next »

[Dustin Smith]

I agree with Chris; most of the "hard" games I've played to completion have had stellar controls. Teppoman 2, vanilla Super Mario World romhacks (not Kaizo-likes, mind you), and Super Mario Bros 2 (Japan) all have a special place in me heart because of the intristic fun of just playing. If somebody would make a Super Mario 64 romhack with high difficulty I wouldn't need another game for, say, a year.

[Molten_]

You mean like a SM64 master quest? That sounds awesome

[Cow]

I agree with Chris; most of the "hard" games I've played to completion have had stellar controls. Teppoman 2, vanilla Super Mario World romhacks (not Kaizo-likes, mind you), and Super Mario Bros 2 (Japan) all have a special place in me heart because of the intristic fun of just playing. If somebody would make a Super Mario 64 romhack with high difficulty I wouldn't need another game for, say, a year.

This is basically what I meant to say.

[Montoli]

Man, almost all the points I wanted to bring up have already been touched on by previous posters.  You guys are too fast/smart for me!  Oh well, I'm still going to mention the ones I think are important and add a few comments, so I can pretend to know stuff too.

Hard games tend to be fun in spite of the difficulty when:

• The player feels like they have complete control over their fate.  They died because THEY failed to make the jump, or dodge the attack, or escape on time, or whatever.  This means the controls have to be hella tight.  Failing because the controls are shoddy is no fun at all, in most cases.
• The skills that the player is failing at should be something that they can get better at with practice.  Running down a hallway that takes 10 seconds to traverse, and has a 5% chance every second of killing the player is lame.  Running down a hallway that every second launches an attack at the player that they have to dodge, or pass some other skill test for, is more fun.
• The player understands what they did wrong, and has some idea how to do it better next time. This one is very important!  Dying 20 times to a boss because he has one attack that you just can't figure out how to avoid is not fun.  Dying 20 times to a boss where you can't quite get out of the way in time, but are pretty sure you need to get behind the rocks before the laser hits, is [more] fun.
• Related to the above:  The challenge that the player is failing at seems, on some level possible.  It could still be with a big qualifier "possible if I had freaky reflexes" or "possible if I could figure out where to stand in time to not die" or whatever.  But the player has to believe on some level that there is a way through, and that they're not just hitting their head against a wall that they will never get through.

I also want to give a shoutout to the person who mentioned Ninja Gaiden, just because I feel that most versions of it (both the NES ones, and the XBox one) are excellent examples of how to have a crazy hard difficulty that is still extremely fun.  The xbox one in particular I remember going for about 10 chapters, where at the end of each chapter I would be like "holy crap, that level/boss was hard.  It better not get any harder than that, since I think that was about my limit..."  And then it would get harder.  And I'd die a lot.  And somehow make it to the end anyway, sure that surely THIS time I had really reached my limit.  By the end of the game, some enemies that had been holy-crap-this-is-my-limit boss encounters were showing up as regular enemies (!!) and I would look at them (as I dispatched them 2-3 at a time) and think to myself "heh.  I remember when I thought those were hard.  I had no idea what was coming, did I?"

The Touhou bullet hell games have been like that for me as well - Started playing them on easy.  Eventually beat it without continuing on easy.  Slowly moved up to normal.  Died a lot.  Started trying to beat them on 1 continue.  Etc.  I still die a lot.  But man, on the rare occasion when I pull off a long-term goal, it feels fantastic.

This is the payoff, of course.  If you can keep the user playing long enough to actually overcome your challenges, then they feel like a million bucks.  You just need to keep the user playing long enough to win.

[Gimym TILBERT]

Oh and that thread, fun mechanics!

http://forums.tigsource.com/index.php?topic=10996.0

[PleasingFungus]

• The player feels like they have complete control over their fate.  They died because THEY failed to make the jump, or dodge the attack, or escape on time, or whatever.  This means the controls have to be hella tight.  Failing because the controls are shoddy is no fun at all, in most cases.
• The player understands what they did wrong, and has some idea how to do it better next time. This one is very important!  Dying 20 times to a boss because he has one attack that you just can't figure out how to avoid is not fun.  Dying 20 times to a boss where you can't quite get out of the way in time, but are pretty sure you need to get behind the rocks before the laser hits, is [more] fun.

This, this, this, this, this.

Excellently put.

[iffi]

• The player feels like they have complete control over their fate.  They died because THEY failed to make the jump, or dodge the attack, or escape on time, or whatever.  This means the controls have to be hella tight.  Failing because the controls are shoddy is no fun at all, in most cases.
• The player understands what they did wrong, and has some idea how to do it better next time. This one is very important!  Dying 20 times to a boss because he has one attack that you just can't figure out how to avoid is not fun.  Dying 20 times to a boss where you can't quite get out of the way in time, but are pretty sure you need to get behind the rocks before the laser hits, is [more] fun.

This, this, this, this, this.

Excellently put.

'd again. Speaking of , I was just playing that Cave Story mod, BoostMania EX, again, and it's an excellent example of this. I must have died at least 20 or 30 times at the same part, but I had a whole lot of fun doing so. I could tell that my deaths were my own fault, and I could see what I needed to do to get past that part, which made it fun rather than frustrating. Not to mention that Cave Story has really great-feeling controls. In addition, there are quite frequent save points, so the punishment for failure is small enough so that it's not frustrating, but great enough so that it's still a challenge to get to the next save point.

[mirosurabu]

Tangent: I never liked intertia in Cave Story ):

[Darken]

Along with good controls... I like the idea of setting up a situation where the player thinks "I don't have full health to comfortably make mistakes on the boss." It ends up where she teaches herself how to eliminate the regular enemies without getting hit. The rewarding part is when she reaches the boss with full health (even if the boss itself is hard). I encounter this a lot in Megaman games or any oldschool hard(fairly) game really where the lives/hp remaining is important. Then again I'm not sure how this method would fare in the modern realm of gaming, I just feel thats part of what makes some hard NES games forgivable.

[AMAZON]

another important thing is, keep the areas between save points manageable sized. nothing is more frustrating that being stuck on one challenge and having to go through a gauntlet of challenges you can already beat to get to it again.

[iffi]

I just realized nobody's mentioned this article on the Team Meat blog, which has some interesting thoughts about difficulty, especially in regards to Super Meat Boy.

[John Sandoval]

A very good example of a good hard game is cactus's Clean Asia. Every time I died in that game, I was able to glean a bit of information on how to defeat that particular boss. "Okay, so I can't dash while holding metal, so I have to release my cache in order to dodge past this wave of bullets". And when I finally did get past a particular boss I was stuck on, it was immensely satisfying. Sure, there were a couple of fuckers that would kill you a lot, but there was always a strategy. "Okay, so this guy has 5 seconds before he starts shooting a shitton of bullets in every direction. So I have to gather up enough ammo in the previous boss so I can kill this one before he gets a single shot off."

Dying in the game was never much of an issue, because it only took you less than a minutes to get back to where you were.

The music was also very, very catchy.

[C.A. Sinner]

another important thing is, keep the areas between save points manageable sized. nothing is more frustrating that being stuck on one challenge and having to go through a gauntlet of challenges you can already beat to get to it again.

I think this can be used well though. The feeling of "I better not die at that boss, or I'll have to replay this entire level again" can add some really intense drama to a game.

[Gorgoo]

The feeling of "I better not die at that boss, or I'll have to replay this entire level again" can add some really intense drama to a game.

It definitely can, but at the risk of completely killing the flow if you do die at that boss and have to replay the entire level again.

The tension can be fun, but I know that, personally, I've stopped playing games for a long time because I died and didn't feel like playing for (potentially) hours in order to get back to the hard part. In at least one case like that, I never finished the game.

I kind of think that, in games where challenge is a big part of the experience, there should be a way of getting to the part of the game that is challenging while easily getting past the parts that you can do, and frequent save points are a way of doing that.

But that obviously can't be done in every game. Bullet hell shmups would get their flow ruined if save points occurred too often (or, some might say, at all). And a difficult strategy game where, if you died, you had the option of starting at the turn before it happened might reduce the challenge too much.

[SirNiko]

The die-at-the-boss thing can be mitigated if replaying the level is not tedious. If I have to perform a series of time consuming but simple jumps, having to replay the level each time I die is not fun. If I master the level before I can beat the boss, dying is not fun.

If each time I die to the boss, I replay the level and complete it noticeably faster, or reach the boss with more life or ammo, then replaying the level isn't too bad.

Megaman games do this, since you can get better at the level and reach the boss with more lives or energy tanks, and that makes the boss easier over time because you get more tries. There's lots of room to use your subweapons more efficiently to get through the stage.