Extra credits on Difficult games vs Punishing games

[teknoman2]

and i have absolutely no problem with a game being too difficult, as long as the difficulty is rational. last time i played BG, i went in durlag's tower without a thief and i had to invent all sorts of tricks to get past the traps. that was not the game's fault. just as in the video it's not the game's fault that the 2nd guy walks over the trap without looking. however, if the game bends the rules in its favor it's not fun at all... like empire earth did, where the AI always had more resources than the player, while having no workers (and the player needed 30 or more to keep up)

[Lephys]

There's a difference between being "punished" and suffering the consequences of a complete lack of effort.

 

If you run into a Level 1 rat, and try to hug it over and over again, and it bites you to death, the game ins't punishing you. YOU'RE punishing you, and you're using a rat to do it.

 

In my opinion, one of the most common forms of punishment is the gauntlet battle. The kind of combat system/encounter in which the foe has 70,000 HP, and your characters can only deal 100 damage per hit, and only have 400 HP, while the foe's dealing 357 damage per hit.

 

Dragon Age 2 on pretty much any difficulty above normal did this. It's no longer about expending effort to have sound tactics. It's just a "let's see how long you can jump-rope without tripping, MUAHAHAHAHA! scenario at that point.

 

I think a much better way to make a combat encounter difficult is to force you to change tactics, or emply out-of-the-ordinary tactics for maximum effectiveness. But, maximum effectiveness should still not require 17 and 1/2 minutes just to get the thing down to half health. That's ridiculous.

 

Really, it's not that "punishing" is inherently a bad thing... it's that it's a lame thing.

 

I don't really even think the Dark Souls type of design is "punishing," because the entire game is designed around those almost puzzle-like combats. The goal of the game is to figure out how to get past creatures/foes, and you know that from the get-go. They're not just like "lolz, the game isn't even ABOUT these encounters, but these are BY FAR THE MOST DIFFICULT, FRUSTRATING THING IN THE ENTIRE GAME!"

 

But, yeah... main point: the requirement of effort does not mean a game is punishing you.

[Chippy]

Excellent video, the person who made it should be happily eating a box of chocolates and wrapping themselves in silk warm fuzzy feeling blankets of contentment after creating it.

 

One game that sprang to mind: Jedi Knight 2: Jedi Outcast.  All Lucasarts Star Wars games had a habit of being hard - maybe because "THIS IS STAR WARS!" but that game insulted me on a personal level.  It's pretty much the only game (apart from Green Beret on the ZX Spectrum, and Ninja Gaiden on the NES) that I felt like: I. Beat. You.  When I completed it.  Every moment of that game (and some really stood out) was like an assessment on a course that had no curriculum - just constant random testing all the time with no structure except the ability to reload/retake each test. Ugh.

[Chippy]

and i have absolutely no problem with a game being too difficult, as long as the difficulty is rational. last time i played BG, i went in durlag's tower without a thief and i had to invent all sorts of tricks to get past the traps. that was not the game's fault. just as in the video it's not the game's fault that the 2nd guy walks over the trap without looking. however, if the game bends the rules in its favor it's not fun at all... like empire earth did, where the AI always had more resources than the player, while having no workers (and the player needed 30 or more to keep up)

 

Shogun: Total War  games did that.  The Creative Assembley reasoned that the player could always beat the ai.  Which I think is really stupid.  I love that developer though and am willing to forgive that ...really stupid and frustrating... point of view.

[SunBroSolaire]

Punishing is the wrong word for what EC is trying to say. Punishing difficulty suggests severe consequences for doing something wrong. Dark Souls is definitely punishing. Small mistakes can set you back an hour, or sometimes even have permanent, intractable consequences. That's punishing. Inconsistent, cheap, or unfair are better words for the type of difficulty they're criticizing. I suppose they didn't use those words because, yeah OBVIOUSLY cheap difficulty is not a good thing. 

 

I think it's a really important distinction, though. Conventional wisdom these days seems to suggest that games should minimize frustration by curbing or eliminating punishment. The auto-save feature that's present in all new games is the perfect example of this philosophy. The thinking is that a game shouldn't waste the players time with boring repetition, which is an admirable goal. There can be problems with that approach to games though. First, you're making sure the player gets through the game, but not that they understand the game. When you play a punishing game like Dark Souls or Age of Decadence, you learn how to play. When you play a relatively forgiving game, like Skyrim, you really never have to get any better at the game because mistakes are not corrected. You can just kind of coast through the whole campaign, maybe retrying the occasional section every once in a while, but basically making constant progress. So while trying to remove frustration, you actually end up removing one of the most rewarding parts of playing a game, which is mastering systems. 

 

I don't think games have to be punishing - you can also make a game more demanding of precision, like Super Meat Boy, or more demanding of analytic thought, like Braid. Those games are very forgiving but still require you to learn the mechanics to progress. Saying that punishing gameplay is always bad just dismisses the validity of learning through repetition. Anyone who's learned to play a musical instrument should know how misguided that is.