What is the most hardcore single player game format you can enjoy?

When I was younger I enjoyed playing games on as hard as possible, but once you've beaten enough games this way it becomes empty and usually as you get older (at least for me) all that time spent to beat hard games feels like a waste of time.

But as there's clearly a public for it, make sure that games allow for different ways how to play, and reward players who ironman or 1cc games with achievements only they can get, that way both kind of players get happy, those craving difficult games can brag about their achievements, the rest of us can ignore them

 

These are usually lame and tacked on compared to something existing as part of the game rules e.g. a scoring or ranking system.

 

I meant achievements as an abstract concept, that includes scoring or ranking for me

 

Anyone who can play Super Mario Brothers has done this though. None of the options necessarily say anything about the difficulty of the game. For example, a puzzle game with quicksaves could still be more difficult than a roguelike. Many are from my experience.

 

The correct answer is Pinball.

 

It also depends on individual strengths. I recently saw a youtube video by a guy who found games like Dark Souls not difficult, but was utterly paralyzed by the idea of play strategy games.

 

The are some genres that would be destroyed by free saving and loading. Ironman modes are usually optional in 4X games, but I don't see the point in playing them in any other way — if you make a mistake, you live with it or die instead of going back to an older save. Starting all over isn't an issue since each playthrough will be different anyway. Free saving needs to be in, though, just to not make you lose all of your progress in case the game crashes or bugs out in the middle of an all-nighter.

Some strategy games and especially tactical shooters also require some save/load restrictions. In most tactical shooters quick loading would quickly destroy not only the tension but the whole "tactical" part, as you'd be able to just brute-force your way past pretty much any challenge. The key to enjoyable game design here is that there's very little stuff you actually have to repeat even if you have to restart a mission. There may be randomized elements within levels (enemy numbers and positions, hostage locations), the levels allow different approaches, and the are no elements that become tedious if repeated like looting, trading, talking, skill point distribution, XP grinding or inventory management. If you fail, you go back to the drawing board and try again with required changes in tactics, and if you're good, you might be able to pull off the thing flawlessly in a few minutes.

The thing I like about the Dark Souls system is that it doesn't just send you back to a previous checkpoint but has permanent elements that carry over after death. You don't have to go pick up that same sword every time after you die, you may be able to open up shortcuts that you can use later on when replaying a segment, and instead of fighting all the same fights again you'll be able to bypass almost all of them since you already got the XP from beating them. It has the good parts of a checkpoint system without the tedium that usually comes with them.

I can see myself enjoying games with pretty much any system except for ones that don't let you quit your game whenever the hell you please. The most important factor is whether starting over feels like work or not.

 

I don't really get anything out of hard games. The "tension" people talk about, and the joy of overcoming, isn't really my thing. Especially now that I have a family and limited gaming time. However what I do want is to be engaged, and to have to learn the game mechanics, pay attention to them and use things like potions or spell combos. So I detest easy modes and super hard modes, and tend to look for whatever is a good balance. This is sometimes "normal" but very often normal is too easy, and one above it feels like the best balance. Also I have to enjoy the combat in the game, if I am just playing for other reasons (*cough* Witcher *cough*) then I'll play on normal.

One game type I always play on hardest is stealth games though, as I like to play full stealth and love doing so. I also challenge myself to get achievements like "never be seen the whole game" because it's an actual fun challenge for me. Doom on nightmare not so much, but Splinter Cell 100% stealth on hard? Yes, yes, yes.

 

Interesting question actually. No, I do not think that this is even a decision to make. ALL games profit form being coherent in those secondary departments, even though not all of them need to exist. Having a text-adventure without either audio to prop it up but also no story makes it basically just as much of a non-game.

No, these things have to considered in tandem. While the Primary gameplay loop needs to be considered first it also needs to fit whatever you want to create, a loop which has the goal to explore the "story", "graphics" and "audio" may still be adequate and would still be considered secondary in context in my eyes.

Yes, this sounds a lot more reasonable. I agree mostly, just pointing out there are games around that do not fullfill this criteria, both true sandboxes which feature nearly no direction and games that actually want you to break the rule (meta-hacking etc) do exist, and i would not deem them failed games.

In most cases though, it is as you say.

 

It sounds like you don't actually want to play the game, just get to the end.

There's an interplay between format and difficulty, but one doesn't necessitate the other. The point Lord of Riva made in his first post is you can really up the difficulty if you have an open save system. I'd also say there's no reason you can't have a very easy game that erases score on continue and otherwise doesn't allow you to reload.

It's really a question of how meaningful that difficulty is. Or rather, how meaningful your play is at all to the game. Some games don't care how you play them. They are more like toys, not games. Others are more like games, you can win or lose and what the player does is meaningful and affects the outcome.

I'd argue as soon as you add an open save system, you go from game to toy.

 

Yes, for the life of me, if you want me to fly a plane or drive a car in a more than arcadey simulation you can just count me out. I am complete and utter shit in these types of games.

 

Hard games by itself aren't meaningful to me and clearly lots of others

Also your choice of words is amusing, games are toys, there's no difference whether easy or difficult

 

I think a game that never tells you "you lost" or a game where as soon as it tells you "you lost" you say "haha no" and reload without consequence is more of a toy than a game.

Do you think this characterization is bad?

 

I get why you think that way, but you confuse your personal preference with an axiomatic truth, which it is not

 

While I made no such claim explicitly, I do admit to thinking that toys are quite declined compared to games. But I also understand this is a personal preference.

I haven't thought deeply about toybox game design. I guess it would be all about size of search space and player state applicability.

 

I just don't see the reason anymore why i shouldn't be allowed to save everywhere and everytime i want.

If you have some annoying saving system (fucking KCD or Dark Souls) then at least give me the option to save freely.
Good thing is mods fix it most times but developers should respect that not everyone wants to play their game using their retarded saving mechanic.

 

I generally don't see the value in repeating the same content over and over again*, which tends to be a problem with checkpoint systems. It's not so much about combat but about everything else: going through the same containers every time, rearranging your inventory items after going through said containers, watching (or skipping) the same cutscenes, clicking through the same dialogue options, overhearing the same NPC conversations, waiting for the same scripted events to take place... What's the point? The DS system avoids all that while still punishing you for failure more than a quick save/load system would.

* There are exceptions to this, of course, like old school platformers where learning the levels and executing them perfectly is a part of the appeal, or games that offer enough tactical and/or strategic flexibility so that starting over doesn't mean doing everything the same way you did the last time and the time before that.

 

F5 everywhere or fuck off.

 

I have always been a fan of classical save points. Churches in Dragon Quest, Tombolas in Shin Megami Tensei, Crystals in Final Fantasy, those offer a real sense of danger when a battle goes south, because you might lose 30mins to 1 hour of progress. Also reaching a new town to save in in a deadly desert or a save spot in the middle of a terrifying dungeon has a lot of satisfaction on its own. A bit of a shame that this system is pretty much exclusive to the weebs, I dont think any western rpg ever made the leap from password saves to savepoints.

 

Dialogue, cutscene, inventory, waiting.

More like tends to be a problem with shitty games rather than the checkpoints.

 

You are oversimplifying things here though. Any game that is more complex than a game based solely on it's gameplay loop (like an arcade game) has things that would be annoying in repetition.

 

But a game is only as complex as its gameplay loop(s). You can have very simple ones like, say, Pacman, to much more complex ones like Civilization 4. Actually you don't need to stray away from early arcade games at all to find very complex gameplay loops e.g. Mr. Do, but I digress.

Point is, things like the mentioned cutscenes, dialogue and waiting do not add complexity, and you can, in fact, have very complex games that are not annoying in repetition.

 

In a more complex game, the game could also offer you the tools to skip the repetition. Dragon Quest 11 has a system where you can skip any cutscene you have already seen, even if you died after seeing it and had to reload, as long as you didnt quit the .exe entirely. Also most games with punishing save systems condition you to do the fiddly bits (inventory managment, level ups) before saving, to minimise the amount of content you have to repeat mindlessly.

I like games that experiment with save systems, there is a lot of potential for incline there still undiscovered. It is dangerous for sales tho, it might always create a save system like Kingdom Come Deliverance which is just shite.

 

You are, i believe, missing the point of what I am saying. Yes the gameplay loop can be simple and it can be complex but that is also kinda my point. You are not loosing much by loosing in Pac-man you loose potentially Hours of Progress if you loose in Civilisation, If a system is more complex it's repetition will also be more complex. -> It has no implication if the game is designed well, it simply means that doing the same stuff over and over can be quite boring, even if without repetition its very enjoyable.

There may well be games that are complex and fun in repetition we agree on the Roguelikes, however the system is build around it's repetition as one of it's main gameplay factors, this is simply not the case for the vast majority of games. There is a reason why different kinds of games exist.

I really do not agree on the fact that you deem certain aspects of games to not add complexity, i am not sure where it is coming from either.

 

I think games are designed around gameplay to the extent it has to be engaging or else the overall experience is rote. However engaging, i.e. having to pay attention and try, does not require extreme difficulty. It also doesn't require redoing things you already completed, being "punished" for failure. Hitting F5 right before a section that might require a few tries isn't some complete clown show of zero challenge and boring non-gameplay. I'd argue it's the standard for the vast majority of PC gamers. This idea of "you have to be punished like in Dark Souls for gaming to matter!" is dick measuring autism.