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PaperclipPerfector  7mo ago (text post)   25760 thread views

Culture War Roundup for the week of April 1, 2024

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Implementing an easy mode does not hurt those who still wish to play at a harder difficulty level because the harder difficulty levels are still available. Nobody is taking anything away from you when implementing an easy mode and there are absolutely no downsides to it.

I think the reason the "but u should git gud" thing tends to fall flat is because it's kind of missing the point a bit, or perhaps trying to answer the wrong question.

What is the point of difficulty? A lot of people forget that difficulty should be in service of fun, not simply an end in itself; otherwise game developers would just implement everything James Rolfe [rightfully] mocks and break sales records because of it.

But the point remains that I need to still continue to be motivated, to still think it's worth mastery of the game's systems. And if the game cannot do that, if I can't actually derive joy from playing it because it's too far up its own ass with "well just get better" (with not even a hint as to how, no incremental progress or that progress is too slow, or something one-shots you/you die to bullshit you can't forsee and it takes 5 minutes to get back to the place you can try again), then the game is not fit for purpose and thus not fit to play. It has failed the player as a servant fails its master- "flow state" is shorthand for/a simplification of this.

(It's probably worth noting most of the people making the "even though the game isn't fun -> worth mastering, git gud" argument are men, and most of the people arguing "I shouldn't have to do any work to win" are women. Both are missing the point that the game should set out and be designed to serve its player but at the same time resist being an unsatisfying pushover of an experience.)

And in the 30-40 year history of video game development, all sorts of things have been done to thread that needle, and the games that fail generally do so because their core mechanics work against any of those solutions. And they've had varying amounts of success, including but not limited to:

  • Overt "secret optional worlds for people who have mastered the game", which was how Nintendo did it for a time (and to a point, still does), usually in their Mario platformers
  • Special rewards for completing the game under more difficult constraints, like how finishing a Metroid game under a certain period of time gives a different ending; "100% completion" and the rewards for that being a subset of this
  • Simply mocking the player for choosing easier difficulties (the early '90s PC game way of doing it), which evolved into the modern practice of "if the designers believes players are in a place where they might be sick of this challenge to the point it's detracting from the fun, here's a powerup that trivializes it/does the level for you, but you won't get the rewards for completing the stage"
  • Subtly modifying the difficulty of the game if a player constantly dies in that section, which is what Resident Evil 4 does (also noteworthy in that that kind of difficulty tweak doesn't generally survive the Internet, where people "discover they've been lied to" about the challenge they overcame to beat the game
  • Giving players all the tools they'd need to beat the game on the hardest difficulty mode, and the game slowly gets harder as you master the systems such that by the time you're at the hardest point you need to use all the tools and play perfectly to win at the highest difficulty (Against the Storm is a good example of this)- if you don't want to have to balance winning against random bad luck you can just bring mostly-perfect play to lower difficulties
  • Being intentionally highly difficult with a persistent upgrade system that, combined with "player skill + randomness", creates a believable and relatively memorable experience with the inherent ability to blame "bad rolls" until your competence increases such that the amount of bad rolls you can withstand becomes greater than those the game deals you in a round (Roguelikes/Roguelites)
  • Making failure annoying but ensuring players aren't taken out very far from where the action was (action-adventure and FPS games generally handle death this way; Battle Royale games usually have a massive "downed = player instantly disconnects" problem unless they go out of their way to mitigate it, like Warzone did)
  • Just not doing it at all, and using the fact they don't do it as a marketing gimmick to sell an otherwise middling game (Fromsoft titles, Hollow Knight, Cuphead)
  • Just not doing it at all, but showing you a variety of sex scenes if you die
  • Just not doing it at all, because the game's mechanics don't lend themselves to more than one difficulty (Mirror's Edge, Outer Wilds)
  • Just not doing it at all, because even though mechanical skill will help you play the game faster, testing mechanical skill is not the main focus of the game (Sonic, Maxis games and their relatives/descendants, visual novels, etc.)

And those approaches are combined when and as appropriate. But it is very obvious when a game is designed with the difficulty in service of the fun, and when it is not, and when it is not it is just as unsatisfying and awful as it is when Bethesda or Ubisoft implements the brain-dead bullet-sponge difficulty, or when your default difficulty fails to be meaningfully challenging.

Just not doing it at all, but showing you a variety of sex scenes if you die

If you're talking about hentai games, some of those do have difficulty adjustments or at least aren't ball-bustingly hard--indeed, for some, you'd probably have to go out of your way to lose on purpose to see said scenes.

Hentai games do this most often for obvious reasons, but the fact that it does that (and all the other things that happen as you start to lose) suggests [to the player] that the difficulty has a slightly more casual relationship with the player even if the rest of the game is quite difficult, so the game designer gets a bit more leeway if the balance isn't otherwise struck just right.

Come to think of it, lots of different games do bad ends this way, and a slightly wider variety of them change substantially based on certain choices you make- for instance, playing the earlier Fallout games with 1 INT makes a lot of the dialogue in the game vastly different. Sure, you don't have to play it that way, and playing it that way makes it more difficult in certain ways (but less in others, at least you can max out STR), but the novelty is going to be worth at least another playthrough.

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