and figure it out. It was AWESOME.
THIS ARTICLE IS TOO HARD TO READ. MAKE THE FONT BIGGER.
Nice to know there are still people who think games are not movies and that just sitting there pushing a few buttons and watching cut scenes is not always a great gaming experience… well, not one worth paying $60 for anyway…
One of the games that I enjoyed the most lately is actually a game despised for its trial and error gameplay: Stuntman Ignition. A lot of people found the game annoyingly hard (or, strangely, very easy if you just tried to get through the stunts without caring about what you were supposed to do) but I found that perfecting every stunt to get 5 stars was actually a lot of fun and quite rewarding (and the actual goal of the game). But once again, you have to memorize a bit and retry a few times, things that a lot of gamers today don’t like to do. But when the goal is clear, the controls are tight and you don’t get the feeling the AI cheats, it’s always a pleasure to roll up you’re sleeves and do your best…
Yeah, I felt a great deal of accomplishment when I beat megaman 9 in under an hour for the acheivement. So, I completely agree, the harder the better. The more trial and error, the better. But, than again, I grew up in an era of gaming where companies got away with calling their games 50+ hour games (what they didn’t mention was 40 of those hours would be spent dying and starting from the beginning of the game), so I guess I’m use to it. I personally can’t put down Fallout3 right now, the AI difficulty might not be the best (or hardest for that matter) but the trial and error is definately there in droves. Anyone who came out of the vault and immediately headed west would know what Im talking about, lol.
Great Article!
If patience was more prevalent amongst gamers, these kind of things wouldn’t be looked down upon. But, you can go to any gaming store around midnight on the eve of some big games release and see how much patience us gamers have.
Yes Ninja Gaiden game is the perfect example of a difficult game! I play other games in hard mode such as Gears of War, Call of Duty 4 etc. The difficulties were not hard, the only thing that makes it hard is that you die all the time, in the end you can manage to beat it!
Capcom games are good examples of difficulty! Old Resident Evil, I still haven’t played them in Hard mode. Take RE Remake for the Gamecube, by just playing Chris’s story, I found it so HARD! Yet I was playing in Easy mode O_o. What about Megaman X games? those were hard, but strictly becomes easy once you find out a bosses weakness with a particular upgrade.
SNES had loads of HARD GAMES! Super Ghosts n Ghouls, Contra 3, Valkriy(is that the name!?) Battletoads, Sky Blazer etc. Damn!
Games now are days are just plain easy even though you play them in the hardest mode. COD4’s Mile High was challenging but not hard, you just have to switch weapons each time and work your way through!
Ninja Gaiden 2 I consider a damn hard game! Anyone who can beat Master Ninja without farming karma in level 1 and by not using Ninpo’s in Chapter 11 is consider a gaming god! Reasons why I dislike the game was for it’s cheapness, onwards from Chapter 9, you’ll get tagged with up to 7 explosive shurikens all at once..what the hell is that!???
RPG games can never be considered hard:/ All you just have to do is level up!
I consider Halo games to have a good difficulty, I still need to play Combat Evolve in Legendary.
I totally agree with, so many gamers these days have gotten used to just beung able to breeze through a game, and i get so frustrated when i can beat a game with ease. If theres no challenge why the hell should i bother with it. Whats the point.
I dont have ninja gaiden but DMC4 is a good example of a similar game I managed to beat it on Dante must Die mode(which is equivilent to very hard) but i simply cant beat the game on Heaven or Hell mode (extreme). Im not ashamed to admit that i simply dont have the skills for it. Its literally one hit at any point in the game and your dead. Doesnt stop me loading it up every once in a while for some good old controller smashing frustration.
I like a challenge, if you cant do a game dont winge about bugs or balance get better at it. I love the old turn based RPG’s and whenever i go from one of them to a shooter i suck ass, but after a little while my reflexes kick in and im good to go. Im never gonna be a great FPS player, but im above average and im happy with that.
Bottom lineif you cant hack it go play barbie princess leave the gaming to real gamers
I both agree and disagree – I want a game with a good amount of challenge, but I also want games to be approachable to non-gamers. Ninja Gaiden, for instance, is one of less than ten games I’ve never finished, because I found it painfully hard – and I dig learning and repetition – the Stuntman series is one of my favourites.
BUT the learning and repetition has to be fun – I’m more of a platformer/racer/strategy/FPS kind of gamer, and I’m not good at God of War/Ninja Gaiden/Heavenly Sword type games, despite playing them a fair bit. I do improve, but it’s just not what I’m good at. However, Ninja Gaiden is ridiculously hard, such that even a seasoned gamer (my first action beat-em-up was Double Dragon, for heavenly sword’s sake!) gave it up – and not because I died once, but because I spent a couple of hours on a ten-minute stretch of gameplay and realised that I was learning next to nothing and it just wasn’t fun.
And if it’s not fun, then you have to ask yourself why you’re playing games!
In my opinion, games should take the God of War approach, where there are some fiendishly hard difficulty levels for folk that like them, but some approachable ones for folk that will struggle even at the lower levels. If we want people who are not gamers to join us in our hobby, the easy difficulty setting _has_ to be easy, and that’s easy to non-gamers. Of course, I agree entirely that the hardest settings should be tough-as-nails hard (although not cheap – that’s another issue alrogether, and one that NG falls foul of).
For example, I could recommend God of War to someone who was thinking about getting into games, but I’d tell them not to touch NG unless they’d been playing action games for a decade or so!
As an aside, if games are going to be difficult, it’s important to make the learning and repetition focus on the difficult bit – I’ve played plenty of games where you play through half an hour of interesting but relatively easy gameplay, and then are confronted with an almost-impossible-to-defeat-first-time boss – with no checkpoint before the boss fight. I dig retrying hard fights, I do not dig trudging through half an hour of gameplay five times to do it. Metroid Prime actually did this after a 45-minute odd section – after repeating this five times and dying, I got jack of it – the boss fight was fine, and fun, but the three hours I had to sink into the boring (not first time ’round, but definitely by the third) trudging – so I traded it in and played something that was difficult but designed to be difficult and fun at the same time.
I’m some where in the middle on this issue. I played and beat Call of Duty 2 through on veteran the one and only time I played it and it was very hard and more then a few times was just so outrageously hard that I had to throw a pillow at the wall but, in this case the game I thought was well designed and exhilarating to complete a level or even a check point. In this case it was fun the objectives were clear you just had to persevere.
Far to often though developers make poor design decisions and I think what gamers or even the writer of this article describe as bugs or broken elements are more just really bad or really frustrating game play elements.
Pick your genre pick your poison be it overly complex lets have 30 kinds of elemental magic types, mail boxes that stop your car dead in its tracks, weapons that degrade, unfinished or underutilized buddy ai to, escort mission, sometimes the things you describe that people complain about are not hard but just plain bad game design.
I think theirs a difference between well design challenges and poorly designed and implemented ideas that frustrate the gamer. Maybe those two are subjective to each gamer.
I totally agree, and not just about shooters and action games.
People tend to say I have “no life” just because I can perfect many Expert songs in Guitar Hero and Rock Band. Sure, I enjoy playing it for an hour or two, but just like everyone else, I have a life outside of it.
If they spent an hour a day on Practice Mode or just started to notice patterns, they could play Expert too.
@PMPB
Have to disagree with you on LittleBigPlanet.
Ultra-tough sections are absolutely fine, and I too revel in re-trying them time after time, but this isn’t possible on LBP due to the checkpoint system.
If I fail something 4 (or 8, depending on the checkpoint) times, I have to restart the level. No other games uses this. If I die in a game, I expect to be able to keep going back to the latest checkpoint time after time after time.
The checkpoints prevent the whole ‘learning’ thing as, by the time you’ve replayed through the rest of the level to get back to where you were, you’ve forgotten how to do it.
They need an unlimited respawn checkpoint.
Sometimes I get way too frustrated at games. I must’ve died 30 times getting past this one level in LBP. That ‘great feeling’ that you were talking about was there when I finally conquered it, but it wasn’t equal to the amount of frustration I had. The ‘good part’ for me is actually conquering it. I felt superhuman having my thumbs move the sticks that fast and precisely to get it just right.
I totally agree with you. While sometimes I enjoy breezing through a fun little game, people over react to difficulty; and while I have my fair share shouting, “BROKEN!”, “CHEAP!”, or “OMGHAX!” I keep them to myself, not online and (hint: the main idea is coming up) I wouldn’t want games to be any other way.
haha. I posted my comment before reading page 3; PMPB talked about the level I talked about in my comment. I didn’t need someone to teach me though. TAKE THAT PACMAN!