Decline So, amateur game designers and difficulty...

[sea]

When you are poor professional/freeware developer. You want your games to be played. If they would have an incredibly harsh difficulty nobody would touch them.

Wasn't that the exact selling point of Super Meat Boy, and it sold a shitton of copies?

Most games that come out these days aren't very challenging, it's not restricted to "amateurs." But they do seem to try and get by on style over substance quite often. Limbo would be the poster child for this in my estimation.

I do kind of agree with this but I think it really boils down more to indie developers working hard to come up with mechanical gimmicks and neat art styles to sell their games on above all else. Because they have limited resources they have to push their uniqueness and "innovation", not just budget and spectacle.

Still, while there are definitely a lot of shitty indie games out there that try to get by on style alone, it's downright ignorant to say that they're all universally easy and that they are all style over substance. There are plenty which are enjoyable and challenging and not just "hipster bullshit."

 

[dnf]

When you are poor professional/freeware developer. You want your games to be played. If they would have an incredibly harsh difficulty nobody would touch them.

Wasn't that the exact selling point of Super Meat Boy, and it sold a shitton of copies?

Super Meat Boy is a save state/load state simulator. Its designed to create the illusion of challange.

Also, console beat em ups is way easier than they arcade counterparts(though i still find SOR remake hard on hard and mania difficulties). Awor should try games like Dungeons and Dragons, The Punisher, Cadillacs and Dinossaurs,etc...

 

[MetalCraze]

Super Meat Boy has infinite lives and you restart from the same screen. So you just grind until you find the exact path through a level a shitty dev envisioned. How the fuck is that harsh difficulty? It's just a game where tedium is the game.

 

[dnf]

And is a insult to superior 2d games such as Mario.

 

[sea]

Super Meat Boy has infinite lives and you restart from the same screen. So you just grind until you find the exact path through a level a shitty dev envisioned. How the fuck is that harsh difficulty? It's just a game where tedium is the game.

You do realize that this is the basis for pretty much the entire platforming genre, right? That is, game which resolves around navigating a path through a level pre-constructed to be difficult to navigate. Super Meat Boy more or less just distills that into micro-sized challenges. Not saying it's the greatest thing ever, but the game certainly is challenging - whether or not it's "legitimate" challenge is not really the point here.

And is a insult to superior 2d games such as Mario.

The games don't have the same goals as each other, but I'm curious, why? I do agree with you (I was not a big Super Meat Boy fan) but I'm wondering what the basis for your claim is.

 

[Raghar]

When you are poor professional/freeware developer. You want your games to be played. If they would have an incredibly harsh difficulty nobody would touch them.

Wasn't that the exact selling point of Super Meat Boy, and it sold a shitton of copies?

Well people are stupid, but what can you do?

Of course hard games have theirs niche, but majority of REAL indies will not aim for that niche. Now when you are not aiming for that niche, you need to compete with AAA games which have: much better GFX, better sound, and most importantly better marketing department (because they have actual money for that, and you'd be idiot to spend money for having a marketing department, and if someone was willing to do it for free, he/she could do something more useful for free).

Now you have something with GFX as crap as majority of Kickstarter projects and you need to force these people who are too spoiled from AAA titles, or they are SW pirates thus able to obtain AAA titles free of charge when they wants, to play that. Do you seriously gimp yourself to have difficulty like Demonphobia? Remember even fast developer like my needs at least 6 months for complex project. Now these 6 months are on the line, can developer risk his 6 months of work by making it too hard?

 

[dnf]

And is a insult to superior 2d games such as Mario.

The games don't have the same goals as each other, but I'm curious, why? I do agree with you (I was not a big Super Meat Boy fan) but I'm wondering what the basis for your claim is.

I don't have a proper basis for my claim its just informal observation. My observation is that exists way better 2d games than Super Meat Boy, be it mechanics, art direction, level design, challange and such. Of course, there must exist some worse games than meat boy, but the overhyping this game gets when released is just preposterous.

 

[sea]

I don't have a proper basis for my claim its just informal observation. My observation is that exists way better 2d games than Super Meat Boy, be it mechanics, art direction, level design, challange and such. Of course, there must exist some worse games than meat boy, but the overhyping this game gets when released is just preposterous.

Have you played either series extensively enough to discuss what about their mechanics might elevate one over the other?

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

Dune 2 can be a pain because of the interface.


But let's look at FPS games - pre mouse era ones generally tend to be piss easy when played with modern input devices because beign able to move and aim at the same time is a huge advantage. Later on detailed collision, terrain representation and, for some time, increasingly powerful AI also pushed the games towards hardcore, so the FPS difficulty curve has generally been climbing up until the dawn of console FPSes and then some due to inertia.

Still, even in FPSes the difficulty has always been all over the place - Blood, for example will make you piss, well, blood despite being a Build Engine game and generally designed primarily with pure KB controls in mind. Then, Quake 2 was a complete snoozefest. Then suddenly Unreal and Half Life.

Come to think about it - did you managed to finish Blood on Extra Crispy? I always failed with the stone gargoyles.

I went Jay Wilson* on those stone gargoyles (fuck those losers, then restart on Well Done) because my ammo supply failed me.

Maybe I'll try again on some later play through.

*) He apparently designed some levels in Blood BTW, so there *are* things he's competent at.

You mentioned Wilson in D3 related news, and yes, when he was in the background of development team he did some fine work with Blood. Extra Crispy must be a co-op only, killing with pitchfork is not a good idea.

 

[MetalCraze]

You do realize that this is the basis for pretty much the entire platforming genre, right? That is, game which resolves around navigating a path through a level pre-constructed to be difficult to navigate.

Ugh no it's not. There is a difference between giving you 3 lives and some margin of error and giving you infinite lives and "I pressed the jump button 1 ms too early OH SHI-"
Good old platformers were intuitive and it depended mostly on a player to not make errors. With how SMB plays you pretty much grind every problem part of the level until you find the correct path.

Super Meat Boy more or less just distills that into micro-sized challenges. Not saying it's the greatest thing ever, but the game certainly is challenging - whether or not it's "legitimate" challenge is not really the point here.

That's a strange challenge. Since you cannot lose the game.

 

[sea]

Ugh no it's not. There is a difference between giving you 3 lives and some margin of error and giving you infinite lives and "I pressed the jump button 1 ms too early OH SHI-"
Good old platformers were intuitive and it depended mostly on a player to not make errors. With how SMB plays you pretty much grind every problem part of the level until you find the correct path.

The only real difference with Super Meat Boy vs. another platformer is that Super Meat Boy's challenges are modular and attrition is mostly removed. The actual challenges are basically the same as any other platformer, but you don't have to replay previous challenges to continue. Since there is no attrition, this gives it much more leeway in being able to be punishingly hard and demanding to a player's reflexes and coordination.

To say it's not difficult and "just grinding" is also bullshit. You can actually get through most of the game on skill and reflexes alone, "grinding" is only required if you aren't good enough. The controls are precise enough, too, that mastery of levels comes less from knowing exactly what to do and more from having the dexterity to pull it off. You seem to be implying it's some sort of puzzle game where once you've figured out the required solution the game becomes easy, which isn't really true.

That's a strange challenge. Since you cannot lose the game.

You can't lose Mario either. You just start over with a continue, or from the beginning. Your point? Only difference is that in Super Meat Boy instead of replaying from the start of the game, you replay from the start of the level, and your punishment for failure is losing your progress towards finishing the current level. And for the record, later Mario games had save systems and did not make you permanently lose much of anything either.

It's actually pretty obvious that most of the challenge in Super Meat Boy comes from alternate versions of levels and hidden areas. It has ridiculously difficult secret stages which have limited lives (which you can't replenish) in order to unlock new characters (which all handle differently from each other), and there are "dark world" alternate versions of the main levels which take the same layouts but add more obstacles or require more advanced techniques to get through.

 

[DraQ]

Quake is special. It is just that enemies in SP campaign become so predictable.

And then there is Quake 2.

 

[Gozma]

Most good difficulty is fairly expensive polish (not potato) that doesn't show up in screenshots and which most reviewers won't understand is there.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

It says a lot about the quality of a game when the ability to die often is the only thing that makes it interesting to play.

Imagine playing ArmA 2/3 but with ability to withstand 20 bullet hits before dying and with 5 lives and ability to replenish life.

 

[Machocruz]

Yeah, I like hard games but I'm ok with not having to replay a game from the start because I died at the last boss anymore. At least that's what my inner pre-teen/teenager thinks. Time moves slower when you're younger, so one of those old hour long games feels like it takes half a day to get through. Maybe it would feel different now. But once I master a stage, replaying it doesn't add to the challenge of the rest of the game, so what's the point.

 

[DraQ]

And then there is Quake 2.

Quake 4 offers, in my opinion, best SP campaign of the series. Considering multiplayer, Quake World for the win.

I don't know and don't care.


Q4 is effectively reheated Q2 and Q2 was uninspired, insultingly easy and very forgetable game, so...



Carmack? Fuck this loser.
:jaywilson:

 

[taxalot]

I never did try the Quake Add ons ; and that is Q1 and Q2 ... How good are they ?

 

[skacky]

Q1's are okay. Scourge of Armagon has a couple of new enemies and has an emphasis on the technological aspect of Quake, the last boss looking like the Makron. It still keeps the other elements though. Dissolution of Eternity has a lot of cool locations (egypt, castles) but the gameplay wasn't very exciting even though it had new weapon variants (multi-rockets for example) and new monsters. It's also very short. All in all they're okay, but other custom mods such as Quoth are of way higher quality when it comes to monsters and items.

I've always found Quake 2 boring so I never tried its addons, but I'm pretty sure someone can tell you if they're any good.

 

[DraQ]

SP campaign qualifies for a decent science fiction movie.

Is this the point where I snarkily remark that we must have very different definitions of Sci-Fi?






Also of decency.

 

[Ninja Destroyer]

Quake 2 MissionPack 1: The Reckoning and Quake 2 MissionPack 2: Ground Zero were for me a better experience than vanilla Q2. They added more enemies (Gekks and the Repair Bots; Medic Commander, Daedalus and the Queen Bitch), some weapons (chainsaw is back,yeah). They are shorter but well paced and I finished it having more fun with it. I remember playing them after forcing myself to finally finish the main game.




That's a speed run of first expansion.

 

[Twinkle]

Dune 2 can be a pain because of the interface.


But let's look at FPS games - pre mouse era ones generally tend to be piss easy when played with modern input devices because beign able to move and aim at the same time is a huge advantage. Later on detailed collision, terrain representation and, for some time, increasingly powerful AI also pushed the games towards hardcore, so the FPS difficulty curve has generally been climbing up until the dawn of console FPSes and then some due to inertia.

Still, even in FPSes the difficulty has always been all over the place - Blood, for example will make you piss, well, blood despite being a Build Engine game and generally designed primarily with pure KB controls in mind. Then, Quake 2 was a complete snoozefest. Then suddenly Unreal and Half Life.

Come to think about it - did you managed to finish Blood on Extra Crispy? I always failed with the stone gargoyles.

They can be beaten fairly easily with some cheese. There are a few spots on that level they can't reach and you can pitchfork those losers* to your heart's content.

*That level was designed by Jay Wilson.

 

[MetalCraze]

It says a lot about the quality of a game when the ability to die often is the only thing that makes it interesting to play.

Imagine playing ArmA 2/3 but with ability to withstand 20 bullet hits before dying and with 5 lives and ability to replenish life.

Durr here we go again.

Except in ArmA there is a shitton of other stuff but dying fast. When playing an unlimited respawn mission on a regular difficulty you get infinite lives and can withstand up to ~5 shots (it gives you "extended armor" noob shit) so that will be a close example.
The whole huge open world, gunporn, create-any-mission-you-want approach is still there it's just that noboby bothers to balance that stuff (same issue as with stuff like SMB - hey you can respawn infinitely so you grind until you win) and everybody plays a lot more careless.

But remove the same 'dying fast' from old arcade ports or new "wannabe-difficult" games - and what will remain? Nothing. Same basic gameplay dozens of competing games have.

The great evidence of this is that for speedrunners it takes 10-20 minutes to rush through so called "old hard games". That's how much gameplay content is there once the difficulty is not a barrier.
In OFP campaign there were 40 missions and one savegame per each. 2 mln people bought it. If you died every 3 minutes there it simply would be impossible to complete the game and it had much less noob-help-derp than ArmA games - so OFP did something right.

 

[DraQ]

The great evidence of this is that for speedrunners it takes 10-20 minutes to rush through so called "old hard games". That's how much gameplay content is there once the difficulty is not a barrier.

Morrowind speedrun takes 7.5min. Your point was?

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Durr here we go again.

Except in ArmA there is a shitton of other stuff but dying fast. When playing an unlimited respawn mission on a regular difficulty you get infinite lives and can withstand up to ~5 shots (it gives you "extended armor" noob shit) so that will be a close example.
The whole huge open world, gunporn, create-any-mission-you-want approach is still there it's just that noboby bothers to balance that stuff (same issue as with stuff like SMB - hey you can respawn infinitely so you grind until you win) and everybody plays a lot more careless.

But remove the same 'dying fast' from old arcade ports or new "wannabe-difficult" games - and what will remain? Nothing. Same basic gameplay dozens of competing games have.

The great evidence of this is that for speedrunners it takes 10-20 minutes to rush through so called "old hard games". That's how much gameplay content is there once the difficulty is not a barrier.
In OFP campaign there were 40 missions and one savegame per each. 2 mln people bought it. If you died every 3 minutes there it simply would be impossible to complete the game and it had much less noob-help-derp than ArmA games - so OFP did something right.

Except that speedrunners are simply masters of these games. The "content" of these games is attaining mastery. The "art" of these games is that they are challenging but at the same time they are fair enough to allow a master to go through them on a single credit, hell, sometimes even without taking a single hit.
The problem that I'm talking about is games allowing sloppy play - if I'm playing a game of constant challenges and I'm playing sloppily and I'm still allowed to progress for 30 minutes, then there's a problem.

 

[MetalCraze]

The "content" of these games is attaining mastery

They do not attain any mastery. They just learn every pixel on levels, every enemy movement by seconds and when they need to press which button. That's not mastery.

The "art" of these games is that they are challenging but at the same time they are fair enough to allow a master to go through them on a single credit, hell, sometimes even without taking a single hit.

No. Sorry bro but when the difference between completing the game in 10 minutes and 10 hours is that it kills you every 50m for not pushing the button at the right time and nothing else - it's a shit design.

Shitty devs make a short game with almost no varied mechanics that can last and then artificially extend the game time by making it nintendo-hard - this can't be excused, sorry.