To me, it doesnt seem as if there are many challenging games at the moment or others seem to be flawed in the manner of how they define the difficulty. I'm wondering what people think are challenging games, and how games can be made that are both challenging and rewarding. A lot of games have differing difficulty levels and seem to put no thought into what really makes things difficult. They use the generic default method of increasing the difficulty which is increase enemy hitpoints, increase enemy weapon damage. How does that make it more difficult, for a reasonably skilled player I cannot see how it would. What it does do though is make combat take longer which I guess by proxy could make combat more difficult(or more tedious). Also with that kind of difficulty there is no skill bypass, as in it will take both an unskilled player and a skilled player roughly the same amount of time to finish combat, thus no incentive to be skilled. A better way to increase difficulty, would perhaps be to add more enemies, or increase the number of skilled enemies(in the vain of Time Crisis). Then you have the reason, "Why should I make things harder on myself", in lots of games there is no reason for the player to do that. Some games give you unlockables at differing difficulties which are supposed to be an incentive to play it again, but unless those unlockables are really worth it then, I wouldnt play again unless I could be assured that the experience would be different(at least slightly) the second time through. Not all games require an implicit incentive for a player to try at a harder difficulty though, Kudos and respect are two reasons, although these games generally have lots of gameplay incentives. A few examples where games which I think are flawed in this manner. Half Life 2, all it serves is to delay and forestall the player. Oblivion, it, too lengthens its combat and increase its tedium without any particular benefit. Gran Turismo 4, It has no difficulty settings, so it is up to you to guess the difficulty before you race and then when you get into the race it gives you a point system(which it tells you little about) which you are supposed to then use to judge the difficulty of the race. It goes from 0 to 100(or higher I think). The trouble is it doesnt seem to have much relevance, you can win races reasonably easily which are up to a difficulty of a hundred or find it impossible to win ones that are only 20. The difficulty is left up to a complete trial and error method(or you are required to use complex mathematical equations to calculate feasibility of a win). So I guess what I'm saying is that if a game has differing difficulties it should give good reasons for them and it should make the consequences of them clear. People could say that its a matter of dumbing down or kowtowing to the majority. But I dont think it is, I think its a matter of developers using the path of least resistance, or not really thinking about it and just doing it the way its been done before. So what are peoples thoughts on this, what are games with good examples of challenges, are developers providing players with the right amount of challenge or have they got a bit lost.

Look to real life skill based activities for an example of "challenging." The effort and often struggle of prolonged physical exertion is balanced by creative efficacy in the example of something like woodworking or carpentry. There is a "game" in using the right technique and ensuring quality. There is a sort of motivational challenge in keeping up with the pace of the work.

That isn't game "fun," and it doesn't translate well into areas where there is a lack of creative efficacy, such as video games. Nonetheless, that kind of frustrating "challenge" of motivation as opposed to mental agility dominates large sections of the video game market. Why?

It's easier to have people have "fun" by doing than by crafting a genuinely enjoyable learning experience/thinking game. Computer games are not hard work. They can only stress your mind, and mental stress doesn't have the value and merit of physical stress. It's something to be avoided, and most developers probably haven't thought that deeply about it, let alone done something like woodworking to see the parallels.

Classical, stress free, learning game "fun" comes from presenting challenges of deduction and reflex as opposed to simulating physical stressors. Here's an example of mismanaged use of such concepts:

In most Capcom fighting games, game play resolves around timing for combos. Players are left open to attack for a small time period after taking action and executing attacks generally deprives the player of some level of control. This is in place to "balance" the game and make it "challenging." Really, it simply limits player reaction speeds arbitrarily: you can't act in the game as fast as you think. That makes sense for real physical actions: it takes time for things to move. The mind isn't naturally irritated by these real world limitations. When you place them into a video game, it's just a frustrating mechanic. Lose states should come when I can no longer keep track of which decisive action to take, not when my character essentially gives up. Why? Because, at that point, I can most definitely say that winning or losing is my fault. It tests my mental agility against another player's. I learn something useful intuitively as opposed to maneuvering around a poorly designed veneer hiding a simple set of game play mechanics beneath.

Those mechanics in fighting games mirror "health buffs" in many RPGs. The enemy should outsmart me. Not because he's quicker, or stronger, or bigger, or badder, or has some specialized knowledge that I as a player am not privy to, but because his logic represents a more refined version than the kind I use. Progress in that kind of game revolves around increasing your actual wit and using your human processing to outsmart the computer.

On the far end of the spectrum, you have character progress games like World of Warcraft, where enemies literally have no AI and execute random or simply scripted actions. Furthermore, combat is generally random and player interaction is of superficial importance. Real "challenge" isn't even on the developer manifesto for those sorts of games. It's accepted that they won't have AI, and that the game play is generally farcical.

Somewhere inbetween you have console action games / action/RPG's in which enemies may be more or less just as dumb but combat resolution and world physics are more detailed, allowing the same functional activity (E.g. attacking) to have different results in implementation (In Devil May Cry 3, as opposed to World of Warcraft, attacks are dealt via physical contact. Actual collisions occur with bounding boxes, albeit in often misleading form. In World of Warcraft, character models are a veneer for what is really an infinitesimal point in space. Projectile attacks are not actually projectiles, they are simply damage with an often delayed impact and a fancy graphic sent from one entity to another, provided the two entities are within a certain number of units of distance). These games often still suffer from the artificial limitation of player reflexes by methods such as wait times.

The ideal game would probably have AI development somewhere on the development budget, preferably above "fancy new graphics effects to hide lack of game play depth," and "timesinks to extend subscription revenue without requiring new content development."

I found that the original Halo had a good amount of challenge in multiplayer, despite it still being eventually "cracked:" players can learn ways to circumvent intuitive actions like aiming by exploiting limitations of the game's coding. Three shotting players with the human pistol is relatively easy if one memorizes the correct location to start aiming at. Sometimes, placement of weapons on a map leads to an unfair advantage being awarded to the player that happens to rush out ahead.

Ideally, challenges are, like you said, presented upfront and in a clear manner. There is no ambiguity: if it looks like an enemy is attacking you, that enemy is attacking you and there isn't some gimmick that causes this attack to function differently from normal attacks unless it is explicitly indicated. Too many games force the player to adjust their instincts to an artificial world instead of allowing the player to trust their instincts and intuitively tackle challenges. At the very least, they need to indicate whose intuition they were developed by: if you want me to think in a certain mindset to enjoy your game, tell me what that mindset is so I'm not using common sense where specialized knowledge is needed.

A game should ideally treat every player equally: when it comes down to it, the game is just a method for you to test yourself. The challenge should not be specifically mastering the game and specific incidences (*cough* every Devil May Cry game ever) it should be mastering yourself.

Take juggling. If juggling were like a computer game, you'd have randomly shaped objects to juggle on your first try. Their physics would be random: you'd have to memorize a new set of physics to understand the dynamics of juggling instead of trying to intuitively discover them.

Or imagine if one day, there were new rules to how you walked in real life. When you try and walk forward, your body takes you sideways. You have to consciously change the direction you think of to get your body to move in the direction you intend. Track Racers then compete on the basis of their ability to keep track of their intended direction instead of their running speed. Kinda roundabout, ain't it? It'd be disorienting and stupid.

So why tolerate that kind of mechanism in a game? Good question indeed. It'd be like playing chess with your hands tied and then deciding that the winner had the better logical mind even though all he's really proven is that he's better at playing chess with his mouth. In science, it's referred to as removing the extraneous variables to test a hypothesis. The point is the same: unless a game is explicitly about memorizing rules of some sort, it shouldn't be about memorizing rules of some sort. It should be about testing things like concentration and thinking ability as well as reflex action, not whether or not you know the class type weaknesses for your next encounter or the style of the next race you're going into in Gran Turismo. Gran Turismo is about racing cars: let it be about racing cars.

And I said I was done with wall of text posts for today...

Not sure what to reply to all that, and unsure if you are arguing or agreeing with me(everything on web must be either^^).

Anyway I think what annoys me is lots of games give players no reason to become skilled at them. Fps's for instance, to be skilled at them you should be an accurate shot, fast(reflexes) and good at picking targets for example(ignoring any tactical elements). The difficulties do not influence or interact with these at all. They perhaps influence your clicking speed which is hindered by the weapon anyway as they force you to shoot the same enemies more often or just force you to slow down by hiding more often, is that a challenge?.

A good game which if I can remember was Goldeneye on the N64 in it you had all manner of difficulties and things which you could unlock. To get all the things in it you had to become very skilled, to get in under the time limits and complete all the objectives, I couldnt get too far with them but it was interesting to try for, I knew persons that annihilated it but didnt feel dissapointed myself that I couldnt.

Time Crisis was another good game for challenge, the general enemy couldnt shoot but it had a few enemies which were very accurate and so it was about picking targets and general accuracy, failure in both games I believe is down to player error.

I just think it would be nice if some games gave a good reason to go with a higher difficulty level, even if it is just Kudos and an adequate challenge. At the standard level they should treat all players equal but allow the more skilled to push on ahead instead of just punishing them with longer combat and contrived difficulty.

Modern games arn't challangeing enough?

Try IKARUGA!

Or try any of the "bullet hell" games like Mars Matrix. Those games are so intense, challangeing, and action packed that even the combined might of every FPS ever made pales in comparison.

I think some of the lack of challenge in modern games is due to a pet peeve of mine; reliance on reload-on-death as the primary challenge mechanic. A huge swath of games these days primarily derive their gameplay from making you quicksave constantly, and then forcing you to quickload when you die. What this fosters is a game where challenge in the usual sense of the word is basically impossible; the only challenges that you can fit into the game are the tiny discrete segments of unknown time between quicksaves. All you can really do with this unknown time segment is have something pop out and suddenly destroy the player so that when he reloads to replay that last five seconds, he will have to remember when and where that things pops out to destroy him.

All the standard techniques of increasing monster health and damage only serve to draw things out or increase the number of reloads you have to do when certain things pop out and suddenly destroy you. There is no chance of actual "losing the game"; there is only the chance that you will annoy the player with constant reloading so much that he will stop playing. And, since this is, perhaps wisely, considered a bad idea, game designers try to ensure that nothing is so annoying that a few reloads won't get you past it.

This should be contrasted with more classical games like chess or football. In these games, you can not quicksave and reload. You either win, or you lose. In order to win, you need to develop your skills. You can't "win" a game of chess by just sitting there and trying every different move each time and reloading until you finally win in the end.

The solution is to first spend some serious time rethinking the usage of quicksave and reload, and figure out alternate methods of play. This is done by necessity in online games where you can't save and reload, and those are good places to look for inspiration. Most games like that are broken into discrete chunks or matches, which do allow for an actual win or lose. For example, capture the flag matches in FPS's, or matches in RTS's, or arena battles in MMORPG's. With the threat of actual loss, and a lack of ability to just constantly retry until you win, the player once again has to develop some sort of actual skill in order to be considered good. I think this design, the idea of breaking things down into discrete chunks or matches that need to be won or lost, can be transfered to most games that currently rely on quicksave/reload, and in this way increase the challenge. Save points are sort of a rough way to handle the discrete chunking, but not a particularly good way. More thought needs to be put into the design.

Quote:

A game should ideally treat every player equally: when it comes down to it, the game is just a method for you to test yourself. The challenge should not be specifically mastering the game and specific incidences (*cough* every Devil May Cry game ever) it should be mastering yourself.

I was under the impression that these games were quite challenging, because the player has to master the characters moves and abilities and use them while avoiding and dealing effectively with the enemies. I have played the latest one, although it wasnt particularly difficult, I believe higher difficulties are more challenging hopefully not in the higher hp way. I would play it again if it werent for the annoying "Look at me I'm cool" fmvs.

Another reason, which perhaps goes in hand with the quicksave problem is the slave to narrative, stories being at the forefront for many games now. Gears of War is a good game, and yet I have heard from some people that it was crap because it took them the weekend to complete. I believe a number of criticisms for it were of its shortness. What could they have done? I guess the standard response would be too increase the content, stretch the levels, add more monsters, and more areas, "what do we do about the savepoints now", "Just put in a quicksave".

But is all that really necessary, how could it be done, not much else, because the games are pretending to be more than they are, either movies or transparent. If they did stick at being games then they would know there is plenty of ways to fluff out the gameplay without adding to much work and giving the skilled players(or even general players) something more to do. The collecting of trinkets and items, time trials, skill judging and scoring systems. Lots of other little things which serve no purpose other than to increase the gameplay and give players something to try for. Nintendo are good at this sort of thing.

[Edited by - Torquemeda on April 12, 2007 4:03:43 PM]