gamedesign.dev: Intense Difficulty

There's always a sense of satisfaction in beating the odds, working diligently, and overcoming an arduous challenge. You've proven that even though this challenge is something that would stop some people in their tracks, you managed to tough it out and come out ahead in the end, proving your skill over those who have tried and failed before you. Which is, let's be honest, pretty damn sweet. However, there's a difference between overcoming a difficult challenge and surviving something brutally tearing you apart by the skin of your teeth, and it seems like some gamers are becoming so experienced that they're dulled to any challenge short of that.

I think the initial problem is that with games of old, the bar was set too high. The arcade and NES titles were both unforgiving and unintuitive, and losing meant restarting the whole game or begging your mom for more quarters. This isn't to discount those games, but later developments, such as those of the SNES, were on the whole more friendly for new players to get themselves into, and the trend has gradually continued as improved hardware and more complex control systems allow for a more immersive and gradual accustomization to the game. Compare and contrast the opening areas of the first Mario game to the newest one and it should be obvious what I mean. Unfortunately, those of us raised on the vicious games of the NES find the newer developments too soft for our tastes, which is to say, actually forgiving.

The second problem is something more attributable to the Internet than the game developers of today: cultures of like-minded individuals can meet up anonymously and with little effort to discuss their interests, be it surfing, the writing of Christopher Moore, or some crazy sexual fetish. This means that all the people who like their games harder than what is usually offered by the gaming industries of today can get together into one group and make their voice known to a given company, or in some cases, develop brutal games of their own. If these people like their games really hard, we get what you usually find in game romhacks: people who have beaten the original game all the way and want something more challenging to up the ante.

So what, you might say? Maybe the games of today really are too easy, and these people are doing us a service by bringing back the challenge to gaming as we know it. I actually consider this a pretty fair argument, except that the problem remains that a lot of game developers cannot design challenges that are actually challenging but can be reasonably figured out by a player without resorting to a guide of the game. That's the big one, I think. If someone with no Internet access and no friends that have beaten the game (this is more likely than you think) picks up the game, will they be able to beat it?

As before, this might seem to clash with my preference for roguelikes, but even as difficult as they are, well-designed roguelikes like Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup or Spelunky are always fair. They might still be really difficult, as trying to fight a hydra head-on in the former or robbing a shopkeeper unarmed in the latter are, but they let you learn how the game works and play according to their own rules, which you are subject to as well. That's what really interests me, actually: the player has a lot in common with some of the enemies they face. In fact, there's probably a unique in DCSS that uses almost the same style in combat as the player does, but while the unique has extra strength to back it up, you have a few aces in the hole in the form of consumables.

Or maybe I'm just Stockholming it up and either they're badly designed or most other games that pride themselves on beating you to death ten times before you finally get to grasp the strategies involved are being fair as they do it as well, but I have yet to see evidence to either one.