Jeff Vogel on RPG difficulty

[sgc_meltdown]

hard in an extremely shallow and lazy way, that I start to get annoyed

the worst are the helpful comments from your brother gamers that you should try dante must die difficulty or ironman ninja gaiden black on highest difficulty or touhou games or similar high functioning savant challenge product and shut up about your easy modern game talk, because that means difficult games are still being made and you're pretending there's a problem when there isn't

what crayon coloring dinosaurs are too easy for you well then here's a dinosaur outline the size of a french emperor's summer estate lawn go color it with a crayon if you're so smart

fuck you stop giving me more of the same shit stacked together and call it an answer when my complaint is about the very fundamentals of your shit in question

 

[Johannes]

What every game should have is custom difficulty setting where you can modify pretty much every aspect of the game for your liking. One good example is Stalker games where I didnt mind that most enemies would kill me with one shot/bite on highest difficulty but did mind that I needed to empty a full clip in a bandits face to kill him. Its not difficult to implement it and it would end all bitching from both casual and hardcore gamers.

That requires you to actually know the game in and out to make enlightened estimates of what settings you'd enjoy. So while it's a nice option to be able to easily tweak things, a lot of effort should be put into working out good default(s) in any case.

 

[Grimlorn]

I see nothing wrong with the majority of games balancing their standard difficulty for, well, the majority.

The issue is that by balancing for normal or easy, usually hard difficulties end up being shitty because they resort to algorithmic false challenge. Instead of more enemies to deal with or more complex challenges and scenarios, it's just multipliers on health, drop rates, etc. That can be fun, but only to a degree, and usually it means that the hardest difficulties are less challenging and more annoying, and lack the features necessary to really survive. By balancing for hard and scaling down, you keep the same number of options and the same complex challenges and scenarios, but give extra handicaps to make the game comfortable for most players. This also gives further incentive to try hard mode other than achievement points, because players will realize there's more depth to the game than is necessary to win on the standard mode.

Also the problem isn't that they are making games that are challenging for the majority. They are making games that can be played and beaten by the dumbest consumers on Normal. The majority of people don't have an IQ of 80, so why make a game that the majority of people can play with little or no challenge just so a bunch of dumb people can enjoy and beat that game. It's the real problem with dumbing everything down.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

"When a player is on the default difficult level, has built his or her characters poorly, and is playing straight through the main storyline with mediocre tactics, that player should almost never be killed.

What does that leave for the levels easier than default, then? Enemies heal you? You get a "CONGRATULATIONS" for dying?


Tags: Jeff Vogel, full, retard

 

[markec]

What every game should have is custom difficulty setting where you can modify pretty much every aspect of the game for your liking. One good example is Stalker games where I didnt mind that most enemies would kill me with one shot/bite on highest difficulty but did mind that I needed to empty a full clip in a bandits face to kill him. Its not difficult to implement it and it would end all bitching from both casual and hardcore gamers.

That requires you to actually know the game in and out to make enlightened estimates of what settings you'd enjoy. So while it's a nice option to be able to easily tweak things, a lot of effort should be put into working out good default(s) in any case.

Its not hard to start the game, play a bit and then modify the game for your liking. There are quite a bit of games that have this option, some even allow you to modify difficulty mid game without the need to start again. There are even mods for many games that add additional features but you are allowed to turn off ones you dont like while playing. This is not hard, and its been done before its just that most developers dont think that their fanbase is smart enough to use this smartly.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

Enemies heal you? You get a "CONGRATULATIONS" for dying?

a 'win' meter pops up that you have to fill by hitting keys

there will be feats that let you fill the meter faster

when the meter fills completely all the enemies start crying while every single party member walks up to them and starts doing visceral instant kill animations

 

[Topher]

Its not hard to start the game, play a bit and then modify the game for your liking. There are quite a bit of games that have this option, some even allow you to modify difficulty mid game without the need to start again. There are even mods for many games that add additional features but you are allowed to turn off ones you dont like while playing. This is not hard, and its been done before its just that most developers dont think that their fanbase is smart enough to use this smartly.

This always struck me as odd. I'm playing several mount and blade mods right now and they are all, every single one, very customizable and yet developers, who are paid for their work and time seemingly refuse to do anything similar.

 

[Duckard]

What does that leave for the levels easier than default, then?

You can win just by smashing your face against the keyboard/awesome button. Or it could be one of those "kids mode" things that some games have where you can't fail at all. Seems like it would be popular as long as you didn't people what it did.

 

[Johannes]

What does that leave for the levels easier than default, then?

You can win just by smashing your face against the keyboard/awesome button. Or it could be one of those "kids mode" things that some games have where you can't fail at all. Seems like it would be popular as long as you didn't people what it did.

Probably for a large part it actually means, in an open-world game like Avernum, that you can roam more freely and don't have to carefully go through all the content in order of difficulty. You can avoid half the quests and still be powerful enough to beat the endgame fights.

 

[Clockwork Knight]

This is practically god given mathematical truth. I've been trying to argue this for years, and it's awesome to hear you support the same idea. Every time a player dies, the chance increases that he will never play your game again. The player is playing to have FUN, not to lose. Even for me, in Geneforge 5 I usually stop playing for the day/week around the time I first die. And I'm a pretty hardcode oldschool gamer.

Why did I have to read the comments? Why?

There is the usual bunch of "When I was a kid I liked challenge but now I have kids so I can't lose five minutes of progress because my mistress only lets me play ten minutes a week, in fact I'd appreciate if games incuded a Win Button from now on so I'll never waste time playing games while I'm wasting time playing games" posts, but these are so common now I stopped caring.

 

[DraQ]

Why make normal difficulty default then?


Why make difficulty scale symmetrical when default is already stupidly easy?
You can make difficulty scale like this:

-Retarded & Handicapped (player has some severe physical disability in addition to being dumb as a brick and cannot control the game properly in addition to being incapable of learning how to play it)
-Retarded (default)
-Easy
-Normal
-Hard
-Very Hard
-Ultra Hard
-Insane
-Realistic

Also, the more I look at the game industry, the more I'm sure that games should be designed at hardest or second hardest difficulty, with lower difficulty levels consisting of added crutches and assorted cheese slanting mechanics in player's favour.

Otherwise you end up with numerical difficulty which manifests itself via enemies having stupid amount of HPs and dealing stupid amounts of damage, which doesn't increase difficulty in any interesting or meaningful manner, with added challenge consisting solely of having much less margin of error when doing the same sort of stupid rote shit as on the easiest level.

 

[Edward_R_Murrow]

the worst are the helpful comments from your brother gamers that you should try dante must die difficulty or ironman ninja gaiden black on highest difficulty or touhou games or similar high functioning savant challenge product and shut up about your easy modern game talk, because that means difficult games are still being made and you're pretending there's a problem when there isn't

what crayon coloring dinosaurs are too easy for you well then here's a dinosaur outline the size of a french emperor's summer estate lawn go color it with a crayon if you're so smart

fuck you stop giving me more of the same shit stacked together and call it an answer when my complaint is about the very fundamentals of your shit in question

Bro, I'm curious by what you mean here. Is it that there's a dearth of challenging games in the genres you're looking for ("No, I've had enough magical loli schoolgirl vs halloween demons bullet hell, new JA2, thank you very much") or is this the sort of complaint about the limits of true difficulty that can be accomplished by AI that can't really adapt to player input in the way that a real human can; that winning basically comes down to Credited Plan+Credited Execution=Win with difficulty typically coming from a low goodplan/totalplans ratio and/or extremely demanding execution (e.g. jRPG bonus bosses with only one corner strategy that works on them or pixel-perfect dodging requirements in a shmup/just-frame timing to break a bosses guard).

I can dig the first one, because the genres with challenging games being made on a regular basis are few in number and narrow in scope, but the second one is a little too pie-in-the-sky for me.

Or perhaps I totally read your stuff wrong. Enlighten me brother.

 

[sgc_meltdown]

the first one

Yes

plus analogy for hp bloat and similar methods of prolonging player input cycles used in standard difficulty rather than increased AI decision scope/new offensive properties

 

[shihonage]

This is just Vogel's way of gently fading into obscurity and freeing a bigger niche for those of us who actually still care about making games more than maximizing sales.

 

[DraQ]

Also, making game too easy can make players say "fuck you" and throw it away, it's very simple:

Your game has a variety of interesting mechanics or tries to inspire tension or whatever. Player learns that just standing in the face of whatever threat and lazily pressing fire button works just as well as whatever you'd want player to be doing instead and doesn't get them killed. All tension, interesting gameplay or whatever you tried to hinge your game on goes out of the window. The game is now shit and not fun to play.

 

[Roguey]

Also, the more I look at the game industry, the more I'm sure that games should be designed at hardest or second hardest difficulty, with lower difficulty levels consisting of added crutches and assorted cheese slanting mechanics in player's favour.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...then-make-it-easier.72410/page-2#post-2106605

Also, making game too easy can make players say "fuck you" and throw it away, it's very simple:

Vogel talked about this in the article (and possibly other entries I think), he said he's never received hate mail from someone who thought his games were too easy whereas he has when someone thought they were too hard so as far he's concerned ragequitting is worse than anyone losing interest. Well up until RPG Codex's response to Avadon anyway.

Of course thanks to Steam and ipad sales his latest games are his biggest sellers by far so he gets the last

 

[DraQ]

Also, the more I look at the game industry, the more I'm sure that games should be designed at hardest or second hardest difficulty, with lower difficulty levels consisting of added crutches and assorted cheese slanting mechanics in player's favour.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...then-make-it-easier.72410/page-2#post-2106605

Except I don't assume scaling down, but introducing "crutches" - sets of stuff that imbalances game in player's favour - for example disabling enemy criticals, or disabling stagger on enemy hits, or overriding one-shot kills on player and so on.

Also, making game too easy can make players say "fuck you" and throw it away, it's very simple:

Vogel talked about this in the article (and possibly other entries I think), he said he's never received hate mail from someone who thought his games were too easy whereas he has when someone thought they were too hard so as far he's concerned ragequitting is worse than anyone losing interest.

When I ragequit the game is still somewhere there, nibbling at my ambition, which makes it quite likely that I will try again instead of just giving up like a loser, but when I lose interest, I lose interest.

Ragequitting is only bad if you somehow manage to make your difficulty curve so vertical that player can't make any progress "no matter what they do" and assume that game is just broken.

One good example is Stalker games where I didnt mind that most enemies would kill me with one shot/bite on highest difficulty but did mind that I needed to empty a full clip in a bandits face to kill him.

Actually you could kill most enemies with a single bullet from even relatively weak weapon in STALKER, you just had to be very precise.

Firing full auto was just mostly worthless, leading to impression of elevated enemy resilience, you should focus on popping headshots with single or short bursts instead, possibly hitting enemies in the body first to stagger them even if armour stops the round.

Going full auto assuming that enemy will be so impressed by your *budda budda* that they will ignore you not hitting them and just drop dead is a manboon tactics.

 

[PorkaMorka]

Vogel talked about this in the article (and possibly other entries I think), he said he's never received hate mail from someone who thought his games were too easy whereas he has when someone thought they were too hard so as far he's concerned ragequitting is worse than anyone losing interest. Well up until RPG Codex's response to Avadon anyway.

His games aren't actually easy, because he includes higher difficulty levels. But unfortunately those difficulty levels are mostly based around increasing the enemy stats, rather than adding difficulty in more interesting ways.

So he has probably lost number of sales from people who played the demo on a high difficulty level and found the game tedious and unrewarding. I know that he lost all my sales because of this.

I'm sure that he's right that there is more money to be made by appealing to the droolers though.

 

[Marsal]

Going full auto assuming that enemy will be so impressed by your *budda budda* that they will ignore you not hitting them and just drop dead is a manboon tactics.

Obviously more dakka is needed...

 

[Roguey]

Also, the more I look at the game industry, the more I'm sure that games should be designed at hardest or second hardest difficulty, with lower difficulty levels consisting of added crutches and assorted cheese slanting mechanics in player's favour.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...then-make-it-easier.72410/page-2#post-2106605

Except I don't assume scaling down, but introducing "crutches" - sets of stuff that imbalances game in player's favour - for example disabling enemy criticals, or disabling stagger on enemy hits, or overriding one-shot kills on player and so on.
...
Ragequitting is only bad if you somehow manage to make your difficulty curve so vertical that player can't make any progress "no matter what they do" and assume that game is just broken.

Vogel includes a character editor with all his games. Anyone with a full version of a game can just open it up, respec at no cost, give themselves all the gold and awesome loot they want, refill their health/mana if it's too low, max out their skills and stats, etc. Despite this generous user-friendly crutch, people still send him angry letters telling him his games are too hard and they'll never buy anything from him again.

 

[DraQ]

Also, the more I look at the game industry, the more I'm sure that games should be designed at hardest or second hardest difficulty, with lower difficulty levels consisting of added crutches and assorted cheese slanting mechanics in player's favour.

http://www.rpgcodex.net/forums/inde...then-make-it-easier.72410/page-2#post-2106605

Except I don't assume scaling down, but introducing "crutches" - sets of stuff that imbalances game in player's favour - for example disabling enemy criticals, or disabling stagger on enemy hits, or overriding one-shot kills on player and so on.
...
Ragequitting is only bad if you somehow manage to make your difficulty curve so vertical that player can't make any progress "no matter what they do" and assume that game is just broken.

Vogel includes a character editor with all his games. Anyone with a full version of a game can just open it up, respec at no cost, give themselves all the gold and awesome loot they want, refill their health/mana if it's too low, max out their skills and stats, etc. Despite this generous user-friendly crutch, people still send him angry letters telling him his games are too hard and they'll never buy anything from him again.

See "retarded" as default difficulty - if you're a complete moron you can't be expected to operate a character editor or even know that it exists.

Crutches should therefore be built-in and completely automatic in most idiot-proof way possible.

Alternatively they can the kind of lesser morons that know of the editor, but despite being unable to "lern2play" they refuse to use it because cheating is somehow below their honour, in which case the above applies just as well - built-in crutches don't involve active cheating that may sully the self image of this sort of 'tard.

 

[sea]

Vogel includes a character editor with all his games. Anyone with a full version of a game can just open it up, respec at no cost, give themselves all the gold and awesome loot they want, refill their health/mana if it's too low, max out their skills and stats, etc. Despite this generous user-friendly crutch, people still send him angry letters telling him his games are too hard and they'll never buy anything from him again.

I broke Avernum: Escape from the Pit by accidentally killing a dragon I wasn't supposed to, and had to send him an e-mail for help in fixing the quest so I wouldn't have to replay the game again.

See "retarded" as default difficulty - if you're a complete moron you can't be expected to operate a character editor or even know that it exists.

Crutches should therefore be built-in and completely automatic in most idiot-proof way possible..

Yeah, have to agree here. Really, there should be "tiers" for stuff like character creation, 1) pick a preset 2) customise look and class but pick a predefined build 3) fully customise. The Average Idiot(TM) is going to start the game, see "character creation" but what he/she is really interested in is customising the look of the character, and gameplay is probably a secondary priority.

However, a problem arises because most people want to feel like they're in control. If they're playing an RPG they want to level up, make the choices and stuff... but especially with more complex RPGs, usually it's possible to create both bad and good builds, or ones with strengths and weaknesses, and there are always going to be players who don't want to accept that fact. If you offer then an ideal build that auto-levels without fuss, they'll feel like their control has been taken away and complain about that... but leave players to their own devices and they'll blame the game for their mistakes. I honestly can't really think of a solution, except creating systems that either allow for respecs or don't need them.

 

[Roguey]

See "retarded" as default difficulty - if you're a complete moron you can't be expected to operate a character editor or even know that it exists.

Crutches should therefore be built-in and completely automatic in most idiot-proof way possible.

Alternatively they can the kind of lesser morons that know of the editor, but despite being unable to "lern2play" they refuse to use it because cheating is somehow below their honour, in which case the above applies just as well - built-in crutches don't involve active cheating that may sully the self image of this sort of 'tard.

Oh, and another thing: even if you make your game this way, it still won't necessarily be better than the "stats go up/stats go down" method. Take, Witcher the First for example:
http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/The_Witcher_gameplay
http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Difficulty_settings_mod

Seems obvious that it was balanced for hard, and normal/easy are pretty much boosted Geralt cheat-modes, yet a lot of prominent posters here will say there's no perceptible difference between hard and easy except one requires you to use potions and the other doesn't. And it looks like CD Projekt was so burned by this they gave up and went the "enemy health and damage go up" route for Witcher the Second.

 

[DraQ]

See "retarded" as default difficulty - if you're a complete moron you can't be expected to operate a character editor or even know that it exists.

Crutches should therefore be built-in and completely automatic in most idiot-proof way possible.

Alternatively they can the kind of lesser morons that know of the editor, but despite being unable to "lern2play" they refuse to use it because cheating is somehow below their honour, in which case the above applies just as well - built-in crutches don't involve active cheating that may sully the self image of this sort of 'tard.

Oh, and another thing: even if you make your game this way, it still won't necessarily be better than the "stats go up/stats go down" method. Take, Witcher the First for example:
http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/The_Witcher_gameplay
http://witcher.wikia.com/wiki/Difficulty_settings_mod

The thing is:

1) AoO were mostly an issue if you were doing something wrong (quaffing a potion without protection, just standing there charging a sign or special attack without anything to buy you several extra seconds, etc.)

2) Most other stuff boils down to numerical difficulty

3) Even on hard TW1 was piss easy most of the time.

What I had in mind was lower difficulties allowing substantial "shortcuts" through the mechanics benefiting the player - nerfs to damage system, critical effects, enabling quest compass, disabling quest fail timer where applicable or making failing quest more difficult, tweaking AI so it doesn't use certain advantages and so on.

 

[kangaroodev]

"When a player is on the default difficult level, has built his or her characters poorly, and is playing straight through the main storyline with mediocre tactics, that player should almost never be killed. Of course, a game should have harder difficulty levels. And, if a player chooses to opt-in on higher difficulty, they should be seriously nasty. But, when played on the default difficulty, the game should be accessible to your mom or average eight-year old."

Uhh, well not really. Not all games are catered to moms and 8 year olds in the first place, so not every game in the world needs to appeal to the same group of people, even if it's on a lower difficulty.

Also that is a very easy thing to say about difficulties, when all you have to do to increase the damage of the enemy and decrease the hp of the player. You can make 10 difficulty options in that way, quite meaningless.

You wouldn't do this in a game where the difficulty is thought out and it means something else than a few variables to tweak. I think that difficulty options aren't important, and that the whole game should have one difficulty that is designed to be fair and challenging. My mom doesn't want to play Monster Hunter, so everything will turn out just fine.