Putting the 'role' back in role-playing games since 2002.
Donate to Codex
Good Old Games
  • Welcome to rpgcodex.net, a site dedicated to discussing computer based role-playing games in a free and open fashion. We're less strict than other forums, but please refer to the rules.

    "This message is awaiting moderator approval": All new users must pass through our moderation queue before they will be able to post normally. Until your account has "passed" your posts will only be visible to yourself (and moderators) until they are approved. Give us a week to get around to approving / deleting / ignoring your mundane opinion on crap before hassling us about it. Once you have passed the moderation period (think of it as a test), you will be able to post normally, just like all the other retards.

Difficulty in RPG games

How hard do you prefer the games you play to be? The second part, what kind of difficulty?

  • Extremely easy. After work I simply want to relax and faceroll the enemies.

    Votes: 3 2.6%
  • Easy. I don't want to be challenged a lot. I prefer to have the story rolling.

    Votes: 1 0.9%
  • Normal. I might need to google, understand a few things about combat/magic to finish the game.

    Votes: 36 31.0%
  • Hard. I will die plenty of times, and will need to understand the mechanics quite deeply.

    Votes: 61 52.6%
  • Extremely hard. Love to spend hours on single encounters, love the satisfaction I get when I win.

    Votes: 14 12.1%
  • Difficulty type: More monster HP, more monsters, monsters immune etc.

    Votes: 7 6.0%
  • Difficulty type: Smarter opponents, but they don't have immunities/more HP.

    Votes: 76 65.5%

  • Total voters
    116

Pulse

Educated
Joined
May 11, 2022
Messages
82
Note: You have 2 votes in the poll. The first is to select what difficulty you prefer, between extremely easy, easy, normal, hard and extremely hard. The second vote is to choose the difficulty type that you prefer in games. If I made the poll in a retarded way, please let me know. It is quite possible I did.

The topic of the difficulty setting in RPG games but also in video games in general has always been a central one. A good base difficulty setting can make a game very interesting and give it high replayability. On the contrary, when wrongly tweaked, it can break a game.

I would love to read your thoughts on:

1) How hard do you like a game to be?


I personally like to play games that are quite challenging. An example was Dark Souls. I know that people got to the point where they finished the game as lvl 1 and with no hits taken, but for the vast majority of us, starting out this game was a big challenge. Even almost unfairly so. But once you started finding patterns in the enemy attacks/behaviours and reacted accordingly, the game became possible to finish.


Another example was soloing Baldurs Gate for the first time. This is another game that can get quite hard if you aren't well versed in the magic system, and how D&D works. Also there are mods that increase the difficulty by a lot. Finishing the game solo for the first time with no cheats/cheese gave me a feeling of achievement. So I do like challenging games/ but not unfairly so.

2) What kind of difficulty?

Difficulty can be increased simply by increasing the number of monsters, or giving more HP to bosses. However making the enemies smarter, seems to me to make the game much more interesting. As an example, there are mods in Baldur's Gate that make spellcasters smarter, almost like how a human opponent would react. I personally find this more interesting.

An example of a game with more artificial difficulty: Diablo 1 with the Hell 2 mod. I loved the mod and its additions, but its difficulty was in the number of monsters and the damage they did. If you get to a point that you can't progress the game, what you have to do is to start new game to farm/grind more xp so you can get to higher levels.


I've made a poll below. Would be interested to see the Codexian's answers :)
 

Cryomancer

Arcane
Glory to Ukraine
Joined
Jul 11, 2019
Messages
14,463
Location
Frostfell
That is a complicated question because honestly, I like having BOTH, extremely easy encounters where I can enjoy a power fantasy and extremely hard encounters where I have a really hard time. Modern gamers tends to call it "difficulty spikes" but I don't see any problem with it.

Also about the "difficulty type", that makes no sense.

"Smarter opponents, but they don't have immunities/more HP."

I like SMARTER enemies AND enemies who has immunities. I don't like games where you can incinerate fire elementals for eg. Nor like games where your Barbarian with supernatural strength needs 666 hits of his large +5 flaming warhammer of godslaying to kill a lv 1 skeleton.
 
Last edited:

Lord of Riva

Arcane
Patron
Joined
Jan 16, 2018
Messages
2,805
Strap Yourselves In Pathfinder: Wrath
I agree with cryomancer regarding the difficulty question there is a mix between the things you have in the selections. Immunities are great, if the abilities give you ways to play around them, more Monsters depends on the combat system and if it's fun, more monster HP is basically always shit in most circumstances.

I do not think that there is "too smart" at this point in time i do not think that the problem ever is that the scripts the AI uses is to smart for the average or at least dedicated player.

A game can not be "normal" unless there is the possibility of reaching a failed state, that does not mean it can't be enjoyable either way (as a story as example) but a game you can't loose is not a game I would put that under Hard in your choices.

One Aspect I enjoy about RPGs, at least from older designs, is the ability to scale the difficulty yourself by grinding or better: finding additional side-content or exploration (for loot) that can help you get over something that you couldn't manage otherwise.
RPGs like this allow for dynamic difficulty which is preferable oin my eyes.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
difficulty doesn't matter as long as games put a time rewind cheat front and center, designing the game around it and encouraging its use. Any obstacle can trivially be overcome through trial and error.
 

Sarathiour

Cipher
Joined
Jun 7, 2020
Messages
3,262
Modern gamers tends to call it "difficulty spikes"

Difficulty spike are a good thing, and they should be tied to the narration of the game.

My opinion would be that at least half of the encounter should be around normal, and serve to check if the basic synergy of your team/ your build work, and what are the strength/weakness of it. Rest of the fight should be hard, and ideally their should be a narrative reason for it : you're entering a dangerous region, rumours of something particularly though wandering around, showdown with an opposing faction ...

Extremly hard is unfortunately often mostly due to retarded mechanic that you end up beating through sheer abuse.
 

Pulse

Educated
Joined
May 11, 2022
Messages
82
That is a complicated question because honestly, I like having BOTH, extremely easy encounters where I can enjoy a power fantasy and extremely hard encounters where I have a really hard time. Modern gamers tends to call it "difficulty spikes" but I don't see any problem with it.

Also about the "difficulty type", that makes no sense.

"Smarter opponents, but they don't have immunities/more HP."

I like SMARTER enemies AND enemies who has immunities. I don't like games where you can incinerate fire elementals for eg. Nor like games where your Barbarian with supernatural strength needs 666 hits of his large +5 flaming warhammer of godslaying to kill a lv 1 skeleton.


Good point, you want easy encounters to reward your character being strong, but also hard encounters for the challenge. Still, I assume most of us prefer to have one more often than the other. For example, some people will prefer to have more easy encounters than hard ones in a game.

For the difficulty type part, I assume it's the same. You can have smart opponents who have some immunities too. Or at least, smart opponents who can't be "cheesed" with a cheap tactic. Honestly though, for the difficulty type I haven't thought it out so well. Maybe it wasn't a good question.
 

Pulse

Educated
Joined
May 11, 2022
Messages
82
difficulty doesn't matter as long as games put a time rewind cheat front and center, designing the game around it and encouraging its use. Any obstacle can trivially be overcome through trial and error.

That's an interesting take. But what's the alternative then?
 

Late Bloomer

Scholar
Joined
Apr 7, 2022
Messages
2,816
difficulty doesn't matter as long as games put a time rewind cheat front and center, designing the game around it and encouraging its use. Any obstacle can trivially be overcome through trial and error.

I never would have thought you as a Life is Strange fan.... how strange.


Concerning the poll. I like Normal difficulty. But i loathe using a search engine to figure anything out. I prefer to stay in game. When I play games, I dont feel I need to prove anything. I just want to enjoy myself and normal / default difficutly seems to work fine for that. As for difficulty type I prefer the mobs/monsters to have high hp but not be "smart" in any conventional sense. I don't feel AI / scripting is really able to convey anything worthwhile yet. So a good fight that isnt over in a matter of a few seconds is a ok with me.
 

FriendlyMerchant

Guest
It doesn't make sense for an rpg to be "difficult" especially as most of the time it's "difficulty" just comes from stacking immunities, hp, and other numbers on top of an enemy. When there's rng involved, it starts to become more along the lines that you lose because the probabilities are just rigged against you at a point. You can't do much damage with a generic party or generic builds yet the AI is designed to kill your party as fast as possible so you end up losing merely because the game is purposely stacked against you in a format where it's not really fair to do so. This is especially true in turn-based or the timer-sequenced action rtwp with games. And then to make it always possible to win, it either devolves into finding the one gimmick programmed into the enemy that lets you avoid the stacks everywhere else or needing to go through a specific procedure to win like a puzzle game (at that point, you might as well have played a puzzle game instead). Number stacking is just a retarded over-correction in all cases for a game being fairly easy for players who develop an understanding of the ruleset behind it.

Requiring that you go through gimmicks to beat enemies because the odds are rigged against you otherwise is terrible since that often limits how you can build your party since now you have to keep characters with specific race/class/perk permutations in order to play the game without coming across a brick wall instead of being more free to play and experiment with a variety of parties/builds. You need that rogue because you always have to disable the traps that normally one-shot you and you always have to run a cleric because you have to stack AC to stand a chance and it has some of the more important AC spells, damage resistance spells, etc. And then even worse, it requires more metagaming then just sitting down and playing the game more naturally. In other words, it's a hindrance to "roleplaying," those two letters in the beginning of the genre name.

"Smarter" AI is a good answer to improving difficulty. However, "smarter" AI isn't always appropriate. I wouldn't expect a gaggle of peasant brigands to behave as intelligently as a band of experienced knights. However, I would expect the Band of experienced knights to get cocky in quite a few situations as well and do something stupid. (This is a big thing in European history btw; for example, the battle of Arsuf's end was a group of Knights getting cocky and impatient deciding to charge Saladin because they were tired of waiting. They would've been slaughtered for going over the top if Richard didn't compensate and reinforce them with supporting maneuvers from the rest of his army and to directly take the mindless charge of the impatient Knights in order to redirect their charge into a sensible tactical maneuver. This resulted in a win for Richard in spite of the initial stupidity of the knights in their charge.) Good AI is not necessarily smarter AI in all cases however as you expect certain enemies like wolves to act in certain ways as opposed to bandits. Good AI is representative AI, not "smart" AI.

Referring to one of the options and likely implied for the later options:
Normal. I might need to google, understand a few things about combat/magic to finish the game.
Is just terrible. You shouldn't have to google anything. Having to google something isn't indicative of difficultly especially as most of the time it ends up resulting in learning the rules a little better results in the player using some gimmicks in the ruleset that ends up trivializing the game. All the need to search for information on how to build characters and take advantage of the game's mechanics indicates is that the developers failed to explain the mechanics to their game. And then you find out the game was easy because knowing that you could use a few gimmicks that you only had to look up means that you dominate the game; so it's not really difficult at all.
 

FriendlyMerchant

Guest
difficulty doesn't matter as long as games put a time rewind cheat front and center, designing the game around it and encouraging its use. Any obstacle can trivially be overcome through trial and error.
Most games already have a save/reload system.
 

Sigourn

uooh afficionado
Joined
Feb 6, 2016
Messages
5,623
I like when I need to gradually learn how the game works in order to progress through the game. But I don't like having to be an "expert" at the game in order to beat it. For that, I'd rather have the game include challenge modes for the most experienced players; of course, there's always the possibility of self-imposed challenges, but honestly many of these don't resemble a normal game experience so the presence of an actual challenge difficulty would be nice.
 

Absinthe

Arcane
Joined
Jan 6, 2012
Messages
4,062
That's an interesting take. But what's the alternative then?
A limited stock of lives and/or continues, like arcade games. You can give people limited reloads the same way. Also ironman mode. Then there's soft failure (which only works well if paired with a system that does not permit save+reload abuse) where failure doesn't give you a game over but leaves you suffering some consequence of your poor decisionmaking.
 

Zarniwoop

TESTOSTERONIC As Fuck™
Patron
Joined
Nov 29, 2010
Messages
18,646
Shadorwun: Hong Kong
Thread title is confusing.

Are we talking about RPG Games? Role RPG's? R playing G's?
 

Arthandas

Liturgist
Joined
Apr 21, 2015
Messages
1,368
Apart from traditional roguelikes (and some janky old titles) there are no extremely hard rpgs so what's the point of this poll?
The only tough rpg I played in recent years was Deadfire thanks to its awesome difficulty settings and Magran's Fires, nothing else comes to mind.

Well, there's also Trials of Fire and higher tiers of Tainted Grail if you want to consider these as rpgs...
 

Pulse

Educated
Joined
May 11, 2022
Messages
82
It doesn't make sense for an rpg to be "difficult" especially as most of the time it's "difficulty" just comes from stacking immunities, hp, and other numbers on top of an enemy. When there's rng involved, it starts to become more along the lines that you lose because the probabilities are just rigged against you at a point. You can't do much damage with a generic party or generic builds yet the AI is designed to kill your party as fast as possible so you end up losing merely because the game is purposely stacked against you in a format where it's not really fair to do so. This is especially true in turn-based or the timer-sequenced action rtwp with games. And then to make it always possible to win, it either devolves into finding the one gimmick programmed into the enemy that lets you avoid the stacks everywhere else or needing to go through a specific procedure to win like a puzzle game (at that point, you might as well have played a puzzle game instead). Number stacking is just a retarded over-correction in all cases for a game being fairly easy for players who develop an understanding of the ruleset behind it.

Requiring that you go through gimmicks to beat enemies because the odds are rigged against you otherwise is terrible since that often limits how you can build your party since now you have to keep characters with specific race/class/perk permutations in order to play the game without coming across a brick wall instead of being more free to play and experiment with a variety of parties/builds. You need that rogue because you always have to disable the traps that normally one-shot you and you always have to run a cleric because you have to stack AC to stand a chance and it has some of the more important AC spells, damage resistance spells, etc. And then even worse, it requires more metagaming then just sitting down and playing the game more naturally. In other words, it's a hindrance to "roleplaying," those two letters in the beginning of the genre name.

"Smarter" AI is a good answer to improving difficulty. However, "smarter" AI isn't always appropriate. I wouldn't expect a gaggle of peasant brigands to behave as intelligently as a band of experienced knights. However, I would expect the Band of experienced knights to get cocky in quite a few situations as well and do something stupid. (This is a big thing in European history btw; for example, the battle of Arsuf's end was a group of Knights getting cocky and impatient deciding to charge Saladin because they were tired of waiting. They would've been slaughtered for going over the top if Richard didn't compensate and reinforce them with supporting maneuvers from the rest of his army and to directly take the mindless charge of the impatient Knights in order to redirect their charge into a sensible tactical maneuver. This resulted in a win for Richard in spite of the initial stupidity of the knights in their charge.) Good AI is not necessarily smarter AI in all cases however as you expect certain enemies like wolves to act in certain ways as opposed to bandits. Good AI is representative AI, not "smart" AI.

Referring to one of the options and likely implied for the later options:
Normal. I might need to google, understand a few things about combat/magic to finish the game.
Is just terrible. You shouldn't have to google anything. Having to google something isn't indicative of difficultly especially as most of the time it ends up resulting in learning the rules a little better results in the player using some gimmicks in the ruleset that ends up trivializing the game. All the need to search for information on how to build characters and take advantage of the game's mechanics indicates is that the developers failed to explain the mechanics to their game. And then you find out the game was easy because knowing that you could use a few gimmicks that you only had to look up means that you dominate the game; so it's not really difficult at all.


I completely agree, difficulty shouldn't be about gimmicks, or in other words cheesing/taking advantage of the AI. Theoretically if the game is built well, encounters shouldn't be able to cheesed, but won because of good planning/preparation/resource management and so on.

For the smarter AI point you make, I think that AI should be made realistic, not perfect. A good and smart opponent can do the right moves 70% of the time, but 30% of the time he leaves himself open, giving you a chance to take advantage of that.

For the third point you make, about not having to google, I agree with you if the developers could give us some nice resources on their game system and world. For example, if by buying a game you also bought a big manual with all the details and in depth analysis of how everything works, then that would be awesome. I am a nerd and I like those things. Perhaps you disagree. But in most cases where you have a pretty complex game (Baldur's Gate as an example, for someone who has never heard of D&D before), the fastest way to understand stuff is to google.

Edit: By the way I don't know what your opinion of BG is, I know there are people in this forum that hate it :)
 

Pulse

Educated
Joined
May 11, 2022
Messages
82
Can you guys see the poll results so far? It's really interesting: 6 prefer normal difficulty, and 12 prefer hard. 4 even prefer extremely hard. All difficulty votes for smarter opponents.
 

Viata

Arcane
Joined
Nov 11, 2014
Messages
9,885
Location
Water Play Catarinense
*increases difficulty*
*now enemies do more damage, takes even longer to finish and has a bigger number of them during any encounter, but they are still as dumb as fuck*
No, thank you. I already finished Wiz 4 and plan to play The Dark Heart of Uukrul this year, everything else I don't even want touch above normal difficulty. Also, those answers makes no sense. As if playing on hardest difficulty would stop people from using google.
 

Trashos

Arcane
Joined
Dec 28, 2015
Messages
3,413
If the hardest difficulty of the game does not require experience, mastery of systems and resources, and ideally even tactical/strategic ingenuity to the degree that it is possible, then the game isn't all that it could have been. This is rather obvious, and no well-meaning individual can think otherwise.

I do have some issue with the requirement of luck that some games have. Luck is not serious difficulty.
 

Absinthe

Arcane
Joined
Jan 6, 2012
Messages
4,062
Fake difficulty just slows down the game. When your enemies are dumb as shit and difficulty means the stats are bloated, you will probably end up isolating some degenerate strategy that will let you plonk away at enemies with minimal risk but take forever doing it. For instance, having one character aggro enemies then run away from them going in circles forever while the rest of the party autoattacks them with ranged weapons (a tactic known as "kiting"). If you have "extra hard" difficulty on where the AI doesn't get smarter, your reward isn't a more engaging game. It's just that every fight takes more than twice as long to finish. In cases like that it's not exactly surprising that people would prefer easier difficulties.

Considering how the overwhelming majority of RPGs tend to make harder difficulties this kind of stupid shit, I'm guessing poll results are being skewed a bit.
 

AdolfSatan

Arcane
Joined
Dec 27, 2017
Messages
1,871
Apart from traditional roguelikes (and some janky old titles) there are no extremely hard rpgs so what's the point of this poll?
If we're talking about combat uniquely, DR, KOTC1 and 2 are above any old school rpg I can think of in terms of difficulty.
 
Joined
Jan 14, 2018
Messages
50,754
Codex Year of the Donut
difficulty doesn't matter as long as games put a time rewind cheat front and center, designing the game around it and encouraging its use. Any obstacle can trivially be overcome through trial and error.

That's an interesting take. But what's the alternative then?
Don't include cheats enabled by default?
There's no such thing as difficulty when you get unlimited retries and no penalty for failure.
 

koyota

Cipher
Patron
Joined
May 19, 2007
Messages
216
Strap Yourselves In Codex Year of the Donut Codex+ Now Streaming!
difficulty doesn't matter as long as games put a time rewind cheat front and center, designing the game around it and encouraging its use. Any obstacle can trivially be overcome through trial and error.


Only Played Fallout 4 on survival, saving every 4 hours or so and ain`t this the truth.
Besides dying from stationary cars, game became exponentially more enjoyable.

As someone who likes Open-Environment able to retreat, multiple-solution shooters wasn`t judging the game based on it being an RPG though...

-------------------------

So my answer is difficulty type: Hard Ironman Mode, but open-solution, able to retreat.
 
Last edited:

As an Amazon Associate, rpgcodex.net earns from qualifying purchases.
Back
Top Bottom