What makes a game difficult?
So in the interests of science, pathological masochism, and Xbox 360 Achievements, I recently excavated my Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare disc, and restarted the campaign on Veteran difficulty.
@_@
That game is hard. That game is its own category of hard. And how is it hard? By being ****ing cheap. Making it through Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on Veteran difficulty isn’t really about skill, it’s about consummate, unconditional tenacity. Mostly reloading checkpoints.
The difficulty is entirely artificial – since a headshot is always going to be an instant kill and enemies remain otherwise reasonably vulnerable to damage, the game compensates for this by pushing overwhelming (and occasionally infinite) numbers of them at the player, as well as an entire third world civil counter-counter-revolution’s supply of hand grenades. It doesn’t matter how accomplished you are at shooting stuff, the heap of grenades that just landed all over you like confetti at a third world civil counter-counter-revolutionary’s wedding isn’t exactly maintaining any real correspondence with fair play.
But then, is it even possible to present increased difficulty without resorting to cheap, artificial subterfuge? Can a game be both difficult AND fair?
One of the most shamelessly dishonest methods of increasing difficulty is by allowing the AI to cheat. Real-time strategy games are particularly egregious offenders in this category – as anyone who’s been Zealot-rushed while they’re still chiselling enough minerals to put up barracks can attest.
In a lot of racers, AI competitors will rubber-band behind you, meaning you can never quite out-distance them regardless of your own speed or expertise – or, ostensibly, the AI’s. Aside from its obvious unfairness, this can also result in a diminished or even absent sense of player progression and consequent boredom, since it’s never really possible to convincingly outplay the AI.
Elsewhere, some games – most particularly shooters, but also some RPGs and action adventure-types – feature hyper-vigilant AI, with enemies “seeing” you the moment you step within a certain radius of them, whether or not you actually remain in view, or were ever even in it in the first place. In dismayingly lethal combination with superhuman speed and accuracy, this sort of AI cheating can very quickly go from challenging to frustrating.
And this gets even worse when, apparently, you’re made of glass, while enemies are made of whatever it is that spaceship blast doors in the movies are made of. Or, basically, Gears of War 2 on Insane difficulty.
Then you have games like Resident Evil 4 and 5, and Dead Space, where ammunition is very limited and player health doesn’t regenerate over time. I also think this is where difficulty scaling starts to become a little more balanced, as this sort of gameplay promotes risk management, expedient strategy, and finesse over what more or less amounts to coping mechanisms or even just stupid luck. But even this kind of difficulty has its own inherent problems – exhausting your ammunition supply completely, for example, or all available health resources can result in, quite literally, a dead end situation, forcing a player to restart a section in its entirety.
Perhaps the most fair approach, of course, is in dynamic difficulty balancing. This is featured most prominently in Valve’s Left 4 Dead games, with an AI “Director” procedurally determining and generating difficulty scenarios as the game plays, and in response to the players. While both Left 4 Dead games feature most of the artificial difficulty concepts I’ve described above, they’re implemented in a subtly different way, combining these with the risk management, expedient strategy, finesse, and – significantly here – teamwork that invests successful play with a sense of performance and achievement instead of stubborn endurance.
What makes a game difficult? << Comments and views
Article courtesy of MyGaming – What makes a hard game hard?
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