Difficulty is fun lol
Discussion
Olivera said:
Just reminiscing there about games from the 8/16 bit days - weren't many of them actually quite hard? You were dead in platformers back then if you were a millimeter out when jumping, and entire genres such as horizontal/vertical shoot-em-ups were just flat out hard.
If anything I think games have often got easier, there's no real skill, and instead it's just wandering through a time sink until the end of the game.
Agree with this. Child of the 80’s here and grew up with Amstrad then mega drive, and having got most of the mini Nintendo and Megadrive rereleases consoles, I can confirm the games are brutally difficult compared to today’s games, but then they are so much more complex in many ways.If anything I think games have often got easier, there's no real skill, and instead it's just wandering through a time sink until the end of the game.
Also agree with the OP, I have no time for souls type games and hated Jedi fallen order - would much rather it was made in the Dark Forces/Jedi Knight mould. Also loved RDR2.
PhilboSE said:
Those are precise game mechanics that don’t float my particular boat. I feel like I’m being punished for not knowing something I had no way of knowing, and the only way to progress is to learn by long and bitter experience and “git gud”. I don’t enjoy that. Which is fine, we don’t have to enjoy the same things.
I cannot comment on the classic games that defined the genre such as Dark Souls and its sequels as I have never liked the "dungeons and dragons" atmosphere, but I have found equivalents such as Nioh 1/2 and Bloodbourne quite ok and enjoyable.It is all very personal anyway and although I am not a fan per se of Souls games I like to take them as a challenge and do not feel punished dying over and over again as I have always felt I learned and missed something in most death. Only once have I thrown the controller, after dying for the umpteenth time against some boss in Sekiro about half way through. I dusted off Nioh 2 as there was one boss last year that I could not get through and am now getting pretty close, and it will take the time it will take but I will work it out.
In the end I think it just boils down to what sort of mood we may be in when we turn on the console/PC. To me it at least has been cyclical, with periods enjoying such hard games and other periods taking a sit back and just enjoying a good action/adventure game with deep storytelling, often with rather long periods of non playing at all in between.
Elden ring is the only game I uninstalled, reinstalled , then finally uninstalled. It really rea!ly pissed me off. Loads of progress and them blam! Repeat.
I do like FPS battle royals as it's you against humans. I've won PUBG a couple of times solo. MW was tough and finally showed me I'm just not as quick as the young ones any more. PUBG can be very tactical but I found MW was more reflex based and I could not keep up. I STILL jump and twitch the mouse when someone surprises me or shoots at me.
I do like FPS battle royals as it's you against humans. I've won PUBG a couple of times solo. MW was tough and finally showed me I'm just not as quick as the young ones any more. PUBG can be very tactical but I found MW was more reflex based and I could not keep up. I STILL jump and twitch the mouse when someone surprises me or shoots at me.
BrettMRC said:
The hardest games ever were the ones you had to load from a cassette on the BBC-B... even getting the sod to run was a mountain to climb! 
I'll raise you the level of difficulty of getting a copied game tape to load on a ZX Spectrum. After 5-10 minutes of looking hopefully at a flashing CRT screen with lots of wobbly lines it would suddenly go black, reboot and you would start all over again. Some days it would take an hour of fiddling with volume and tone controls, or even trying different cassette players, to even get to the start.
As for in-game difficulty, I think the hardest was Eureka! a five-part text adventure that had no save game option but did have random events that would kill you without warning.
I was watching something on YouTube about old games. And the result was, they were rock hard as they lasted a few minutes at most if you could complete them, so they were made almost impossible.
Eg, 'The Last V8' on C64. The car was virtually uncontrollable. The video I saw was him completing it in about 2 minutes!
Eg, 'The Last V8' on C64. The car was virtually uncontrollable. The video I saw was him completing it in about 2 minutes!
MCBrowncoat said:
And what an exercise! The aesthetics of some of the areas I have seen - but that I personally never got to - look incredible. But a lot of people will never experience them because they sent it back or got bored like me. Isn't that weird?!! A huge portion of this game you created a reasonable proportion of your players will never experience?!!
You could look at it from the perspective of the devs not wanting you to experience those parts of the game until you've earned it. You may suffer, but you must persist. There is less satisfaction in beating a boss who goes down easy.Take Sekiro for example, the final boss is an impenetrable wall the first time you meet him. Hks offense is devastating as you can barely slip an attack through his guard before he crushes you with another blow. But as you study the fight, you start to learn the counters and see the gaps, you position differently and adjust your timing. It takes a while, but by the time you finally beat him, you will have toppled the games mightiest challenge and are now deserving of seeing the ending and saying you beat the game. If you arrived at that fight and won it first or second time, unless you're some kind of god-tier player, it would feel like a hollow victory.
ZedLeg said:
CrutyRammers said:
Dave Hedgehog said:
mmm-five said:
Simple solution, just don't buy/play the stuff you don't like.
I don't like FPS game, so stay away from things like CoD MW, Fortnite, PUGB, Tarkov, etc.
This, I avoid any souls type game or game where you have to repeat sections to get back to the boss again on death, or the boss resets on deathI don't like FPS game, so stay away from things like CoD MW, Fortnite, PUGB, Tarkov, etc.
they are just mindless dirge
add linear games like jedi fallen order, I was bored before I even got to the end of the scrap yard
Edited by Dave Hedgehog on Wednesday 22 March 13:45
I much prefer games where they create a world and you get emergent behaviour, rather than these heavily scripted things. I do like a multiplayer FPS for that reason, but I'm getting worse at those as I get older - or rather, don't invest the time in them in order to be good. I'm getting more casual but I don't see that as a bad thing. These days I prefer the more thinky type of game where you can take your time. Oxygen not included is my fave example at the moment. I doubt many would claim that's not hard, but the difficulty comes from consequences of your decisions, not just because you missed a move in a scripted sequence.
Most of my favourite games are in the former category but I've also spent 100s of hours in big open world games wandering around.
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