What substitutes for challenge?

[Wyrmlord]

Making a challenging game ultimately requires out-thinking the player in advance, which can be a fairly demanding endeavour.

So this means that the game might not be wholly challenging, or, like Daggerfall, loses all challenge once you get your character to a high enough level and with good enough equipment. And that's what happens with the more average game, and even with older and relatively more challenging games, you will see the same thing that you more or less see with some of the better recent games - "It started out medium to hard, but got way too easy midway into it" or "It was pretty easy for most of the game except the end".

But there's obviously that something else, which can still give that incentive to enjoy what's going on, despite the game starting to get easier or being not entirely challenging. What is that something else for you?

For me, it's still being able to experiment with all the elaborate ways of torturing enemies. Sure, the fight is not too hard, but I can still enjoy burning that guy, bringing those few into a windstorm, having the summoned tiger eat up the mages, and so on. It's why despite my disgust and dislike of KotOR games, I still enjoyed Plagueing a large number of Gweedo-look-alike bounty hunters, Choking all of them at the same time, slowly burning them with Force Storms, and knocking down the remaining Mandalorians with Force Winds so that they can have lightsabers thrown in their direction.

Or like in BaK, where you had even more ways of sitting back and seeing enemies tortured. You could place mines all over the battle map, and see moredhel keep stumbling over them. With Mad God's Rage, you'd see the most powerful enemies brought to their knees by a lightning storm striking each one of them until they are dead. You could have Rusalki surround them and pound them with missiles, with them having nowhere to go. And you could have a single Firestorm push back all of them away or kill them simultaneously.

All in all, I guess if a game can't make you feel pounded down upon and abused, it can at least still make you feel like an ultimate destroyer. The only thing that is bad is the middle ground of having small ordinary weapons and equipment and still easily killing all enemies in the game.

 

[Awor Szurkrarz]

Choices and consequences - especially the ones related to power and its abuse and social relations.
Yeah, and ability to torture, rape, etc. with impunity.
It would need to show a more realistic behaviour of the victims, though.

 

[Emotional Vampire]

Making a challenging game ultimately requires out-thinking the player in advance, which can be a fairly demanding endeavour.

From its release in October through the end of 2008, Fallout 3 shipped over 4.7 million units.[93] According to NPD Group the Xbox 360 version has sold 1.14 million units and the PlayStation 3 version has sold 552,000 units as of January 2009.[94] The Xbox 360 version was the 14th best-selling game of December 2008 in the United States, while the PlayStation 3 version was the eighth best-selling PlayStation 3 game in that region and month.[95]

 

[yolesaber]

All in all, I guess if a game can't make you feel pounded down upon and abused, it can at least still make you feel like an ultimate destroyer. The only thing that is bad is the middle ground of having small ordinary weapons and equipment and still easily killing all enemies in the game.

It is not merely about combat in these instances. A game can be challenging without just throwing enemies at you. I think if a game is hard to balance combat-wise, then a developer can make up for it with interesting level and quest design. Bloodlines got really really easy towards the end, but the ambiance of the locales and the open-ended, challenging nature of a few (sadly, not enough) of the quests kept me going.

Another example is Ultima VII - really easy, unbalance combat right off the bat. Worst part of the game. However, even towards the end there were countless places to explore that you hadn't heard of, plus quests that were truly challenging. Not challenging in the sense of baddies to fight, but the actual gameplay of the quest was difficult because of the tasks involved. You had to solve things on your own, especially regarding finding the culprits of the murder; it required chasing them across all of Britannia! That's a prolonged quest that really kept me going throughout the whole game, with clues scattered throughout that made me think I was getting there when, in fact, the goal was always a few steps ahead of me. That's challenging and involving gameplay.