Decline So, amateur game designers and difficulty...

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I have noticed that a lot of indie games have very low difficulty level that makes them downright tedious to play.

Recently, I downloaded Streets of Rage Remake and I played it for 25 minutes on one credit and only because I didn't set up keyboard and I was basically spamming basic attacks and jump attacks. What the fuck? 25 minutes on one coin on the first attempt?
That game makes me wish I would finally die because how long one can go through trash mobs.
Also, bosses are much less difficult than trash mobs and often can be damage and damaged without doing anything.

Now I tried playing on the highest difficulty level and it was the same, just wishing for it to end, especially that my palm was hurting from pressing the attack/jump keys.

 

[spectre]

Or it may be so that you have simply grown up.
No irony there, bro, back when my age was only a single digit, beating Level 5 of Dungeon Master was an heroic feat for little ole me. So was finally winning that first mission in TFTD.
Not so now.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Or it may be so that you have simply grown up.
No irony there, bro, back when my age was only a single digit, beating Level 5 of Dungeon Master was an heroic feat for little ole me. So was finally winning that first mission in TFTD.
Not so now.

It doesn't work like this. If it did, any adult could go to an arcade saloon and occupy one machine for half an hour without any preparation.
Also, being unable to win because you have no idea what the rules of the game are isn't the same as being unable to win because the game is difficult.
Another thing is that in most of these indie games, I didn't win because I was good. I won because the authors failed to provide challenge or made them too forgiving.
When I play C64 arcade games, they start dishing out punishment first 30 seconds into game. Not to mention stuff like Ghosts 'N Goblins where you just get killed and killed again until you learn how to do play perfectly.

 

[hoverdog]

Or it may be so that you have simply grown up.
No irony there, bro, back when my age was only a single digit, beating Level 5 of Dungeon Master was an heroic feat for little ole me. So was finally winning that first mission in TFTD.
Not so now.

Not really, it depends on the kind of games. I finished Prince of Persia when I was like 9. Now I can't get through level 3 or 4. Of course, back then I had no idea how Warlords 2 worked (and still I had a lot of fun with it), which is a really easy-to-use game.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I got Streets of Rage playable by decreasing the amount of lives to 0. Finally it's possible to lose in a reasonable amount of time.

 

[Jick Magger]

Back in the day, heightened difficulty was basically a compensator for generally short length of a game. Nowadays developers have much more storage capacity to work with, and can thus pace their games more thoroughly.
That and, honestly, most indie developers these days are more pre-occupied with making their games look good than actually making the gameplay challenging or deep. Look at shit like Fez and Bastion.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Back in the day, heightened difficulty was basically a compensator for generally short length of a game. Nowadays developers have much more storage capacity to work with, and can thus pace their games more thoroughly.

Yeah, but what's the point of it? Why waste my time? I don't have time to spend 30 minutes every time I want to play a stupid shooter or beat em up without challenge. If these 30 minutes aren't my achievement, then it's a waste of time.

 

[Jick Magger]

Back in the day, heightened difficulty was basically a compensator for generally short length of a game. Nowadays developers have much more storage capacity to work with, and can thus pace their games more thoroughly.

Yeah, but what's the point of it? Why waste my time? I don't have time to spend 30 minutes every time I want to play a stupid shooter or beat em up without challenge. If these 30 minutes aren't my achievement, then it's a waste of time.

I'm not disagreeing with you. Shorter lengths meant that they had to actually pay attention to making the gameplay challenging as fuck back then. Nowadays all your casual player needs for gratification is getting from point A to point B with as little fuss as possible while feeling like a badass. If you don't follow this line of thought (and if you take video games seriously at all, you shouldn't) then yes, it is a waste of time.

 

[Machocruz]

Streets of Rage was easy to begin with. I beat both games the same afternoon I rented them. Maybe they were too faithful with Remake.

 

[Occasionally Fatal]

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. And then of course, not every difficult game is difficult in an interesting or a worthwhile way. There are counter examples (Super Meat Boy comes to mind), they are just more rare.

Also, isn't Fez the game with a puzzle that took the whole internet months to solve? I haven't checked it out because it was only available on XBLA or whatever and I don't roll that way.

 

[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.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

I'm not disagreeing with you. Shorter lengths meant that they had to actually pay attention to making the gameplay challenging as fuck back then. Nowadays all your casual player needs for gratification is getting from point A to point B with as little fuss as possible while feeling like a badass. If you don't follow this line of thought (and if you take video games seriously at all, you shouldn't) then yes, it is a waste of time.

Besides the question of substance, it's also a literally waste of time because playing a mindless beat em up or a shooter for 25 minutes lasts much more than playing it for 4 minutes. I'm a casual gamer, I don't have time to play games for 30 minutes just because the game dishes out tons of healing items and has too much lives or downright avoids trying to make me lose.

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.

I'm not talking about incredibly harsh difficulty - there actually some games like that - the most infamous example being I Wanna be the Guy.
I'm talking about games where it's possible to lose in a reasonable period of time when one isn't good at playing them.

 

[Jick Magger]

Also, isn't Fez the game with a puzzle that took the whole internet months to solve? I haven't checked it out because it was only available on XBLA or whatever and I don't roll that way.

It had a QR Code as a puzzle, IIRC. Which is less challenging and more just complete bullshit. The actual platforming is also ridiculously easy.

 

[spectre]

Not really, it depends on the kind of games. I finished Prince of Persia when I was like 9. Now I can't get through level 3 or 4. Of course, back then I had no idea how Warlords 2 worked (and still I had a lot of fun with it), which is a really easy-to-use game.

Yeah, somehow it cuts both ways I guess. I remember when I was younger, I could beat Master of Orion or Civilization 2 on high difficulties with little effort (and I wasn't even paying attention to half of the stuff that was going on). Dunno if my playstyle changed over time, but it's not that easy nowadays.

 

[DraQ]

Modern games are insultingly easy more often than old ones (and those that are made by proffushunal designers suffer much more from that, because they typically have high budgets and need to be non-frustrating to as large part of the bell curve as physically possible to turn profits), but difficulty has always been all over the place regardless of genre.

 

[asongforsimeon]

While it's true that difficulty is generally lower in modern gaming, an obvious consequence of a much larger player base, I think that old gamers' perception in somewhat biased. I remembered Dune II as fiendishly difficult, because when I played it I was a small kid. But for the 28 years-old me is really piss easy.

Nevertheless, I don't think there aren't pretty hard games: Majesty II, for example, has some really challenging missions. Elven Legacy can be a pain even for grognards. And so on. What I find sad, indeed, is that AI development is pretty much stalled in VG, and difficulty comes mostly for mission design or outright cheating, instead of smarter programmed opponent.

 

[DraQ]

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.

 

[Telengard]

I'm a casual gamer...

Apparently, you're not casual enough.

*

If an arcadey, nostalgic, side-scrolling beat-em-up doesn't punish severely for any mistake, then it's not doing the formula any justice, which kind of defeats the very purpose of the trip down nostalgia lane.

Not only that, though, side-scrolling beat-em-ups have simplistic gameplay. The "game" lies in the challenge of staying alive, not in the mashing beat-em-up part. Strip out the challenge, and those games become little more than a kung-fu movie.

 

[Destroid]

The average age of gamers has done nothing but go up since the dawn of videogaming, I think with this information we can conclude that as you age you get progressively more retarded and incapable of exploratory learning.

 

[skacky]

snoozefest

First person shooters are worth playing only in multiplayer.

I completely disagree with that statement. I have way more fun playing Quake in singleplayer than in multiplayer, and I've played Quakeworld for many years.

 

[ghostdog]

Challenge is great but don't forget that back in the day, most coin-ops where set to the highest difficulty in their system menu for ULTIMATE money grabbing. Now that I've replayed them with mame, most of them are still pretty challenging even in their lowest difficulty and would still require a shitload of coins to finish them.

First person shooters are worth playing only in multiplayer if they can be played with a doom source port.

fixed.

 

[DraQ]

First person shooters are worth playing only in multiplayer if they can be played with a doom source port. dannyfx1 is a faggot

fixed.

fixed to logical conclusion.

 

[MetalCraze]

Recently, I downloaded Streets of Rage Remake and I played it for 25 minutes on one credit and only because I didn't set up keyboard and I was basically spamming basic attacks and jump attacks. What the fuck? 25 minutes on one coin on the first attempt?
That game makes me wish I would finally die because how long one can go through trash mobs.

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.

And you will be surprised how many old games that you loved back in the day are actually terrible shit.

Ironically how more and more oldfags that actually played old games find them to be subpar nowadays while newfags that try to be hardcore will praise them, even though they never heard about them before a "remake" or a "sequel" etc.

 

[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.

 

[DraQ]

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.