Difficulty itself is little to blame as this thread has shown. But it's the player's personal reaction to it that creates the problem, and unfortunately that's an unpredictable variable.
Basically a metric that I have used for myself is my reaction to grappling with the difficulty. If I feel a challenge and then feel satisfied or punch the air in triumph for overcoming the obstacle, then it's right. Whereas if I'm struggling in a state of confusion and then when I overcome it just sit there thinking, "Finally it's over..." Then it's bad.
Case in point: I hate hard games but love Demon's Souls
I think there is a clear distinction to be made between "bad games" and "challenging games". Both types can be hard, but one is good and one is bad.
Some examples : I love Super Meat Boy, Quake live, and MW3 multiplayer. These are considered "hard" games ; however, their mechanics are incredibly well polished and the challenge is very gratifying. I cannot stop playing those, as it reminds me of the great Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island days
On the other end of the spectrum there's stuff like FFXIII ... complex mechanics just for the sake of it, painful downtimes ... this makes me pull my hair off, or whatever is left of it It's not even "hard" per say, but it's just so much inertia that I just cannot take it. Hard as in, tedious. I would actually love to play this kind of games ... if the genre embraced the turn-based mechanic in a more hardcore way. That is to say, not playing stupid animations or some repetitive victory music. If at the core, it's a turned based tabletop game, then it would be best to cut the inertia and provide a more instantaneous flow ... It would open the game to some even deeper (and harder to master) mechanics ... but I would be much more eager to play it!
Ironically and on a side note : I would really love it if games with either broken gameplay mechanics or tedious flow had a "auto play" mode. Even good games would benefit from that, actually! The only ones I know with something of this kind are REZ with its journey mode and MGS3 Subsistence coming with a special DVD showing the whole game being played through, and edited to feature film length. I think this stuff is amazing, and I wish it was more widespread. The latest Alone In The Dark had an option to skip "scenes" as well. Very interesting stuff.
I know I would buy waaaaaay more games (single player and multiplayer alike) if they all had that option. Just sit down, launch the game, and have it unfold before your eyes with maybe the option to pick up the controller at leisure. It sounds quite ironic and goes against the very idea of challenging games, but there is indeed a market out there ; the youtube playthrough are very popular already. Just give me this option and I'll give you my money! For busy individuals, watching someone play a game (while doing something else at the same time) is great entertainment.
One of the more modern games I considered very difficult was Ninja Gaiden (2004). In fact I found it so annoyingly difficult that I traded it in and didnt even look at subsiquent releases. I like a challenge but that one over stepped the mark imo.
Good points Pior, I have watched a few games played through that I couldnt be bothered to try and finish haha. Feel like Im cheating but I would rather cheat than miss that experience completely.
Also with the bad games vs challenging games arguement. I find it hard to define because sometimes a game is great fun and then you get to a scene which is just so tedious, so frustrating, so difficult to enjoy that you begin to lose your respect for the game as a whole. example: [ame="http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3nJ-B7xTAyo"]Bringing Down A Star Destroyer - The Force Unleashed - YouTube[/ame]
that was a terrible bit of gameplay and its the one bit of the story that I was looking forward to.
@Ged whats hard to define about it? I'd say the video speaks for itself as its not an exercise in ability.
You're using the same words to describe the section of force unleashed as you are levels in super meat boy or whatever game that might take multiple attempts without distinguishing WHY or WHAT you're doing in those sections.
I've spent upto 30mins on 1 level on dustforce, why will i restart? Because I made a mistake, i wasn't idle at any point... i wasn't just holding buttons, i was engaged in play the entire time and restarting took a matter of seconds.
I find that if the act of playing isnt tedious (and im dying due to my own mistakes) then it shouldn't be a problem that I have to make multiple attempts, right? In a game like modernwarfare the actual shooting mechanics are solid, the way you interact with the game (aside some special gimmicks) are pretty much the same throughout but the scenery is changing. (hard to define exactly what im talking about and MW has incredibly bad artificial difficulty)
Sod it, a game like time crisis / House of the dead is fun to play, like the actual act of shooting a light gun and the satisfaction of shooting zombies, the fact that its challenging to sap money out of you is neither here nor there because the fun exists outside of that. If the games hook is on its next cutscene without solid gameplay to link it together then that to me is a flawed game, challenging or not.
@Ged whats hard to define about it? I'd say the video speaks for itself as its not an exercise in ability.
You're using the same words to describe the section of force unleashed as you are levels in super meat boy or whatever game that might take multiple attempts without distinguishing WHY or WHAT you're doing in those sections.
Im not sure I understand what you are saying. That part of force unleashed was not fun because
A. it changes the gameplay, the gameplay in the rest of the game is nothing like this section.
B. changing the gameplay would be ok if it was more fun than the standard game but this is less fun, they have replaced quite nice responsive controls with big explosive effects for an annoying unresponsive QTE type minigime intersperced with boring waves of hard to time enemys.
C. It doesnt make sense, I was completely bafffled when I played this scene: why cant I pull the stardestroyer down? it seems like it isnt even moving? then the waves of enemys come and Im like piss off Im busy! and they dont go away so I fight them but they arent close enough so Im confused by how to actually fight them etc etc etc took me about 30 minutes to do this scene and at the end I was just relieved it was over and felt no accomplishment whatsoever.
Overall it was a good game but this part of it made me think maybe its a bad game. So I find it hard to quantify wether a game is challenging or just a bad game because some people may have found this part of the game fun and rewarding where I did not at all.
...stuff like FFXIII ... complex mechanics just for the sake of it...
Ehhh I strongly disagree. The mechanics are very simple, they just seem complicated because of how ridiculously badly they're implemented.
The entire FFXIII paradigm combat system is essentially a game of rock paper scissors (with 6-8ish choices instead of 3) where your enemy is always throwing the same things. Its implementation is confusingly redundant because there's so much overlap (8 different paradigms that are effectively all "scissors" for example) and theres no way to tell what you need to beat your opponent which requires trial and error, but it's anything but complex in my opinion.
The worst part about it is that the way they designed it, it didn't even work. You can only store iirc 4 different paradigms out of 8 choices (these numbers are kind of arbitrary because I can't remember the exact amounts) and you'd usually need at least two of the correct ones to beat a boss. So if you didn't have the ones you needed to kill the boss you were fighting, you couldn't kill it. Were it not for the fact that losing a battle simply means restarting in the exact same spot with no penalty, the game would have been completely unplayable. Conversely, because of the nature of RPS systems, as long as you had the right paradigms set up then auto combat will carry you to victory without you having to do anything but switch paradigms occasionally.
The battles in that game are decided before they even begin based on whether or not you have the right paradigms you need to beat the boss.
What's sad about this is that the Pokemon games effectively do the exact same thing (using pokemon lineups instead of paradigms), except in a much better way that is more enjoyable, easier to understand, and isn't so repetitive that it requires an auto combat button to get through battles.
What im trying to say is that whats happening there objectively doesn't really look engaging and like you say, its a tedious.
Making something hard to time because its difficult to gauge distance/range isn't a good example of a challenge, its like making it hard by blurring out important infomation, that to me is false.
Stepmania is a good example when it comes to difficulty from the RIGHT things. Vanilla stepmania is about timing/reactions/pattern recognition, its fun to play... you can enjoy the music while slowly learning to read the game and your fingers develop the speed required. However, in the options you can turn on silly options like drunk mode/reverse arrows/whirlwind (arrows from silly directions)... blind mode, this make the game hard in an artificial sense.
You could debate that though, if some of those options were on by default youd eventually learn to read it all the same and the "metagame" of whats important would also stay the same... its just it would be harder to get to this because the wall is tedious. Like reading a book with blurred writing and missing letters, its not the point.
"Overall it was a good game but this part of it made me think maybe its a bad game. So I find it hard to quantify wether a game is challenging or just a bad game because some people may have found this part of the game fun and rewarding where I did not at all."
If the bulk of the game has responsive controls and is completely different why would you think about tarring it all with the same brush because of one bad segment? People can enjoy whatever they want, but it doesnt take much presence of mind to stepback and try to assess its qualities regardless of taste.
I've never had any problems with failure and repetition if the core gameplay of the game was enjoyable. In fact, when people say that they are frustrated when forced to replay sections of the game I think it might be because the game is not designed to be replayable. Having to go through long cut scenes you've seen 5 times within the last hour and not being able to skip them is just bad design (screw you Xenogears :poly127:) and issues like that could be easily avoided by placing the save point right before the battle.
Essentially, I believe that challenging games are best when the challenging sections of the game are "enclosed" and made to be no longer than a few minutes. Super Meat Boy did it right with its super short levels. Halo:CE did it very well with well-placed checkpoints. Even Infinity Engine cRPG's were very well balanced; enemies were always placed in well-spaced groups and the game would allow you to save only before and after each battle that generally wouldn't last longer than a few minutes.
There are of course types of games which can get away with making you replay longer sections of the game. Bayonetta is a good example; while the game doesn't force you to replay levels it often makes you want to replay them in order to get the higher score. You can still get through the game abusing health packs and buff items but doing so will make you end up with a very low score. The game allows you to get through it no matter how much you suck. At the same time, it gives you room for getting better at it.
Happy to see this mentioned. This is one of the few games I have ever seen where the actual gameplay mechanics are so simple yet can be so easily injected with challenge. Hell, you can literally choose if you wish to play on super-hard or super-easy mode from the get go with completely satisfying gameplay in both, with the same mechanics.
Certainly can't be said about an upcoming bioware game...
If the bulk of the game has responsive controls and is completely different why would you think about tarring it all with the same brush because of one bad segment? People can enjoy whatever they want, but it doesnt take much presence of mind to stepback and try to assess its qualities regardless of taste.
I disagree, if that one bad segment means I cannot complete the game at all then the whole game is a bad game regardless of the fact that the rest of it was fun. You wouldnt tell your friends to watch a film that you know they cant see the ending of even if the main bulk of the film is enjoyable.I do still recommend the force unleashed to mates but Im not sure I would if I had not got past that star destroyer section.
Actually it does take a lot of presence of mind to assess a games qualities regardless of taste. How can you assess the game based on something other than your own personal ideas of what is fun and what you expected of the product? No one is truly unbiased.
teaandciggarets I agree about keeping times down on hard sections(super meat boy) and letting people replay when they want not because they have to(baypnetta) even cod has so many save points that its not too bad if you die in a hard section.
Hmmm, you read a little too deep into the whole "bad segment", and for the most part im not trying to confine what makes a "game" to be the entire package... merely the makeup of it. (basically, i don't have to complete a game to understand what makes that game... that game, its not defined by a cutscene or story its defined by the way its played for the most part)
Perhaps if portal had one level that was an on rails QTE section, id still advise people to play it because the bulk of it is what id class the main mechanic to be. At which point you wouldn't say "its a bad game", youd say "its a good game, but that QTE level was shit".
It's a bit of a drastic comparison, but i see the way you view games in such a black and white manner to be a bit like "one black man stole, they all steal".
Also, regarding the film comparison > I and no doubt many others have shown highlights of their favorite films to others, and there are plenty of popcorn films that are devoid of story but entertaining to watch (even if that meant not watching the finale). Films are more than the sum of their parts (proper usage of the term?) People look at screencaps to admire compositions... Hell, a film like Irreversible is a really hard film to watch and ill probably never watch it again, but i'd still recommend it to people who are interested in films and cinematography.
I still remember having to abandon Zelda for +2 months, because I couldnt for the life of me get past the water temple. But when I finally solved the Puzzle (wasnt even a Puzzle, you had to use your Heavy Steel Boots in the Middle Tower to sink yourself to a secret passage), I felt so awesome!
hate to reference pics/memes, but this portrays my feelings pretty good:
I wish more games made me feel like that again. Where things just gradually get harder and harder, and the half the reward of completing the game; is being able to say you ****** nailed that game.
I think it's important to note with difficulty/fun discussion is that fun in overcoming difficult odds and winning is *one type* of fun, not *the one* type. Fun can also be about exploring your creativity (sandbox minecraft?) experiencing things in a new way (flower?) interacting socially (animal crossing?)- probably a bunch more definitions too.
So I'd be tempted to say that the ghost recon game isn't actually trying to give you the enjoyment of overcoming something really hard, so why judge it that way? To me it seems more like a roller-coaster ride, be a total badass for a day doing sweet future-military stuff. In the context of pretending to be an unstoppable military might, maybe it actively detracts from giving that experience if your innards get splattered across the street every 5 minutes
Interesting topic, I remember playing Silent Hill 1 again after so many years. And I have to say it is much much much easier than I remembered. So maybe it's because we grew older?( for some games at least)
It's a bit of a drastic comparison, but i see the way you view games in such a black and white manner to be a bit like "one black man stole, they all steal".
No, what Im saying is "one level in the game was crap therefore the game was crap" you may disagree but that is genuinely how I felt after not being able to finish a game. Whether or not that is a good logical rational response is not important because people hardly make good rational responses when they are pissed off at a videogame they could not complete. Do you never get so angry at a game that you dislike it intensely regardless of its other overall qualities? Im talking about immediet response here like when you are punched in the face and have an emotional response to that punch, not a week later blow by blow breakdown of every aspect of the fight. I am being black and white with my views here in order to create debate and discussion, Im not really some gaming diva hahaa.
fair enough, still it is an interesting topic and one I find myself thinking about at work, we only make mobile games and they are casual most of the time but its actually quite hard to make it challenging and casual. Sometime there are things that are out of our control eg loadtimes or the touch screen interface being hard to use for frenetic button mashing. Nice thing about where I work is that we all get to brainstorm stuff and give our 2c so sometimes we come up with something quite cool and discussions like this one help getting the ideas flowing.
-Difficulty is a matter of taste. How much effort would you like to extend developing what kinds of skills? This determines what kinds of games with what kinds of challenges you like.
-Frustration is pretty objectively an undesirable result.
-A frustrating game is one that the player does not perceive as fairly rewarding their abilities or skills, or that they do not perceive themselves improving in.
ps, ninja gaiden (xbox/ps3) is AMAZING, it's one of the most rewarding and fair action games ever made. But it's super brutal, it will slam you into brick walls until you play for a few more hours and develop the required skill as a player. It takes a lot of work. (ninja gaiden 2 suuuuuuuuucks.)
what do you guys think about those type of games (like osman mentioned Silent Hill) that get farther and farther from their roots, is it the attempt of trying something "new" or trying to appeal to more that hurts them?
because i think in the case of silent hill, it was the attempt of something "new". After part 2, it felt like they forgot what made it good, and just rehashed a bunch of silent hill type of levels with different characters and called it a day. The puzzles and the helplessness just faded away.
I think the notion of very skilled professionals intentionally throwing out good ideas for the sake of 'new' ideas that they know are inferior is absolutely absurd.
They change games because they seek to make the best possible game about their subject with their resources. Not for some disingenuous focus group situation. It seems like franchises typically decline when significant designers leave the team, or when significant designers aim high for specific goals and far very short. The deficiency of good design in either scenario leads to a game feeling derivative of the other games in the franchise, instead of similar.
Yeah, i get what you mean. That makes a whole lot of sense, cause i think in the case of silent hill the changed developers a couple of times or so.
yeah, i have zero insider experience, my judgement entirely comes from observations like that. Virtually without fail, if a sequel is bad, or just missing the spirit of the original, somebody changed teams or the developers give interviews/postmortems that describe what went wrong (deus ex: IW, etc)
The same thing holds true in the inverse -- ffxii, vagrant story, and the final fantasy tactics games are huge standouts from the rest of square enix's library in terms of design and storytelling, and I LOVE them. I wondered why such distinct but similar games cropped up occasionally in square's library -- It wasn't too surprising when I learned they're the only games that studio made with a certain lead designer/lead artist pair.
Game Developers also don't live in a bubble, over the years and years that multiple games in a franchise are made (whereby a 'style' of game unique to it has grown) they get to look out into the world and see what other games are made and what is popular or innovative. They will attempt to put these incremental gameplay evolutions from the outside world into a series that has an ingrained 'feeling.'
As somebody who is really still going through my ps2 collection, when I play more modern games every so often I can tell that they feel completely different- even though the mechanics of say jumping, shooting, or stats etc actually work just like 20 years ago.
Replies
Basically a metric that I have used for myself is my reaction to grappling with the difficulty. If I feel a challenge and then feel satisfied or punch the air in triumph for overcoming the obstacle, then it's right. Whereas if I'm struggling in a state of confusion and then when I overcome it just sit there thinking, "Finally it's over..." Then it's bad.
Case in point: I hate hard games but love Demon's Souls
I think there is a clear distinction to be made between "bad games" and "challenging games". Both types can be hard, but one is good and one is bad.
Some examples : I love Super Meat Boy, Quake live, and MW3 multiplayer. These are considered "hard" games ; however, their mechanics are incredibly well polished and the challenge is very gratifying. I cannot stop playing those, as it reminds me of the great Super Mario World and Yoshi's Island days
On the other end of the spectrum there's stuff like FFXIII ... complex mechanics just for the sake of it, painful downtimes ... this makes me pull my hair off, or whatever is left of it
Ironically and on a side note : I would really love it if games with either broken gameplay mechanics or tedious flow had a "auto play" mode. Even good games would benefit from that, actually! The only ones I know with something of this kind are REZ with its journey mode and MGS3 Subsistence coming with a special DVD showing the whole game being played through, and edited to feature film length. I think this stuff is amazing, and I wish it was more widespread. The latest Alone In The Dark had an option to skip "scenes" as well. Very interesting stuff.
I know I would buy waaaaaay more games (single player and multiplayer alike) if they all had that option. Just sit down, launch the game, and have it unfold before your eyes with maybe the option to pick up the controller at leisure. It sounds quite ironic and goes against the very idea of challenging games, but there is indeed a market out there ; the youtube playthrough are very popular already. Just give me this option and I'll give you my money! For busy individuals, watching someone play a game (while doing something else at the same time) is great entertainment.
how about, if you kill it, you will have the chance to get a rare item?
Wait, why do I always steer the subject to wow. x.x
Please carry on.
and nobody wants a loose our soul
Also with the bad games vs challenging games arguement. I find it hard to define because sometimes a game is great fun and then you get to a scene which is just so tedious, so frustrating, so difficult to enjoy that you begin to lose your respect for the game as a whole. example: [ame="
that was a terrible bit of gameplay and its the one bit of the story that I was looking forward to.
hahahahaha
EDIT:
yeah, pior i just read your post good point.
You're using the same words to describe the section of force unleashed as you are levels in super meat boy or whatever game that might take multiple attempts without distinguishing WHY or WHAT you're doing in those sections.
I've spent upto 30mins on 1 level on dustforce, why will i restart? Because I made a mistake, i wasn't idle at any point... i wasn't just holding buttons, i was engaged in play the entire time and restarting took a matter of seconds.
I find that if the act of playing isnt tedious (and im dying due to my own mistakes) then it shouldn't be a problem that I have to make multiple attempts, right? In a game like modernwarfare the actual shooting mechanics are solid, the way you interact with the game (aside some special gimmicks) are pretty much the same throughout but the scenery is changing. (hard to define exactly what im talking about and MW has incredibly bad artificial difficulty)
Sod it, a game like time crisis / House of the dead is fun to play, like the actual act of shooting a light gun and the satisfaction of shooting zombies, the fact that its challenging to sap money out of you is neither here nor there because the fun exists outside of that. If the games hook is on its next cutscene without solid gameplay to link it together then that to me is a flawed game, challenging or not.
Im not sure I understand what you are saying. That part of force unleashed was not fun because
A. it changes the gameplay, the gameplay in the rest of the game is nothing like this section.
B. changing the gameplay would be ok if it was more fun than the standard game but this is less fun, they have replaced quite nice responsive controls with big explosive effects for an annoying unresponsive QTE type minigime intersperced with boring waves of hard to time enemys.
C. It doesnt make sense, I was completely bafffled when I played this scene: why cant I pull the stardestroyer down? it seems like it isnt even moving? then the waves of enemys come and Im like piss off Im busy! and they dont go away so I fight them but they arent close enough so Im confused by how to actually fight them etc etc etc took me about 30 minutes to do this scene and at the end I was just relieved it was over and felt no accomplishment whatsoever.
Overall it was a good game but this part of it made me think maybe its a bad game. So I find it hard to quantify wether a game is challenging or just a bad game because some people may have found this part of the game fun and rewarding where I did not at all.
The entire FFXIII paradigm combat system is essentially a game of rock paper scissors (with 6-8ish choices instead of 3) where your enemy is always throwing the same things. Its implementation is confusingly redundant because there's so much overlap (8 different paradigms that are effectively all "scissors" for example) and theres no way to tell what you need to beat your opponent which requires trial and error, but it's anything but complex in my opinion.
The worst part about it is that the way they designed it, it didn't even work. You can only store iirc 4 different paradigms out of 8 choices (these numbers are kind of arbitrary because I can't remember the exact amounts) and you'd usually need at least two of the correct ones to beat a boss. So if you didn't have the ones you needed to kill the boss you were fighting, you couldn't kill it. Were it not for the fact that losing a battle simply means restarting in the exact same spot with no penalty, the game would have been completely unplayable. Conversely, because of the nature of RPS systems, as long as you had the right paradigms set up then auto combat will carry you to victory without you having to do anything but switch paradigms occasionally.
The battles in that game are decided before they even begin based on whether or not you have the right paradigms you need to beat the boss.
What's sad about this is that the Pokemon games effectively do the exact same thing (using pokemon lineups instead of paradigms), except in a much better way that is more enjoyable, easier to understand, and isn't so repetitive that it requires an auto combat button to get through battles.
Making something hard to time because its difficult to gauge distance/range isn't a good example of a challenge, its like making it hard by blurring out important infomation, that to me is false.
Stepmania is a good example when it comes to difficulty from the RIGHT things. Vanilla stepmania is about timing/reactions/pattern recognition, its fun to play... you can enjoy the music while slowly learning to read the game and your fingers develop the speed required. However, in the options you can turn on silly options like drunk mode/reverse arrows/whirlwind (arrows from silly directions)... blind mode, this make the game hard in an artificial sense.
You could debate that though, if some of those options were on by default youd eventually learn to read it all the same and the "metagame" of whats important would also stay the same... its just it would be harder to get to this because the wall is tedious. Like reading a book with blurred writing and missing letters, its not the point.
"Overall it was a good game but this part of it made me think maybe its a bad game. So I find it hard to quantify wether a game is challenging or just a bad game because some people may have found this part of the game fun and rewarding where I did not at all."
If the bulk of the game has responsive controls and is completely different why would you think about tarring it all with the same brush because of one bad segment? People can enjoy whatever they want, but it doesnt take much presence of mind to stepback and try to assess its qualities regardless of taste.
I've never had any problems with failure and repetition if the core gameplay of the game was enjoyable. In fact, when people say that they are frustrated when forced to replay sections of the game I think it might be because the game is not designed to be replayable. Having to go through long cut scenes you've seen 5 times within the last hour and not being able to skip them is just bad design (screw you Xenogears :poly127:) and issues like that could be easily avoided by placing the save point right before the battle.
Essentially, I believe that challenging games are best when the challenging sections of the game are "enclosed" and made to be no longer than a few minutes. Super Meat Boy did it right with its super short levels. Halo:CE did it very well with well-placed checkpoints. Even Infinity Engine cRPG's were very well balanced; enemies were always placed in well-spaced groups and the game would allow you to save only before and after each battle that generally wouldn't last longer than a few minutes.
There are of course types of games which can get away with making you replay longer sections of the game. Bayonetta is a good example; while the game doesn't force you to replay levels it often makes you want to replay them in order to get the higher score. You can still get through the game abusing health packs and buff items but doing so will make you end up with a very low score. The game allows you to get through it no matter how much you suck. At the same time, it gives you room for getting better at it.
Happy to see this mentioned. This is one of the few games I have ever seen where the actual gameplay mechanics are so simple yet can be so easily injected with challenge. Hell, you can literally choose if you wish to play on super-hard or super-easy mode from the get go with completely satisfying gameplay in both, with the same mechanics.
Certainly can't be said about an upcoming bioware game...
I disagree, if that one bad segment means I cannot complete the game at all then the whole game is a bad game regardless of the fact that the rest of it was fun. You wouldnt tell your friends to watch a film that you know they cant see the ending of even if the main bulk of the film is enjoyable.I do still recommend the force unleashed to mates but Im not sure I would if I had not got past that star destroyer section.
Actually it does take a lot of presence of mind to assess a games qualities regardless of taste. How can you assess the game based on something other than your own personal ideas of what is fun and what you expected of the product? No one is truly unbiased.
teaandciggarets I agree about keeping times down on hard sections(super meat boy) and letting people replay when they want not because they have to(baypnetta) even cod has so many save points that its not too bad if you die in a hard section.
Perhaps if portal had one level that was an on rails QTE section, id still advise people to play it because the bulk of it is what id class the main mechanic to be. At which point you wouldn't say "its a bad game", youd say "its a good game, but that QTE level was shit".
It's a bit of a drastic comparison, but i see the way you view games in such a black and white manner to be a bit like "one black man stole, they all steal".
Also, regarding the film comparison > I and no doubt many others have shown highlights of their favorite films to others, and there are plenty of popcorn films that are devoid of story but entertaining to watch (even if that meant not watching the finale). Films are more than the sum of their parts (proper usage of the term?) People look at screencaps to admire compositions... Hell, a film like Irreversible is a really hard film to watch and ill probably never watch it again, but i'd still recommend it to people who are interested in films and cinematography.
@tea
hate to reference pics/memes, but this portrays my feelings pretty good:
I wish more games made me feel like that again. Where things just gradually get harder and harder, and the half the reward of completing the game; is being able to say you ****** nailed that game.
So I'd be tempted to say that the ghost recon game isn't actually trying to give you the enjoyment of overcoming something really hard, so why judge it that way? To me it seems more like a roller-coaster ride, be a total badass for a day doing sweet future-military stuff. In the context of pretending to be an unstoppable military might, maybe it actively detracts from giving that experience if your innards get splattered across the street every 5 minutes
No, what Im saying is "one level in the game was crap therefore the game was crap" you may disagree but that is genuinely how I felt after not being able to finish a game. Whether or not that is a good logical rational response is not important because people hardly make good rational responses when they are pissed off at a videogame they could not complete. Do you never get so angry at a game that you dislike it intensely regardless of its other overall qualities? Im talking about immediet response here like when you are punched in the face and have an emotional response to that punch, not a week later blow by blow breakdown of every aspect of the fight. I am being black and white with my views here in order to create debate and discussion, Im not really some gaming diva hahaa.
I've calmed down a lot from all the ego++ competitive gaming so i'm quite decent at thinking rationally even when stuck/frustrated.
-Difficulty is a matter of taste. How much effort would you like to extend developing what kinds of skills? This determines what kinds of games with what kinds of challenges you like.
-Frustration is pretty objectively an undesirable result.
-A frustrating game is one that the player does not perceive as fairly rewarding their abilities or skills, or that they do not perceive themselves improving in.
ps, ninja gaiden (xbox/ps3) is AMAZING, it's one of the most rewarding and fair action games ever made. But it's super brutal, it will slam you into brick walls until you play for a few more hours and develop the required skill as a player. It takes a lot of work. (ninja gaiden 2 suuuuuuuuucks.)
because i think in the case of silent hill, it was the attempt of something "new". After part 2, it felt like they forgot what made it good, and just rehashed a bunch of silent hill type of levels with different characters and called it a day. The puzzles and the helplessness just faded away.
They change games because they seek to make the best possible game about their subject with their resources. Not for some disingenuous focus group situation. It seems like franchises typically decline when significant designers leave the team, or when significant designers aim high for specific goals and far very short. The deficiency of good design in either scenario leads to a game feeling derivative of the other games in the franchise, instead of similar.
yeah, i have zero insider experience, my judgement entirely comes from observations like that. Virtually without fail, if a sequel is bad, or just missing the spirit of the original, somebody changed teams or the developers give interviews/postmortems that describe what went wrong (deus ex: IW, etc)
The same thing holds true in the inverse -- ffxii, vagrant story, and the final fantasy tactics games are huge standouts from the rest of square enix's library in terms of design and storytelling, and I LOVE them. I wondered why such distinct but similar games cropped up occasionally in square's library -- It wasn't too surprising when I learned they're the only games that studio made with a certain lead designer/lead artist pair.
omg, aludra! god so many memories rushing back! threads of fate!
As somebody who is really still going through my ps2 collection, when I play more modern games every so often I can tell that they feel completely different- even though the mechanics of say jumping, shooting, or stats etc actually work just like 20 years ago.