Quote:

Original post by Splinter of Chaos How hard should games be standard (to be beaten)?

I think maybe we should stop thinking in terms of challenging players to 'beat' our games and start thinking more in terms of how to make those games an interesting and fun challenge.

Lets face it, beating a 'difficult' game tends to be less an exercise in skill and more an exercise in frustration. The only thing that prevents me from beating a game - on just about any difficulty - is how many times I have to reload my last save before I get so annoyed with it that I throw it out the window. And completing the challenge doesn't so much fill me with satisfaction at having beaten a tough challenge, but angry at the developers for wasting my time.

Is that the sort of emotional response we're looking to evoke in people? I don't know, but it's certainly not the emotional experience I'm looking for when I play a game. And not only that, but I don't think it's necessary to achieve the sense of satisfaction from beating a challenge.

A hard game is always going to be frustrating to a crap player, but an easy game needn't be boring to a good player. If I'm playing a game and it's too hard, I get pissed off and frustrated. If I'm playing a game and it's too easy, I'll make things more interesting for myself by posing myself challenges. For example: "I must beat this level using only the worst weapon", or "I'm not allowed to have more than ten units in the game at a time" or whatever. If at any time a challenge turns out to be too difficult or unworkable, I can just abandon it and carry on playing normally.

So can we encourage players to do this? I think we can. We can add all sorts of little extra bonuses and rewards for completing certain challenges. And trying to win them can be both challenging and fun, while being much less frustrating than getting stomped all the time.

What about games such as Morrowind and Fallout, where the main quest doesn't require much of anything to win? The sub quests (which amount to about 75% of the games) could be as challenging and as easy as the designer wants.

And some sub quests wouldn't even need to be labeled as such. What if the quest is instead labeled "no way in hell - do not try this". All of the villagers could plead with the hero to not risk it, because there is just no chance for victory. Or the game world itself could be made to give the player huge warnings before he darts off to save the unsavable princess. Once a player emerges from the ashes of an unwinnable quest, he may have a shiny new sword, companion, or special ability that exists no where else. Not to mention a monster ego.

To be honest, I would hunt these places down. But it would provide the insane difficulties that some like, without bothering the wimps.

Quote:

Lets face it, beating a 'difficult' game tends to be less an exercise in skill and more an exercise in frustration. The only thing that prevents me from beating a game - on just about any difficulty - is how many times I have to reload my last save before I get so annoyed with it that I throw it out the window. And completing the challenge doesn't so much fill me with satisfaction at having beaten a tough challenge, but angry at the developers for wasting my time.

I just want to double check on that. Does dying really frustrate people? I died about twenty times trying to complete a "fiend challenge" in Ninja Gaiden without helth potions, but I never cracked a nerve. I just have to wonder whether stress and dying are at all inter-related, or if there is more to the equation than we all think.


And about the adaptable AI, True: it MAY if used PROPERLY help train the player, but False: it is fair. I think that kind of AI should ALWAYS stay out of the main game, but here's a thought. What if it we only used it for training, seeing as that's what a few of you are saying it does so well. It is an imperfect way of assuming a player-skill level, but if it's never used to make the main game harder, and never used to make a scorebourd, than maybe it could be alright.


As for the better AI v stronger AI discussion:
The only place this might come into problems might be in enemies that aren't supposed to be capable of strategy. For example: in Half Life 2, you have all these bug creatures to fight for and against you, but how do you decide how to make them harder? All I'm really saying is I support better AI, but let's not villainies a stronger AI.

Quote:

Original post by Sandman Lets face it, beating a 'difficult' game tends to be less an exercise in skill and more an exercise in frustration. The only thing that prevents me from beating a game - on just about any difficulty - is how many times I have to reload my last save before I get so annoyed with it that I throw it out the window. And completing the challenge doesn't so much fill me with satisfaction at having beaten a tough challenge, but angry at the developers for wasting my time.

I think a lot of this is going to come down to personal preference. There are obviously a wide variety of responses in this thread from "Always Easy" to "Always Hard" to everything in between.

This having been said, the source of difficulty must be in sync with the genre and gameplay of the game itself. The save/reload system of so many games is a problem in and of itself. That's a whole different argument that I won't get into, but I will state my opinion on the matter by saying that Save-Anywhere combined with Reload-On-Death is one of my least favorite gameplay mechanics, and it makes any attempt at balance or difficulty impossible or useless, since it does, as you, say, make the entire game nothing but an exercise in patience for tedium rather than an actual "game". In my opinion, Save/Reload becomes a "metagame" within the game, so much so that it actually overlaps all other mechanics in the game to become the ONLY actual gameplay mechanic that matters. However, there are lots of genres where save/reload isn't the primary mechanic, and in those cases difficulty becomes more important. Fighting games, racing games, sports games, multiplayer games, online games, etc. In those genres, I'd say difficulty does become an exercise in skill rather than patience, usually.

Quote:

A hard game is always going to be frustrating to a crap player, but an easy game needn't be boring to a good player. If I'm playing a game and it's too hard, I get pissed off and frustrated. If I'm playing a game and it's too easy, I'll make things more interesting for myself by posing myself challenges. For example: "I must beat this level using only the worst weapon", or "I'm not allowed to have more than ten units in the game at a time" or whatever. If at any time a challenge turns out to be too difficult or unworkable, I can just abandon it and carry on playing normally.

I believe the opposite. A hard game doesn't become frustrating to me even if I'm terrible; in fact, I generally find so few hard games that I'm intrigued by the ones that present a challenge. As others have said, of course, there is a difference between being "difficult" due to gameplay and just being "annoying" due to shoddy controls or buggy implementation. I dislike making up my own challenges as it is basically me admitting that the game itself has failed me and that I am now just trying to amuse myself by making up my own game in my head. Why would I want to do that when I could instead find a new game that directly supports and enforces the challenge levels that I want? I could play chess against a terrible player by deciding in my head that I'm only going to use pawns and bishops the whole time, but I would much rather play real chess against a good player. Why? Because playing fake chess will never make me better at chess; my strategies will become optimized for playing against poor opponents. Every time I win, I will just think that my fake rules were just too lenient and that I should maybe only use knights instead of bishops, and every victory is pointless since I'm really just playing against myself. If I lose, I probably won't decide I'm bad and need to get better, I will just assume that chess is far too unbalanced if I can only use three pawns and a knight vs 20 queens, and that again my fake rules need rebalancing to try and make it a fair game. Basically, making up fake rules constantly for a game stops me from being a player and turns me into a game designer, which isn't really what I want to be doing when I'm playing games. The game designer who made the game should be the one who figured out balance to make it playable, not me.

Quote:

Original post by Splinter of Chaos I just want to double check on that. Does dying really frustrate people? I died about twenty times trying to complete a "fiend challenge" in Ninja Gaiden without helth potions, but I never cracked a nerve. I just have to wonder whether stress and dying are at all inter-related, or if there is more to the equation than we all think.

It's not so much the dying and reloading that is frustrating; that's more of a minor annoyance. It's the inability to progress the game.

Incidentally, your 'fiend challenge without health potions' sounds more like the sort of self set challenge that I'm talking about encouraging. Did you have to do it without health potions, or did you choose to do it to test yourself?

Quote:

Original post by makeshiftwings However, there are lots of genres where save/reload isn't the primary mechanic, and in those cases difficulty becomes more important. Fighting games, racing games, sports games, multiplayer games, online games, etc. In those genres, I'd say difficulty does become an exercise in skill rather than patience, usually.

Yes, you're right, but I think that's more to do with the nature of the challenges in those games than anything else.

There are three basic parties who can challenge the player: the game developer, other people, and the player himself. The challenge presented by a game can come from one or more of these parties.

In an online FPS such as UT, the challenge comes from other people. The difficulty varies considerably depending on who you play, and can be frustrating if you're getting stomped constantly by vastly superior players, but ultimately the player can control the difficulty by choosing to play against people with a similar ability, and the challenge posed by those people will often be interesting and varied.

In a single player game such as Tetris, the challenge is primarily from yourself. You don't play tetris to beat the computer, because it goes on forever. The challenge is to beat your last score. You're playing against yourself. Racing games also tend to contain an element of this, because even if you can always play to beat your previous time. The level of challenge presented here depends exactly on the player's own skill, which means it's always within reach however good or crap he is.

Now in a single player RPG or FPS or whatever, the primary source of difficulty is the game designer. And this is where the challenge in the game starts to become problematic. If the game designer happened to judge the difficulty too high, lots of people don't get to finish the game, get frustrated and give up. If the game designer happened to judge the difficulty too low, lots of people finish it in half an hour and complain because they don't feel they've had their money's worth. And short of cheating, or tweaking a difficulty slider (which may or may not be sufficiently finely grained or have a wide enough range for any given player) the player has no control over the difficulty he faces.

What I'm suggesting is that rather than develop a game in which the player has to beat the game designer and try and guess the magic difficulty level(s) which will make the game fun for everyone, we could try and design the game so that the player is encouraged to compete against himself.

Quote:

Original post by Splinter of ChaosAnd how can you have a high score bourd when you're constantly raising and lowering players to give false representations of skill?

The situation you describe may be impossible, but having a high score board with evolutionary DDA is possible. The point I've been trying to get across is that evolutionary DDA does not work by raising or lowering a static bar. It increases the challenge as players get better. But it doesn't wait around for you either. If you are playing badly, the enemies will learn to exploit your weak tactics and force you to learn something better! It's not about coddling weaker players, though it does allow for some flexibility in individual learning speed.

In our example of an evolutionary Space Invaders, score could be the number of kills made by the player before dying or reaching some time limit. This would be hard to exploit. If you are playing normally and killing as many enemies as you can, eventually the enemies will become too smart and overpower you, ending the game. If you try to manipulate the system by carefully killing the smarter enemies and only getting rid of stupid ones when there are no smart enemies left, you will still run into problems. First of all, that is not a very efficient way to get a lot of kills. Also, though you may be slowing the evolution, you are also slowing down your score, and eventually those aliens are going to catch up.

Nothing's ever perfect, but please don't dismiss this idea out of hand. If you have criticisms, at least give some concrete arguments about the system itself, not just expressions of incredulity.

Quote:

Original post by Kest There are already many games that use the player's human skills instead of artificial "experience" and leveling. First person shooters, action adventures, platformers. IE, non-RPG titles. These game characters have very little or no computerized stats. A good RPG should be made to do exactly the opposite of what you're suggesting. The game characters have skills, not the human player. The human player uses his brain to implement strategies, but everything else is left up to the character. You hold aim and press fire. The character uses reaction time and accuracy to put a bullet in the best place he can. You choose, he executes. If you remove leveling from the RPG, you have an action-adventure with a good story. If you want to design or play an action adventure with a good story rather than an RPG, then do so. There's no reason to flush out RPGs, or to force the RPG sub-title onto every game made.

It seems like several other threads here also touch on the same issues:
How about items that grow?
Instead of choosing your class in an RPG...

What I was saying is that maybe it would be a good idea to use the skill-based gameplay of action games in RPGs. But apparently you think that the idea is incompatible with RPGs. I'm not an RPG expert, so you are probably right that RPGs focus on other things, and skill-based skills would only be a distraction. However, I have several different points to make in response to that.

One is that I was thinking more in terms of MMOs than RPGs, which is a newer genre and has not been explored very much yet. You may still think that skill-based MMOs won't work, but in this case I will not defer to your experience and instead request that you give some reasons for your position!

Also, when I say "RPG" I am not necessarily thinking only of the current state of the genre. Remember that it stands for "Role Playing Game". If there is a better way to convey the experience of playing the role of another person, then who is to say that it shouldn't be called an RPG? From what I've read, including GameDev's own The Future of RPGs, it seems that RPGs have not been very true to their supposed purpose.

And finally, I would like to expand on your idea that RPGs should encapsulate skill into the player's avatar so it doesn't distract from essential RPG elements. This could be compatible with evolutionary DDA if the player's avatar had skill not based on stats, but on AI like a neural net that can truly learn. That way player expectation about how skills are learned and improved in the real world would actually hold in the game world! Let me know how you like this idea. If what you say is true, avatar skill in RPGs may never rely on player skill, but at least it doesn't have to depend on stats either!

Quote:

Original post by Splinter of Chaos I just want to double check on that. Does dying really frustrate people?

Yes. I am less interested in beating levels and I care more about the experience of interacting with the game world. Dying is not my favorite experience.

That is probably partly because I am interested in game design, so I look at levels as mere content added on after the important parts of the game are finished. :D Well, not quite, but I definitely do see levels as artificial challenges to be played or not played based on how much I enjoy playing them, not because I have to beat them. It's a little different when they are part of a storyline. But when I play games like N, I wish for more open levels where I can play around and feel the exhiliration of soaring through the air and dodging machine gun bullets, not memorize a sequence of precise button presses.

Quote:

Original post by axcho What I was saying is that maybe it would be a good idea to use the skill-based gameplay of action games in RPGs. But apparently you think that the idea is incompatible with RPGs.

I'm saying character development is about the only solid element that defines an RPG. If you bypass the character skills and use human player skills, you surely can't keep calling it an RPG. And if so, the name has become meaningless. Halo uses player shooting skills. GTA uses player driving skills (the shooting in GTA is somewhat character skilled). Fallout uses character skills. I can understand a small mix of human skills, such as in games that have action based combat. But not a complete replacement of character stats, as you mentioned earlier.

Quote:

One is that I was thinking more in terms of MMOs than RPGs, which is a newer genre and has not been explored very much yet. You may still think that skill-based MMOs won't work, but in this case I will not defer to your experience and instead request that you give some reasons for your position!

Nope, actually, I agree 100% that human skill works well in MMOs. But I don't think RPGs work well in MMOs. In fact, I think the two acronyms repel each other. An MMORPG defaces everything I enjoy about an RPG, so I stay far away from them.

Quote:

Also, when I say "RPG" I am not necessarily thinking only of the current state of the genre. Remember that it stands for "Role Playing Game". If there is a better way to convey the experience of playing the role of another person, then who is to say that it shouldn't be called an RPG?

I suppose real fans of the real genre will need to invent a new name for our beloved category of games, as it seems everyone wants to rip a piece off of it's meaning. TRPG maybe?

Quote:

And finally, I would like to expand on your idea that RPGs should encapsulate skill into the player's avatar so it doesn't distract from essential RPG elements. This could be compatible with evolutionary DDA if the player's avatar had skill not based on stats, but on AI like a neural net that can truly learn. That way player expectation about how skills are learned and improved in the real world would actually hold in the game world! Let me know how you like this idea. If what you say is true, avatar skill in RPGs may never rely on player skill, but at least it doesn't have to depend on stats either!

The real world does not mix well with RPG skill learning. What would you say is the best way to learn in the real world? I would think it is to fail. Or to barely succeed. The more difficult your experience, the more you obviously learn. Repetition is also important. But none of these will work in video games. Because they become annoying or easy to exploit, or both. If something tedious can be done to increase your abilities (true in real life with nearly every activity through repetition), most players will hate it. They have two choices. A, spend hours running in circles to increase stamina, or B, forego the circle jogging and accept the fact that your character could be faster if you had more patience. You're really going to hate the designers if your slow character dies because he runs out of breath later on.

A stat in most RPGs is nothing but a measure of your character's progress. And true RPG fans do not want to remove them. Not sure what else can be said about that.

Quote:

Original post by Kest Quote: And finally, I would like to expand on your idea that RPGs should encapsulate skill into the player's avatar so it doesn't distract from essential RPG elements. This could be compatible with evolutionary DDA if the player's avatar had skill not based on stats, but on AI like a neural net that can truly learn. That way player expectation about how skills are learned and improved in the real world would actually hold in the game world! Let me know how you like this idea. If what you say is true, avatar skill in RPGs may never rely on player skill, but at least it doesn't have to depend on stats either! The real world does not mix well with RPG skill learning. What would you say is the best way to learn in the real world? I would think it is to fail. Or to barely succeed. The more difficult your experience, the more you obviously learn. Repetition is also important. But none of these will work in video games. Because they become annoying or easy to exploit, or both. If something tedious can be done to increase your abilities (true in real life with nearly every activity through repetition), most players will hate it. They have two choices. A, spend hours running in circles to increase stamina, or B, forego the circle jogging and accept the fact that your character could be faster if you had more patience. You're really going to hate the designers if your slow character dies because he runs out of breath later on. A stat in most RPGs is nothing but a measure of your character's progress. And true RPG fans do not want to remove them. Not sure what else can be said about that.

Well, removing the stats in an RPG is not entirely unthinkable, an is in fact very logical if you think about how in most RPGs, your character starting - although is a vet - somehow works his skills up to 50X greater than they were. And stats do more than just measure progress too: statistics are directly related to battle strategy.

But if those stats weren't collected than there would have to be other, more interesting game play mechanics to follow suit. Difficulty, in other words, would be much less artificial.

Quote:

Original post by axcho Quote: Original post by Splinter of ChaosAnd how can you have a high score bourd when you're constantly raising and lowering players to give false representations of skill? The situation you describe may be impossible, but having a high score board with evolutionary DDA is possible. The point I've been trying to get across is that evolutionary DDA does not work by raising or lowering a static bar. It increases the challenge as players get better. But it doesn't wait around for you either. If you are playing badly, the enemies will learn to exploit your weak tactics and force you to learn something better! It's not about coddling weaker players, though it does allow for some flexibility in individual learning speed. In our example of an evolutionary Space Invaders, score could be the number of kills made by the player before dying or reaching some time limit. This would be hard to exploit. If you are playing normally and killing as many enemies as you can, eventually the enemies will become too smart and overpower you, ending the game. If you try to manipulate the system by carefully killing the smarter enemies and only getting rid of stupid ones when there are no smart enemies left, you will still run into problems. First of all, that is not a very efficient way to get a lot of kills. Also, though you may be slowing the evolution, you are also slowing down your score, and eventually those aliens are going to catch up.

OK. I really can't argue with that. Maybe in the specific case of a linear arcade style play, and only used to exploit strategy and not skill, this DDA crap could work. Feel free to try and expand situations it'd be good in, because I sure won't. So please do.

Quote:

Original post by Sandman Quote: Original post by Splinter of Chaos I just want to double check on that. Does dying really frustrate people? I died about twenty times trying to complete a "fiend challenge" in Ninja Gaiden without helth potions, but I never cracked a nerve. I just have to wonder whether stress and dying are at all inter-related, or if there is more to the equation than we all think. It's not so much the dying and reloading that is frustrating; that's more of a minor annoyance. It's the inability to progress the game. Incidentally, your 'fiend challenge without health potions' sounds more like the sort of self set challenge that I'm talking about encouraging. Did you have to do it without health potions, or did you choose to do it to test yourself?

XP it does sound a bit like a self-challenge doesn't it . . . well it is and it isn't. The reason I tried to do that (as I hinted at earlier) is the fact that I'm extremely anal on health potion use. I never know when I might need it later as games often create in me a projection of future difficulty. Thus it's hard for my to, for example, use my shotgun on a tough enemy when I have a full pistol clip. So it's not really a self-challenge in that I'm not trying to make the game harder, I'm trying to make it easier by not using up all of my supplies. I was really just trying to note the discrepancy between dying and stress.

Quote:

Original post by Sandman What I'm suggesting is that rather than develop a game in which the player has to beat the game designer and try and guess the magic difficulty level(s) which will make the game fun for everyone, we could try and design the game so that the player is encouraged to compete against himself.

Hm, based after 47 posts in a thread about game difficulty, I think we can pretty well say that that magical difficulty level is nothing but an urban legend.

Quote:

Original post by Splinter of Chaos Quote: Original post by Kest A stat in most RPGs is nothing but a measure of your character's progress. And true RPG fans do not want to remove them. Not sure what else can be said about that. Well, removing the stats in an RPG is not entirely unthinkable, an is in fact very logical if you think about how in most RPGs, your character starting - although is a vet - somehow works his skills up to 50X greater than they were. And stats do more than just measure progress too: statistics are directly related to battle strategy. But if those stats weren't collected than there would have to be other, more interesting game play mechanics to follow suit. Difficulty, in other words, would be much less artificial.

What negative reasons are there to remove character development through stats? That's the part I'm missing. And what will you replace them by to keep the genre?

To sum this up. I think that if the game is difficult aka an actual learning curve so to speak. The player needs to be put into situations that allow them to build up the correct way to use skills to allow them to accomplish the game as it revs up to its full difficulty potential.

If the player is not "taught" or in some ways shown the correct way to interact in the environment, then the game is just being hard to be hard. In essence you teach the player through the "push the maturing bird out of the tree and hope they fly".