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naraburns  nihil supernum  1yr ago (text post)   Edited 1yr ago   2738 thread views

Friday Fun Thread for January 6, 2023

Be advised: this thread is not for serious in-depth discussion of weighty topics (we have a link for that), this thread is not for anything Culture War related. This thread is for Fun. You got jokes? Share 'em. You got silly questions? Ask 'em.

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Sekiro and Demon Souls are considered the most difficult sword/adventure games. What are some of the most difficult games in other genres: puzzles, RPGs, survival?

Baba is You in the puzzle category, no contest.

Ever play those crappy motorcycle flash games that sort of maybe that but not really simulated the suspensions? Well the grand daddy of them all was a Hungarian game called Elastomania, released all the way back in 2000. You'd play the first few levels, thinking you actually got the hang of it, before being asked to squeeze in between narrow corridors, or perfectly time a midair rotation to catch a lip of terrain with your wheel (that the body of the motorcycle magically phases though). And finally you'd watch a replay where all the stunts your thought impossible are perfectly executed and quit the game in shame.

Are you familiar with Dwarf Fortress?

Regarding RPGs, many old-school roguelikes probably count. Ancient Domains of Mystery is one.

Dwarf fortress isn't that difficult unless you pick a deliberately harsh zone (with aquifers). It's just has an impenetrably bad UI. At least it used to, now there's a steam release with a more polished and pretty UI, and I'm looking forward to try!

Well now we get into the territory of "what does difficult mean".

I'm making the distinction between a hard to control game and a hard game where you know the controls.

To learn the controls is to spend a couple of afternoons on the wiki and learning key sequences to rival vim's, as well as memorizing what some of the characters mean in the odd and low resolution display. Once we're past that we get to the actual game.

My point is the fact that Dwarf Fortress has a reputation for being hard strikes me as odd. The game is involves managing an incresingly large populations of citizens that sort of have free wills, but will mostly execute the tasks that you ask of them. The game is quite forgiving with things like food abundance and storage. It's easy enough to train an army in DF that's effectively unstoppable, in RM it's a struggle from start to finish as gunfights get constantly harder.

By contrast RM is much easier to pick up and understand what's going on the screen. The lack of a z axis helps. However it's a harder game because acquiring, cooking and keeping food fresh is a struggle. Gunfights are always tricky as the enemies get harder as your colonists get better guns. In DF you're fighting goblins with trash bronze weapons or elves with wooden ones, fodder for the smelters!

To get some extra difficulty there's a literal hell deep below but getting to that point is a test of patience as the game gets inevitably slower, multiplied by your ambitious projects requiring more labour. All single threaded of course so all your fancy newfangled 60 core processor can do is remind you of Amdahl's law.

I can’t help but pedantically point out that Demon’s Souls is prob the easiest Soulsborne game, except maybe DS1. Elden Ring has to be the most difficult, followed be Sekiro.

I'd put path of exile up for difficult ARPG but you need to define difficulty somewhat strangely. It is the type of game the most knowledgeable and skilled players will take down the Uber bosses on a fresh economy in a couple days and you may not take them down in months. But that might not even by your goal and the moment to moment combat isn't that hard, the difficulty is knowing all of the different systems both in gearing your character/allocating your passive points in a tree that looks like this complete with items you can socket into the tree to change how it works as well as strategize about how you generate the gear/currency/crafting/boss fight invitations necessary to take down the big bosses.

EVE Online for MMOs

Eve is probably the best tool ever created for teaching comparative advantage.

For puzzle games, probably Zachtronics games if you don't have a background in programming/engineering. I guess a lot of 90s adventure games may count, insofar as they have hidden "puzzles" that are basically impossible to reason your way through and will softlock your progress if you don't get them right.

For strategy, an operational level game like Command Ops 2, which sees you as a commander in a number of WW2 battles. It has a ton of variables and simulation, of course (forests increase the indirect damage from artillery because the splinters from exploding trees act as extra shrapnel), but the main thrust of the game is that it's an actual strategy game. Instead of microing your little dudes on the map, you give orders to NATO icons on a top-down map representing companies. Your orders take time to reach your companies, and then take a little extra time to trickle down to everyone in the company, and then it takes a little bit of extra time for your companies to reorganize and gear up for the order. It's real-time and you're grappling with imperfect information and the simulated clunkiness of giving orders in war, so the game is basically one big exercise in the OODA Loop

A lot of people bounce off Zachtronics games, but the ones I've stuck with I've beaten, and I don't have a programming background. I don't go that far into the postgame puzzles, though.

(Zachtronics games are also games that I continually have a craving to return and play, but they're not really games you can dip in and out of.)

Xcom terror from the deep is quite difficult because there was a bug in the original game where the difficulty setting didn't actually change anything and there were many complaints the game was way too easy, and they fixed the bug and made the next game much harder.

I can never read the og XCOM bug list without cracking up. It's just so bad, and yet the game was amazing.

Do you have a link?

If you have an hour or six to read through them: https://www.ufopaedia.org/index.php/Known_Bugs

The specific one he was talking about was

The DOS version has a problem where no matter what difficulty level you choose, it will revert to "Beginner" level after the first mission. This is caused by one incorrectly set bit in all DOS versions of the game (1.0 through to 1.4).

But my favorite was the one where there was an entire radar UI that just didn't do anything. Building 10 radars would give no better detection than 1, except for filling up a meaningless detection bar.

The bugs in incendiaries and smoke might take first place if I could even understand them. And I don't even want to think about all the weird mind control glitches that led to disappearing soldiers and penalties for aliens dying like they were your own guys.

In some early versions I think soldiers could overflow their exp counter and level up into useless gibbering retards with their stats at 0.

Iirc there's a bug in the "going berserk" panic code where their action points underflow the counter and they get 255 actions to automatically shoot at any aliens in line of sight until their magazine is empty. Which is fucking awesome and I love that it's a feature.

I'm not sure this is exhaustive, but there's a long list here.

It's also easy to find games which can be set to extremely high difficulty, but the difficulty is always purely artificial, because it doesn't rely on making the computer-controlled enemies better at the game or making the scenario more complex, it simply makes the enemies stronger (impossibly so, given the ostensible rules and the narrative) while handicapping the player's units.

I never really got this complaint. Depending on how the game mechanics are set up, it may not be reasonable for the AI to be 'improved', and it's not even always the case that good AI makes the game harder. In addition, many games presume or establish asymmetry between the player and the enemy to begin with. In most FPS titles, for example, the player is usually vastly outnumbered by the enemy, but enemies are individually weaker and usually only have a single gun to work with.

Or creating an RPG character that's a dog's breakfast of classes and features that could not possibly make sense narratively, but allows for all sort of insane synergies that are possible because the makers of the game couldn't possibly have tested all the combinations of 8 races and 30 classes, each with a dozen different abilities. And characters like that are the only way to beat some of the "optional bosses" that no party that would be legal in a table-top game could ever hope to defeat.

I think stuff like this is fun, though. Isn't the point of high difficulty to force the player out of cookie-cutter builds and force them to explore the wider space of different options and combinations? Isn't that a form of 'mastery' too?

If the game is so hard that Pun-Pun nonsense-jank is necessary to beat it, then it isn't encouraging people to explore a wider space of options. Everything converges on the one broken nonsense build, and "cookie-cutter" archetypical builds become, perversely, rarer. everyone is a GensaiWarlockPaladin

My typical self-imposed challenge in RPGs is to find a sub-system or strategy or archetype that I LIKE or isnt used by Power builds and make it work anyways.

I never really got this complaint.

I don't mind loing to a strong chess engine, but I don't care to play a weak engine that is strong because it has two queens. The same is true for other strategy games. I want the computer to use the same options as the player not have a bigger economy/free troops etc that it mostly wastes. Also, many free resource games become gigantic slogs toward the end when the only sane option is pointing every resource toward the threat and the computer is sending an army that the player couldn't make in 20 turns every other turn. Not usually hard to beat, just quite full because you're beating the same army in similar ways to finish a game that was "over" some time ago.

Well, that's mostly the issue of asymmetric games pretending to be symmetric. In better designed games, the asymmetry is explicit and both the advantages and limitations of the AI are built around instead of the game pretending they don't exist.

And the second problem isn't really fundamentally caused by the asymmetry, it's caused by bad victory conditions. Plenty of strategy games become gigantic slogs by endgame when played in multiplayer as well. Which is why nearly all multiplayer matches in Starcraft or Civ end in forfeits.

I Wanna be The Guy for platformers.

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